Thief of Time

He darted back into the workshop. Jeremy still stood transfixed, blushing as pinkly as her ladyship had done.

“I'll jutht be nipping out to get that new glathwork for the multiplier, thur,” Igor said quickly. “It thould be done by now. Yeth?”

Jeremy spun on his heel and marched very quickly over to the workbench.

“You do that, Igor. Thank you,” he said, his voice slightly muffled.

Lady LeJean's party were down the street when Igor slipped out and moved quickly into the shadows.

At the crossroad her ladyship waved one hand vaguely and the trolls headed off by themselves. Igor stayed with her. For all the trademark limp, Igors could move fast when they had to. They often had to, when the mob hit the windmill.11

Out in the open, he could see more wrong things. She didn't move quite right. It was as though she was controlling her body, rather than letting it control itself. That's what humans did. Even zombies got the hang of things after a while. The effect was subtle, but Igors had very good eyesight. She moved like someone unused to wearing skin.

The quarry headed down a narrow street, and Igor half hoped that some of the Thieves' Guild were around. He'd very much like to see what happened if one of them gave her the tap on the noggin that was their prelude to negotiations. One had tried it with Igor yesterday, and if the man had been surprised at the metallic clang he'd been astonished to have his arm grabbed and broken with anatomical exactitude.

In fact, she turned into an alleyway between a couple of the buildings.

Igor hesitated. Letting yourself be outlined in the daylight at the mouth of an alley was item one on the local checklist of death. But, on the other hand, he wasn't actually doing anything wrong, was he? And she didn't look armed.

There was no sound of footsteps in the alley. He waited a moment and stuck his head round the corner.

There was no sign of Lady LeJean. There was also no way out of the alley—it was a dead end, full of rubbish.

But there was a fading grey shape in the air, which vanished even as he stared. It was a hooded robe, grey as fog. It merged into the general gloom and disappeared.

She'd turned into an alleyway, and then she'd turned into… something else.

Igor felt his hands twitch.

Individual Igors might have their particular specialities, but they were all expert surgeons and had an inbuilt desire not to see anybody wasted. Up in the mountains, where most of the employment was for woodchoppers and miners, having an Igor living locally was considered very fortunate. There was always the risk of an axe bouncing or a sawblade running wild, and then a man was glad to have an Igor around who could lend a hand—or even an entire arm, if you were lucky.

And while they practised their skills freely and generously in the community, the Igors were even more careful to use them amongst themselves. Magnificent eyesight, a stout pair of lungs, a powerful digestive system… It was terrible to think of such wonderful workmanship going to the worms. So they made sure it didn't. They kept it in the family.

Igor really did have his grandfather's hands. And now they were bunching into fists, all by themselves.

Tick

A very small kettle burned on a fire of wood shavings and dried yak dung.

“It was… a long time ago,” said Lu-Tze. “Exactly when doesn't matter, 'cos of what happened. In fact asking exactly ‘when’ doesn't make any sense any more. It depends where you are. In some places it was hundreds of years ago. Some other places… well, maybe it hasn't happened yet. There was this man in Uberwald. Invented a clock. An amazing clock. It measured the tick of the universe. Know what that is?”

“No.”

“Me neither. The abbot's your man for that kind of stuff. Lemme see… okay… think of the smallest amount of time that you can. Really small. So tiny that a second would be like a billion years. Got that? Well, the cosmic quantum tick—that's what the abbot calls it—the cosmic quantum tick is much smaller than that. It's the time it takes to go from now to then. The time it takes an atom to think of wobbling. It's—”

“It's the time it takes for the smallest thing that's possible to happen to happen?” said Lobsang.

“Exactly. Well done,” said Lu-Tze. He took a deep breath. “It's also the time it takes for the whole universe to be destroyed in the past and rebuilt in the future. Don't look at me like that—that's what the abbot said.”

“Has it been happening while we've been talking?” said Lobsang.

“Millions of times. An oodleplex of times, probably.”

“How many's that?”

“It's one of the abbot's words. It means more numbers than you can imagine in a yonk.”

“What's a yonk?”

“A very long time.”

“And we don't feel it? The universe is destroyed and we don't feel it?”

“They say not. The first time it was explained to me I got a bit jumpy, but it's far too quick for us to notice.”

Lobsang stared at the snow for a while. Then he said, “All right. Go on.”