Thief of Time

Then his master had conceived the idea of making the thing live, so that it could punch its own tapes and wind its own spring. Igor, who knew exactly when to follow instructions to the letter, dutifully rigged up the classic rising-table-and-lightning-rod arrangement on the evening of a really good storm. He didn't see exactly what happened thereafter, because he wasn't there when the lightning hit the clockwork. No, Igor was at a dead run halfway down the hill to the village, with all his possessions in a carpet bag. Even so, a white-hot cogwheel had whirred over his head and buried itself in a treetrunk.

Loyalty to a master was very important, but it took second place to loyalty to Igordom. If the world was going to be full of lurching servants, then they were damn well going to be called Igor.

It seemed to this Igor that if you could make a tick-tock man live, he'd be like Jeremy. And Jeremy was ticking faster, as the clock neared completion.

Igor didn't much like the clock. He was a people person. He preferred things that bled. And as the clock grew, with its shimmering crystal parts that didn't seem entirely all here, so Jeremy grew more absorbed and Igor grew more tense. There was definitely something new happening here, and while Igors were avid to learn new things there were limits. Igors did not believe in forbidden knowledge and “Things Man Was Not Meant to Know”, but obviously there were some things a man was not meant to know, such as what it felt like to have every single particle of your body sucked into a little hole, and that seemed to be one of the options available in the immediate future.

And then there was Lady LeJean. She gave Igor the willies, and he was a man not usually subject to even the smallest willy. She wasn't a zombie and she wasn't a vampire, because she didn't smell like one. She didn't smell like anything. In Igor's experience, everything smelled like something.

And there was the other matter.

“Her feet don't touch the ground, thur,” he said.

“Of course they do,” said Jeremy, buffing up part of the mechanism with his sleeve. “She'll be here again in a minute and seventeen seconds. And I'm sure her feet will be touching the ground.”

“Oh, thometimeth they do, thur. But you watch when thee goeth up or down a thtep, thur. Thee doethn't get it egthactly right, thur. You can jutht thee the thadow under her thoeth.”

“Thoeth?”

“On her feet, thur,” sighed Igor. The lisp could be a problem, and in truth any Igor could easily fix it, but it was part of being an Igor. You might as well stop limping.

“Go and get ready by the door,” said Jeremy. “Floating in the air doesn't make you a bad person.”

Igor shrugged. He was entertaining the idea that it didn't mean you were a person at all, and incidentally he was rather worried that Jeremy seemed to have dressed himself with a little more care this morning.

He'd decided in these circumstances not to broach the subject of his hiring, but he had been working that one out. He'd been hired before her ladyship had engaged Jeremy to do this work? Well, all that showed was that she knew her man. But she'd hired him herself in Bad Schüschein. And he'd got himself onto the mail coach that very day. And it turned out that Lady LeJean had visited Jeremy on that day, too.

The only thing faster than the mail coach between Uberwald and Ankh-Morpork was magic, unless someone had found a way to travel by semaphore. And Lady LeJean hardly looked like a witch.

The shop's clocks were putting up a barrage of noise to signal the passing of seven o'clock when Igor opened the front door. It always Did10 to anticipate the knock. That was another part of the Code of the Igors.

He wrenched it open.

“Two pints, sir, lovely and fresh,” said Mr Soak, handing him the bottles. “And a day like this just says fresh cream, doesn't it?”

Igor glared at him, but took the bottles. “I prefer it when it'th going green,” he said haughtily. “Good day to you, Mr Thoak.”

He shut the door.

“It wasn't her?” said Jeremy, when he arrived back in the workshop.

“It wath the milkman, thur.”

“She's twenty-five seconds late!” said Jeremy, looking concerned. “Do you think anything could have happened to her?”

“Real ladieth are often fathionably late, thur,” said Igor, putting the milk away. It was icy cold under his fingers.

“Well, I'm sure her ladyship is a real lady.”

“I wouldn't know about that, thur,” said Igor, who in fact had the aforesaid very strong doubts in that area. He walked back into the shop and took up position with his hand on the door handle just as the knock came.

Lady LeJean swept past Igor. The two trolls ignored him and took up their positions just inside the workshop. Igor put them down as hired rock, anyone's for two dollars a day plus walking-around money.

Her ladyship was impressed.