Thief of Time

“Later. There will be plenty of time,” said Lobsang. “I shall see to it.”

The way he said it, so carefully dropping the words into place, made her turn.

“You're going to take over?” she said. “You are Time now?”

“Yes.”

“But you're mostly human!”

“So?” Lobsang's smile took after his father. It was the gentle and, to Susan, the infuriating smile of a god.

“What's in all these rooms?” she demanded. “Do you know?”

“One perfect moment. In each one. An oodleplex of oodleplexes.”

“I'm not certain there's such a thing as a genuinely perfect moment,” said Susan. “Can we go home now?”

Lobsang wrapped the edge of his robe around his fist and smashed it against the glass front panel of the clock. It shattered, and dropped to the ground.

“When we get to the other side,” he said, “don't stop and don't look back. There will be a lot of flying glass.”

“I'll try to dive behind one of the benches,” said Susan.

“They probably won't be there.”

SQUEAK?

The Death of Rats had scurried up the side of the clock and was peering cheerfully over the top.

“What do we do about that?” said Lobsang.

“That looks after itself,” said Susan. “I never worry about it.”

Lobsang nodded. “Take my hand,” he said. She reached out.

With his free hand Lobsang grasped the pendulum and stopped the clock.

A blue-green hole opened in the world.

The return journey was a lot swifter but, when the world existed again, she was falling into water. It was brown, muddy and stank of dead plants. Susan surfaced, fighting against the drag of her skirts, and trod water while she tried to get her bearings.

The sun was nailed to the sky, the air was heavy and humid, and a pair of nostrils was watching her from a few feet away.

Susan had been brought up to be practical and that meant swimming lessons. The Quirm College for Young Ladies had been very advanced in that respect, and its teachers took the view that a girl who couldn't swim two lengths of the pool with her clothes on wasn't making an effort. To their credit, she'd left knowing four swimming strokes and several life-saving techniques, and was entirely at home in the water. She also knew what to do if you were sharing the same stretch of water with a hippopotamus, which was to find another stretch of water. Hippos only look big and cuddly from a distance. Close up, they just look big.

Susan summoned up all the inherited powers of the deathly voice plus the terrible authority of the schoolroom, and yelled, GO AWAY!

The creature floundered madly in its effort to turn round, and Susan struck out for the shore. It was an unsure shore, the water becoming land in a tangle of sandbanks, sucking black muck, rotted tree roots and swamp. Insects swirled around and—

–the cobbles were muddy underfoot, and there was the sound of horsemen in the mist

–and ice, piled up against dead trees—

–and Lobsang, taking her arm.

“Found you,” he said.

“You just shattered history,” said Susan. “You broke it!”

The hippo had come as a shock. She'd never realized one mouth could hold so much bad breath, or be so big and deep.

“I know. I had to. There was no other way. Can you find Lu-Tze? I know Death can locate any living thing, and since you—”

“All right, all right, I know,” said Susan darkly. She held out her hand and concentrated. An image of Lu- Tze's extremely heavy lifetimer appeared, and gathered weight.

“He's only a few hundred yards over there,” she said, pointing to a frozen drift.

“And I know when he is,” said Lobsang. “Only sixty thousand years away. So…”

Lu-Tze, when they found him, was looking calmly up at an enormous mammoth. Under its huge hairy brow its eyes were squinting with the effort both of seeing him and of getting all three of its brain cells lined up so that it could decide whether to trample on him or gouge him out of the frost-bound landscape. One brain cell was saying “gouge”, one was going for “trample” but the third had wandered off and was thinking about as much sex as possible.

At the far end of its trunk, Lu-Tze was saying, “So, you've never heard of Rule One, then?”

Lobsang stepped out of the air beside him. “We must go, Sweeper!”

The appearance of Lobsang did not seem to surprise Lu-Tze at all, although he did seem annoyed at the interruption.

“No rush, wonder boy,” he said. “I've got this perfectly under control—”

“Where's the lady?” said Susan.

“Over by that snowdrift,” said Lu-Tze, indicating with his thumb while still trying to outstare a pair of eyes five feet apart. “When this turned up she screamed and twisted her ankle. Look, you can see I've made it nervous —”

Susan waded into the drift and hauled Unity upright. “Come on, we're leaving,” she said brusquely.

“I saw his head cut off!” Unity babbled. “And then suddenly we were here!”

“Yes, that kind of thing happens,” said Susan.

Unity stared at her, wild-eyed.

“Life is full of surprises,” said Susan, but the sight of the creature's distress made her hesitate. All right, the thing was one of them, one that was merely wearing—Well, at least had started out merely wearing a body as a kind of coat, but now… After all, you could say that about everyone, couldn't you?

Susan had even wondered if the human soul without the anchor of a body would end up, eventually, as something like an Auditor. Which, to be fair, meant that Unity, who was getting more firmly wrapped in flesh by the minute, was something like a human. And that was a pretty good definition of Lobsang and, if it came to it, Susan as well. Who knew where humanity began and where it finished?

“Come along,” she said. “We've got to stick together, right?”

Like shards of glass, spinning through the air, fragments of history drifted and collided and intersected in the dark.

There was a lighthouse, though. The valley of Oi Dong held on to the ever-repeating day. In the hall almost all of the giant cylinders stood silent, all time run out. Some had split. Some had melted. Some had exploded. Some had simply vanished. But one still turned.

Big Thanda, the oldest and largest, ground slowly on its basalt bearing, winding time out at one end and back on the other, ensuring as Wen had decreed that the perfect day would never end.

Rambut Handisides was all alone in the hall, sitting beside the turning stone in the light of a butter lamp and occasionally throwing a handful of grease onto the base.

A clink of stone made him peer into the darkness. It was heavy with the smoke of fried rock.

There the sound was again and, then, the scratch and flare of a match.

“Lu-Tze?” he said. “Is that you?”

“I hope so, Rambut, but who knows, these days?” Lu-Tze stepped into the light and sat down. “Keeping you busy, are they?”

Handisides sprang to his feet. “It's been terrible, Sweeper! Everyone's up in the Mandala Hall! It's worse than the Great Crash! There's bits of history everywhere and we've lost half the spinners! We'll never be able to put