‘I’m glad you’ve come back for her,’ said the king vaguely.
‘She’s your sister, you know. Half sister, that is. Sometimes I wish I’d married her mother, but you see she wasn’t royal. Very bright woman, her mother.’
Teppic listened hard. There it was again: a faint breathing noise, only heard at all because of the deep silence of the night. He worked his way to the back of the room, listened again, and lifted the lid of a case.
Ptraci was curled up on the bottom, fast asleep with her head on her arm.
He leaned the lid carefully against the wall and touched her hair. She muttered something in her sleep, and settled into a more comfortable position.
‘Er, I think you’d better wake up,’ he whispered.
She changed position again and muttered something like: ‘Wstflgl.’
Teppic hesitated. Neither his tutors nor Dios had prepared him for this. He knew at least seventy different ways of killing a sleeping person, but none to wake them up first.
He prodded her in what looked like the least embarrassing area of her skin. She opened her eyes.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s you.’ And she yawned.
‘I’ve come to take you away,’ said Teppic. ‘You’ve been asleep all day.’
‘I heard someone talking,’ she said, stretching in a fashion that made Teppic look away hurriedly. ‘It was that priest, the one with the face like a bald eagle. He’s really horrible.’
‘He is, isn’t he?’ agreed Teppic, intensely relieved to hear it said.
‘So I just kept quiet. And there was the king. The new king.’
‘Oh. He was down here, was he?’ said Teppic weakly. The bitterness in her voice was like a Number Four stabbing knife in his heart.
‘All the girls say he’s really weird,’ she added, as he helped her out of the case. ‘You can touch me, you know. I’m not made of china.’
He steadied her arm, feeling in sore need of a cold bath and a quick run around the rooftops.
‘You’re an assassin, aren’t you,’ she went on. ‘I remembered that after you’d gone. An assassin from foreign parts. All that black. Have you come to kill the king?’
‘I wish I could,’ said Teppic. ‘He’s really beginning to get on my nerves. Look, could you take your bangles off?’
‘Why?’
‘They make such a noise when you walk.’ Even Ptraci’s earrings appeared to chime the hours when she moved her head.
‘I don’t want to,’ she said. ‘I’d feel naked without them.’
‘You’re nearly naked with them,’ hissed Teppic. ‘Please!’
‘She can play the dulcimer,’ said the ghost of Teppicymon XXVII, apropos of nothing much. ‘Not very well, mind you. She’s up to page five of “Little Pieces for Tiny Fingers”.’
Teppic crept to the passage leading out of the embalming room and listened hard. Silence ruled in the palace, broken only by heavy breathing and the occasional clink behind him as Ptraci stripped herself of her jewellery. He crept back.
‘Please hurry up,’ he said, ‘we haven’t got a lot of-‘
Ptraci was crying.
‘Er,’ said Teppic. ‘Er.’
‘Some of these were presents from my granny,’ sniffed Ptraci. ‘The old king gave me some, too. These earrings have been in my family for ever such a long time. How would you like it if you had to do it?’
‘You see, jewellery isn’t just something she wears,’ said the ghost of Teppicymon XXVII. ‘It’s part of who she is.’ My word, he added to himself, that’s probably an Insight. Why is it so much easier to think when you’re dead?
‘I don’t wear any,’ said Teppic.
‘You’ve got all those daggers and things.’
‘Well, I need them to do my job.’
‘Well then.’
‘Look, you don’t have to leave them here, you can put them in my pouch,’ he said. ‘But we must be going. Please!’
‘Goodbye,’ said the ghost sadly, watching them sneak out to the courtyard. He floated back to his corpse, who wasn’t the best of company.
The breeze was stronger when they reached the roof. It was hotter, too, and dry.
Across the river one or two of the older pyramids were already sending up their flares, but they were weak and looked wrong.
‘I feel itchy,’ said Ptraci. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘It feels like we’re in for a thunderstorm,’ said Teppic, staring across the river at the Great Pyramid. Its blackness had intensified, so that it was a triangle of deeper darkness in the night. Figures were running around its base like lunatics watching their asylum burn.
‘What’s a thunderstorm?’
‘Very hard to describe,’ he said, in a preoccupied voice. ‘Can you see what they’re doing over there?’
Ptraci squinted across the river.
‘They’re very busy,’ she said.
‘Looks more like panic to me.’
A few more pyramids flared, but instead of roaring straight up the flames flickered and lashed backwards and forwards, driven by intangible winds.
Teppic shook himself. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you away from here.’
‘I said we should have capped it this evening,’ shouted Ptaclusp IIb above the screaming of the pyramid. ‘I can’t float it up now, the turbulence up there must be terrific!’
The ice of day was boiling off the black marble, which was already warm to the touch. He stared distractedly at the capstone on its cradle and then at his brother, who was still in his nightshirt.
‘Where’s father?’ he said.
‘I sent one of us to go and wake him up,’ said IIa.
‘Who?’
‘One of you, actually.’
‘Oh.’ IIb stared again at the capstone. ‘It’s not that heavy,’ he said. ‘Two of us could manhandle it up there.’ He gave his brother an enquiring look.
‘You must be mad. Send some of the men to do it.’
‘They’ve all run away-‘
Down river another pyramid tried to flare, spluttered, and then ejected a screaming, ragged flame that arched across the sky and grounded near the top of the Great Pyramid itself.
‘It’s interfering with the others now!’ shouted IIb. ‘Come on. We’ve got to flare it off, it’s the only way!’
About a third of the way up the pyramid’s flanks a crackling blue zigzag arced out and struck itself on a stone sphinx. The air above it boiled.
The two brothers slung the stone between them and staggered to the scaffolding, while the dust around them whirled into strange shapes.
‘Can you hear something?’ said IIb, as they stumbled on to the first platform.
‘What, you mean the fabric of time and space being put through the wringer?’ said IIa.
The architect gave his brother a look of faint admiration. It was an unusual remark for an accountant. Then his face returned to its previous look of faint terror.
‘No, not that,’ he said.
‘Well, the sound of the very air itself being subjected to horrible tortures?’
‘Not that, either,’ said IIb, vaguely annoyed. ‘I mean the creaking noise.’
Three more pyramids struck their discharges, which fizzled through the roiling clouds overhead and poured into the black marble above them.
‘Can’t hear anything like that,’ said IIa.
‘I think it’s coming from the pyramid.’
‘Well, you can put your ear against it if you like, but I’m not going to.’
The scaffolding swayed in the storm as they eased their way up another ladder, the heavy capstone rocking between them.
‘I said we shouldn’t do it,’ muttered the accountant, as the stone slid gently on to his toes. ‘We shouldn’t have built this.’
‘Just shut up and lift your end, will you?’
And so, one rocking ladder after another, the brothers Ptaclusp eased their bickering way up the flanks of the Great Pyramid, while the lesser tombs along the Djel fired one after another, and the sky streamed with lines of sizzling time.
It was around about this point that the greatest mathematician in the world, lying in cosy flatulence in his stall below the palace, stopped chewing the cud and realised that something very wrong was happening to numbers. All the numbers.
The camel looked along its nose at Teppic. Its expression made it clear that of all the riders in all the world it would least like to ride it, he was right at the top of the list. However, camels look like that at everyone. Camels have a very democratic approach to the human race. They hate every member of it, without making any distinctions for rank or creed.
This one appeared to be chewing soap.
Teppic looked distractedly down the shadowy length of the royal stables, which had once contained a hundred camels. He’d have given the world for a horse, and a moderately-sized continent for a pony. But the stables now held only a handful of rotting war chariots, relics of past glories, an elderly elephant whose presence was a bit of a mystery, and this camel. It looked an extremely inefficient animal. It was going threadbare at the knees.
‘Well, this is it,’ he said to Ptraci. ‘I don’t dare try the river during the night. I could try and get you over the border.’