Thief of Time

‘a delicious fondant sugar creme infused with delightfully rich and creamy raspberry filling wrapped in mysterious dark chocolate’… you grey bastards!”

A shower of small objects pattered down on the street. Several of them broke open.

Lu-Tze heard a whine or, rather, the silence caused by the absence of a whine he'd grown used to.

“Oh, no, I'm winding dow…”

Trailing smoke, but looking more like a milkman again, albeit one that'd just delivered to a blazing house, Ronnie Soak stormed into his dairy.

“Who does he think he is?” he muttered, gripping the spotless edge of a counter so hard that the metal bent. “Hah, oh yes, they just toss you aside, but when they want you to make a comeback—”

Under his fingers the metal went white hot and then dripped.

“I've got customers. I've got customers. People depend on me. It might not be a glamorous job, but people will always need milk—”

He clapped a hand to his forehead. Where the molten metal touched his skin the metal evaporated.

The headache was really bad.

He could remember the time when there was only him. It was hard to remember, because… there was nothing, no colour, no sound, no pressure, no time, no spin, no light, no life…

Just Kaos.

And the thought arose: Do I want that again? The perfect order that goes with changelessness?

More thoughts were following that one, like little silvery eels in his mind. He was, after all, a Horseman, and had been ever since the time the people in mud cities on baking plains put together some hazy idea of Something that had existed before anyone else. And a Horseman picks up the noises of the world. The mud-city people and the skin-tent people, they'd known instinctively that the world swirled perilously through a complex and uncaring multiverse, that life was lived a mirrors thickness from the cold of space and the gulfs of night. They knew that everything they called reality, the web of rules that made life happen, was a bubble on the tide. They feared old Kaos. But now—

He opened his eyes and looked down at his dark, smoking hands. To the world in general, he said, “Who am I now?”

Lu-Tze heard his voice speed up from nothing: “—wn…”

“No, you're wound up again,” said a young woman in front of him. She stood back, giving him a critical look. Lu-Tze, for the first time in eight hundred years, felt that he'd been caught doing something wrong. It was that kind of expression—searching, rummaging around inside his head.

“You'll be Lu-Tze, then,” said Susan. “I'm Susan Sto Helit. No time for explanations. You've been out for… well, not for long. We have to get Lobsang to the glass clock. Are you any good? Lobsang thinks you're a bit of a fraud.”

“Only a bit? I'm surprised.” Lu-Tze looked around. “What happened here?”

The street was empty, except for the ever-present statues. But scraps of silver paper and coloured wrappers littered the ground, and across the wall behind him was a long splash of what looked very much like chocolate icing.

“Some of them got away,” said Susan, picking up what Lu-Tze could only hope was a giant icing syringe. “Mostly they fought with one another. Would you try to tear someone apart just for a coffee creme?”

Lu-Tze looked into those eyes. After eight hundred years you learn how to read people. And Susan was a story that went back a very long way. She probably even knew about Rule One, and didn't care. This was someone to treat with respect. But you couldn't let even someone like her have it all their own way.

“The kind with a coffee bean on the top, or the ordinary kind?” he said.

“The kind without the coffee bean, I think,” said Susan, holding his gaze.

“Nnn-o. No. No, I don't think I would,” said Lu-Tze.

“But they are learning,” said a woman's voice behind the sweeper. “Some resisted. We can learn. That's how humans became humans.”

Lu-Tze regarded the speaker. She looked like a society lady who had just had a really bad day in a threshing machine.

“Can I just be clear here?” he said, staring from one woman to the other. “You've been fighting the grey people with chocolate?”

“Yes,” said Susan, peering round the corner. “It's the sensory explosion. They lose control of their morphic field. Can you throw at all? Good. Unity, give him as many chocolate eggs as he can carry. The secret is to get them to land hard so that there's lots of shrapnel—”

“And where is Lobsang?” said Lu-Tze.

“Him? You could say he's with us in spirit.”

There were blue sparkles in the air.

“Growing pains, I think,” Susan added.

Centuries of experience once again came to Lu-Tze's aid.

“He always looked like a lad who needed to find himself,” he said.

“Yes,” said Susan. “And it came as a bit of a shock. Let's go.”

Death looked down at the world. Timelessness had reached the Rim now, and was expanding into the universe at the speed of light. The Discworld was a sculpture in crystal.

Not an apocalypse. There had always been plenty of those—small apocalypses, not the full shilling at all, fake apocalypses: apocryphal apocalypses. Most of them had been back in the old days, when the world as in “end of the world” was often objectively no wider than a few villages and a clearing in the forest.

And those little worlds had ended. But there had always been somewhere else. There had been the horizon, to start with. The fleeing refugees would find that the world was bigger than they'd thought. A few villages in a clearing? Hah, how could they have been so stupid! Now they knew it was a whole island! Of course, there was that horizon again…

The world had run out of horizons.

As Death watched, the sun stopped in its orbit and its light became duller, redder.

He sighed, and nudged Binky. The horse stepped forward, in a direction that could not be found on any map.

And the sky was full of grey shapes. There was a ripple in the ranks of Auditors as the Pale Horse trotted forward.

One drifted towards Death and hung in the air a few feet away. It said, Should you not be riding out?

DO YOU SPEAK FOR ALL ?

You know the custom, said the voice in Death's mind. Among us, one speaks for all.

WHAT IS BEING DONE IS WRONG.

It is not your business.

NEVERTHELESS, WE ARE ALL ANSWERABLE.

The universe will last for ever, said the voice. Everything preserved, ordered, understood, lawful, filed… changeless. A perfect world. Finished.

NO.