Lady LeJean felt a prickling on her forehead. Why was it doing that?
‘No. Why should I slow the work? There would be no logic to it!’
One said, Hmm.
And an Auditor did not say ‘Hmm’ by accident. ‘Hmm’ had a very precise meaning.
It went on: You are making moisture on your head.
‘Yes. It’s a body thing.’
One said, Yes. And that, too, had a very specific and ominous meaning.
One said, We wonder if too long in a solid body weakens resolve. Also, we find it hard to see your thoughts.
‘Body again, I am afraid. The brain is a very imprecise instrument.’ Lady LeJean got control of her hands at last.
One said, Yes.
Another said, When water fills a jug, it takes the shape of the jug. But the water is not the jug, nor is the jug the water.
‘Of course,’ said Lady LeJean. And, inside, a thought that she hadn’t known she was thinking, a thought that turned up out of the darkness behind the eyes, said: We are surely the most stupid creatures in the universe.
One said, It is not good to act alone.
She said, ‘Of course.’ And once again a thought emerged from the darkness: I’m in trouble now.
One said, And therefore you will have companions. No blame attaches. One should never be alone. Together, resolve is strengthened.
Motes began to twinkle in the air.
Lady LeJean’s body backed away automatically and, when she saw what was forming, she backed it away further. She had seen humans in all states of life and death, but seeing a body being spun out of raw matter was curiously disquieting when you were currently inhabiting a similar one. It was one of those times when the stomach did the thinking, and thought it wanted to throw up.
Six figures took shape, blinked and opened their eyes. Three of the figures were male, three were female. They were dressed in human-sized equivalents of the Auditors’ robes.
The remaining Auditors drew back, but one said, They will accompany you to the clockmaker; and matters will be resolved today. They will not eat or breathe.
Hah! thought one of the little voices that made up Lady LeJean’s thinking.
One of the figures whimpered.
‘The body will breathe,’ said her ladyship. ‘You will not persuade it that air is not required.’
She was aware of the choking noises.
‘You are thinking, yes, we can exchange necessary materials with the outside world, and this is true,’ she went on. ‘But the body does not know that. It thinks it is dying. Let it breathe.’
There was a series of gasps.
‘And you will feel better shortly,’ said her ladyship, and was enthralled to hear the inner voice think: These are your jailers, and you are already stronger than them.
One of the figures felt its face with a clumsy hand and, panting, said, ‘Whom do you speak to with your mouth?’
‘You,’ said Lady LeJean.
‘Us?’
‘This will take some explaining-‘
‘No,’ said the Auditor. ‘Danger lies that way. We believe the body imposes a method of thought on the brain. No blame attaches. It is a… malfunction. We will accompany you to the clockmaker. We will do this now.’
‘Not in those clothes,’ said Lady LeJean. ‘You will frighten him. It may lead to irrational actions.’
There was a moment of silence. The Auditors-made-flesh looked hopelessly at one another.
‘You have to talk with your mouth,’ Lady LeJean prompted. ‘The minds stay inside the head.’
One said, ‘What is wrong with these clothes? It is a simple shape found in many human cultures.’
Lady LeJean walked to the window. ‘See the people down there?’ she said. ‘You must dress in appropriate city fashions.’
Reluctantly the Auditors did so, and, while they retained the greyness, they did give themselves clothes that would pass unnoticed in the street. Up to a point, anyway.
‘Only those of female appearance should wear dresses,’ Lady LeJean pointed out.
A hovering grey shape said, Warning. Danger. The one calling itself Lady LeJean may give unsafe advice. Warning.
‘Understood,’ said one of the incarnate ones. ‘We know the way. We will lead.’
It walked into the door.
The Auditors clustered around the door for a while, and then one of them glared at Lady LeJean, who smiled.
‘Doorknob,’ she said.
The Auditor turned back to the door, stared at the brass knob, and then looked the door up and down. It dissolved into dust.
‘Doorknob was simpler,’ said Lady LeJean.
Tick
There were big mountains around the Hub. But the ones towering above the temple didn’t all have names, because there were simply too many of them. Only gods have enough time to name all the pebbles on a beach, but gods don’t have the patience.
Copperhead was small enough to be big enough to have a name. Lobsang awoke and saw its crooked peak, towering above the lesser local mountains, outlined against the sunrise.
Sometimes the gods have no taste at all. They allow sunrises and sunsets in ridiculous pink and blue hues that any professional artist would dismiss as the work of some enthusiastic amateur who’d never looked at a real sunset. This was one of those sunrises. It was the kind of sunrise a man looks at and says, ‘No real sunrise could paint the sky Surgical Appliance Pink.’
Nevertheless, it was beautiful.[15]
Lobsang was half covered in a pile of dry bracken. There was no sign of the yeti.
It was springtime here. There was still snow, but with the occasional patch of bare soil and a hint of green. He stared around, and saw leaves in bud.
Lu-Tze was standing some way off, gazing up into a tree. He didn’t turn his head as Lobsang approached.
‘Where’s the yeti?’
‘He wouldn’t go further than this. Can’t ask a yeti to leave snow,’ whispered Lu-Tze.
‘Oh,’ whispered Lobsang. ‘Er, why are we whispering?’
‘Look at the bird.’
It was perched on a branch by a fork in the tree, next to what looked like a birdhouse, and nibbling at a piece of roughly round wood it held in one claw.
‘Must be an old nest they’re repairing,’ said Lu-Tze. ‘Can’t have got that advanced this early in the season.’
‘Looks like some kind of old box to me,’ said Lobsang. He squinted to see better. ‘Is it an old … clock?’ he added.
‘Look at what the bird is nibbling,’ suggested Lu-Tze.
‘Well, it looks like… a crude gearwheel? But why-‘
‘Well spotted. That, lad, is a clock cuckoo. A young one, by the look of it, trying to build a nest that’ll attract a mate. Not much chance of that… See? It’s got the numerals all wrong and it’s stuck the hands on crooked.’
‘A bird that builds clocks? I thought a cuckoo clock was a clock with a mechanical cuckoo that came out when-‘
‘And where do you think people got such a strange idea from?’
‘But that’s some kind of miracle!’
‘Why?’ said Lu-Tze. ‘They barely go for more than half an hour, they keep lousy time and the poor dumb males go frantic trying to keep them wound.’
‘But even to-‘
‘Everything happens somewhere, I suppose,’ said Lu-Tze. ‘Not worth making too much of a fuss. Got any food left?’
‘No. We finished it last night,’ said Lobsang. He added, hopefully, ‘Er … I heard tell that really advanced monks can live on the, er, life force in the actual air itself…’
‘Only on the planet Sausage, I expect,’ said Lu-Tze. ‘No, we’ll skirt Copperhead and find something in the valleys on the other side. Let’s go, there’s not much time.’
But time enough to watch a bird, thought Lobsang as he let the world around him become blue and fade, and the thought was comforting.
It was easier going without the snow on the ground, provided he avoided the strange resistance offered by bushes and long grass. Lu-Tze walked on ahead, looking oddly colourful and unreal against the faded landscape.
They went past the entrance to dwarf mines, but saw no one above ground. Lobsang was glad of that. The statues he had seen in the villages yesterday weren’t dead, he knew, but merely frozen at a different speed of time. Lu-Tze had forbidden him to go near anyone, but he needn’t have bothered. Walking around the living statues was invasive, somehow. It made it worse when you realized that they were moving, but very, very slowly…
The sun had barely moved from the horizon when they came down through warmer woods on the Rim side of the mountain. Here the landscape had a more domesticated air. It was woodland rather than forest. The game trail they d been following crossed a creek at a point where there were cart tracks, old but still not overgrown.
Lobsang looked behind him after he’d walked across the ford, and watched the water very slowly reclaim the shape of his footprints in the stream.