Vorbis stirred the ashes with his foot.
"No bones," he said.
The soldiers stood silently. The fluffy gray flakes collapsed and blew a little way in the dawn breeze.
"And the wrong sort of ash," said Vorbis.
The sergeant opened his mouth to say something.
"Be assured I know that of which I speak," said Vorbis.
He wandered over to the charred trapdoor, and prodded it with his toe.
"We followed the tunnel," said the sergeant, in the tones of one who hopes against experience that sounding helpful will avert the wrath to come. "It comes out near the docks."
"But if you enter it from the docks it does not come out here," Vorbis mused. The smoking ashes seemed to hold an endless fascination for him.
The sergeant's brow wrinkled.
"Understand?" said Vorbis. "The Ephebians wouldn't build a way out that was a way in. The minds that devised the labyrinth would not work like that. There would be . . . valves. Sequences of triggerstones, perhaps. Trips that trip only one way. Whirring blades that come out of unexpected walls."
` Ah.
"Most intricate and devious, I have no doubt."
The sergeant ran a dry tongue over his lips. He could not read Vorbis like a book, because there had never been a book like Vorbis. But Vorbis had certain habits of thought that you learned, after a while.
"You wish me to take the squad and follow it up from the docks," he said hollowly.
"I was just about to suggest it," said Vorbis.
"Yes, lord."
Vorbis patted the sergeant on the shoulder.
"But do not worry!" he said cheerfully. "Om will protect the strong in faith."
"Yes, lord."
"And the last man can bring me a full report. But first . . . they are not in the city?"
"We have searched it fully, lord."
"And no one left by the gate? Then they left by sea."
"All the Ephebian war vessels are accounted for, Lord Vorbis."
"This bay is lousy with small boats."
"With nowhere to go but the open sea, sir."
Vorbis looked out at the Circle Sea. It filled the world from horizon to horizon. Beyond lay the smudge of the Sto plains and the ragged line of the Ramtops, all the way to the towering peaks that the heretics called the Hub but which was, he _ knew,
the Pole, visible around the curve of the world only because of the way light bent in atmosphere, just as it did in water . . . and he saw a smudge of white, curling over the distant ocean.
Vorbis had very good eyesight, from a height.
He picked up a handful of gray ash, which had once been Dykeri's Principles of Navigation, and let it drift through his fingers.
"Om has sent us a fair wind," he said. "Let us get down to the docks."
Hope waved optimistically in the waters of the sergeant's despair.
"You won't be wanting us to explore the tunnel, lord?" he said.
"Oh, no. You can do that when we return."


Urn prodded at the copper globe with a piece of wire while the Unnamed Boat wallowed in the waves.
"Can't you beat it?" said Simony, who was not up to speed on the difference between machines and people.
"It's a philosophical engine," said Urn. "Beating won't help."
"But you said machines could be our slaves," said Simony.
"Not the beating sort," said Urn. "The nozzles are bunged up with salt. When the water rushes out of the globe it leaves the salt behind."
"Why?"
"I don't know. Water likes to travel light."
"We're becalmed! Can you do anything about it?"
"Yes, wait for it to cool down and then clean it out and put some more water in it."
Simony looked around distractedly.
"But we're still in sight of the coast!"
"You might be," said Didactylos. He was sitting in the middle of the boat with his hands crossed on the top of his walking-stick, looking like an old man who doesn't often get taken out for an airing and is quite enjoying it.
"Don't worry. No one could see us out here," said Urn. He prodded at the mechanism. "Anyway, I'm a bit worried about the screw. It was invented to move water along, not move along on water."
"You mean it's confused?" said Simony.
"Screwed up," said Didactylos happily.
Brutha lay in the pointed end, looking down at the water. A small squid siphoned past, just under the surface. He wondered what it was-
-and knew it was the common bottle squid, of the class Cephalopoda, phylum Mollusca, and that it had an internal cartilaginous support instead of a skeleton and a well-developed nervous system and large, image-forming eyes that were quite similar to vertebrate eyes.
The knowledge hung in the forefront of his mind for a moment, and then faded away.
"Om?" Brutha whispered.
"What?"
"What're you doing?"
"Trying to get some sleep. Tortoises need a lot of sleep, you know."
Simony and Urn were bent over the philosophical engine. Brutha stared at the globe
-a sphere of radius r, which therefore had a volume V = (4/3)(pi) rrr, and surface area A = 4(pi) rr-
"Oh, my god . . ."
"What now?" said the voice of the tortoise.
Didactylos's face turned towards Brutha, who was clutching at his head.
"What's a pi?"
Didactylos reached out a hand and steadied Brutha.
"What's the matter?" said Om.
"I don't know! It's just words! I don't know what's in the books! I can't read!"
"Getting plenty of sleep is vital," said Om. "It builds a healthy shell."
Brutha sagged to his knees in the rocking boat. He felt like a householder coming back unexpectedly and finding the old place full of strangers. They were in every room, not menacing, but just filling the space with their thereness.
"The books are leaking!"
"I don't see how that can happen," said Didactylos. "You said you just looked at them. You didn't read them. You don't know what they mean."
"They know what they mean!"
"Listen. They're just books, of the nature of books," said Didactylos. "They're not magical. If you could know what books contained just by looking at them, Urn there would be a genius."
"What's the matter with him?" said Simony.
"He thinks he knows too much."
"No! I don't know anything! Not really know," said Brutha. "I just remembered that squids have an internal cartilaginous support!"
"I can see that would be a worry," said Simony. "Huh. Priests? Mad, the lot of them."
"No! I don't know what cartilaginous means!"
"Skeletal connective tissue," said Didactylos. "Think of bony and leathery at the same time."
Simony snorted. "Well, well," he said, "we live and learn, just like you said."
"Some of us even do it the other way round," said Didactylos.
"Is that supposed to mean something?"
"It's philosophy," said Didactylos. "And sit down, boy. You're making the boat rock. We're overloaded as it is."
"It's being buoyed upward by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid," muttered Brutha, sagging.
"Hmm?"
"Except that I don't know what buoyed means."
Urn looked up from the sphere. "We're ready to start again," he said. "Just bale some water in here with your helmet, mister."
"And then we shall go again?"
"Well, we can start getting up steam," said Urn. He wiped his hands on his toga.
"Y'know," said Didactylos, "there are different ways of learning things. I'm reminded of the time when old Prince Lasgere of Tsort asked me how he could become learned, especially since he hadn't got any time for this reading business. I said to him, `There is no royal road to learning, sire,' and he said to me, `Bloody well build one or I shall have your legs chopped off. Use as many slaves as you like.' A refreshingly direct approach, I always thought. Not a man to mince words. People, yes. But not words."
"Why didn't he chop your legs off?" said Urn.
"I built him his road. More or less."
"How? I thought that was just a metaphor."
"You're learning, Urn. So I found a dozen slaves who could read and they sat in his bedroom at night whispering choice passages to him while he slept."
"Did that work?"
"Don't know. The third slave stuck a six-inch dagger in his ear. Then after the revolution the new ruler let me out of prison and said I could leave the country if I promised not to think of anything on the way to the border. But I don't believe there was anything wrong with the idea in principle."
Urn blew on the fire.
"Takes a little while to heat up the water," he explained.
Brutha lay back in the bow again. If he concentrated, he could stop the knowledge flowing. The thing to do was avoid looking at things. Even a cloud-
-devised by natural philosophy as a means of occasioning shade on the surface of the world, thus preventing overheating-
-caused an intrusion. Om was fast asleep.
Knowing without learning, thought Brutha. No. The other way round. Learning without knowing . . .


Nine-tenths of Om dozed in his shell. The rest of him drifted like a fog in the real world of the gods, which is a lot less interesting than the three-dimensional world inhabited by most of humanity.
He thought: we're a little boat. She'll probably not even notice us. There's the whole of the ocean. She can't be everywhere.
Of course, she's got many believers. But we're only a little boat . . .
He felt the minds of inquisitive fishes nosing around the end of the screw. Which was odd, because in the normal course of things fishes were not known for their-
"Greetings," said the Queen of the Sea.
"Ah."
"I see you're still managing to exist, little tortoise." "Hanging in there," said Om. "No problems."
There was a pause which, if it were taking place between two people in the human world, would have been spent in coughing and looking embarrassed. But gods are never embarrassed.
"I expect," said Om guardedly, "you are looking for your price."
"This vessel and everyone in it," said the Queen. "But your believer can be saved, as is the custom."
"What good are they to you? One of them's an atheist."
"Hah! They all believe, right at the end."
"That doesn't seem . . ." Om hesitated. "Fair?"
Now the Sea Queen paused.
"What's fair?"
"Like . . . underlying justice?" said Om. He wondered why he said it.
"Sounds a human idea to me."
"They're inventive, I'll grant you. But what I meant was . . . I mean . . . they've done nothing to deserve it."
"Deserve? They're human. What's deserve got to do with it?"
Om had to concede this. He wasn't thinking like a god. This bothered him.
"It's just . . ."
"You've been relying on one human for too long, little god."
"I know. I know." Om sighed. Minds leaked into one another. He was seeing too much from a human point of view. "Take the boat, then. If you must. I just wish it was-"
"Fair?" said the Sea Queen. She moved forward. Om felt her all around him.
"There's no such thing," she said. "Life's like a beach. And then you die."
Then she was gone.
Om let himself retreat into the shell of his shell.
"Brutha?"
"Yes?"
"Can you swim?"
The globe started to spin.
Brutha heard Urn say, "There. Soon be on our way."
"We'd better be." This was Simony. "There's a ship out there."
"This thing goes faster than anything with sails or oars."
Brutha looked across the bay. A sleek Omnian ship was passing the lighthouse. It was still a long way off, but Brutha stared at it with a dread and expectation that magnified better than telescopes.
"It's moving fast," said Simony. "I don't understand it-there's no wind."
Urn looked round at the flat calm.
"There can't be wind there and not here," he said.
"I said, can you swim?" The voice of the tortoise was insistent in Brutha's head.
"I don't know," said Brutha.
"Do you think you could find out quickly?"
Urn looked upwards.
"Oh," he said.
Clouds had massed over the Unnamed Boat. They were visibly spinning.
"You've got to know!" shouted Om. "I thought you had a perfect memory!"
"We used to splash around in the big cistern in the village," whispered Brutha. "I don't know if that counts!"
Mist whipped off the surface of the sea. Brutha's ears popped. And still the Omnian ship came on, flying across the waves.
"What do you call it when you've got a dead calm surrounded by winds-" Urn began.
"Hurricane?" said Didactylos.
Lightning crackled between sky and sea. Urn yanked at the lever that lowered the screw into the water. His eyes glowed almost as brightly as the lightning.
"Now there's a power," he said. "Harnessing the lightning! The dream of mankind!"
The Unnamed Boat surged forward.
"Is it? It's not my dream," said Didactylos. "I always dream of a giant carrot chasing me through a field of lobsters."
"I mean metaphorical dream, master," said Urn.
"What's a metaphor?" said Simony.
Brutha said, "What's a dream?"
A pillar of lightning laced the mist. Secondary lightnings sparked off the spinning globe.
"You can get it from cats," said Urn, lost in a philosophical world, as the Boat left a white wake behind it. "You stroke them with a rod of amber, and you get tiny lightnings . . . if I could magnify that a million times, no man would ever be a slave again and we could catch it in jars and do away with the night . . ."
Lightning struck a few yards away.
"We're in a boat with a large copper ball in the middle of a body of salt water," said Didactylos. "Thanks, Urn."
"And the temples of the gods would be magnificently lit, of course," said Urn quickly.
Didactylos tapped his stick on the hull. "It's a nice idea, but you'd never get enough cats," he said. The sea surged up.
"Jump into the water!" Om shouted.
"Why?" said Brutha.
A wave almost overturned the boat. Rain hissed on the surface of the sphere, sent up a scalding spray.
"I haven't got time to explain! Jump overboard! It's for the best! Trust me!"
Brutha stood up, holding the sphere's framework to steady himself.
"Sit down!" said Urn.
"I'm just going out," said Brutha. "I may be some time."
The boat rocked under him as he half-jumped, half-fell into the boiling sea.
Lightning struck the sphere.
As Brutha bobbed to the surface he saw, for a moment, the globe glowing white-hot and the Unnamed Boat, its screw almost out of the water, skimming away through the mists like a comet. It vanished in the clouds and rain. A moment later, above the noise of the storm, there was a muffled "boom."
Brutha raised his hand. Om broke the surface, blowing seawater out of his nostrils.
"You said it would be for the best!" screamed Brutha.
"Well? We're still alive! And hold me out of the water! Tortoises can't swim!"
"But they might be dead!"
"Do you want to join them?"
A wave submerged Brutha. For a moment the world was a dark green curtain, ringing in his ears.
"I can't swim with one hand!" he shouted, as he broke surface again.
"We'll be saved! She wouldn't dare!"
"What do you mean?"
Another wave slapped at Brutha, and suction dragged at his robes.
"Om?"
"Yes?"
"I don't think I can swim . . ."


Gods are not very introspective. It has never been a survival trait. The ability to cajole, threaten, and terrify has always worked well enough. When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency toward quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point-of-view is seldom necessary.
Which had led, across the multiverse, to men and women of tremendous brilliance and empathy devoting their entire lives to the service of deities who couldn't beat them at a quiet game of dominoes. For example, Sister Sestina of Quirm defied the wrath of a local king and walked unharmed across a bed of coals and propounded a philosophy of sensible ethics on behalf of a goddess whose only real interest was in hairstyles, and Brother Zephilite of Klatch left his vast estates and his family and spent his life ministering to the sick and poor on behalf of the invisible god F'rum, generally considered unable, should he have a backside, to find it with both hands, should he have hands. Gods never need to be very bright when there are humans around to be it for them.
The Sea Queen was considered fairly dumb even by other gods. But there was a certain logic to her thoughts, as she moved deep below the storm-tossed waves. The little boat had been a tempting target . . . but here was a bigger one, full of people, sailing right into the storm.
This one was fair game.
The Sea Queen had the attention span of an onion bahji.
And, by and large, she created her own sacrifices. And she believed in quantity.


The Fin of God plunged from wave crest to wave trough, the gale tearing at its sails. The captain fought his way through waist-high water to the prow, where Vorbis stood clutching the rail, apparently oblivious to the fact that the ship was wallowing half-submerged.
"Sir! We must reef sail! We can't outrun this!"
Green fire crackled on the tops of the masts. Vorbis turned. The light was reflected in the pit of his eyes.
"It is all for the glory of Om," he said. "Trust is our sail, and glory is our destination."
The captain had had enough. He was unsteady on the subject of religion, but felt fairly confident that after thirty years he knew something about the sea.
"The ocean floor is our destination!" he shouted.
Vorbis shrugged. "I did not say there would not be stops along the way," he said.
The captain stared at him and then fought his way back across the heaving deck. What he knew about the sea was that storms like this didn't just happen You didn't just sail from calm water into the midst of a raging hurricane. This wasn't the sea. This was personal.
Lightning struck the mainmast. There was a scream from the darkness as a mass of torn sail and rigging crashed on to the deck.
The captain half-swam, half-climbed up the ladder to the wheel, where the helmsman was a shadow in the spray and the eerie storm glow.
"We'll never make it alive!"
CORRECT.
"We'll have to abandon ship!"
NO. WE WILL TAKE IT WITH US. IT'S A NICE SHIP.
The captain peered closer in the murk.
"Is that you, Bosun Coplei?"
WOULD YOU LIKE ANOTHER GUESS?
The hull hit a submerged rock and ripped open. Lightning struck the remaining mast and, like a paper boat that had been too long in the water, the Fin of God folded up. Baulks of timber splintered and fountained up into the whirling sky . . .
And there was a sudden, velvety silence.
The captain found that he had acquired a recent memory. It involved water, and a ringing in his ears, and the sensation of cold fire in his lungs. But it was fading. He walked over to the rail, his footsteps loud in the quietness, and looked over the side. Despite the fact that the recent memory included something about the ship being totally smashed, it now seemed to be whole again. In a way.
"Uh," he said, "we appear to have run out of sea."
YES.
"And land, too."
The captain tapped the rail. It was grayish, and slightly transparent.
"Uh. Is this wood?"
MORPHIC MEMORY.
"Sorry?"
YOU WERE A SAILOR. YOU HAVE HEARD A SHIP REFERRED TO AS A LIVING THING?
"Oh, yes. You can't spend a night on a ship without feeling that it has a sou-"
YES.
The memory of Fin of God sailed on through the silence. There was the distant sighing of wind, or of the memory of wind. The blown-out corpses of dead gales.
"Uh," said the ghost of the captain, "did you just say `were'?"
YES.
"I thought you did."
The captain stared down. The crew was assembling on deck, looking up at him with anxious eyes.
He looked down further. In front of the crew the ship's rats had assembled. There was a tiny robed shape in front of them.
It said, SQUEAK.
He thought: even rats have a Death . . .
Death stood aside and beckoned to the captain.
YOU HAVE THE WHEEL.
"But-but where are we going?"
WHO KNOWS?
The captain gripped the spokes helplessly. "But . . . there's no stars that I recognize! No charts! What are the winds here? Where are the currents?"
Death shrugged.
The captain turned the wheel aimlessly. The ship glided on through the ghost of a sea.
Then he brightened up. The worst had already happened. It was amazing how good it felt to know that. And if the worst had already happened . . .
"Where's Vorbis?" he growled.
HE SURVIVED.
"Did he? There's no justice!"
THERE'S JUST ME.
Death vanished.
The captain turned the wheel a bit, for the look of the thing. After all, he was still captain and this was still, in a way, a ship.
"Mr. Mate?"
The mate saluted. Sir!"
"Um. Where shall we go now?"
The mate scratched his head.
"Well, cap'n, I did hear as the heathen Klatch have got this paradise place where there's drinking and singing and young women with bells on and . . . you know . . . regardless."
The mate looked hopefully at his captain.
"Regardless, eh?" said the captain thoughtfully.
"So I did hear."
The captain felt that he might be due some regardless.
"Any idea how you get there?"
"I think you get given instructions when you're alive," said the mate.
"Oh."
"And there're some barbarians up toward the Hub," said the mate, relishing the word, "who reckon they go to a big hall where there's all sorts to eat and drink."
"And women?"
"Bound to be."
The captain frowned. "It's a funny thing," he said, "but why is it that the heathens and the barbarians seem to have the best places to go when they die?"
"A bit of a poser, that," agreed the mate. "I s'pose it makes up for 'em . . . enjoying themselves all the time when they're alive, too?" He looked puzzled. Now that he was dead, the whole thing sounded suspicious.
"I suppose you've no idea of the way to that paradise either?" said the captain.
"Sorry, cap'n."
"No harm in searching, though."
The captain looked over the side. If you sailed for long enough, you were bound to strike a shore. And no harm in searching.
A movement caught his eye. He smiled. Good. A sign. Maybe it was all for the best, after all . . .
Accompanied by the ghosts of dolphins, the ghost of a ship sailed on . . .


Seagulls never ventured this far along the desert coast. Their niche was filled by the scalbie, a member of the crow family that the crow family would be the first to disown and never talked about in company. It seldom flew, but walked everywhere in a sort of lurching hop. Its distinctive call put listeners in mind of a malfunctioning digestive system. It looked like other birds looked after an oil slick. Nothing ate scalbies, except other scalbies. Scalbies ate things that made a vulture sick. Scalbies would eat vulture sick. Scalbies ate everything.
One of them, on this bright new morning, sidled across the flea-hopping sand, pecking aimlessly at things in case pebbles and bits of wood had become edible overnight. In the scalbie's experience, practically anything became edible if it was left for long enough. It came across a mound lying on the tideline, and gave it a tentative jab with its beak.
The mound groaned.
The scalbie backed away hurriedly and turned its attention to a small domed rock beside the mound. It was pretty certain this hadn't been there yesterday, either. It essayed an exploratory peck.
The rock extruded a head and said, "Bugger off, you evil sod."
The scalbie leapt backward and then made a kind of running jump, which was the nearest any scalbie ever bothered to come to actual flight, on to a pile of sun-bleached driftwood. Things were looking up. If this rock was alive, then eventually it would be dead.
The Great God Om staggered over to Brutha and butted him in the head with its shell until he groaned.
"Wake up, lad. Rise and shine. Huphuphup. All ashore who's going ashore."
Brutha opened an eye.
"Wha' happened?" he said.
"You're alive is what happened," said Om. Life's a beach, he remembered. And then you die.
Brutha pulled himself into a kneeling position.
There are beaches that cry out for brightly colored umbrellas.
There are beaches that speak of the majesty of the sea.
But this beach wasn't like that. It was merely a barren hem where the land met the ocean. Driftwood piled up on the high-tide line, scoured by the wind. The air buzzed with unpleasant small insects. There was a smell that suggested that something had rotted away, a long time ago, somewhere where the scalbies couldn't find it. It was not a good beach.
"Oh. God."
"Better than drowning," said Om encouragingly.
"I wouldn't know." Brutha looked along the beach. "Is there any water to drink?"
"Shouldn't think so," said Om.
"Ossory V, verse 3, says that you made living water flow from the dry desert," said Brutha.
"That was by way of being artistic license," said Om.
"You can't even do that?"
"No."
Brutha looked at the desert again. Behind the driftwood lines, and a few patches of grass that appeared to be dying even while it grew, the dunes marched away.
"Which way to Omnia?" he said.
"We don't want to go to Omnia," said Om.
Brutha stared at the tortoise. Then he picked him up.
"I think it's this way," he said.
Om's legs waggled frantically.
"What do you want to go to Omnia for?" he said.
"I don't want to," said Brutha. "But I'm going anyway."


The sun hung high above the beach.
Or possibly it didn't.
Brutha knew things about the sun now. They were leaking into his head. The Ephebians had been very interested in astronomy. Expletius had proved that the Disc was ten thousand miles across. Febrius, who'd stationed slaves with quick reactions and carrying voices all across the country at dawn, had proved that light travelled at about the same speed as sound. And Didactylos had reasoned that, in that case, in order to pass between the elephants, the sun had to travel at least thirty-five thousand miles in its orbit every day or, to put it another way, twice as fast as its own light.
Which meant that mostly you could only ever see where the sun had been, except twice every day when it caught up with itself, and this meant that the whole sun was a faster-than-light particle, a tachyon or, as Didactylos put it, a bugger.
It was still hot. The lifeless sea seemed to steam.
Brutha trudged along, directly above the only piece of shadow for hundreds of miles. Even Om had stopped complaining. It was too hot.
Here and there fragments of wood rolled in the scum at the edge of the sea.
Ahead of Brutha the air shimmered over the sand. In the middle of it was a dark blob.
He regarded it dispassionately as he approached, incapable of any real thought. It was nothing more than a reference point in a world of orange heat, expanding and contracting in the vibrating haze.
Closer to, it turned out to be Vorbis.
The thought took a long time to seep through Brutha's mind.
Vorbis.
Not with a robe. All torn off. Just his singlet with. The nails sewn in. Blood -all. Over one leg. Torn by. Rocks. Vorbis.
Vorbis.
Brutha slumped to his knees. On the high-tide line, a scalbie gave a croak.
"He's still . . . alive," Brutha managed.
"Pity," said Om.
"We should do something . . . for him."
"Yes? Maybe you can find a rock and stove his head in," said Om.
"We can't just leave him here."
"Watch us." No."
Brutha got his hand under the deacon and tried to lift him. To his dull surprise, Vorbis weighed almost nothing. The deacon's robe had concealed a body that was just skin stretched over bone. Brutha could have broken him with bare hands.
"What about me?" whined Om.
Brutha slung Vorbis over his shoulder.
"You've got four legs," he said.
"I am your God!"
"Yes. I know." Brutha trudged on along the beach.
"What are you going to do with him?"
"Take him to Omnia," said Brutha thickly. "People must know. What he did."
"You're mad! You're mad! You think you're going to carry him to Omnia?"
"Don't know. Going to try."
"You! You!" Om pounded a claw on the sand. "Millions of people in the world and it had to be you! Stupid! Stupid!"
Brutha was becoming a wavering shape in the haze.
"That's it!" shouted Om. "I don't need you! You think I need you? I don't need you! I can soon find another believer! No problem about that!"
Brutha disappeared.
"And I'm not chasing after you!" Om screamed.


Brutha watched his feet dragging one in front of the other.
He was past the point of thinking now. What drifted through his frying brain were disjointed images and fragments of memory.
Dreams. They were pictures in your head. Coaxes had written a whole scroll about them. The superstitious thought they were messages sent by God, but really they were created by the brain itself, thrown up as it nightly sorted and fiIed the experiences of the day. Brutha never dreamed. So sometimes . . .
blackout, while the mind did the filing. It fiIed all the books. Now he knew without learning . . .
That was dreams.
God. God needed people. Belief was the food of the gods. But they also needed a shape. Gods became what people believed they ought to be. So the Goddess of Wisdom carried a penguin. It could have happened to any god. It should have been an owl. Everyone knew that. But one bad sculptor who had only ever had an owl described to him makes a mess of a statue, belief steps in, next thing you know the Goddess of Wisdom is lumbered with a bird that wears evening dress the whole time and smells of fish.
You gave a god its shape, like a jelly fills a mold.
Gods often became your father, said Abraxas the Agnostic. Gods became a big beard in the sky, because when you were three years old that was your father.
Of course Abraxas survived . . . This thought arrived sharp and cold, out of the part of his own mind that Brutha could still call his own. Gods didn't mind atheists, if they were deep, hot, fiery atheists like Simony, who spend their whole life not believing, spend their whole life hating gods for not existing. That sort of atheism was a rock. It was nearly belief . . .
Sand. It was what you found in deserts. Crystals of rock, sculpted into dunes. Gordo of Tsort said that sand was worn-down mountains but Irexes had found that sandstone was stone pressed out of sand, which suggested that grains were the fathers of mountains . . .
Every one a little crystal. And all of them getting bigger . . .
Much bigger . . .
Quietly, without realizing it, Brutha stopped falling forward and lay still.


"Bugger Off!"
The scalbie took no notice. This was interesting. It was getting to see whole new stretches of sand it had never seen before and, of course, there was the prospect, even the certainty, of a good meal at the end of it all.
It had perched on Om's shell.
Om stumped along the sand, pausing occasionally to shout at his passenger.
Brutha had come this way.
But here one of the outcrops of rocks, littering the desert like islands in a sea, stretched right down to the water's edge. He'd never have been able to climb it. The footprints in the sand turned inland, toward the deep desert.
"Idiot!"
Om struggled up the side of a dune, digging his feet in to stop himself slaloming backward.
On the far side of the dune the tracks became a long groove, where Brutha must have fallen. Om retracted his legs and tobogganed down it.
The tracks veered here. He must have thought that he could walk around the next dune and find the rock again on the other side. Om knew about deserts, and one of the things he knew was that this kind of logical thinking had been previously applied by a thousand bleached, lost skeletons.
Nevertheless, he plodded after the tracks, grateful for the brief shade of the dune now that the sun was sinking.
Around the dune and, yes, here they zigzagged awkwardly up a slope about ninety degrees away from where they should be heading. Guaranteed. That was the thing about deserts. They had their own gravity. They sucked you into the center.


Brutha crawled forward, Vorbis held unsteadily by one limp arm. He didn't dare stop. His grandmother would hit him again. And there was Master Nhumrod, too, drifting in and out of vision.
"I am really disappointed in you, Brutha. Mmm?"
"Want . . . water . . ."
"-water," said Nhumrod. "Trust in the great God."
Brutha concentrated. Nhumrod vanished.
"Great God?" he said.
Somewhere there was some shade. The desert couldn't go on for ever.


The sun set fast. For a while, Om knew, heat would radiate off the sand and his own shell would store it, but that would soon go and then there would be the bitterness of a desert night.
Stars were already coming on when he found Brutha. Vorbis had been dropped a little way away.
Om pulled himself level with Brutha's ear.
"Hey!"
There was no sound, and no movement. Om butted Brutha gently in the head and then looked at the cracked lips.
There was a pecking noise behind him.
The scalbie was investigating Brutha's toes, but its explorations were interrupted when a tortoise jaw closed around its foot.
"I old oo, ugger ogg!"
The scalbie gave a burp of panic and tried to fly away, but it was hindered by a determined tortoise hanging on to one leg. Om was bounced along the sand for a few feet before he let go.
He tried to spit, but tortoise mouths aren't designed for the job.
"I hate all birds," he said, to the evening air.
The scalbie watched him reproachfully from the top of a dune. It ruffled its handful of greasy feathers with the air of one who was prepared to wait all night, if necessary. As long as it took.
Om crawled back to Brutha. Well, there was still breathing going on.
Water . . .
The god gave it some thought. Smiting the living rock. That was one way. Getting water to flow . . . no problem. It was just a matter of molecules and vectors. Water had a natural tendency to flow. You just have to see to it that it flowed here instead of there. No problem at all to a god in the peak of condition.
How did you tackle it from a tortoise perspective?
The tortoise dragged himself to the bottom of the dune and then walked up and down for a few minutes. Finally he selected a spot and began digging.


This wasn't right. It had been fiery hot. Now he was freezing.
Brutha opened his eyes. Desert stars, brilliant white, looked back at him. His tongue seemed to fill his mouth. Now, what was it . . .
Water.
He rolled over. There had been voices in his head, and now there were voices outside his head. They were faint, but they were definitely there, echoing quietly over the moonlit sands.
Brutha crawled painfully toward the foot of the dune. There was a mound there. In fact, there were several mounds. The muffled voice was coming from one of them. He pulled himself closer.
There was a hole in the mound. Somewhere far underground, someone was swearing. The words were unclear as they echoed backward and forward up the tunnel, but the general effect was unmistakable.
Brutha flopped down, and watched.
After a few minutes there was movement at the mouth of the hole and Om emerged, covered with what, if this wasn't a desert, Brutha would have called mud.
"Oh, it's you," said the tortoise. "Tear off a bit of your robe and pass it over."
Dreamlike, Brutha obeyed.
"Turnin' round down there", said Om, "is no picnic, let me tell you."
He took the rag in his jaws, backed around carefully, and disappeared down the hole. After a couple of minutes he was back, still dragging the rag.
It was soaked. Brutha let the liquid dribble into his mouth. It tasted of mud, and sand, and cheap brown dye, and slightly of tortoise, but he would have drunk a gallon of it. He could have swum in a pool of it.
He tore off another strip for Om to take down.
When Om re-emerged, Brutha was kneeling beside Vorbis.
"Sixteen feet down! Sixteen bloody feet!" shouted Om. "Don't waste it on him! Isn't he dead yet?"
"He's got a fever."
"Put him out of our misery."
"We're still taking him back to Omnia."
"You think we'll get there? No food? No water?"
"But you found water. Water in the desert."
"Nothing miraculous about that," said Om. "There's a rainy season near the coast. Flash floods. Wadis. Dried-up river beds. You get aquifers," he added.
"Sounds like a miracle to me," croaked Brutha.
"Just because you can explain it doesn't mean it's not still a miracle."
"Well, there's no food down there, take it from me," said Om. "Nothing to eat. Nothing in the sea, if we can find the sea again. I know the desert. Rocky ridges you have to go round. Everything turning you out of your path. Dunes that move in the night . . . lions . . . other things . . ."
. . . gods.
"What do you want to do, then?" said Brutha. "You said better alive than dead. You want to go back to Ephebe? We'll be popular there, you think?"
Om was silent.
Brutha nodded.
"Fetch more water, then."


It was better traveling at night, with Vorbis over one shoulder and Om under one arm.
At this time of year-
-the glow in the sky over there is the Aurora Corealis, the hublights, where the magical field of the Discworld constantly discharges itself among the peaks of Cori Celesti, the central mountain. And at this time of year the sun rises over the desert in Ephebe and over the sea in Omnia, so keep the hublights on the left and the sunset glow behind you-
"Did you ever go to Cori Celesti?" said Brutha.
Om, who had been nodding off in the cold, woke up with a start.
"Huh?"
"It's where the gods live."
"Hah! I could tell you stories," said Om darkly.
"What?"
"Think they're so bloody elite!"
"You didn't live up there, then?"
"No. Got to be a thunder god or something. Got to have a whole parcel of worshipers to live on Nob Hill. Got to be an anthropomorphic personification, one of them things."
"Not just a Great God, then?"
Well, this was the desert. And Brutha was going to die.
"May as well tell you," muttered Om. "It's not as though we're going to survive . . . See, every god's a Great God to someone. I never wanted to be that great. A handful of tribes, a city or two. It's not much to ask, is it?"
"There's two million people in the empire," said Brutha.
"Yeah. Pretty good, eh? Started off with nothing but a shepherd hearing voices in his head, ended up with two million people."
"But you never did anything with them," said Brutha.
"Like what?"
"Well . . . tell them not to kill one another, that sort of thing . . ."
"Never really given it much thought. Why should I tell them that?"
Brutha sought for something that would appeal to god psychology.
"Well, if people didn't kill one another, there'd be more people to believe in you?" he suggested.
"It's a point," Om conceded. "Interesting point. Sneaky."
Brutha walked along in silence. There was a glimmer of frost on the dunes.
"Have you ever heard", he said, "of Ethics?"
"Somewhere in Howondaland, isn't it?"
"The Ephebians were very interested in it."
"Probably thinking about invading."
"They seemed to think about it a lot."
"Long-term strategy, maybe."
"I don't think it's a place, though. It's more to do with how people live."
"What, lolling around all day while slaves do the real work? Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it's because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place while those fellows are living like-"
"-gods?" said Brutha.
There was a terrible silence.
"I was going to say kings," said Om, reproachfully.
"They sound a bit like gods."
"Kings," said Om emphatically.
"Why do people need gods?" Brutha persisted.
"Oh, you've got to have gods," said Om, in a hearty, no-nonsense voice.
"But it's gods that need people," said Brutha. "To do the believing. You said."
Om hesitated. "Well, okay," he said. "But people have got to believe in something. Yes? I mean, why else does it thunder?"
"Thunder," said Brutha, his eyes glazing slightly, "I don't-"
"-is caused by clouds banging together; after the lightning stroke, there is a hole in the air, and thus the sound is engendered by the clouds rushing to fill the hole and colliding, in accordance with strict cumulodynamic principles."
"Your voice goes funny when you're quoting," said Om. "What does engendered mean?"
"I don't know. No one showed me a dictionary."
"Anyway, that's just an explanation," said Om. "It's not a reason."
"My grandmother said thunder was caused by the Great God Om taking his sandals off," said Brutha. "She was in a funny mood that day. Nearly smiled."
"Metaphorically accurate," said Om. "But I never did thundering. Demarcation, see. Bloody I've-got-a-big-hammer Blind Io up on Nob Hill does all the thundering."
"I thought you said there were hundreds of thunder gods," said Brutha.
"Yeah. And he's all of 'em. Rationalization. A couple of tribes join up, they've both got thunder gods, right? And the gods kind of run together-you know how amoebas split?"
"No."
"Well, it's like that, only the other way."
"I still don't see how one god can be a hundred thunder gods. They all look different . . ."
"False noses."
"What?"
"And different voices. I happen to know Io's got seventy different hammers. Not common knowledge, that. And it's just the same with mother goddesses. There's only one of 'em. She just got a lot of wigs and of course it's amazing what you can do with a padded bra."
There was absolute silence in the desert. The stars, smeared slightly by high-altitude moisture, were tiny, motionless rosettes.
Away toward what the Church called the Top Pole, and which Brutha was coming to think of as the Hub, the sky flickered.
Brutha put Om down, and laid Vorbis on the sand.
Absolute silence.
Nothing for miles, except what he had brought with him. This must have been how the prophets felt, when they went into the desert to find . . . whatever it was they found, and talk to . . . whoever they talked to.
He heard Om, slightly peevish, say: "People've got to believe in something. Might as well be gods. What else is there?"
Brutha laughed.
"You know," he said, "I don't think I believe in anything any more."
"Except me!"
"Oh, I know you exist," said Brutha. He felt Om relax a little. "There's something about tortoises. Tortoises I can believe in. They seem to have a lot of existence in one place. It's gods in general I'm having difficulty with."
"Look, if people stop believing in gods, they'll believe in anything," said Om. "They'll believe in young Urn's steam ball. Anything at all."
"Hmm."
A green glow in the sky indicated that the light of dawn was chasing frantically after its sun.
Vorbis groaned.
"I don't know why he won't wake up," said Brutha. "I can't find any broken bones."
"How do you know?"
"One of the Ephebian scrolls was all about bones. Can't you do anything for him?"
"Why?"
"You're a god."
"Well, yes. If I was strong enough, I could probably strike him with lightning."
"I thought to did the lightning."
"No, just the thunder. You're allowed to do as much lightning as you like but you have to contract for the thundering."
Now the horizon was a broad golden band.
"How about rain?" said Brutha. "How about something useful?"
A line of silver appeared at the bottom of the gold. Sunlight was racing towards Brutha.
"That was a very hurtful remark," said the tortoise. "A remark calculated to wound."
In the rapidly growing light Brutha saw one of the rock islands a little way off. Its sand-blasted pillars offered nothing but shade, but shade, always available in large quantities in the depths of the Citadel, was now in short supply here.
"Caves?" said Brutha.
"Snakes."
"But still caves?"
"In conjunction with snakes."
"Poisonous snakes?"
"Guess."

The Unnamed Boat clipped along gently, the wind filling Urn's robe attached to a mast made out of bits of the sphere's framework bound together with Simony's sandal thongs.
"I think I know what went wrong," said Urn. "A mere overspeed problem."
"Overspeed? We left the water!" said Simony.
"It needs some sort of governor device," said Urn, scratching a design on the side of the boat. "Something that'd open the valve if there was too much steam. I think I could do something with a pair of revolving balls."
"It's funny you should say that," said Didactylos. "When I felt us leave the water and the sphere exploded I distinctly felt my-"
"That bloody thing nearly killed us!" said Simony.
"So the next one will be better," said Urn, cheerfully. He scanned the distant coastline.
"Why don't we land somewhere along here?" he said.
"The desert coast?" said Simony. "What for? Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, easy to lose your way. Omnia's the only destination in this wind. We can land this side of the city. I know people. And those people know people. All across Omnia, there's people who know people. People who believe in the Turtle."
"You know, I never meant for people to believe in the Turtle," said Didactylos unhappily. "It's just a big turtle. It just exists. Things just happen that way. I don't think the Turtle gives a damn. I just thought it might be a good idea to write things down and explain things a bit."
"People sat up all night, on guard, while other people made copies," said Simony, ignoring him. "Passing them from hand to hand! Everyone making a copy and passing it on! Like a fire spreading underground!"
"Would this be lots of copies?" said Didactylos cautiously.
"Hundreds! Thousands!"
"I suppose it's too late to ask for, say, a five per cent royalty?" said Didactylos, looking hopeful for a moment. "No. Probably out of the question, I expect. No. Forget I even asked."
A few flying fish zipped out of the waves, pursued by a dolphin.
"Can't help feeling a bit sorry for that young Brutha," said Didactylos.
"Priests are expendable," said Simony. "There's too many of them."
"He had all our books," said Urn.
"He'll probably float with all that knowledge in him," said Didactylos.
"He was mad, anyway," said Simony. "I saw him whispering to that tortoise."
"I wish we still had it. There's good eating on one of those things," said Didactylos.


It wasn't much of a cave, just a deep hollow carved by the endless desert winds and, a long time ago, even by water. But it was enough.
Brutha knelt on the stony floor and raised the rock over his head.
There was a buzzing in his ears and his eyeballs felt as though they were set in sand. No water since sunset and no food for a hundred years. He had to do it.
"I'm sorry," he said, and brought the rock down.
The snake had been watching him intently but in its early-morning torpor it was too slow to dodge. The cracking noise was a sound that Brutha knew his conscience would replay to him, over and over again.
"Good," said Om, beside him. "Now skin it, and don't waste the juice. Save the skin, too."
"I didn't want to do it," said Brutha.
"Look at it this way," said Om, "if you'd walked in the cave without me to warn you, you'd be lying on the floor now with a foot the size of a wardrobe. Do unto others before they do unto you."
"It's not even a very big snake," said Brutha.
"And then while you're writhing there in indescribable agony, you imagine all the things you would have done to that damn snake if you'd got to it first," said Om. "Well, your wish has been granted. Don't give any to Vorbis," he added.
"He's running a bad fever. He keeps muttering."
"Do you really think you'll get him back to the Citadel and they'll believe you?" said Om.
"Brother Nhumrod always said I was very truthful," said Brutha. He smashed the rock on the cave wall to create a crude cutting edge, and gingerly started dismembering the snake. "Anyway, there isn't anything else I can do. I couldn't just leave him."
"Yes you could," said Om.
"To die in the desert?"
"Yes. It's easy. Much easier than not leaving him to die in the desert."
No.
"This is how they do things in Ethics, is it?" said Om sarcastically.
"I don't know. It's how I'm doing it."


The Unnamed Boat bobbed in a gully between the rocks. There was a low cliff beyond the beach. Simony climbed back down it, to where the philosophers were huddling out of the wind.
"I know this area," he said. "We're a few miles from the village where a friend lives. All we have to do is wait till nightfall."
"Why're you doing all this?" said Urn. "I mean, what's the point?"
"Have you ever heard of a country called Istanzia?" said Simony. "It wasn't very big. It had nothing anyone wanted. It was just a place for people to live."
"Omnia conquered it fifteen years ago," said Didactylos.
"That's right. My country," said Simony. "I was just a kid then. But I won't forget. Nor will others. There's lots of people with a reason to hate the Church."
"I saw you standing close to Vorbis," said Urn. "I thought you were protecting him."
"Oh, I was, I was," said Simony. "I don't want anyone to kill him before I do."
Didactylos wrapped his toga around himself and shivered.


The sun was riveted to the copper dome of the sky. Brutha dozed in the cave. In his own corner, Vorbis tossed and turned.
Om sat waiting in the cave mouth.
Waited expectantly.
Waited in dread.
And they came.
They came out from under scraps of stone, and from cracks in the rock. They fountained up from the sand, they distilled out of the wavering sky. The air was fiIled with their voices, as faint as the whispering of gnats.
Om tensed.
The language he spoke was not like the language of the high gods. It was hardly language at all. It was a mere modulation of desires and hungers, without nouns and with only a few verbs .
. . . Want . . .
Om replied, mine.
There were thousands of them. He was stronger, yes, he had a believer, but they fiIled the sky like locusts. The longing poured down on him with the weight of hot lead. The only advantage, the only advantage, was that the small gods had no concept of working together. That was a luxury that came with evolution .
. . . Want . . .
Mine!
The chittering became a whine.
But you can have the other one, said Om .
. . . Dull, hard, enclosed, shut-in . . .
I know, said Om. But this one, mine!
The psychic shout echoed around the desert. The small gods fled.
Except for one.
Om was aware that it had not been swarming with the others, but had been hovering gently over a piece of sun-bleached bone. It had said nothing.
He turned his attention on it.
You. Mine!
I know, said the small god. It knew speech, real god speech, although it talked as though every word had been winched from the pit of memory.
Who are you? said Om.
The small god stirred.
There was a city once, said the small god. Not just a city. An empire of cities. I, I, I remember there were canals, and gardens. There was a lake. They had floating gardens on the lake, I recall. I, I. And there were temples. Such temples as you may dream of. Great pyramid temples that reached to the sky. Thousands were sacrificed. To the greater glory.
Om felt sick. This wasn't just a small god. This was a small god who hadn't always been small . . .
Who were you?
And there were temples. I, I, me. Such temples as you may dream of. Great pyramid temples that reached to the sky. The glory of. Thousands were sacrificed. Me. To the greater glory.
And there were temples. Me, me, me. Greater glory. Such glory temples as you may dream of. Great pyramid dream temples that reached to the sky. Me, me. Sacrificed. Dream. Thousands were sacrificed. To me the greater sky glory-
You were their God? Om managed.
Thousands were sacrificed. To the greater glory.
Can you hear me?
Thousands sacrificed greater glory. Me, me, me.
What was your name? shouted Om.
Name?
A hot wind blew over the desert, shifting a few grains of sand. The echo of a lost god blew away, tumbling over and over, until it vanished among the rocks.
Who were you?
There was no answer.
That's what happens, Om thought. Being a small god was bad, except at the time you hardly knew that it was bad because you only barely knew anything at all, but all the time there was something which was just possibly the germ of hope, the knowledge and belief that one day you might be more than you were now.
But how much worse to have been a god, and to now be no more than a smoky bundle of memories, blown back and forth across the sand made from the crumbled stones of your temples . . .
Om turned around and, on stumpy legs, walked purposefully back into the cave until he came to Brutha's head, which he butted.
"Wst?"
"Just checking you're still alive."
"Fgfl."
"Right."
Om staggered back to his guard position at the mouth of the cave.
There were said to be oases in the desert, but they were never in the same place twice. The desert wasn't mappable. It ate map-makers.
So did the lions. Om could remember them. Scrawny things, not like the lions of the Howondaland veldt. More wolf than lion, more hyena than either. Not brave, but with a kind of vicious, rangy cowardice that was much more dangerous . . .
Lions.
Oh, dear . . .
He had to find lions.
Lions drank.


Brutha awoke as the afternoon light dragged across the desert. His mouth tasted of snake.
Om was butting him on the foot.
"Come on, come on, you're missing the best of the day."
"Is there any water?" Brutha murmured thickly.
"There will be. Only five miles off. Amazing luck."
Brutha pulled himself up. Every muscle ached.
"How do you know?"
"I can sense it. I am a god, you know."
"You said you could only sense minds."
Om cursed. Brutha didn't forget things.
"It's more complicated than that," lied Om. "Trust me. Come on, while there's some twilight. And don't forget Mister Vorbis."
Vorbis was curled up. He looked at Brutha with unfocused eyes, stood up like a man still asleep when Brutha helped him.
"I think he might have been poisoned," said Brutha. "There's sea creatures with stings. And poisonous corals. He keeps moving his lips, but I can't make out what he's trying to say."
"Bring him along," said Om. "Bring him along. Oh, yes."
"You wanted me to abandon him last night," said Brutha.
"Did I?" said Om, his very shell radiating innocence. "Well, maybe I've been to Ethics. Had a change of heart. I can see he's with us for a purpose now. Good old Vorbis. Bring him along."


Simony and the two philosophers stood on the clifftop, looking across the parched farmlands of Omnia to the distant rock of the Citadel. Two of them looking, anyway.
"Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I'd smash that place like an egg," said Simony, leading Didactylos down the narrow path.
"Looks big," said Urn.
"See the gleam? Those are the doors."
"Look massive."
"I was wondering," said Simony, "about the boat. The way it moved. Something like that could smash the doors, right?"
"You'd have to flood the valley," said Urn.
"I mean if it was on wheels."
"Hah, yes," said Urn, sarcastically. It had been a long day. "Yes, if I had a forge and half a dozen blacksmiths and a lot of help. Wheels? No problem. But--
"We shall have to see," said Simony, "what we can do."


The sun was on the horizon when Brutha, his arm around Vorbis's shoulders, reached the next rock island. It was bigger than the one with the snake. The wind had carved the stones into gaunt, unlikely shapes, like fingers. There were even plants lodging in crevices in the rock.
"There's water somewhere," said Brutha.
"There's always water, even in the worst deserts," said Om. "One, oh, maybe two inches of rain a year."
"I can smell something," said Brutha, as his feet stopped treading on sand and crunched up the limestone scree around the boulders. "Something rank."
"Hold me over your head."
Om scanned the rocks.
"Right. Now bring me down again. And head for that rock that looks like . . . that looks very unexpected, really."
Brutha stared. "It does, too," he croaked, eventually. "Amazing to think it was carved by the wind."
"The wind god has a sense of humor," said Om. "Although it's pretty basic."
Near the foot of the rock huge slabs had fallen over the years, forming a jagged pile with, here and there, shadowy openings.
"That smell-" Brutha began.
"Probably animals come to drink the water," said Om.
Brutha's foot kicked against something yellowwhite, which bounced away among the rocks making a noise like a sackful of coconuts. In the stifling empty silence of the desert, it echoed loudly.
"What was that?"
"Definitely not a skull," lied Om. "Don't worry . . .
"There's bones everywhere!"
"Well? What did you expect? This is a desert! People die here! It's a very popular occupation in this vicinity!"
Brutha picked up a bone. He was, as he well knew, stupid. But people didn't gnaw their own bones after they died.
"Om-"
"There's water here!" shouted Om. "We need it! But-there's probably one or two drawbacks!"
"What kind of drawbacks?"
"As in natural hazards!"
"Like-?"
"Well, you know lions?" said Om desperately.
"There's lions here?"
"Well . . . slightly."
"Slightly lions?"
"Only one lion."
"Only one-"
"-generally a solitary creature. Most to be feared are the old males, who are forced into the most inhospitable regions by their younger rivals. They are eviltempered and cunning and in their extremity have lost all fear of man-'
The memory faded, letting go of Brutha's vocal chords.
"That kind?" Brutha finished.
"It won't take any notice of us once it's fed," said Om.
"Yes?"
"They go to sleep."
"After feeding-?"
Brutha looked round at Vorbis, who was slumped against a rock.
"Feeding?" he repeated.
"It'll be a kindness," said Om.
"To the lion, yes! You want to use him as bait?"
"He's not going to survive the desert. Anyway, he's done much worse to thousands of people. He'll be dying for a good cause."
"A good cause?"
"I like it."
There was a growl, from somewhere in the stones. It wasn't loud, but it was a sound with sinews in it. Brutha backed away.
"We don't just throw people to the lions!"
"He does."
"Yes. I don't."
"All right, we'll get on top of a slab and when the lion starts on him you can brain it with a rock. He'll probably get away with an arm or a leg. He'll never miss it."
"No! You can't do that to people just because they're helpless!"
"You know, I can't think of a better time?"
There was another growl from the rock pile. It sounded closer.
Brutha looked down desperately at the scattered bones. Among them, half-hidden by debris, was a sword. It was old, and not well-made, and scoured by sand. He picked it up gingerly by the blade.
"Other end," said Om.
"I know!..
"Can you use one?"
"I don't know!"
"I really hope you're a fast learner."
The lion emerged, slowly.
Desert lions, it has been said, are not like the lions of the veldt. They had been, when the great desert had been verdant woodland.[7] Then there had been time to lie around for most of the day, looking majestic, in between regular meals of goat.[8] But the woodland had become scrubland, the scrubland had become, well, poorer scrubland, and the goats and the people and, eventually, even the cities, went away.
The lions stayed. There's always something to eat, if you're hungry enough. People still had to cross the desert. There were lizards. There were snakes. It wasn't much of an ecological niche, but the lions were hanging on to it like grim death, which was what happened to most people who met a desert lion.
Someone had already met this one.
Its mane was matted. Ancient scars criss-crossed its pelt. It dragged itself towards Brutha, back legs trailing uselessly.
"It's hurt," said Brutha.
"Oh, good. And there's plenty of eating on one of those," said Om. "A bit stringy, but-"
The lion collapsed, its toast-rack chest heaving. A spear was protruding from its flank. Flies, which can always find something to eat in any desert, flew up in a swarm.
Brutha put down the sword. Om stuck his head in his shell.
"Oh no," he murmured. "Twenty million people in this world, and the only one who believes in me is a suicide"
"We can't just leave it," said Brutha.
"We can. We can. It's a lion. You leave lions alone. "
Brutha knelt down. The lion opened one crusted yellow eye, too weak even to bite him.
"You're going to die, you're going to die. I'm not going to find anyone to believe in me out here-"
Brutha's knowledge of animal anatomy was rudimentary. Although some of the inquisitors had an enviable knowledge of the insides of the human body that is denied to all those who are not allowed to open it while it's still working, medicine as such was frowned upon in Omnia. But somewhere, in every village, was someone who officially didn't set bones and who didn't know a few things about certain plants, and who stayed out of reach of the Quisition because of the fragile gratitude of their patients. And every peasant picked up a smattering of knowledge. Acute toothache can burn through all but the strongest in faith.
Brutha grasped the spear-haft. The lion growled as he moved it.
"Can't you speak to it?" said Brutha.
"It's an animal."
"So are you. You could try to calm it down. Because if it gets excited-"
Om snapped into concentration.
In fact the lion's mind contained nothing but pain, a spreading nebula of the stuff, overcoming even the normal background hunger. Om tried to encircle the pain, make it flow away . . . and not to think about what would happen if it went. By the feel of things, the lion had not eaten for days.
The lion grunted as Brutha withdrew the spearhead.
"Omnian," he said. "It hasn't been there long. It must have met the soldiers when they were on the way to Ephebe. They must have passed close by." He tore another strip from his robe, and tried to clean the wound.
"We want to eat it, not cure it!" shouted Om. "What're you thinking of? You think it's going to be grateful?"
"It wanted to be helped."
"And soon it will want to be fed, have you thought about that?"
"It's looking pathetically at me."
"Probably never seen a week's meals all walking around on one pair of legs before."
That wasn't true, Om reflected. Brutha was shedding weight like an ice-cube, out here in the desert. That kept him alive! The boy was a two-legged camel.
Brutha crunched towards the rock pile, shards and bones shifting under his feet. The boulders formed a maze of half-open tunnels and caves. By the smell, the lion had lived there for a long time, and had quite often been ill.
He stared at the nearest cave for some time.
"What's so fascinating about a lion's den?" said Om.
"The way it's got steps down into it, I think," said Brutha.


Didactylos could feel the crowd. It filled the barn.
"How many are there?" he said.
"Hundreds!" said Urn. "They're even sitting on the rafters! And . . . master?"
"Yes?"
"There's even one or two priests! And dozens of soldiers!"
"Don't worry," said Simony, joining them on the makeshift platform made of fig barrels. "They are Turtle believers, just like you. We have friends in unexpected places!"
"But I don't-" Didactylos began, helplessly.
"There isn't anyone here who doesn't hate the Church with all their soul," said Simony.
"But that's not-"
"They're just waiting for someone to lead them!"
"But I never-"
"I know you won't let us down. You're a man of reason. Urn, come over here. There's a blacksmith I want you to meet-"
Didactylos turned his face to the crowd. He could feel the hot, hushed silence of their stares.


Each drop took minutes.
It was hypnotic. Brutha found himself staring at each developing drip. It was almost impossible to see it grow, but they had been growing and dripping for thousands of years.
"How?" said Om.
"Water seeps down after the rains," said Brutha. "It lodges in the rocks. Don't gods know these things?"
"We don't need to." Om looked around. "Let's go. I hate this place."
"It's just an old temple. There's nothing here."
"That's what I mean."
Sand and rubble half-filled it. Light lanced in through the broken roof high above, on to the slope that they had climbed down. Brutha wondered how many of the windcarved rocks in the desert had once been buildings. This one must have been huge, perhaps a mighty tower. And then the desert had come.
There were no whispering voices here. Even the small gods kept away from abandoned temples, fo the same reason that people kept away from graveyards. The only sound was the occasional plink of the water.
It dripped into a- shallow pool in front of what looked like an altar. From the pool it had worn a groove in the slabs of the floor all the way to a round pit, which appeared to be bottomless. There were a few statues, all of them toppled; they were heavy-proportioned, lacking any kind of detail, each one a child's clay model chiseled in granite. The distant walls had once been covered with some kind of bas-relief, but it had crumbled away except in a few places, which showed strange designs that mainly consisted of tentacles.
"Who were the people who lived here?" said Brutha.
"I don't know."
"What god did they worship?"
"I don't know."
"The statues are made of granite, but there's no granite near here."
"They were very devout, then. They dragged it all the way."
"And the altar block is covered in grooves."
"Ah. Extremely devout. That would be to let the blood run off."
"You really think they did human sacrifice?"
"I don't know! I want to get out of here!"
"Why? There's water and it's cool-"
"Because . . . a god lived here. A powerful god. Thousands worshiped it. I can feel it. You know? It comes out of the walls. A Great God. Mighty were his dominions and magnificent was his word. Armies went forth in his name and conquered and slew. That kind of thing. And now no one, not you, not me, no one, even knows who the god was or his name or what he looked like. Lions drink in the holy places and those little squidgy things with eight legs, there's one by your foot, what d'you call 'em, the ones with the antennae, crawl beneath the altar. Now do you understand?"
"No," said Brutha.
"Don't you fear death? You're a human!"
Brutha considered this. A few feet away. Vorbis stared mutely at the patch of sky.
"He's awake. He's just not speaking."
"Who cares? I didn't ask you about him."
"Well . . . sometimes . . . when I'm on catacomb duty . . . it's the kind of place where you can't help . . . I mean, all the skulls and things . . . and the Book says . . ."
"There you are," said Om, a note of bitter triumph in his voice. "You don't know. That's what stops everyone going mad, the uncertainty of it, the feeling that it might work out all right after all. But it's different for gods. We do know. You know that story about the sparrow flying through a room?"
"No."
"Everyone knows it."
"Not me."
"About life being like a sparrow flying through a room? Nothing but darkness outside? And it flies through the room and there's just a moment of warmth and light?"
"There are windows open?" said Brutha.
"Can't you imagine what it's like to be that sparrow, and know about the darkness? To know that afterward there'll be nothing to remember, ever, except that one moment of the light?"
No.
"No. Of course you can't. But that's what it's like, being a god. And this place . . . it's a morgue."
Brutha looked around at the ancient, shadowy temple.
"Well . . . do you know what it's like, being human?"
Om's head darted into his shell for a moment, the nearest he was capable of to a shrug.
"Compared to a god? Easy. Get born. Obey a few rules. Do what you're told. Die. Forget."
Brutha stared at him.
"Is something wrong?"
Brutha shook his head. Then he stood up and walked over to Vorbis.
The deacon had drunk water from Brutha's cupped hands. But there was a switched-off quality about him. He walked, he drank, he breathed. Or something did. His body did. The dark eyes opened, but appeared to be looking at nothing that Brutha could see. There was no sense that anyone was looking out through them. Brutha was certain that if he walked away, Vorbis would sit on the cracked flagstones until he very gently fell over. Vorbis' body was present, but the whereabouts of his mind was probably not locatable on any normal atlas.
It was just that, here and now and suddenly, Brutha felt so alone that even Vorbis was good company.
"Why do you bother with him? He's had thousands of people killed!"
"Yes, but perhaps he thought you wanted it."
"I never said I wanted that."
"You didn't care," said Brutha.
"But I-"
"Shut up!"
Om's mouth opened in astonishment.
"You could have helped people," said Brutha. "But all you did was stamp around and roar and try to make people afraid. Like . . . like a man hitting a donkey with a stick. But people like Vorbis made the stick so good, that's all the donkey ends up believing in."
"That could use some work, as a parable," said Om sourly.
"This is real life I'm talking about!"
"It's not my fault if people misuse the-"
"It is! It has to be! If you muck up people's minds just because you want them to believe in you, what they do is all your fault!"
Brutha glared at the tortoise, and then stamped off toward the pile of rubble that dominated one end of the ruined temple. He rummaged around in it.
"What are you looking for?"
"We'll need to carry water," said Brutha.
"There won't be anything," said Om. "People just left. The land ran out and so did the people. They took everything with them. Why bother to look?"
Brutha ignored him. There was something under the rocks and sand.
"Why worry about Vorbis?" Om whined. "In a hundred years' time, he'll be dead anyway. We'll all be dead."
Brutha tugged at the piece of curved pottery. It came away, and turned out to be about two-thirds of a wide bowl, broken right across. It had been almost as wide as Brutha's outstretched arms, but had been too broken for anyone to loot.
It was useful for nothing. But it had once been useful for something. There were embossed figures round its rim. Brutha peered at them, for want of something to distract himself, while Om's voice droned on in his head.
The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god). In the center of the bowl was a larger figure, obviously important, some kind of god they were doing it for . . .
"What?" he said.
"I said, in a hundred years' time we'll all be dead."
Brutha stared at the figures round the bowl. No one knew who their god was, and they were gone. Lions slept in the holy places and-
-Chilopoda aridius, the common desert centipede, his memory resident library supplied
-scuttled beneath the altar.
"Yes," said Brutha. "We will." He raised the bowl over his head, and turned.
Om ducked into his shell.
"But here-" Brutha gritted his teeth as he staggered under the weight. "And now-"
He threw the bowl. It landed against the altar. Fragments of ancient pottery fountained up, and clattered down again. The echoes boomed around the temple.
"-we are alive!"
He picked up Om, who had withdrawn completely into his shell.
"And we'll make it home. All of us," he said. "I know it."
"It's written, is it?" said Om, his voice muffled.
"It is said. And if you argue-a tortoise shell is a pretty good water container, I expect."
"You wouldn't."
"Who knows? I might. In a hundred years' time we'll all be dead, you said."
"Yes! Yes!" said Om desperately. "But here and now-"
"Right."


Didactylos smiled. It wasn't something that came easily to him. It wasn't that he was a somber man, but he could not see the smiles of others. It took several dozen muscle movements to smile, and there was no return on his investment.
He'd spoken many times to crowds in Ephebe, but they were invariably made up of other philosophers, whose shouts of "Bloody daft!," "You're making it up as you go along!" and other contributions to the debate always put him at his ease. That was because no one really paid any attention. They were just working out what they were going to say next.
But this crowd put him in mind of Brutha. Their listening was like a huge pit waiting for his words to fill it. The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy, but they were listening in gibberish.
"You can't believe in Great A'Tuin," he said. "Great A'Tuin exists. There's no point in believing in things that exist."
"Someone's put up their hand," said Urn.
"Yes?"
"Sir, surely only things that exist are worth believing in?" said the enquirer, who was wearing a uniform of a sergeant of the Holy Guard.
"If they exist, you don't have to believe in them," said Didactylos. "They just are." He sighed. "What can I tell you? What do you want to hear? I just wrote down what people know. Mountains rise and fall, and under them the Turtle swims onward. Men live and die, and the Turtle Moves. Empires grow and crumble, and the Turtle Moves. Gods come and go, and still the Turtle Moves. The Turtle Moves. "
From the darkness came a voice, "And that is really true?"
Didactylos shrugged. "The Turtle exists. The world is a flat disc. The sun turns round it once every day, dragging its light behind it. And this will go on happening, whether you believe it is true or not. It is real. I don't know about truth. Truth is a lot more complicated than that. I don't think the Turtle gives a bugger whether it's true or not, to tell you the truth."
Simony pulled Urn to one side as the philosopher went on talking.
"This isn't what they came to hear! Can't you do anything?"
"Sorry?" said Urn.
"They don't want philosophy. They want a reason to move against the Church! Now! Vorbis is dead, the Cenobiarch is gaga, the hierarchy are busy stabbing one another in the back. The Citadel is like a big rotten plum."
"Still a few wasps in it, though," said Urn. "You said you've only got a tenth of the army."
"But they're free men," said Simony. "Free in their heads. They'll be fighting for more than fifty cents a day."
Urn looked down at his hands. He often did that when he was uncertain about anything, as if they were the only things he was sure of in all the world.
"They'll get the odds down to three to one before the rest know what's happening," said Simony grimly. "Did you talk to the blacksmith?"
"Yes."
"Can you do it?"
"I . . . think so. It wasn't what I . . ."
"They tortured his father. Just for having a horseshoe hanging up in his forge, when everyone knows that smiths have to have their little rituals. And they took his son off into the army. But he's got a lot of helpers. They'll work through the night. All you have to do is tell them what you want."
"I've made some sketches . . ."
"Good," said Simony. "Listen, Urn. The Church is run by people like Vorbis. That's how it all works. Millions of people have died for-for nothing but lies. We can stop all that-"
Didactylos had stopped talking.
"He's muffed it," said Simony. "He could have done anything with them. And he just told them a lot of facts. You can't inspire people with facts. They need a cause. They need a symbol."


They left the temple just before sundown. The lion had crawled into the shade of some rocks, but stood up unsteadily to watch them go.
"It'll track us," moaned Om. "They do that. For miles and miles."
"We'll survive."
"I wish I had your confidence."
"Ah, but I have a God to have faith in."
"There'll be no more ruined temples."
"There'll be something else."
"And not even snake to eat."
"But I walk with my God."
"Not as a snack, though. And you're walking the wrong way, too."
"No. I'm still heading away from the coast."
"That's what I mean."
"How far can a lion go with a spear wound like that in him?"
"What's that got to do with anything?"
"Everything."
And, half an hour later, a black shadowy line on the silver moonlit desert, there were the tracks.
"The soldiers came this way. We just have to follow the tracks back. If we head where they've come from, we'll get where we're going."
"We'll never do it!"
"We're traveling light."
"Oh, yeah. They were burdened by all the food and water they had to carry," said Om bitterly. "How lucky for us we haven't got any."
Brutha glanced at Vorbis. He was walking unaided now, provided that you gently turned him around whenever you needed to change direction.
But even Om had to admit that the tracks were some comfort. In a way they were alive, in the same way that an echo is alive. People had been this way, not long ago. There were other people in the world. Someone, somewhere, was surviving.
Or not. After an hour or so they came across a mound beside the track. There was a helmet atop it, and a sword stuck in the sand.
"A lot of soldiers died to get here quickly," said Brutha.
Whoever had taken enough time to bury their dead had also drawn a symbol in the sand of the mound. Brutha halfexpected it to be a turtle, but the desert wind had not quite eroded the crude shape of a pair of horns.
"I don't understand that," said Om. "They don't really believe I exist, but they go and put something like that on a grave."
"It's hard to explain. I think it's because they believe they exist," said Brutha. "It's because they're people, and so was he."
He pulled the sword out of the sand.
"What do you want that for?"
"Might be useful."
"Against who?"
"Might be useful."
An hour later the lion, who was limping after Brutha, also arrived at the grave. It had lived in the desert for sixteen years, and the reason it had lived so long was that it had not died, and it had not died because it never wasted handy protein. It dug.
Humans have always wasted handy protein ever since they started wondering who had lived in it.
But, on the whole, there are worse places to be buried than inside a lion.


There were snakes and lizards on the rock islands. They were probably very nourishing and every one was, in its own way, a taste explosion.
There was no more water.
But there were plants . . . more or less. They looked like groups of stones, except where a few had put up a central flower spike that was a brilliant pink and purple in the dawn light.
"Where do they get the water from?"
"Fossil seas."
"Water that's turned to stone?"
"No. Water that sank down thousands of years ago.
Right down in the bedrock."
"Can you dig down to it?"
"Don't be stupid."
Brutha glanced from the flower to the nearest rock island.
"Honey," he said.
"What?"


The bees had a nest high on the side of a spire of rock. The buzzing could be heard from ground level. There was no possible way up.
"Nice try," said Om.
The sun was up. Already the rocks were warm to the touch. "Get some rest," said Om, kindly. "I'll keep watch."
"Watch for what?"
"I'll watch and find out."
Brutha led Vorbis into the shade of a large boulder, and gently pushed him down. Then he lay down too.
The thirst wasn't too bad yet. He'd drunk from the temple pool until he squelched as he walked. Later on, they might find a snake . . . When you considered what some people in the world had, life wasn't too bad.
Vorbis lay on his side, his black-on-black eyes staring at nothing.
Brutha tried to sleep.
He had never dreamed. Didactylos had been quite excited about that. Someone who remembered everything and didn't dream would have to think slowly, he said. Imagine a heart,[9] he said, that was nearly all memory, and had hardly any beats to spare for the everyday purposes of thinking. That would explain why Brutha moved his lips while he thought.
So this couldn't have been a dream. It must have been the sun.
He heard Om's voice in his head. The tortoise sounded as though he was holding a conversation with people Brutha could not hear.
Mine!
Go away!
No.
Mine!
Both of them!
Mine!
Brutha turned his head.
The tortoise was in a gap between two rocks, neck extended and weaving from side to side. There was another sound, a sort of gnat-like whining, that came and went . . . and promises in his head.
They flashed past . . . faces talking to him, shapes, visions of greatness, moments of opportunity, picking him up, taking him high above the world, all this was his, he could do anything, all he had to do was believe, in me, in me, in me-
An image formed in front of him. There, on a stone beside him, was a roast pig surrounded by fruit, and a mug of beer so cold the air was frosting on the sides.
Mine!
Brutha blinked. The voices faded. So did the food.
He blinked again.
There were strange after-images, not seen but felt. Perfect though his memory was, he could not remember what the voices had said or what the other pictures had been. All that lingered was a memory of roast pork and cold beer.
"That's because they don't know what to offer you," said Om's voice, quietly. "So they try to offer you anything. Generally they start with visions of food and carnal gratification."
"They got as far as the food," said Brutha.
"Good job I overcame them, then," said Om. "No telling what they might have achieved with a young man like yourself."
Brutha raised himself on his elbows.
Vorbis had not moved.
"Were they trying to get through to him, too?"
"I suppose so. Wouldn't work. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. Never seen a mind so turned in on itself."
"Will they be back?"
"Oh, yes. It's not as if they've got anything else to do."
"When they do," said Brutha, feeling lightheaded, "could you wait until they've shown me visions of carnal gratification?"
"Very bad for you."
"Brother Nhumrod was very down on them. But I think perhaps we should know our enemies, yes?"
Brutha's voice faded to a croak.
"I could have done with the vision of the drink," he said, wearily.
The shadows were long. He looked around in amazement.
"How long were they trying?"
"All day. Persistent devils, too. Thick as flies."
Brutha learned why at sunset.
He met St. Ungulant the anchorite, friend of all small gods. Everywhere.

"Well, well, well," said St. Ungulant. "We don't get very many visitors up here. Isn't that so, Angus?"
He addressed the air beside him.
Brutha was trying to keep his balance, because the cartwheel rocked dangerously every time he moved. They'd left Vorbis seated on the desert twenty feet below, hugging his knees and staring at nothing.
The wheel had been nailed flat on top of a slim pole. It was just wide enough for one person to lie uncomfortably. But St. Ungulant looked designed to lie uncomfortably. He was so thin that even skeletons would say, "Isn't he thin?" He was wearing some sort of minimalist loin-cloth, insofar as it was possible to tell under the beard and hair.
It had been quite hard to ignore St. Ungulant, who had been capering up and down at the top of his pole shouting "Coo-ee!" and "Over here!" There was a slightly smaller pole a few feet away, with an old-fashioned half-moon-cutout-on-the-door privy on it. Just because you were an anchorite, St. Ungulant said, didn't mean you had to give up everything.
Brutha had heard of anchorites, who were a kind of oneway prophet. They went out into the desert but did not come back, preferring a hermit's life of dirt and hardship and dirt and holy contemplation and dirt. Many of them liked to make life even more uncomfortable for themselves by being walled up in cells or living, quite appropriately, at the top of a pole. The Omnian Church encouraged them, on the basis that it was best to get madmen as far away as possible where they couldn't cause any trouble and could be cared for by the community, insofar as the community consisted of lions and buzzards and dirt.
"I was thinking of adding another wheel," said St. Ungulant, "just over there. To catch the morning sun, you know."
Brutha looked around him. Nothing but flat rock and sand stretched away on every side.
"Don't you get the sun everywhere all the time?" he said.
"But it's much more important in the morning," said St. Ungulant. "Besides, Angus says we ought to have a patio."
"He could barbecue on it," said Om, inside Brutha's head.
"Um," said Brutha. "What . . . religion . . . are you a saint of, exactly?"
An expression of embarrassment crossed the very small amount of face between St. Ungulant's eyebrows and his mustache.
"Uh. None, really. That was all rather a mistake," he said. "My parents named me Sevrian Thaddeus Ungulant, and then one day, of course, most amusing, someone drew attention to the initials. After that, it all seemed rather inevitable."
The wheel rocked slightly. St. Ungulant's skin was almost blackened by the desert sun.
"I've had to pick up herming as I went along, of course," he said. "I taught myself. I'm entirely selftaught. You can't find a hermit to teach you herming, because of course that rather spoils the whole thing."
"Er . . . but there's . . . Angus?" said Brutha, stating at the spot where he believed Angus to be, or at least where he believed St. Ungulant believed Angus to be.
"He's over here now," said the saint sharply, pointing to a different part of the wheel. "But he doesn't do any of the herming. He's not, you know, trained. He's just company. My word, I'd have gone quite mad if it wasn't for Angus cheering me up all the time!"
"Yes . . . I expect you would," said Brutha. He smiled at the empty air, in order to show willing.
"Actually, it's a pretty good life. The hours are rather long but the food and drink are extremely worthwhile."
Brutha had a distinct feeling that he knew what was going to come next.
"Beer cold enough?" he said.
"Extremely frosty," said St. Ungulant, beaming.
"And the roast pig?"
St. Ungulant's smile was manic.
"All brown and crunchy round the edges, yes," he said.
"But I expect, er . . . you eat the occasional lizard or snake, too?"
"Funny you should say that. Yes. Every once in a while. Just for a bit of variety."
"And mushrooms, too?" said Om.
"Any mushrooms in these parts?" said Brutha innocently.
St. Ungulant nodded happily.
"After the annual rains, yes. Red ones with yellow spots. The desert becomes really interesting after the mushroom season."
"Full of giant purple singing slugs? Talking pillars of flame? Exploding giraffes? That sort of thing?" said Brutha carefully.
"Good heavens, yes," said the saint. "I don't know why. I think they're attracted by the mushrooms."
Brutha nodded.
"You're catching on, kid," said Om.
"And I expect sometimes you drink . . . water?" said Brutha.
"You know, it's odd, isn't it," said St. Ungulant. "There's all this wonderful stuff to drink but every so often I get this, well, I can only call it a craving, for a few sips of water. Can you explain that?"
"It must be . . . a little hard to come by," said Brutha, still talking very carefully, like someone playing a fifty-pound fish on a fifty-one-pound breakingstrain fishing-line.
"Strange, really," said St. Ungulant. "When icecold beer is so readily available, too."
"Where, uh, do you get it? The water?" said Brutha.
"You know the stone plants?"
"The ones with the big flowers?"
"If you cut open the fleshy part of the leaves, there's up to half a pint of water," said the saint. "It tastes like weewee, mind you."
"I think we could manage to put up with that," said Brutha, through dry lips. He backed toward the rope-ladder that was the saint's contact with the ground.
"Are you sure you won't stay?" said St. Ungulant. "It's Wednesday. We get sucking pig plus chef's selection of sun-drenched dew-fresh vegetables on Wednesdays."
"We, uh, have lots to do," said Brutha, halfway down the swaying ladder.
"Sweets from the trolley?"
"I think perhaps . . .
St. Ungulant looked down sadly at Brutha helping Vorbis away across the wilderness.
"And afterward there's probably mints!" he shouted, through cupped hands. "No?"
Soon the figures were mere dots on the sand.
"There may be visions of sexual grati-no, I tell a lie, that's Fridays . . ." St. Ungulant murmured.
Now that the visitors had gone, the air was once again filled with the zip and whine of the small gods. There were billions of them.
St. Ungulant smiled.
He was, of course, mad. He'd occasionally suspected this. But he took the view that madness should not be wasted. He dined daily on the food of the gods, drank the rarest vintages, ate fruits that were not only out of season but out of reality. Having to drink the occasional mouthful of brackish water and chew the odd lizard leg for medicinal purposes was a small price to pay.
He turned back to the laden table that shimmered in the air. All this . . . and all the little gods wanted was someone to know about them, someone to even believe that they existed.
There was jelly and ice-cream today, too.
"All the more for us, eh, Angus?"
Yes, said Angus.


The fighting was over in Ephebe. It hadn't lasted long, especially when the slaves joined in. There were too many narrow streets, too many ambushes and, above all, too much terrible determination. It's generally held that free men will always triumph over slaves, but perhaps it all depends on your point of view.
Besides, the Ephebian garrison commander had declared somewhat nervously that slavery would henceforth be abolished, which infuriated the slaves. What would be the point of saving up to become free if you couldn't own slaves afterwards? Besides, how'd they eat?
The Omnians couldn't understand, and uncertain people fight badly. And Vorbis had gone. Certainties seemed less certain when those eyes were elsewhere.
The Tyrant was released from his prison. He spent his first day of freedom carefully composing messages to the other small countries along the coast.
It was time to do something about Omnia.


Brutha sang.
His voice echoed off the rocks. Flocks of scalbies shook off their lazy pedestrian habits and took off frantically, leaving feathers behind in their rush to get airborne. Snakes wriggled into cracks in the stone.
You could live in the desert. Or at least survive . . .
Getting back to Omnia could only be a matter of time. One more day . . .
Vorbis trooped along a little behind him. He said nothing and, when spoken to, gave no sign that he had understood what had been said to him.
Om, bumping along in Brutha's pack, began to feel the acute depression that steals over every realist in the presence of an optimist.
The strained strains of Claws of Iron shall Rend the Ungodly faded away. There was a small rockslide, some way off.
"We're alive," said Brutha.
"For now."
"And we're close to home."
"Yes?"
"I saw a wild goat on the rocks back there."
"There's still a lot of 'em about."
"Goats?"
"Gods. And the ones we had back there were the puny ones, mind you."
"What do you mean?"
Om sighed. "It's reasonable, isn't it? Think about it. The stronger ones hang around the edge, where there's prey . . . I mean, people. The weak ones get pushed out to the sandy places, where people hardly ever go-"
"The strong gods," said Brutha, thoughtfully. "Gods that know about being strong."
"That's right."
"Not gods that know what it feels like to be weak . . ."
"What? They wouldn't last five minutes. It's a god-eat-god world."
"Perhaps that explains something about the nature of gods. Strength is hereditary. Like sin."
His face clouded.
"Except that . . . it isn't. Sin, I mean. I think, perhaps, when we get back, I shall talk to some people."
"Oh, and they'll listen, will they?"
"Wisdom comes out of the wilderness, they say."
"Only the wisdom that people want. And mushrooms."
When the sun was starting to climb Brutha milked a goat. It stood patiently while Om soothed its mind. And Om didn't suggest killing it, Brutha noticed.
Then they found shade again. There were bushes here, lowgrowing, spiky, every tiny leaf barricaded behind its crown of thorns.
Om watched for a while, but the small gods on the edge of the wilderness were more cunning and less urgent. They'd be here, probably at noon, when the sun turned the landscape into a hellish glare. He'd hear them. In the meantime, he could eat.
He crawled through the bushes, their thorns scraping harmlessly along his shell. He passed another tortoise, which wasn't inhabited by a god and gave him that vague stare that tortoises employ when they're deciding whether something is there to be eaten or made love to, which are the only things on a normal tortoise mind. He avoided it, and found a couple of leaves it had missed.
Periodically he'd stomp back through the gritty soil and watch the sleepers.
And then he saw Vorbis sit up, look around him in a slow methodical way, pick up a stone, study it carefully, and then bring it down sharply on Brutha's head.
Brutha didn't even groan.
Vorbis got up and strode directly toward the bushes that hid Om. He tore the branches aside, regardless of the thorns, and pulled out the tortoise Om had just met.
For a moment it was held up, legs moving slowly, before the deacon threw it overarm into the rocks.
Then he picked up Brutha with some effort, slung him across his shoulders, and set off towards Omnia.
It happened in seconds.
Om fought to stop his head and legs retracting automatically into his shell, a tortoise's instinctive panic reaction.
Vorbis was already disappearing round some rocks.
He disappeared.
Om started to move forward and then ducked into his shell as a shadow skimmed over the ground. It was a familiar shadow, and one fiIled with tortoise dread.
The eagle swept down and towards the spot where the stricken tortoise was struggling and, with barely a pause in the stoop, snatched the reptile and soared back up into the sky with long, lazy sweeps of its wings.
Om watched it until it became a dot, and then looked away as a smaller dot detached itself and tumbled over and over toward the rocks below.
The eagle descended slowly, preparing to feed.
A breeze rattled the thornbushes and stirred the sand. Om thought he could hear the taunting, mocking voices of all the small gods.


St. Ungulant, on his bony knees, smashed open the hard swollen leaf of a stone plant.
Nice lad, he thought. Talked to himself a lot, but that was only to be expected. The desert took some people like that, didn't it, Angus?
Yes, said Angus.
Angus didn't want any of the brackish water. He said it gave him wind.
"Please yourself," said St. Ungulant. "Well, well! Here's a little treat."
You didn't often get Chilopoda aridius out here in the open desert, and here were three, all under one rock!
Funny how you felt like a little nibble, even after a good meal of Petit porc r\a244ti avec pommes de terre nouvelles et l\a233gumes du jour et bi\a232re glac\a233e avec figment de l'imagination.
He was picking the legs of the second one out of his tooth when the lion padded to the top of the nearest dune behind him.
The lion was feeling odd sensations of gratitude. It felt it should catch up with the nice food that had tended to it and, well, refrain from eating it in some symbolic way. And now here was some more food, hardly paying it any attention. Well, it didn't owe this one anything . . .
It padded forward, then lumbered up into a run.
Oblivious to his fate, St. Ungulant started on the third centipede.
The lion leapt . . .
And things would have looked very bad for St. Ungulant if Angus hadn't caught it right behind the ear with a rock.


Brutha was standing in the desert, except that the sand was as black as the sky and there was no sun, although everything was brilliantly lit.
Ah, he thought. So this is dreaming.
There were thousands of people walking across the desert. They paid him no attention. They walked as if completely unaware that they were in the middle of a crowd.
He tried to wave at them, but he was nailed to the spot. He tried to speak, and the words evaporated in his mouth.
And then he woke up.


The first thing he saw was the light, slanting through a window. Against the light was a pair of hands, raised in the sign of the holy horns.
With some difficulty, his head screaming pain at him, Brutha followed the hands along a pair of arms to where they joined not far under the bowed head of-
"Brother Nhumrod?"
The master of novices looked up.
"Brutha?"
"Yes?"
"Om be praised!"
Brutha craned his neck to look around.
"Is he here?"
"-here? How do you feel?"
"I-"
His head ached, his back felt as though it was on fire, and there was a dull pain in his knees.
"You were very badly sunburned," said Nhumrod. "And that was a nasty knock on the head you had in the fall."
"What fall?"
"-fall. From the rocks. In the desert. You were with the Prophet," said Nhumrod. "You walked with the Prophet. One of my novices."
"I remember . . . the desert . . ." said Brutha, touching his head gingerly. "But . . . the . . . Prophet . . . ?"
"-Prophet. People are saying you could be made a bishop, or even an Iam," said Nhumrod. "There's a precedent, you know. The Most Holy St. Bobby was made a bishop because he was in the desert with the Prophet Ossory, and he was a donkey."
"But I don't . . . remember . . . any Prophet. There was just me and-"
Brutha stopped. Nhumrod was beaming.
"Vorbis?"
"He most graciously told me all about it," said Nhumrod. "I was privileged to be in the Place of Lamentation when he arrived. It was just after the Sestine prayers. The Cenobiarch was just departing . . . well, you know the ceremony. And there was Vorbis. Covered in dust and leading a donkey. I'm afraid you were across the back of the donkey."
"I don't remember a donkey," said Brutha.
"-donkey. He'd picked it up at one of the farms. There was quite a crowd with him!"
Nhumrod was flushed with excitement.
"And he's declared a month of Jhaddra, and double penances, and the Council has given him the Staff and the Halter, and the Cenobiarch has gone off to the hermitage in Skant!"
"Vorbis is the eighth Prophet," said Brutha.
"-Prophet. Of course."
"And . . . was there a tortoise? Has he mentioned anything about a tortoise?"
"-tortoise? What have tortoises got to do with anything?" Nhumrod's expression softened. "But, of course, the Prophet said the sun had affected you. He said you were raving-excuse me-about all sorts of strange things."
"He did?"
"He sat by your bed for three days. It was . . . inspiring."
"How long . . . since we came back?"
"-back? Almost a week."
"A week!"
"He said the journey exhausted you very much."
Brutha stared at the wall.
"And he left orders that you were to be brought to him as soon as you were fully conscious," said Nhumrod. "He was very definite about that." His tone of voice suggested that he wasn't quite sure of Brutha's state of consciousness, even now. "Do you think you can walk? I can get some novices to carry you, if you'd prefer."
"I have to go and see him now?"
"-now. Right away. I expect you'll want to thank him."


Brutha had known about these parts of the Citadel only by hearsay. Brother Nhumrod had never seen them, either. Although he had not been specifically included in the summons, he had come nevertheless, fussing importantly around Brutha as two sturdy novices carried him in a kind of sedan chair normally used by the more crumbling of the senior clerics.
In the center of the Citadel, behind the Temple, was a walled garden. Brutha looked at it with an expert eye. There wasn't an inch of natural soil on the bare rock-every spadeful that these shady trees grew in must have been carried up by hand.
Vorbis was there, surrounded by bishops and Iams. He looked round as Brutha approached.
"Ah, my desert companion," he said, amiably. "And Brother Nhumrod, I believe. My brothers, I should like you to know that I have it in mind to raise our Brutha to archbishophood."
There was a very faint murmur of astonishment from the clerics, and then a clearing of a throat. Vorbis looked at Bishop Treem, who was the Citadel's archivist.
"Well, technically he is not yet even ordained," said Bishop Treem, doubtfully. "But of course we all know there has been a precedent."
"Ossory's ass," said Brother Nhumrod promptly. He put his hand over his mouth and went red with shame and embarrassment.
Vorbis smiled.
"Good Brother Nhumrod is correct," he said. "Who had also not been ordained, unless the qualifications were somewhat relaxed in those days."
There was a chorus of nervous laughs, such as there always is from people who owe their jobs and possibly their lives to a whim of the person who has just cracked the not very amusing line.
"Although the donkey was only made a bishop," said Bishop "Deathwish" Treem.
"A role for which it was highly qualified," said Vorbis sharply. "And now, you will all leave. Including Subdeacon Nhumrod," he added. Nhumrod went from red to white at this sudden preferment. "But Archbishop Brutha will remain. We wish to talk."
The clergy withdrew.
Vorbis sat down on a stone chair under an elder tree. It was huge and ancient, quite unlike its short-lived relatives outside the garden, and its berries were ripening.
The Prophet sat with his elbows on the stone arms of the chair, his hands interlocked in front of him, and gave Brutha a long, slow stare.
"You are . . . recovered?" he said, eventually.
"Yes, lord," said Brutha. "But, lord, I cannot be a bishop, I cannot even-"
"I assure you the job does not require much intelligence," said Vorbis. "If it did, bishops would not be able to do it."
There was another long silence.
When Vorbis next spoke, it was as if every word was being winched up from a great depth.
"We spoke once, did we not, of the nature of reality?"
"Yes."
"And about how often what is perceived is not that which is fundamentally true?"
"Yes."
Another pause. High overhead, an eagle circled, looking for tortoises.
"I am sure you have confused memories of our wanderings in the wilderness."
No."
"It is only to be expected. The sun, the thirst, the hunger . . ."
"No, lord. My memory does not confuse readily."
"Oh, yes. I recall."
"So do I, lord."
Vorbis turned his head slightly, looking sidelong at Brutha as if he was trying to hide behind his own face.
"In the desert, the Great God Om spoke to me."
"Yes, lord. He did. Every day."
"You have a mighty if simple faith, Brutha. When it comes to people, I am a great judge."
"Yes, lord. Lord?"
"Yes, my Brutha?"
"Nhumrod said you led me through the desert, lord."
"Remember what I said about fundamental truth, Brutha? Of course you do. There was a physical desert, indeed, but also a desert of the soul. My God led me, and I led you."
"Ah. Yes. I see."
Overhead, the spiraling dot that was the eagle appeared to hang motionless in the air for a moment. Then it folded its wings and fell-
"Much was given to me in the desert, Brutha. Much was learned. Now I must tell the world. That is the duty of a prophet. To go where others have not been, and bring back the truth of it."
-faster than the wind, its whole brain and body existing only as a mist around the sheer intensity of its purpose-
"I did not expect it to be this soon. But Om guided my steps. And now that we have the Cenobiarchy, we shall . . . make use of it."
Somewhere out on the hillsides the eagle swooped, picked something up, and strove for height . . .
"I'm just a novice, Lord Vorbis. I am not a bishop, even if everyone calls me one."
"You will get used to it."
It sometimes took a long time for an idea to form in Brutha's mind, but one was forming now. It was something about the way Vorbis was sitting, something about the edge in his voice.
Vorbis was afraid of him.
Why me? Because of the desert? Who would care? For all I know, it was always like this-probably it was Ossory's ass that carried him in the wilderness, who found the water, who kicked a lion to death.
Because of Ephebe? Who would listen? Who would care? He is the Prophet and the Cenobiarch. He could have me killed just like that. Anything he does is right. Anything he says is true.
Fundamentally true.
"I have something to show you that may amuse you," said Vorbis, standing up. "Can you walk?"
"Oh, yes. Nhumrod was just being kind. It's mainly sunburn."
As they moved away, Brutha saw something he hadn't noticed before. There were members of the Holy Guard, armed with bows, in the garden. They were in the shade of trees, or amongst bushes-not too obvious, but not exactly hidden.
Steps led from the garden to the maze of underground tunnels and rooms that underlay the Temple and, indeed, the whole of the Citadel. Noiselessly, a couple of guards fell in behind them at a respectful distance.
Brutha followed Vorbis through the tunnels to the artificers' quarter, where forges and workshops clustered around one wide, deep light-well. Smoke and fumes billowed up around the hewn rock walls.
Vorbis walked directly to a large alcove that glowed red with the light of forge fires. Several workers were clustered around something wide and curved.
"There," said Vorbis. "What do you think?"
It was a turtle.
The iron-founders had done a pretty good job, even down to the patterning on the shell and the scales on the legs. It was about eight feet long.
Brutha heard a rushing noise in his ears as Vorbis spoke.
"They speak poisonous gibberish about turtles, do they not? They think they live on the back of a Great Turtle. Well, let them die on one."
Now Brutha could see the shackles attached to each iron leg. A man, or a woman, could with great discomfort lie spread-eagled on the back of the turtle and be chained firmly at the wrists and ankles.
He bent down. Yes, there was the firebox underneath. Some aspects of Quisition thinking never changed.
That much iron would take ages to heat up to the point of pain. Much time, therefore, to reflect on things . . .
"What do you think?" said Vorbis.
A vision of the future flashed across Brutha's mind.
"Ingenious," he said.
"And it will be a salutary lesson for all others tempted to stray from the path of true knowledge," said Vorbis.
"When do you intend to, uh, demonstrate it?"
"I am sure an occasion will present itself," said Vorbis.
When Brutha straightened up, Vorbis was staring at him so intently that it was as if he was reading Brutha's thoughts off the back of his head.
"And now, please leave," said Vorbis. "Rest as much as you can . . . my son."


Brutha walked slowly across the Place, deep in unaccustomed thought.
"Afternoon, Your Reverence."
"You know already?"
Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Dhblah beamed over the top of his lukewarm ice-cold sherbet stand.
"Heard it on the grapevine," he said. "Here, have a slab of Klatchian Delight. Free. Onna stick."
The Place was more crowded than usual. Even Dhblah's hot cakes were selling like hot cakes.
"Busy today," said Brutha, hardly thinking about it.
"Time of the Prophet, see," said Dhblah, "when the Great God is manifest in the world. And if you think it's busy now, you won't be able to swing a goat here in a few days' time."
"What happens then?"
"You all right? You look a bit peaky."
"What happens then?"
"The Laws. You know. The Book of Vorbis? I suppose-" Dhblah leaned toward Brutha-"you wouldn't have a hint, would you? I suppose the Great God didn't happen to say anything of benefit to the convenience food industry?"
"I don't know. I think he'd like people to grow more lettuce."
"Really?"
"It's only a guess."
Dhblah grinned evilly. "Ah, yes, but it's your guess. A nod's as good as a poke with a sharp stick to a deaf camel, as they say. I know where I can get my hands on a few acres of well-irrigated land, funnily enough. Perhaps I ought to buy now, ahead of the crowd?"
"Can't see any harm in it, Mr. Dhblah."
Dhblah sidled closer. This was not hard. Dhblah sidled everywhere. Crabs thought he walked sideways.
"Funny thing," he said. "I mean . . . Vorbis?"
"Funny?" said Brutha.
"Makes you think. Even Ossory must have been a man who walked around, just like you and me. Got wax in his ears, just like ordinary people. Funny thing."
"What is?"
"The whole thing."
Dhblah gave Brutha another conspiratorial grin and then sold a footsore pilgrim a bowl of hummus that he would come to regret.
Brutha wandered down to his dormitory It was empty at this time of day, hanging around dormitories being discouraged in case the presence of the rockhard mattresses engendered thoughts of sin. His few possessions were gone from the shelf by his bunk. Probably he had a room of his own somewhere, although no one had told him.
Brutha felt totally lost.
He lay down on the bunk, just in case, and offered up a prayer to Om. There was no reply. There had been no reply for almost all of his life, and that hadn't been too bad, because he'd never expected one. And before, there'd always been the comfort that perhaps Om was listening and simply not deigning to say anything.
Now, there was nothing to hear.
He might as well be talking to himself, and listening to himself.
Like Vorbis.
That thought wouldn't go away. Mind like a steel ball, Om had said. Nothing got in or out. So all Vorbis could hear were the distant echoes of his own soul. And out of the distant echoes he would forge a Book of Vorbis, and Brutha suspected he knew what the commandments would be. There would be talk of holy wars and blood and crusades and blood and piety and blood.
Brutha got up, feeling like a fool. But the thoughts wouldn't go away.
He was a bishop, but he didn't know what bishops did. He'd only seen them in the distance, drifting along like earthbound clouds. There was only one thing he felt he knew how to do.
Some spotty boy was hoeing the vegetable garden. He looked at Brutha in amazement when he took the hoe, and was stupid enough to try to hang on to it for a moment.
"I am a bishop, you know," said Brutha. "Anyway, you aren't doing it right. Go and do something else."
Brutha jabbed viciously at the weeds around the seedlings. Only away a few weeks and already there was a haze of green on the soil.
You're a bishop. For being good. And here's the iron turtle. In case you're bad. Because . . .
. . . there were two people in the desert, and Om spoke to one of them.
It had never occurred to Brutha like that before.
Om had spoken to him. Admittedly, he hadn't said the things that the Great Prophets said he said. Perhaps he'd never said things like that . . .
He worked his way along to the end of the row. Then he tidied up the bean vines.
Lu-Tze watched Brutha carefully from his little shed by the soil heaps.


It was another barn. Urn was seeing a lot of barns.
They'd started with a cart, and invested a lot of time in reducing its weight as much as possible. Gearing had been a problem. He'd been doing a lot of thinking about gears. The ball wanted to spin much faster than the wheels wanted to turn. That was probably a metaphor for something or other.
"And I can't get it to go backward," he said.
"Don't worry," said Simony. "It won't have to go backward. What about armor?"
Urn waved a distracted hand around his workshop.
"This is a village forge!" he said. "This thing is twenty feet long! Zacharos can't make plates bigger than a few feet across. I've tried nailing them on a framework, but it just collapses under the weight."
Simony looked at the skeleton of the steam car and the pile of plates stacked beside it.
"Ever been in a battle, Urn?" he said.
"No. I've got flat feet. And I'm not very strong."
"Do you know what a tortoise is?"
Urn scratched his head. "Okay. The answer isn't a little reptile in a shell, is it? Because you know I know that."
"I mean a shield tortoise. When you're attacking a fortress or a wall, and the enemy is dropping everything he's got on you, every man holds his shield overhead so that it . . . kind of . . . slots into all the shields around it. Can take a lot of weight."
"Overlapping," murmured Urn.
"Like scales," said Simony.
Urn looked reflectively at the cart.
"A tortoise," he said.
"And the battering-ram?" said Simony.
"Oh, that's no problem," said Urn, not paying much attention. "Tree-trunk bolted to the frame. Big iron rammer. They're only bronze doors, you say?"
"Yes. But very big."
"Then they're probably hollow. Or cast bronze plates on wood. That's what I'd do."
"Not solid bronze? Everyone says they're solid bronze."
"That's what I'd say, too."
"Excuse me, sirs."
A burly man stepped forward. He wore the uniform of the palace guards.
"This is Sergeant Fergmen," said Simony. "Yes, sergeant?"
"The doors is reinforced with Klatchian steel. Because of all the fighting in the time of the False Prophet Zog. And they opens outwards only. Like lock gates on a canal, you understand? If you push on 'em, they only locks more firmly together."
"How are they opened, then?" said Urn.
"The Cenobiarch raises his hand and the breath of God blows them open," said the sergeant.
"In a logical sense, I meant."
"Oh. Well, one of the deacons goes behind a curtain and pulls a lever. But . . . when I was on guard down in the crypts, sometimes, there was a room . . . there was gratings and things . . . well, you could hear water gushing . . ."
"Hydraulics," said Urn. "Thought it would be hydraulics."
"Can you get in?" said Simony.
"To the room? Why not? No one bothers with it."
"Could he make the doors open?" said Simony.
"Hmm?" said Urn.
Urn was rubbing his chin reflectively with a hammer. He seemed to be lost in a world of his own.
"I said, could Fergmen make these hydra haulics work?"
"Hmm? Oh. Shouldn't think so," said Urn, vaguely.
"Could you?"
"What?"
"Could you make them work?"
"Oh. Probably. It's just pipes and pressures, after all. Um."
Urn was still staring thoughtfully at the steam cart. Simony nodded meaningfully at the sergeant, indicating that he should go away, and then tried the mental interplanetary journey necessary to get to whatever world Urn was in.
He tried looking at the cart, too.
"How soon can you have it all finished?"
"Hmm?"
"I said-"
"Late tomorrow night. If we work through tonight."
"But we'll need it for the next dawn! We won't have time to see if it works!"
"It'll work first time," said Urn.
"Really?"
"I built it. I know about it. You know about swords and spears and things. I know about things that go round and round. It will work first time."
"Good. Well, there are other things I've got to do-"
"Right."
Urn was left alone in the barn. He looked reflectively at his hammer, and then at the iron cart.
They didn't know how to cast bronze properly here. Their iron was pathetic, just pathetic. Their copper? It was terrible. They seemed to be able to make steel that shattered at a blow. Over the years the Quisition had weeded out all the good smiths.
He'd done the best he could, but . . .
"Just don't ask me about the second or third time," he said quietly to himself.


Vorbis sat in the stone chair in his garden, papers strewn around him.
"Well?"
The kneeling figure did not look up. Two guards stood over it, with drawn swords.
"The Turtle people . . . the people are plotting something," it said, the voice shrill with terror.
"Of course they are. Of course they are," said Vorbis. "And what is this plot?"
"There is some kind of . . . when you are confirmed as Cenobiarch . . . some kind of device, some machine that goes by itself . . . it will smash down the doors of the Temple . . ."
The voice faded away.
"And where is this device now?" said Vorbis.
"I don't know. They've bought iron from me. That's all I know."
"An iron device."
"Yes." The man took a deep breath-half-breath, half-gulp. "People say . . . the guards said . . . you have my father in prison and you might . . . I plead . . ."
Vorbis looked down at the man.
"But you fear," he said, "that I might have you thrown into the cells as well. You think I am that sort of person. You fear that I may think, this man has associated with heretics and blasphemers in familiar circumstances . . ."
The man continued to stare fixedly at the ground. Vorbis's fingers curled gently around his chin and raised his head until they were eye to eye.
"What you have done is a good thing," he said. He looked at one of the guards. "Is this man's father still alive?"
"Yes, lord."
"Still capable of walking?"
The inquisitor shrugged. "Ye-es, lord."
"Then release him this instant, put him in the charge of his dutiful son here, and send them both back home."
The armies of hope and fear fought in the informant's eyes.
"Thank you, lord," he said.
"Go in peace."
Vorbis watched one of the guards escort the man from the garden. Then he waved a hand vaguely at one of the head inquisitors.
"Do we know where he lives?"
"Yes, lord."
"Good."
The inquisitor hesitated.
"And this . . . device, lord?"
"Om has spoken to me. A machine that goes by itself? Such a thing is against all reason. Where are its muscles? Where is its mind?"
"Yes, lord."
The inquisitor, whose name was Deacon Cusp, had got where he was today, which was a place he wasn't sure right now that he wanted to be, because he liked hurting people. It was a simple desire, and one that was satisfied in abundance within the Quisition. And he was one of those who were terrified in a very particular way by Vorbis. Hurting people because you enjoyed it . . . that was understandable. Vorbis just hurt people because he'd decided that they should be hurt, without passion, even with a kind of hard love.
In Cusp's experience, people didn't make things up, ultimately, not in front of an exquisitor. Or course there were no such things as devices that moved by themselves, but he made a mental note to increase the guard-
"However," said Vorbis, "there will be a disturbance during the ceremony tomorrow."
"Lord?"
"I have . . . special knowledge," said Vorbis.
"Of course, lord."
"You know the breaking strain of sinews and muscles, Deacon Cusp."
Cusp had formed an opinion that Vorbis was somewhere on the other side of madness. Ordinary madness he could deal with. In his experience there were quite a lot of mad people in the world, and many of them became even more insane in the tunnels of the Quisition. But Vorbis had passed right through that red barrier and had built some kind of logical structure on the other side. Rational thoughts made out of insane components . . .
"Yes, lord," he said.
"I know the breaking strain of people."


It was night, and cold for the time of year.
Lu-Tze crept through the gloom of the barn, sweeping industriously. Sometimes he took a rag from the recesses of his robe and polished things.
He polished the outside of the Moving Turtle, which loomed low and menacing in the shadows.
And he swept his way toward the forge, where he watched for a while.
It takes extreme concentration to pour good steel. No wonder gods have always clustered around isolated smithies. There are so many things that can go wrong. A slight mis-mix of ingredients, a moment's lapse--
Urn, who was almost asleep on his feet, grunted as he was nudged awake and something was put in his hands.
It was a cup of tea. He looked into the little round face of LuTze.
"Oh," he said. "Thank you. Thank you very much."
Nod, smile.
"Nearly done," said Urn, more or less to himself. "Just got to let it cool now. Got to let it cool really slowly. Otherwise it crystallises, you see."
Nod, smile, nod.
It was good tea.
"S'not 'n important cast anyway," said Urn, swaying. "Jus' the control levers-"
Lu-Tze caught him carefully and steered him to a seat on a heap of charcoal. Then he went and watched the forge for a while. The bar of steel was glowing in the mold.
He poured a bucket of cold water over it, watched the great cloud of steam spread and disperse, and then put his broom over his shoulder and ran away hurriedly.
People to whom Lu-Tze was a vaguely glimpsed figure behind a very slow broom would have been surprised at his turn of speed, especially in a man six thousand years old who ate nothing but brown rice and drank only green tea with a knob of rancid butter in it.
A little way away from the Citadel's main gates he stopped running and started sweeping. He swept up to the gates, swept around the gates themselves, nodded and smiled at a soldier who glared at him and then realized that it was only the daft old sweeper, polished one of the handles of the gates, and swept his way by passages and cloisters to Brutha's vegetable garden.
He could see a figure crouched among the melons.
Lu-Tze found a rug and padded back out into the garden, where Brutha was sitting hunched up with his hoe over his knees.
Lu-Tze had seen many agonized faces in his time, which was a longer time than most whole civilizations managed to see. Brutha's was the worst. He tugged the rug over the bishop's shoulders.
"I can't hear him," said Brutha hoarsely. "It may mean that he's too far away. I keep on thinking that. He might be out there somewhere. Miles away!"
Lu-Tze smiled and nodded.
"It'll happen all over again. He never told anyone to do anything. Or not to do anything. He didn't care!"
Lu-Tze nodded and smiled again. His teeth were yellow. They were in fact his two-hundredth set.
"He should have cared."
Lu-Tze disappeared into his corner again and returned with a shallow bowl full of some kind of tea. He nodded and smiled and proffered it until Brutha took it and had a sip. It tasted like hot water with a lavender bag in it.
"You don't understand anything I'm talking about, do you?" said Brutha.
"Not much," said Lu-Tze.
"You can talk?"
Lu-Tze put a wisened finger to his lips.
"Big secret," he said.
Brutha looked at the little man. How much did he know about him? How much did anyone know about him?
"You talk to God," said Lu-Tze.
"How do you know that?"
"Signs. Man who talk to God have difficult life."
"You're right!" Brutha stared at Lu-Tze over the cup. "Why are you here?" he said. "You're not Omnian. Or Ephebian."
"Grew up near Hub. Long time ago. Now Lu-Tze a stranger everywhere he goes. Best way. Learned religion in temple at home. Now go where job is."
"Carting soil and pruning plants?"
"Sure. Never been bishop or high panjandrum. Dangerous life. Always be man who cleans pews or sweeps up behind altar. No one bother useful man. No one bother small man. No one remember name."
"That's what I was going to do! But it doesn't work for me."
"Then find other way. I learn in temple. Taught by ancient master. When trouble, always remember wise words of ancient and venerable master."
"What were they?"
"Ancient master say: `That boy there! What you eating? Hope you brought enough for everybody!' Ancient master say: `You bad boy! Why you no do homework?' Ancient master say: `What boy laughing? No tell what boy laughing, whole dojo stay in after school!' When remember these wise words, nothing seems so bad."
"What shall I do? I can't hear him!"
"You do what you must. I learn anything, it you have to walk it all alone."
Brutha hugged his knees.
"But he told me nothing! Where's all this wisdom? All the other prophets came back with commandments!"
"Where they get them?"
"I . . . suppose they made them up."
"You get them from same place."


"You call this philosophy?" roared Didactylos, waving his stick.
Urn cleaned pieces of the sand mold from the lever.
"Well . . . natural philosophy," he said.
The stick whanged down on the Moving Turtle's flanks.
"I never taught you this sort of thing!" shouted the philosopher. "Philosophy is supposed to make life better! "
"This will make it better for a lot of people," said Urn, calmly. "It will help overthrow a tyrant."
"And then?" said Didactylos.
"And then what?"
"And then you'll take it to bits, will you?" said the old man. "Smash it up? Take the wheels off? Get rid of all those spikes? Burn the plans? Yes? When it's served its purpose, yes?"
"Well-" Urn began.
"Aha!"
"Aha what? What if we do keep it? It'll be a . . . a deterrent to other tyrants!"
"You think tyrants won't build 'em too?"
"Well . . . I can build bigger ones!" Urn shouted.
Didactylos sagged. "Yes," he said. "No doubt you can. So that's all right, then. My word. And to think I was worrying. And now . . . I think I'll go and have a rest somewhere . . .
He looked hunched up, and suddenly old.
"Master?" said Urn.
"Don't `master' me," said Didactylos, feeling his way along the barn walls to the door. "I can see you know every bloody thing there is to know about human nature now. Hah!"

The Great God Om slid down the side of an irrigation ditch and landed on his back in the weeds at the bottom. He righted himself by gripping a root with his mouth and hauling himself over.
The shape of Brutha's thoughts flickered back and forth in his mind. He couldn't make out any actual words, but he didn't need to, any more than you needed to see the ripples to know which way the river flowed.
Occasionally, when he could see the Citadel as a gleaming dot in the twilight, he'd try shouting his own mind back as loudly as he could:
"Wait! Wait! You don't want to do that! We can go to Ankh-Morpork! Land of opportunity! With my brains and your . . . with you, the world is our mollusk! Why throw it all away . . .
And then he'd slide into another furrow. Once or twice he saw the eagle, forever circling.
"Why put your hand into a grinder? This place deserves Vorbis! Sheep deserve to be led!"
It had been like this when his very first believer had been stoned to death. Of course, by then he had dozens of other believers. But it had been a wrench. It had been upsetting. You never forgot your first believer. They gave you shape.
Tortoises are not well equipped for cross-country navigation. They need longer legs or shallower ditches.
Om estimated that he was doing less than a fifth of a mile an hour in a direct line, and the Citadel was at least twenty miles away. Occasionally he made good time between the trees in an olive grove, but that was more than pulled back by rocky ground and field walls.
All the time, as his legs whirred, Brutha's thoughts buzzed in his head like a distant bee.
He tried shouting in his mind again.
"What've you got? He's got an army! You've got an army? How many divisions have you got?"
But thoughts like that needed energy, and there was a limit to the amount of energy available in one tortoise. He found a bunch of fallen grapes and gobbled them until the juice covered his head, but it didn't make a lot of difference.
And then there was nightfall. Nights here weren't as cold as the desert, but they weren't as warm as the day. He'd slow down at night as his blood cooled. He wouldn't be able to think as fast. Or walk as fast.
He was losing heat already. Heat meant speed.
He pulled himself up on to an anthill-
"You're going to die! You're going to die!"
-and slid down the other side.


Preparations for the inauguration of the Cenobiarch Prophet began many hours before the dawn. Firstly, and not according to ancient tradition, there was a very careful search of the temple by Deacon Cusp and some of his colleagues. There was a prowling for tripwires and a poking of odd corners for hidden archers. Although it was against the thread, Deacon Cusp had his head screwed on. He also sent a few squads into the town to round up the usual suspects. The Quisition always found it advisable to leave a few suspects at large. Then you knew where to find them when you needed them.
After that a dozen lesser priests arrived to shrive the premises and drive out all afreets, djinns, and devils. Deacon Cusp watched them without comment. He'd never had any personal dealings with supernatural entities, but he knew what a well-placed arrow would do to an unexpecting stomach.
Someone tapped him on the rib-cage. He gasped at the sudden linkage of real life into the chain of thought, and reached instinctively for his dagger.
"Oh," he said.
Lu-Tze nodded and smiled and indicated with his broom that Deacon Cusp was standing on a patch of floor that he, Lu-Tze, wished to sweep.
"Hello, you ghastly little yellow fool," said Deacon Cusp.
Nod, smile.
"Never say a bloody word, do you?" said Deacon Cusp.
Smile, smile.
"Idiot."
Smile. Smile. Watch.


Urn stood back.
"Now," he said, "you sure you've got it all?"
"Easy," said Simony, who was sitting in the Turtle's saddle.
"Tell me again," said Urn.
"We-stoke-up-the-firebox," said Simony. "Then-when-thered-needle-points-to-xxvi, turn-the-brass-tap; when-the-bronze-whistle-blows, pull-the-big-lever. And steer by pulling the ropes."
"Right," said Urn. But he still looked doubtful. "It's a precision device," he said.
"And I am a professional soldier," said Simony. "I'm not a superstitious peasant."
"Fine, fine. Well . . . if you're sure . . . '
They'd had time to put a few finishing touches to the Moving Turtle. There were serrated edges to the shell and spikes on the wheels. And of course the waste steam pipe . . . he was a little uncertain about the waste steam pipe . . .
"It's merely a device," said Simony. "It does not present a problem."
"Give us an hour, then. You should just get to the Temple by the time we get the doors open."
"Right. Understood. Off you go. Sergeant Fergmen knows the way."
Urn looked at the steam pipe and bit his lip. I don't know what effect it's going to have on the enemy, he thought, but it scares the hells out of me.


Brutha woke up, or at least ceased trying to sleep. Lu-Tze had gone. Probably sweeping somewhere.
He wandered through the deserted corridors of the novice section. It would be hours before the new Cenobiarch was crowned. There were dozens of ceremonies to be undertaken first. Everyone who was anyone would be in the Place and the surrounding piazzas, and so would the even greater number of people who were no one very much. The sestinas were empty, the endless prayers left unsung. The Citadel might have been dead, were it not for the huge indefinable background roar of tens of thousands of people being silent. Sunlight filtered down through the light-wells.
Brutha had never felt more alone. The wilderness had been a feast of fun compared to this. Last night . . . last night, with Lu-Tze, it had all seemed so clear. Last night he had been in a mood to confront Vorbis there and then. Last night there seemed to be a chance. Anything was possible last night. That was the trouble with last nights. They were always followed by this mornings.
He wandered out into the kitchen level, and then into the outside world. There were one or two cooks around, preparing the ceremonial meal of meat, bread, and salt, but they paid him no attention at all.
He sat down outside one of the slaughterhouses. There was, he knew, a back gate somewhere around. Probably no one would stop him, today, if he walked out. Today they would be looking for unwanted people walking in.
He could just walk away. The wilderness had seemed quite pleasant, apart from the thirst and hunger. St. Ungulant with his madness and his mushrooms seemed to have life exactly right. It didn't matter if you fooled yourself provided you didn't let yourself know it, and did it well. Life was so much simpler, in the desert.
But there were a dozen guards by the gate. They had an unsympathetic look. He went back to his seat, which was tucked away in a corner, and stared gloomily at the ground.
If Om was alive, surely he could send a sign?
A grating by Brutha's sandals lifted itself up a few inches and slid aside. He stared at the hole.
A hooded head appeared, stared back, and disappeared again. There was a subterranean whispering. The head reappeared, and was followed by a body. It pulled itself on to the cobbles. The hood was pushed back. The man grinned conspiratorially at Brutha, put his finger to his lips and then, without warning, launched himself at him with violent intent.
Brutha rolled across the cobbles and raised his hands frantically as he saw the gleam of metal. One filthy hand clamped against his mouth. A knifeblade made a dramatic and very final silhouette against the light-
"No! "
"Why not? We said the first thing we'll do, we'll kill all the priests!"
"Not that one!"
Brutha dared to swivel his eyes sideways. Although the second figure rising from the hole was also wearing a filthy robe, there was no mistaking the paintbrush hairstyle.
He tried to say "Urn?"
"Shut up, you," said the other man, pressing the knife to his throat.
"Brutha?" said Urn. "You're alive?"
Brutha moved his eyes from his captor to Urn in a way which he hoped would indicate that it was too soon to make any commitment on this point.
"He's all right," said Urn.
"All right? He's a priest!"
"But he's on our side. Aren't you, Brutha?"
Brutha tried to nod, and thought: I'm on everyone's side. It'd be nice if, just for once, someone was on mine.
The hand was unclamped from his mouth, but the knife remained resting on his throat. Brutha's normally careful thought processes ran like quicksilver.
"The Turtle Moves?" he ventured.
The knife was withdrawn, with obvious reluctance.
"I don't trust him," said the man. "We should shove him down the hole at least."
"Brutha's one of us," said Urn.
"That's right. That's right," said Brutha. "Which ones are you?"
Urn leaned closer.
"How's your memory?"
"Unfortunately, it is fine."
"Good. Good. Uh. It would be a good idea to stay out of trouble, d'you hear . . . if anything happens. Remember the Turtle. Well, of course you would."
"What things?"
Urn patted him on the shoulder, making Brutha think for a moment of Vorbis. Vorbis, who never touched another person inside his head, was a great toucher with his hands.
"Best if you don't know what's happening," said Urn.
"But I don't know what's happening," said Brutha.
"Good. That's the way."
The burly man gestured with his knife towards the tunnels that led into the rock.
"Are we going, or what?" he demanded.
Urn ran after him and then stopped briefly and turned.
"Be careful," he said. "We need what's in your head!"
Brutha watched them go.
"So do I," he murmured.
And then he was alone again.
But he thought: Hold on. I don't have to be. I'm a bishop. At least I can watch. Om's gone and soon the world will end, so at least I might as well watch it happen.
Sandals flapping, Brutha set off towards the Place.
Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be.


"You godawful idiot! Don't go that way!"
The sun was well up now. In fact it was probably setting, if Didactylos's theories about the speed of light were correct, but in matters of relativity the point of view of the observer is very important, and from Om's point of view the sun was a golden ball in a flaming orange sky.
He pulled himself up another slope, and stared blearily at the distant Citadel. In his mind's eye, he could hear the mocking voices of all small gods.
They didn't like a god who had failed. They didn't like that at all. It let them all down. It reminded them of mortality. He'd be thrust out into the deep desert, where no one would ever come. Ever. Until the end of the world.
He shivered in his shell.


Urn and Fergmen walked nonchalantly through the tunnels of the Citadel, using the kind of nonchalant walk which, had there been anyone to take an interest in it, would have drawn detailed and arrow-sharp attention to them within seconds. But the only people around were those with vital jobs to do. Besides, it was not a good idea to stare too hard at the guards, in case they stared back.
Simony had told Urn he'd agreed to this. He couldn't quite remember doing so. The sergeant knew a way into the Citadel, that was sensible. And Urn knew about hydraulics. Fine. Now he was walking through these dry tunnels with his toolbelt clinking. There was a logical connection, but it had been made by someone else.
Fergmen turned a corner and stopped by a large grille, which stretched from floor to ceiling. It was very rusty. It might once have been a door-there was a suggestion of hinges, rusted into the stone. Urn peered through the bars. Beyond, in the gloom, there were pipes.
"Eureka," he said.
"Going to have a bath, then?" said Fergmen.
"Just keep watch."
Urn selected a short crowbar from his belt and inserted it between the grille and the stonework. Give me a foot of good steel and a wall to brace . . . my . . . foot . . . against-the grille ground forward and then popped out with a leaden sound-and I can change the world . . .
He stepped inside the long, dark, damp room, and gave a whistle of admiration.
No one had done any maintenance for-well, for as long as it took iron hinges to become a mass of crumbling rust-but all this still worked?
He looked up at lead and iron buckets bigger than he was, and a tangle of man-sized pipes.
This was the breath of God.
Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent-protection.
There were the levers and there, hanging over pits in the rock floor, were the two sets of counterweights. Probably it'd only take a few hundred gallons of water to swing the balance either way. Of course, the water'd have to be pumped up-
"Sergeant?"
Fergmen peered round the door. He looked nervous, like an atheist in a thunderstorm.
"What?"
Urn pointed.
"There's a big shaft through the wall there, see? At the bottom of the gear-chain?"
"The what?"
"The big knobbly wheels?"
"Oh. Yeah."
"Where does the shaft go to?"
"Don't know. There's the big Treadmill of Correction through there."
Ah.
The breath of God was ultimately the sweat of men. Didactylos would have appreciated the joke, Urn thought.
He was aware of a sound that had been there all the time but was only now penetrating through his concentration. It was tinny and faint and full of echoes, but it was voices. From the pipes.
The sergeant, to judge by his expression, had heard them too.
Urn put his ear to the metal. There was no possibility of making out words, but the general religious rhythm was familiar enough.
"It's just the service going on in the Temple," he said. "It's probably resonating off the doors and the sound's being carried down the pipes."
Fergmen did not look reassured.
"No gods are involved in any way," Urn translated. He turned his attention to the pipes again.
"Simple principle," said Urn, more to himself than to Fergmen. "Water pours into the reservoirs on the weights, disturbing the equilibrium. One lot of weights descends and the other rises up the shaft in the wall. The weight of the door is immaterial. As the bottom weights descend, these buckets here tip over, pouring the water out. Probably quite a smooth action. Perfect equilibrium at either end of the movement, too. Nicely thought out."
He caught Fergmen's expression.
"Water goes in and out and the doors swing open," he translated. "So all we've got to do is wait for . . . what did he say the sign would be?"
"They'll blow a trumpet when they're through the main gate," said Fergmen, pleased to be of service.
"Right." Urn eyed the weights and the reservoirs overhead. The bronze pipes dripped with corrosion.
"But perhaps we'd better just check that we know what we're doing," he said. "It probably takes a minute or two before the doors start moving." He fumbled under his robe and produced something that looked, to Fergmen's eye, very much like a torture instrument. This must have communicated itself to Urn, who said very slowly and kindly: "This is an ad-just-ab-ble span-ner."
"Yes?"
"It's for twisting nuts off."
Fergmen nodded miserably.
"Yes?" he said.
"And this is a bottle of penetrating oil."
"Oh, good."
"Just give me a leg up, will you? It'll take time to unhook the linkage to the valve, so we might as well make a start." Urn heaved himself into the ancient machinery while, above, the ceremony droned on.


Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Dhblah was all for new prophets. He was even in favor of the end of the world, if he could get the concession to sell religious statues, cut-price icons, rancid sweetmeats, fermenting dates, and putrescent olives on a stick to any watching crowds.
Subsequently, this was his testament. There never was a Book of the Prophet Brutha, but an enterprising scribe, during what came to be called the Renovation, did assemble some notes, and Dhblah had this to say:
"I. I was standing right by the statue of Ossory, right, when I noticed Brutha just beside me. Everyone was keeping away from him because of him being a bishop and they do things to you if you jostle bishops.
"II. I said to him, hello, Your Graciousness, and offered him a yoghurt practically free.
"III. He responded, no.
"IV. I said, it's very healthy, it's a live yoghurt.
"V. He said, yes, he could see.
"VI. He was staring at the doors. This was about the time of the third gong, right, so we all knew we'd got hours to wait. He was looking a bit down and it's not as if he even ate the yoghurt, which I admit was on the hum a bit, what with the heat. I mean, it was more alive than usual. I mean, I had to keep hitting it with a spoon to stop it getting out of the . . . all right. I was just explaining about the yoghurt. All right. I mean, you want to put a bit of color in, don't you? People like a bit of color. It was green.
"VII. He just stood there, staring. So I said, got a problem, Your Reverence? Upon which he vouchsafed, I cannot hear him. I said, what is this he to whom what you refer? He said, if he was here, he would send me a sign.
"VIII. There is no truth whatsoever in the rumor that I ran away at this juncture. It was just the pressure of the crowd. I have never been a friend of the Quisition. I might have sold them food, but I always charged them extra.
"IX. Anyway, right, then he pushed through the line of guards what was holding the crowd back and stood right in front of the doors, and they weren't sure what to do about bishops, and I heard him say something like, I carried you in the desert, I believed all my life, just give me this one thing.
"X. Something like that, anyway. How about some yoghurt? Bargain offer. Onna stick."


Om lifted himself over a creeper-clad wall by grasping tendrils in his beak and hauling himself up by the neck muscles. Then he fell down the other side. The Citadel was as far away as ever.
Brutha's mind was flaming like a beacon in Om's senses. There's a streak of madness in everyone who spends quality time with gods, and it was driving the boy now.
"It's too soon!" Om yelled. "You need followers! It can't be just you! You can't do it by yourself! You have to get disciples first!"


Simony turned to look down the length of the Turtle. Thirty men were crouched under the shell, looking very apprehensive.
A corporal saluted.
"The needle's there, sergeant."
The brass whistle whistled.
Simony picked up the steering ropes. This was what war should be, he thought. No uncertainty. A few more Turtles like this, and no one would ever fight again.
"Stand by," he said.
He pulled the big lever hard.
The brittle metal snapped in his hand.
Give anyone a lever long enough and they can change the world. It's unreliable levers that are the problem.


In the depths of the Temple's hidden plumbing, Urn grasped a bronze pipe firmly with his spanner and gave the nut a cautious turn. It resisted. He changed position, and grunted as he used more pressure.
With a sad little metal sound, the pipe twisted-and broke . . .
Water gushed out, hitting him in the face. He dropped the tool and tried to block the flow with his fingers, but it spurted around his hands and gurgled down the channel towards one of the weights.
"Stop it! Stop it!" he shouted.
"What?" said Fergmen, several feet below him.
"Stop the water!"
"How?"
"The pipe's broken!"
"I thought that's what we wanted to do?"
"Not yet!"
"Stop shouting, mister! There's guards around!"
Urn let the water gush for a moment as he struggled out of his robe, and then he rammed the sodden material into the pipe. It shot out again with some force and slapped wetly against the lead funnel, sliding down until it blocked the tube that led to the weights. The water piled up behind it and then spilled over on to the floor.
Urn glanced at the weight. It hadn't begun to move.
He relaxed slightly. Now, provided there was still enough water to make the weight drop . . .
"Both of you-stand still."
He looked around, his mind going numb.
There was a heavy-set man in a black robe standing in the stricken doorway. Behind him, a guard held a sword in a meaningful manner.
"Who are you? Why are you here?"
Urn hesitated for only a moment.
He gestured with his spanner.
"Well, it's the seating, innit," he said. "You've got shocking seepage around the seating. Amazing it holds together."
The man stepped into the room. He glared uncertainly at Urn for a moment and then turned his attention to the gushing pipe. And then back to Urn.
"But you're not-" he began.
He spun around as Fergmen hit the guard hard with a length of broken pipe. When he turned back, Urn's spanner caught him full in the stomach. Urn wasn't strong, but it was a long spanner, and the wellknown principles of leverage did the rest. He doubled up and then sagged backwards against one of the weights.
What happened next happened in frozen time. Deacon Cusp grabbed at the weight for support. It sank down, ponderously, his extra poundage adding to the weight of the water. He clawed higher. It sank further, dropping below the lip of the pit. He sought for balance again, but this time it was against fresh air, and he tumbled on top of the falling weight.
Urn saw his face staring up at him as the weight fell into the gloom.
With a lever, he could change the world. It had certainly changed it for Deacon Cusp. It had made it stop existing.
Fergmen was standing over the guard, his pipe raised.
"I know this one," he said. "I'm going to give him a-"
"Never mind about that!"
"But-"
Above them linkage clanked into action. There was a distant creaking of bronze against bronze.
"Let's get out of here," said Urn. "Only the gods know what's happening up there."


And blows rained on the unmoving Moving Turtle's carapace.
"Damn! Damn! Damn!" shouted Simony, thumping it again. "Move! I command you to move! Can you understand plain Ephebian! Move!"
The unmoving machine leaked steam and sat there.


And Om pulled himself up the slope of a small hill. So it came to this, then. There was only one way to get to the Citadel now.
It was a million-to-one chance, with any luck.


And Brutha stood in front of the huge doors, oblivious to the crowd and the muttering guards. The Quisition could arrest anyone, but the guards weren't certain what happened to you if you apprehended an archbishop, especially one so recently favored by the Prophet.
Just a sign, Brutha thought, in the loneliness of his head.
The doors trembled, and swung slowly outwards.
Brutha stepped forward. He wasn't fully conscious now, not in any coherent way as understood by normal people. Just one part of him was still capable of looking at the state of his own mind and thinking: perhaps the Great Prophets felt like this all the time.
The thousands inside the temple were looking around in confusion. The choirs of lesser Iams paused in their chant. Brutha walked on up the aisle, the only one with a purpose in the suddenly bewildered throng.
Vorbis was standing in the center of the temple, under the vault of the dome. Guards hurried toward Brutha, but Vorbis raised a hand in a gentle but very positive movement.
Now Brutha could take in the scene. There was the staff of Ossory, and Abbys's cloak, and the sandals of Cena. And, supporting the dome, the massive statues of the first four prophets. He'd never seen them. He'd heard about them every day of his childhood.
And what did they mean now? They didn't mean anything. Nothing meant anything, if Vorbis was Prophet. Nothing meant anything, if the Cenobiarch was a man who'd heard nothing in the inner spaces of his own head but his own thoughts.
He was aware that Vorbis's gesture had not only halted the guards, although they surrounded him like a hedge. It had also filled the temple with silence. Into which Vorbis spoke.
"Ah. My Brutha. We had looked for you in vain. And now even you are here . . ."
Brutha stopped a few feet away. The moment of . . . whatever it had been . . . that had propelled him through the doors had drained away.
Now all there was, was Vorbis.
Smiling.
The part of him still capable of thought was thinking: there is nothing you can say. No one will listen. No one will care. It doesn't matter what you tell people about Ephebe, and Brother Murduck, and the desert. It won't be fundamentally true.
Fundamentally true. That's what the world is, with Vorbis in it.
Vorbis said, "There is something wrong? Something you wish to say?"
The black-on-black eyes filled the world, like two pits.
Brutha's mind gave up, and Brutha's body took over. It brought his hand back and raised it, oblivious to the sudden rush forward of the guards.
He saw Vorbis turn his cheek, and smile.
Brutha stopped, and lowered his hand.
He said, "No. I won't."
Then, for the first and only time, he saw Vorbis really enraged. There had been times before when the deacon had been angry, but it had been something driven by the brain, switched on and off as the need arose. This was something else, something out of control. And it flashed across his face only for a moment.
As the hands of the guards closed on him, Vorbis stepped forward and patted him on the shoulder. He looked Brutha in the eye for a moment and then said softly:
"Thrash him within an inch of his life and burn him the rest of the way."
An Iam began to speak, but stopped when he saw Vorbis's expression.
"Do it now."


A world of silence. No sound up here, except the rush of wind through the feathers.
Up here the world is round, bordered by a band of sea. The viewpoint is from horizon to horizon, the sun is closer.
And yet, looking down, looking for shapes . . .
. . . down in the farmland on the edge of the wilderness . . .
. . . on a small hill . . .
. . . a tiny moving dome, ridiculously exposed . . .
No sound but the rush of wind through feathers as the eagle pulls in its wings and drops like an arrow, the world spinning around the little moving shape that is the focus of all the eagle's attention.
Closer and . . .
. . . talons down . . .
. . . grip . . .
. . . and rise . . .


Brutha opened his eyes.
His back was merely agonizing. He'd long ago got used to switching off pain.
But he was spread-eagled on a surface, his arms and legs chained to something he couldn't see. Sky above. The towering frontage of the temple to one side.
By turning his head a little he could see the silent crowd. And the brown metal of the iron turtle. He could smell smoke.
Someone was just tightening the shackles on his hand. Brutha looked over at the inquisitor. Now, what was it he had to say? Oh, yes.
"The Turtle Moves?" he mumbled.
The man sighed.
"Not this one, friend," he said.


The world spun under Om as the eagle sought for shellcracking height, and his mind was besieged by the tortoise's existential dread of being off the ground. And Brutha's thoughts, bright and clear this close to death . . .
I'm on my back and getting hotter and I'm going to die . . .
Careful, careful. Concentrate, concentrate. It'll let go any second . . .
Om stuck out his long scrawny neck, stared at the body just above him, picked what he hoped was about the right spot, plunged his beak through the brown feathers between the talons, and gripped.
The eagle blinked. No tortoise had ever done that to an eagle, anywhere else in history.
Om's thoughts arrived in the little silvery world of its mind:
"We don't want to hurt one another, now do we?"
The eagle blinked again.
Eagles have never evolved much imagination or forethought, beyond that necessary to know that a turtle smashes when you drop it on the rocks. But it was forming a mental picture of what happened when you let go of a heavy tortoise that was still intimately gripping an essential bit of you.
Its eyes watered.
Another thought crept into its mind.
"Now. You play, uh, ball with me, I'll play . . . ball with you. Understand? This is important. This is what I want you to do . . ."
The eagle soared on a thermal off the hot rocks, and sped towards the distant gleam of the Citadel.
No tortoise had ever done this before. No tortoise in the whole universe. But no tortoise had ever been a god, and knew the unwritten motto of the Quisition: Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum.
When you have their full attention in your grip, their hearts and minds will follow.


Urn pushed his way through the crowds, with Fergmen trailing behind. That was the best and the worst of civil war, at least at the start-everyone wore the same uniform. It was much easier when you picked enemies who were a different color or at least spoke with a funny accent. You could call them "gooks" or something. It made things easier.
Hey, Urn thought. This is nearly philosophy. Pity I probably won't live to tell anyone.
The big doors were ajar. The crowd was silent, and very attentive. He craned forward to see, and then looked up at the soldier beside him.
It was Simony.
"I thought-"
"It didn't work," said Simony, bitterly.
"Did you-?"
"We did everything! Something broke!"
"It must be the steel they make here," said Urn. "The link pins on-"
"That doesn't matter now," said Simony.
The flat tones of his voice made Urn follow the eyes of the crowd.
There was another iron turtle there-a proper model of a turtle, mounted on a sort of open gridwork of metal bars in which a couple of inquisitors were even now lighting a fire. And chained to the back of the turtle-
"Who's that?"
"Brutha."
"What?"
"I don't know what happened. He hit Vorbis, or didn't hit him. Or something. Enraged him anyway. Vorbis stopped the ceremony, right there and then."
Urn glanced at the deacon. Not Cenobiarch yet, so uncrowned. Among the Iams and bishops standing uncertainly in the open doorway, his bald head gleamed in the morning light.
"Come on, then," said Urn.
"Come on what?"
"We can rush the steps and save him!"
"There's more of them than there are of us," said Simony.
"Well, haven't there always been? There's not magically more of them than there are of us just because they've got Brutha, are there?"
Simony grabbed his arm.
"Think logically, will you?" he said. "You're a philosopher, aren't you? Look at the crowd!"
Urn looked at the crowd.
"Well?"
"They don't like it,." Simon turned. "Look, Brutha's going to die anyway. But this way it'll mean something. People don't understand, really understand, about the shape of the universe and all that stuff, but they'll remember what Vorbis did to a man. Right? We can make Brutha's death a symbol for people, don't you see?"
Urn stared at the distant figure of Brutha. It was naked, except for a loin-cloth.
"A symbol?" he said. His throat was dry.
"It has to be."
He remembered Didactylos saying the world was a funny place. And, he thought distantly, it really was. Here people were about to roast someone to death, but they'd left his loin-cloth on, out of respectability. You had to laugh. Otherwise you'd go mad.
"You know," he said, turning to Simony. "Now I know Vorbis is evil. He burned my city. Well, the Tsorteans do it sometimes, and we burn theirs. It's just war. It's all part of history. And he lies and cheats and claws power for himself, and lots of people do that, too. But do you know what's special? Do you know what it is?"
"Of course," said Simony. "It's what he's doing to-"
"It's what he's done to you."
"What?"
"He turns other people into copies of himself."
Simony's grip was like a vice. "You're saying I'm like him?"
"Once you said you'd cut him down," said Urn. "Now you're thinking like him . . .
"So we rush them, then?" said Simony. "I'm sure of-maybe four hundred on our side. So I give the signal and a few hundred of us attack thousands of them? And he dies anyway and we die too? What difference does that make?"
Urn's face was gray with horror now.
"You mean you don't know?" he said.
Some of the crowd looked round curiously at him.
"You don't know?" he said.


The sky was blue. The sun wasn't high enough yet to turn it into Omnia's normal copper bowl.
Brutha turned his head again, towards the sun. It was about a width above the horizon, although if Didactylos's theories about the speed of light were correct, it was really setting, thousands of years in the future.
It was eclipsed by the head of Vorbis.
"Hot yet, Brutha?" said the deacon.
"Warm."
"It will get warmer."
There was a disturbance in the crowd. Someone was shouting. Vorbis ignored it.
"Nothing you want to say?" he said. "Can't you manage even a curse? Not even a curse?"
"You never heard Om," said Brutha. "You never believed. You never, ever heard his voice. All you heard were the echoes inside your own mind."
"Really? But I am the Cenobiarch and you are going to burn for treachery and heresy," said Vorbis. "So much for Om, perhaps?"
"There will be justice," said Brutha. "If there is no justice, there is nothing."
He was aware of a small voice in his head, too faint yet to distinguish words.
"Justice?" said Vorbis. The idea seemed to enrage him. He spun around to the crowd of bishops. "Did you hear him? There will be justice? Om has judged! Through me! This is justice!"
There was a speck in the sun now, speeding toward the Citadel. And the little voice was saying left left left up up left right a bit up left-The mass of metal under him was getting uncomfortably hot.
"He comes now," said Brutha.
Vorbis waved his hand to the great facade of the temple. "Men built this. We built this," he said. "And what did Om do? Om comes? Let him come! Let him judge between us!"
"He comes now," Brutha repeated. "The God."
People looked apprehensively upward. There was that moment, just one moment, when the world holds its breath and against all experience waits for a miracle.
-up left now, when I say three, one, two, THREE-
"Vorbis?" croaked Brutha.
"What?" snapped the deacon.
"You're going to die."
It was hardly a whisper, but it bounced off the bronze doors and carried across the Place . . .
It made people uneasy, although they couldn't quite say why.
The eagle sped across the square, so low that people ducked. Then it cleared the roof of the temple and curved away towards the mountains. The watchers relaxed. It was only an eagle. For a moment there, just for a moment . . .
No one saw the tiny speck, tumbling down from the sky.
Don't put your faith in gods. But you can believe in turtles.
A feeling of rushing wind in Brutha's mind, and a voice . . .
-obuggerbuggerbuggerhelpaarghnoNoNoAarghBuggerNONOAARGH-
Even Vorbis got a grip of himself. There had been just a moment, when he'd seen the eagle-but, no . . .
He extended his arms and smiled beatifically at the sky.
"I'm sorry," said Brutha.
One or two people, who had been watching Vorbis closely, said later that there was just time for his expression to change before two pounds of tortoise, traveling at three meters a second, hit him between the eyes.
It was a revelation.
And that does something to people watching. For a start, they believe with all their heart.


Brutha was aware of feet running up the steps, and hands pulling at the chains.
And then a voice:
I. He is Mine.
The Great God rose over the Temple, billowing and changing as the belief of thousands of people flowed into him. There were shapes there, of eagle-headed men, and bulls, and golden horns, but they tangled and flamed and fused into one another.
Four bolts of fire whirred out of the cloud and burst the chains holding Brutha.
II. He Is Cenobiarch And Prophet of Prophets.
The voice of theophany rumbled off the distant mountains.
III. Do I Hear Any Objections? No? Good.
The cloud had by now condensed into a shimmering golden figure, as tall as the Temple. It leaned down until its face was a few feet away from Brutha, and in a whisper that boomed across the Place said:
IV. Don't Worry. This Is Just The Start. You and Me, Kid! People Are Going To Find Out What Wailing and Gnashing Of Teeth Really Is.
Another shaft of flame shot out and struck the Temple doors. They slammed shut, and then the white-hot bronze melted, erasing the commandments of the centuries.
V. What Shall It Be, Prophet?
Brutha stood up, unsteadily. Urn supported him by one arm, and Simony by the other.
"Mm?" he said, muzzily.
VI. Your Commandments?
"I thought they were supposed to come from you," said Brutha. "I don't know if I can think of any . . .
The world waited.
"How about `Think for Yourself'?" said Urn, staring in horrified fascination at the manifestation.
"No," said Simony. "Try something like `Social Cohesiveness is the Key to Progress.' "
"Can't say it rolls off the tongue," said Urn.
"If I can be of any help," said Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Dhblah, from the crowd, "something of benefit to the convenience food industry would be very welcome."
"Not killing people. We could do with one like that," said someone else.
"It'd be a good start," said Urn.
They looked at the Chosen One. He shook himself free of their grip and stood alone, swaying a little.
"No-oo," said Brutha. "No. I thought like that once, but it wouldn't. Not really."
Now, he said. Only now. Just one point in history. Not tomorrow, not next month, it'll always be too late unless it's now.
They stared at him.
"Come on," said Simony. "What's wrong with it? You can't argue with it."
"It's hard to explain," said Brutha. "But I think it's got something to do with how people should behave. I think . . . you should do things because they're right. Not because gods say so. They might say something different another time."
VII. I Like One About Not Killing, said Om, from far above.
VIII. It's Got A Good Ring To It. Hurry Up, I've Got Some Smiting To Do.
"You see?" said Brutha. "No. No smiting. No commandments unless you obey them too."
Om thumped on the roof of the Temple.
IX. You Order Me? Here? NOW? ME?
"No. I ask."
X. That's Worse Than Ordering!
"Everything works both ways."
Om thumped his Temple again. A wall caved in. That part of the crowd that hadn't managed to stampede from the Place redoubled its efforts.
XI. There Must Be Punishment! Otherwise There Will Be No Order!
` No.
XII. I Do Not Need You! I Have Believers Enough Now!
"But only through me. And, perhaps, not for long. It will all happen again. It's happened before. It happens all the time. That's why gods die. They never believe in people. But you have a chance. All you need to do is . . . believe."
XIII. What? Listen To Stupid Prayers? Watch Over Small Children? Make It Rain?
"Sometimes. Not always. It could be a bargain."
XIV. BARGAIN! I don't Bargain! Not With Humans!
"Bargain now," said Brutha. "While you have the chance. Or one day you'll have to bargain with Simony, or someone like him. Or Urn, or someone like him. "
XV. I Could Destroy You Utterly.
"Yes. I am entirely in your power."
XVI. I Could Crush You Like An Egg!
"Yes."
Om paused.
Then he said: XVII. You Can't Use Weakness As A Weapon.
"It's the only one I've got."
XVIII. Why Should I Yield, Then?
"Not yield. Bargain. Deal with me in weakness. Or one day you'll have to bargain with someone in a position of strength. The world changes."
XIX. Hah! You Want A Constitutional Religion?
"Why not? The other sort didn't work."
Om leaned on the Temple, his temper subsiding.
Chap. II v. l. Very Well, Then. But Only For A Time. A grin spread across the enormous, smoking face. For One Hundred Years, Yes?
"And after a hundred years?"
II. We Shall See.
"Agreed."
A finger the length of a tree unfolded, descended, touched Brutha.
III. You Have A Persuasive Way. You Will Need It. A Fleet Approaches.
"Ephebians?" said Simony.
IV. And Tsorteans. And Djelibeybians. And Klatchians. Every Free Country Along The Coast. To Stamp Out Omnia For Good. Or Bad.
"You don't have many friends, do you?" said Urn.
"Even I don't like us much, and I am us," said Simony. He looked up at the god.
"Will you help?"
V. You Don't Even Believe In Me!
"Yes, but I'm a practical man."
VI. And Brave, Too, To Declare Atheism Before Your God.
"This doesn't change anything, you know!" said Simony. "Don't think you can get round me by existing! "
"No help," said Brutha, firmly.
"What?" said Simony. "We'll need a mighty army against that lot!"
"Yes. And we haven't got one. So we'll do it another way."
"You're crazy!"
Brutha's calmness was like a desert.
"This may be the case."
"We have to fight!"
"Not yet."
Simony clenched his fists in anger.
"Look . . . listen . . . We died for lies, for centuries we died for lies." He waved a hand towards the god. "Now we've got a truth to die for!"
"No. Men should die for lies. But the truth is too precious to die for."
Simony's mouth opened and shut soundlessly as he sought for words. Finally, he found some from the dawn of his education.
"I was told it was the finest thing to die for a god," he mumbled.
"Vorbis said that. And he was . . . stupid. You can die for your country or your people or your family,
but for a god you should live fully and busily, every day of along life."
"And how long is that going to be?"
"We shall see."
Brutha looked up at Om.
"You will not show yourself like this again?"
Chap. III v. I. No. Once Is Enough.
"Remember the desert."
II. I Will Remember.
"Walk with me."
Brutha went over to the body of Vorbis and picked it up.
"I think," he said, "that they will land on the beach on the Ephebian side of the forts. They won't use the rock shore and they can't use the cliffs. I'll meet them there." He glanced down at Vorbis. "Someone should."
"You can't mean you want to go by yourself?"
"Ten thousand won't be sufficient. One might be enough."
He walked down the steps.
Urn and Simony watched him go.
"He's going to die," said Simony. "He won't even be a patch of grease on the sand." He turned to Om. "Can you stop him?"
III. It May Be That I Cannot.
Brutha was already halfway across the Place.
"Well, we're not deserting him," said Simony.
IV. Good.
Om watched them go, too. And then he was alone, except for the thousands watching him, crammed around the edges of the great square. He wished he knew what to say to them. That's why he needed people like Brutha. That's why all gods needed people like Brutha.
"Excuse me?"
The god looked down.
V. Yes?
"Um. I can't sell you anything, can I?"
VI. What Is Your Name?
"Dhblah, god."
VII. Ah, Yes. And What Is It You Wish?
The merchant hopped anxiously from one foot to the other.
"You couldn't manage just a small commandment? Something about eating yoghurt on Wednesdays, say? It's always very difficult to shift, midweek."
VIII. You Stand Before Your God And Look For Business Opportunities?
"We-ell," said Dhblah, "we could come to an arrangement. Strike while the iron is hot, as the inquisitors say. Haha. Twenty percent? How about it? After expenses, of course-"
The Great God Om smiled.
IX. I Think You Will Make A Little Prophet, Dhblah, he said.
"Right. Right. That's all I'm looking for. Just trying to make both ends hummus."
X. Tortoises Are To Be Left Alone.
Dhblah put his head on one side.
"Doesn't sing, does it?" he said. "But . . . tortoise necklaces . . . hmm . . . brooches, of course. Tortoiseshel-"
XI. NO!
"Sorry, sorry. See what you mean. All right. Tortoise statues. Ye-ess. I thought about them. Nice shape. Incidentally, you couldn't make a statue wobble every now and again, could you? Very good for business wobbling statues. The statue of Ossory wobbles eve; Fast of Ossory, reg'lar. By means of a small piston device operated in the basement, it is said. But very good for the prophets, all the same."
XII. You Make me Laugh, Little Prophet. Sell Your Tortoises, By All Means.
"Tell you the truth," said Dhblah, "I've already drawn a few designs just now . . ."
Om vanished. There was a brief thunderclap. Dhblah looked reflectively at his sketches.
". . . but I suppose I'll have to take the little figure off them," he said, more or less to himself.

The shade of Vorbis looked around.
"Ah. The desert," he said. The black sand was absolutely still under the starlit sky. It looked cold.
He hadn't planned on dying yet. In fact . . . he couldn't quite remember how he'd died . . .
"The desert," he repeated, and this time there was a hint of uncertainty. He'd never been uncertain about anything in his . . . life. The feeling was unfamiliar and terrifying. Did ordinary people feel like this?
He got a grip on himself.
Death was impressed. Very few people managed this, managed to hold on to the shape of their old thinking after death.
Death took no pleasure in his job. It was an emotion he found hard to grasp. But there was such a thing as satisfaction.
"So," said Vorbis. "The desert. And at the end of the desert?"
JUDGEMENT.
"Yes, yes, of course."
Vorbis tried to concentrate. He couldn't. He could feel certainty draining away. And he'd always been certain.
He hesitated, like a man opening a door to a familiar room and finding nothing there but a bottomless pit. The memories were still there. He could feel them. They had the right shape. It was just that he couldn't remember what they were. There had been a voice . . . . Surely, there had been a voice? But all he could remember was the sound of his own thoughts, bouncing off the inside of his own head.
Now he had to cross the desert. What could there be to fear? The desert was what you believed.
Vorbis looked inside himself.
And went on looking.
He sagged to his knees.
I CAN SEE THAT YOU ARE BUSY, said Death.
"Don't leave me! It's so empty!"
Death looked around at the endless desert. He snapped his fingers and a large white horse trotted up.
I SEE A HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE, he said, swinging himself into the saddle.
"Where? Where?"
HERE. WITH YOU.
"I can't see them!"
Death gathered up the reins.
NEVERTHELESS, he said. His horse trotted forward a few steps.
"I don't understand!" screamed Vorbis.
Death paused. YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE, he said, THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE?
"Yes. Yes, of course."
Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG.


The first boats grounded in the shallows, and the troops leapt into shoulder-high surf.
No one was quite sure who was leading the fleet. Most of the countries along the coast hated one another, not in any personal sense, but simply on a kind of historical basis. On the other hand, how much leadership was necessary? Everyone knew where Omnia was. None of the countries in the fleet hated the others worse than they did Omnia. Now it was necessary for it . . . not to exist.
General Argavisti of Ephebe considered that he was in charge, because although he didn't have the most ships he was avenging the attack on Ephebe. But Imperiator Borvorius of Tsort knew that he was in charge, because there were more Tsortean ships than any others. And Admiral Rham-ap-Efan of Djelibeybi knew that he was in charge, because he was the kind of person who always thought he was in charge of anything. The only captain who did not, in fact, think that he was commanding the fleet was Fasta Benj, a fisherman from a very small nation of marsh-dwelling nomads of whose existence all the other countries were in complete ignorance, and whose small reed boat had been in the path of the fleet and had got swept along. Since his tribe believed that there were only fifty-one people in the world, worshiped a giant newt, spoke a very personal language which no one else understood, and had never seen metal or fire before, he was spending a lot of time wearing a puzzled grin.
Clearly they had reached a shore, not of proper mud and reeds, but of very small gritty bits. He lugged his little reed boat up the sand, and sat down with interest to see what the men in the feathery hats and shiny fish-scale vests were going to do next.
General Argavisti scanned the beach.
"They must have seen us coming," he said. "So why would they let us establish a beachhead?"
Heat haze wavered over the dunes. A dot appeared, growing and contracting in the shimmering air.
More troops poured ashore.
General Argavisti shaded his eyes against the sun.
"Fella's just standing there," he said.
"Could be a spy," said Borvorius.
"Don't see how he could be a spy in his own country," said Argavisti. "Anyway, if he was a spy he'd be creepin' around. That's how you can tell."
The figure had stopped at the foot of the dunes. There was something about it that drew the eye. Argavisti had faced many an opposing army, and this was normal. One patiently waiting figure was not. He found he kept turning to look at it.
"S'carrying something," he said eventually. "Sergeant? Go and bring that man here."
A few minutes later the sergeant returned.
"Says he'll meet you in the middle of the beach, sir," he reported.
"Didn't I tell you to bring him here?"
"He didn't want to come, sir."
"You've got a sword, haven't you?"
"Yessir. Prodded him a bit, but he dint want to move, sir. And he's carrying a dead body, sir."
"On a battlefield? It's not bring-your-own, you know."
"And . . . sir?"
"What?"
"Says he's probably the Cenobiarch, sir. Wants to talk about a peace treaty."
"Oh, he does? Peace treaty? We know about peace treaties with Omnia. Go and tell . . . no. Take a couple of men and bring him here."
Brutha walked back between the soldiers, through the organized pandemonium of the camp. I ought to feel afraid, he thought. I was always afraid in the Citadel. But not now. This is through fear and out the other side.
Occasionally one of the soldiers would give him a push. It's not allowed for an enemy to walk freely into a camp, even if he wants to.
He was brought before a trestle table, behind which sat half a dozen large men in various military styles,
and one small olive-skinned man who was gutting a fish and grinning hopefully at everyone.
"Well, now," said Argavisti, "Cenobiarch of Omnia, eh?"
Brutha dropped Vorbis's body on to the sand. Their gaze followed it.
"I know him-" said Borvorius. "Vorbis! Someone killed him at last, eh? And will you stop trying to sell me fish? Does anyone know who this man is?" he added, indicating Fasta Benj.
"It was a tortoise," said Brutha.
"Was it? Not surprised. Never did trust them, always creeping around. Look, I said no fish! He's not one of mine, I know that. Is he one of yours?"
Argavisti waved a hand irritably. "Who sent you, boy?"
"No one. I came by myself. But you could say I come from the future."
"Are you a philosopher? Where's your sponge?"
"You've come to wage war on Omnia. This would not be a good idea."
"From Omnia's point of view, yes."
"From everyone's. You will probably defeat us. But not all of us. And then what will you do? Leave a garrison? For ever? And eventually a new generation will retaliate. Why you did this won't mean anything to them. You'll be the oppressors. They'll fight. They might even win. And there'll be another war. And one day people will say: why didn't they sort it all out, back then? On the beach. Before it all started. Before all those people died. Now we have that chance. Aren't we lucky?"
Argavisti stared at him. Then he nudged Borvorius.
"What did he say?"
Borvorius, who was better at thinking than the others, said, "Are you talking about surrender?"
"Yes. If that's the word."
Argavisti exploded.
"You can't do that!"
"Someone will have to. Please listen to me. Vorbis is dead. He's paid."
"Not enough. What about your soldiers? They tried to sack our city!"
"Do your soldiers obey your orders?"
"Certainly! "
"And they'd cut me down here and now if you commanded it?"
"I should say so!"
"And I'm unarmed," said Brutha.
The sun beat down on an awkward pause.
"When I say they'd obey-" Argavisti began.
"We were not sent here to parley," said Borvorius abruptly. "Vorbis's death changes nothing fundamental. We are here to see that Omnia is no longer a threat."
"It is not. We will sent materials and people to help rebuild Ephebe. And gold, if you like. We will reduce the size of our army. And so on. Consider us beaten. We will even open Omnia to whatever other religions wish to build holy places here."
A voice echoed in his head, like the person behind you who says, "Put the red Queen on the black King," when you think you have been playing all by yourself . . .
I. What?
"This will encourage . . . local effort," said Brutha.
IL Other Gods? Here?
"There will be free trade along the coast. I wish to see Omnia take its place among its fellow nations."
III. I heard You Mention Other Gods.
"Its place is at the bottom," said Borvorius.
"No. That won't work."
IV. Could We Please Get Back To The Matter Of Other Gods?
"Will you please excuse me a moment?" said Brutha, brightly. "I need to pray."
Even Argavisti raised no objection as Brutha walked off a little way up the beach. As St. Ungulant preached to any who would listen, there were plus points in being a madman. People hesitated to stop you, in case it made things worse.
"Yes?" said Brutha, under his breath.
V. I Don't Seem To Recall Any Discussion About Other Gods Being Worshiped In Omnia?
"Ah, but it'll work for you," said Brutha. "People will soon see that those other ones are no good at all, won't they?" He crossed his fingers behind his back.
VI. This Is Religion, Boy. Not Comparison Bloody Shopping! You Shall Not Subject Your God To Market Forces!
"I'm sorry. I can see that you would be worried about-"
VII. Worried? Me? By A Bunch Of Primping Women And Musclebound Posers In Curly Beards?
"Fine. Is that settled, then?"
VIII. They Won't Last Five Minutes! . . . what?
"And now I'd better go and talk to these men one more time."
His eye was caught by a movement among the dunes.
"Oh, no," he said. "The idiots . . .
He turned and ran desperately toward the beached fleet.
"No! It's not like that! Listen! Listen!"
But they had seen the army, too.
It looked impressive, perhaps more impressive than it really was. When news gets through that a huge enemy fleet has beached with the intent of seriously looting, pillaging, and-because they are from civilized countries-whistling and making catcalls at the women and impressing them with their flash bloody uniforms and wooing them away with their flash bloody consumer goods, I don't know, show them a polished bronze mirror and it goes right to their heads, you'd think there was something wrong with the local lads . . . then people either head for the hills or pick up some handy, swingable object, get Granny to hide the family treasures in her drawers, and prepare to make a fight of it.
And, in the lead, the iron cart. Steam poured out of its funnel. Urn must have got it working again.
"Stupid! Stupid!" Brutha shouted, to the world in general, and carried on running.
The fleet was already forming battle-lines, and its commander, whichever he was, was amazed to see an apparent attack by one man.
Borvorius caught him as he plunged towards a line of spears.
"I see," he said. "Keep us talking while your soldiers got into position, eh?"
"No! I didn't want that!"
Borvorius's eyes narrowed. He had not survived the many wars of his life by being a stupid man.
"No," he said, "maybe you didn't. But it doesn't matter. Listen to me, my innocent little priest. Sometimes there has to be a war. Things go too far for words. There's . . . other forces. Now . . . go back to your people. Maybe we'll both be alive when all this is over and then we can talk. Fight first, talk after. That's how it works, boy. That's history. Now, go back."
Brutha turned away.
I. Shall I Smite Them?
"No!"
Il. I Could Make Them As Dust. Just Say The Word.
"No. That's worse than war."
III. But You Said A God Must Protect His People
"What would we be if I told you to crush honest men?"
IV. Not Stuck Full Of Arrows?
No.
The Omnians were assembling among the dunes. A lot of them had clustered around the iron-shielded cart. Brutha looked at it through a mist of despair.
"Didn't I say I'd go down there alone?" he said.
Simony, who was leaning against the Turtle, gave him a grim smile.
"Did it work?" he said.
"I think . . . it didn't."
"I knew it. Sorry you had to find out. Things have a way of wanting to happen, see? Sometimes you get people facing off and . . . that's it."
"But if only people would-"
"Yeah. You could use that as a commandment."
There was a clanging noise, and a hatch opened on the side of the Turtle. Urn emerged, backward, holding a spanner.
"What is this thing?" said Brutha.
"It's a machine for fighting," said Simony. "The Turtle Moves, eh?"
"For fighting Ephebians?" said Brutha.
Urn turned around.
"What?" he said.
"You've built this . . . this thing . . . to fight Ephebians?"
"Well . . . no . . . no," said Urn, looking bewildered. "We're fighting Ephebians?"
"Everyone," said Simony.
"But I never . . . I'm an . . . I never-"
Brutha looked at the spiked wheels and the sawedged plates around the edge of the Turtle.
"It's a device that goes by itself," said Urn. "We were going to use it for . . . I mean . . . look, I never wanted it to . . .'
"We need it now," said Simony.
"Which we?"
"What comes out of the big long spout thing at the front?" said Brutha.
"Steam," said Urn dully. "It's connected to the safety valve."
"Oh."
"It comes out very hot," said Urn, sagging even more.
"Oh?"
"Scalding, in fact."
Brutha's gaze drifted from the steam funnel to the rotating knives.
"Very philosophical," he said.
"We were going to use it against Vorbis," said Urn.
"And now you're not. It's going to be used against Ephebians. You know, I used to think I was stupid, and then I met philosophers."
Simony broke the silence by patting Brutha on the shoulder.
"It will all work out," he said. "We won't lose. After all," he smiled encouragingly, "we have God on our side."
Brutha turned. His fist shot out. It wasn't a scientific blow, but it was hard enough to spin Simony around. He clutched his chin.
"What was that for? Isn't this what you wanted?"
"We get the gods we deserve," said Brutha, "and I think we don't deserve any. Stupid. Stupid. The sanest man I've met this year lives up a pole in the desert. Stupid. I think I ought to join him."
I. Why?
"Gods and men, men and gods," said Brutha. "Everything happens because things have happened before. Stupid."
II. But You Are The Chosen One.
"Choose someone else."
Brutha strode off through the ragged army. No one tried to stop him. He reached the path that led up to the cliffs, and did not even turn to look at the battlelines.
"Aren't you going to watch the battle? I need someone to watch the battle."
Didactylos was sitting on a rock, his hands folded on his stick.
"Oh, hello," said Brutha, bitterly. "Welcome to Omnia."
"It helps if you're philosophical about it," said Didactylos.
"But there's no reason to fight!"
"Yes there is. Honor and revenge and duty and things like that."
"Do you really think so? I thought philosophers were supposed to be logical?"
Didactylos shrugged.
"Well, the way I see it, logic is only a way of being ignorant by numbers."
"I thought it would all be over when Vorbis was dead."
Didactylos stared into his inner world.
"It takes a long time for people like Vorbis to die. They leave echoes in history."
"I know what you mean."
"How's Urn's steam machine?" said Didactylos.
"I think he's a bit upset about it," said Brutha.
Didactylos cackled and banged his stick on the ground.
"Hah! He's learning! Everything works both ways!"
"It should do," said Brutha.


Something like a golden comet sped across the sky of the Discworld. Om soared like an eagle, buoyed up by the freshness, by the strength of the belief. For as long as it lasted, anyway. Belief this hot, this desperate, never lasted long. Human minds could not sustain it. But while it did last, he was strong.
The central spire of Cori Celesti rises up from the mountains at the Hub, ten vertical miles of green ice and snow, topped by the turrets and domes of Dunmanifestin.
There the gods of the Discworld live.
At the least, any god who is anybody. And it is strange that, although it takes years of effort and work and scheming for a god to get there, once there they never seem to do a lot apart from drink too much and indulge in a little mild corruption. Many systems of government follow the same broad lines.
They play games. They tend to be very simple games, because gods are easily bored by complicated things. It is strange that, while small gods can have one aim in mind for millions of years, are in fact one aim, large gods seem to have the attention span of the common mosquito.
And style? If the gods of the Discworld were people they would think that three plaster ducks is a bit avant-garde.
There was a double door at the end of the main hall.
It rocked to a thunderous knocking.
The gods looked up vaguely from their various preoccupations, shrugged and turned away.
The doors burst inward.
Om strode through the debris, looking around with the air of one who has a search to complete and not a lot of time to do it in.
"Right," he said.
Io, God of Thunder, looked up from his throne and waved his hammer threateningly.
"Who are you?"
Om strode toward the throne, picked up to by his toga, and gave a quick jab with his forehead.
Hardly anyone really believes in thunder gods any more . . .
Ow.
"Listen, friend. I've got no time for talking to some pantywaister in a sheet. Where's the gods of Ephebe and Tsort?"
lo, clutching at his nose, waved vaguely towards the center of the hall.
"You nidn't naf to ndo dat!" he said reproachfully.
Om strode across the hall.
In the center of the room was what at first looked like a round table, and then looked like a model of the Discworld, Turtle, elephants and all, and then in some undefinable way looked like the real Discworld, seen from far off yet brought up close to. There was something subtly wrong about the distances, a feeling of vast space curled up small. But possibly the real Discworld wasn't covered with a network of glowing lines, hovering just above the surface. Or perhaps miles above the surface?
Om hadn't seen this before, but he knew what it was. Both a wave and a particle; both a map and the place mapped. If he focused on the tiny glittering dome on top of the tiny Cori Celesti, he would undoubtedly see himself, looking down on an even smaller model . . . and so on, down to the point where the universe coiled up like the tail of an ammonite, a kind of creature that lived millions of years ago and never believed in any gods at all . . .
The gods clustered around it, watching intently.
Om elbowed aside a minor Goddess of Plenty.
There were dice floating just above the world, and a mess of little clay figures and gaming counters. You didn't need to be even slightly omnipotent to know what was going on.
"He hid by nose!"
Om turned around.
"I never forget a face, friend. Just take yours away, right? While you still have some left?"
He turned back to the game.
"S'cuse me," said a voice by his waist. He looked down at a very large newt.
"Yes?"
"You not supposed do that here. No Smiting. Not up here. It the rules. You want fight, you get your humans fight his humans."
"Who're you?"
"P'tang-P'tang, me."
"You're a god?"
"Definite."
"Yeah? How many worshipers have you got?"
"Fifty-one!"
The newt looked at him hopefully, and added, "Is that lots? Can't count."
It pointed at a rather crudely molded figure on the beach in Omnia and said, "But got a stake!"
Om looked at the figure of the little fisherman.
"When he dies, you'll have fifty worshippers," he said.
"That more or less than fifty-one?"
"A lot less."
"Definite?"
"Yes."
"No one tell me that."
There were several dozen gods watching the beach. Om vaguely remembered the Ephebian statues. There was the goddess with the badly carved owl. Yes.
Om rubbed his head. This wasn't god-like thinking. It seemed simpler when you were up here. It was all a game. You forgot that it wasn't a game down there. People died. Bits got chopped off. We're like eagles up here, he thought. Sometimes we show a tortoise how to flY.
Then we let go.
He said, to the occult world in general, "There's people going to die down there."
A Tsortean God of the Sun did not even bother to look round.
"That's what they're for," he said. In his hand he was holding a dice box that looked very much like a human skull with rubies in the eye-sockets.
"Ah, yes," said Om. "I forgot that, for a moment." He looked at the skull, and then turned to the little Goddess of Plenty.
"What's this, love? A cornucopia? Can I have a look? Thanks."
Om emptied some of the fruit out. Then he nudged the Newt God.
"If I was you, friend, I'd find something long and hefty," he said.
"Is one less than fifty-one?" said P'Tang-P'Tang.
"It's the same," said Om, firmly. He eyed the back of the Tsortean God's head.
"But you have thousands," said the Newt God. "You fight for thousands."
Om rubbed his forehead. I spent too long down there, he thought. I can't stop thinking at ground level.
"I think," he said, "I think, if you want thousands, you have to fight for one." He tapped the Solar God on the shoulder. "Hey, sunshine?"
When the God looked around, Om broke the cornucopia over his head.


It wasn't a normal thunderclap. It stuttered like the shyness of supernovas, great ripping billows of sound that tore up the sky. Sand fountained up and whirled across the recumbent bodies lying face down on the beach. Lightning stabbed down, and sympathetic fire leapt from spear-tip and sword-point.
Simony looked up at the booming darkness.
"What the hell's happening?" He nudged the body next to him.
It was Argavisti. They stared at one another.
More thunder smashed across the sky. Waves climbed up one another to rip into the fleet. Hull drifted with awful grace into hull, giving the bass line of the thunder a counterpoint of groaning wood.
A broken spar thudded into the sand by Simony's head.
"We're dead if we stay here," he said. "Come on."
They staggered through the spray and sand, amidst groups of cowering and praying soldiers, fetching up against something hard, half-covered.
They crawled into the calm under the Turtle.
Other people had already had the same idea. Shadowy figures sat or sprawled in the darkness. Urn sat dejectedly on his toolbox. There was a hint of gutted fish.
"The gods are angry," said Borvorius.
"Bloody furious," said Argavisti.
"I'm not that happy myself," said Simony. "Gods? Huh!"
"This is no time for impiety," said Rham-ap-Efan.
There was a shower of grapes outside.
"Can't think of a better one," said Simony.
A piece of cornucopia shrapnel bounced off the roof of the Turtle, which rocked on its spiked wheels.
"But why be angry with us?" said Argavisti. "We're doing what they want."
Borvorius tried to smile. "Gods, eh?" he said. "Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em."
Someone nudged Simony, and passed him a soggy cigarette. It was a Tsortean soldier. Despite himself, he took a puff.
"It's good tobacco," he said. "The stuff we grow tastes like camel's droppings."
He passed it along to the next hunched figure.
THANK YOU.
Borvorius produced a flask from somewhere.
"Will you go to hell if you have a drop of spirit?" he said.
"So it seems," said Simony, absently. Then he noticed the flask. "Oh, you mean alcohol? Probably. But who cares? I won't be able to get near the fire for priests. Thanks."
"Pass it round."
THANK YOU.
The Turtle rocked to a thunderbolt.
"G'n y'himbe bo?"
They all looked at the pieces of raw fish, and Fasta Benj's hopeful expression.
"I could rake some of the coals out of the firebox from here," said Urn, after a while.
Someone tapped Simony on the shoulder, creating a strange tingling sensation.
THANK YOU. I HAVE TO GO.
As he took it he was aware of the rush of air, a sudden breath in the universe. He looked around in time to see a wave lift a ship out of the water and smash it against the dunes.
A distant scream colored the wind.
The soldiers stared.
"There were people under there," said Argavisti.
Simony dropped the flask.
"Come on," he said.
And no one, as they hauled on timbers in the teeth of the gale, as Urn applied everything he knew about levers, as they used their helmets as shovels to dig under the wreckage, asked who it was they were digging for, or what kind of uniform they'd been wearing.
Fog rolled in on the wind, hot and flashing with electricity, and still the sea pounded down.
Simony hauled on a spar, and then found the weight lessen as someone grasped the other end. He looked up into Brutha's eyes.
"Don't say anything," said Brutha.
"Gods are doing this to us?"
"Don't say anything!"
"I've got to know!"
"It's better than us doing this to us, isn't it?"
"There's still people who never got off the ships!"
"No one ever said it was going to be nice!"
Simony pulled aside some planking. There was a man there, armor and leathers so stained as to be unrecognizable, but alive.
"Listen," said Simony, as the wind whipped at him, "I'm not giving in! You've haven't won! I'm not doing this for any sort of god, whether they exist or not! I'm doing it for other people! And stop smiling like that!"
A couple of dice dropped on to the sand. They sparkled and crackled for a while and then evaporated.
The sea calmed. The fog went ragged and curled into nothingness. There was still a haze in the air, but the sun was at least visible again, if only as a brighter area in the dome of the sky.
Once again, there was the sensation of the universe drawing breath.
The gods appeared, transparent and shimmering in and out of focus. The sun glinted off a hint of golden curls, and wings, and lyres.
When they spoke, they spoke in unison, their voices drifting ahead or trailing behind the others, as always
.happens when a group of people are trying to faithfully repeat something they've been told to say.
Om was in the throng, standing right behind the Tsortean God of Thunder with a faraway expression on his face. It was noticeable, if only to Brutha, that the Thunder God's right arm disappeared up behind his own back in a way that, if such a thing could be imagined, would suggest that someone was twisting it to the edge of pain.
What the gods said was heard by each combatant in his own language, and according to his own understanding. It boiled down to:
I. This is Not a Game.
II. Here and Now, You are Alive.


And then it was over.


"You'd make a good bishop," said Brutha.
"Me?" said Didactylos. "I'm a philosopher!"
"Good. It's about time we had one."
""And an Ephebian!"
"Good. You can think up a better way of ruling the country. Priests shouldn't do it. They can't think about it properly. Nor can soldiers."
"Thank you," said Simony.
They were sitting in the Cenobiarch's garden. Far overhead an eagle circled, looking for anything that wasn't a tortoise.
"I like the idea of democracy. You have to have someone everyone distrusts," said Brutha. "That way, everyone's happy. Think about it. Simony?"
"Yes?"
"I'm making you head of the Quisition."
"What?"
"I want it stopped. And I want it stopped the hard way."
"You want me to kill all the inquisitors? Right!"
"No. That's the easy way. I want as few deaths as possible. Those who enjoyed it, perhaps. But only those. Now . . . where's Urn?"
The Moving Turtle was still on the beach, wheels buried in the sand blown about by the storm. Urn had been too embarrassed to try to unearth it.
"The last I saw, he was tinkering with the door mechanism," said Didactylos. "Never happier than when he's tinkering with things."
"Yes. We shall have to find things to keep him occupied. Irrigation. Architecture. That sort of thing."
"And what are you going to do?" said Simony.
"I've got to copy out the Library," said Brutha.
"But you can't read and write," said Didactylos.
"No. But I can see and draw. Two copies. One to keep here."
"Plenty of room when we burn the Septateuch," said Simony.
"No burning of anything. You have to take a step at a time," said Brutha. He looked out at the shimmering line of the desert. Funny. He'd been as happy as he'd ever been in the desert.
"And then . . ." he began.
"Yes?"
Brutha lowered his eyes, to the farmlands and villages around the Citadel. He sighed.
"And then we'd better get on with things," he said. "Every day."


Fasta Benj rowed home, in a thoughtful frame of mind.
It had been a very good few days. He'd met a lot of new people and sold quite a lot of fish. P'Tang-P'Tang, with his lesser servants, had talked personally to him, making him promise not to wage war on some place he'd never heard of. He'd agreed.[10]
Some of the new people had shown him this amazing way of making lightning. You hit this rock with this piece of hard stuff and you got little bits of lightning which dropped on to dry stuff which got red and hot like the sun. If you put more wood on it got bigger and if you put a fish on it got black but if you were quick it didn't get black but got brown and tasted better than anything he'd ever tasted, although this was not difficult. And he'd been given some knives not made out of rock and cloth not made out of reeds and, all in all, life was looking up for Fasta Benj and his people.
He wasn't sure why lots of people would want to hit Pacha Moj's uncle with a big rock, but it definitely escalated the pace of technological progress.


No one, not even Brutha, noticed that old Lu-Tze wasn't around any more. Not being noticed, either as being present or absent, is part of a history monk's stock in trade.
In fact he'd packed his broom and his bonsai mountains and had gone by secret tunnels and devious means to the hidden valley in the central peaks, where the abbot was waiting for him. The abbot was playing chess in the long gallery that overlooked the valley. Fountains bubbled in the gardens, and swallows flew in and out of the windows.
"All went well?" said the abbot, without looking up.
"Very well, lord," said Lu-Tze. "I had to nudge things a little, though."
"I wish you wouldn't do that sort of thing," said the abbot, fingering a pawn. "You'll overstep the mark one day."
"It's the history we've got these days," said Lu-Tze. "Very shoddy stuff, lord. I have to patch it up all the time-"
"Yes, Yes-"
"We used to get much better history in the old days."
"Things were always better than they are now. It's in the nature of things."
"Yes, lord. Lord?"
The abbot looked up in mild exasperation.
"Er . . . you know the books say that Brutha died and there was a century of terrible warfare?"
"You know my eyesight isn't what it was, Lu-Tze."
"Well . . . it's not entirely like that now."
"Just so long as it all turns out all right in the end," said the abbot.
"Yes, lord," said the history monk.
"There are a few weeks before your next assignment. Why don't you have a little rest?"
"Thank you, lord. I thought I might go down to the forest and watch a few falling trees."
"Good practice. Good practice. Mind always on the job, eh?"
As Lu-Tze left, the abbot glanced up at his opponent.
"Good man, that," he said. "Your move."
The opponent looked long and hard at the board.
The abbot waited to see what long-term, devious strategies were being evolved. Then his opponent tapped a piece with a bony finger.
REMIND ME AGAIN, he said. HOW THE LITTLE HORSESHAPED ONES MOVE.


Eventually Brutha died, in unusual circumstances.
He had reached a great age, but this at least was not unusual in the Church. As he said, you had to keep busy, every day.
He rose at dawn, and wandered over to the window. He liked to watch the sunrise.
They hadn't got around to replacing the Temple doors. Apart from anything else, even Urn hadn't been able to think of a way of removing the weirdly contorted heap of molten metal. So they'd just built steps over them. And after a year or two people had quite accepted it, and said it was probably a symbol. Not of anything, exactly, but still a symbol. Definitely symbolic.
But the sun did shine off the copper dome of the Library. Brutha made a mental note to enquire about the progress of the new wing. There were too many complaints about overcrowding these days.
People came from everywhere to visit the Library. It was the biggest non-magical library in the world. Half the philosophers of Ephebe seemed to live there now, and Omnia was even producing one or two of its own. And even priests were coming to spend some time in it, because of the collection of religious books. There were one thousand, two hundred and eighty-three religious books in there now, each one-according to itself-the only book any man need ever read. It was sort of nice to see them all together. As Didactylos used to say, you had to laugh.
Ix was while Brutha was eating his breakfast that the subdeacon whose job it was to read him his appointments for the day, and tactfully make sure he wasn't wearing his underpants on the outside, shyly offered him congratulations.
"Mmm?" said Brutha, his gruel dripping off the spoon.
"One hundred years," said the subdeacon. "Since you walked in the desert, Sir."
"Really? I thought it was, mm, fifty years? Can't be more than sixty years, boy."
"Uh, one hundred years, lord. We had a look in the records."
"Really. One hundred years? One hundred years' time?" Brutha laid down his spoon very carefully, and stared at the plain white wall opposite him. The subdeacon found himself turning to see what it was the Cenobiarch was looking at, but there was nothing, only the whiteness of the wall.
"One hundred years," mused Brutha. "Mmm. Good lord. I forgot." He laughed. "I forgot. One hundred years, eh? But here and now, we-"
The subdeacon turned round.
"Cenobiarch?"
He stepped closer, the blood draining from his face.
"Lord?"
He turned and ran for help.
Brutha's body toppled forward almost gracefully, smacking into the table. The bowl overturned, and 'gruel dripped down on to the floor.
And then Brutha stood up, without a second glance at his corpse.
"Hah. I wasn't expecting you," he said.
Death stopped leaning against the wall.
HOW FORTUNATE YOU WERE.
"But there's still such a lot to be done . . ."
YES. THERE ALWAYS IS.
Brutha followed the gaunt figure through the wall where, instead of the privy that occupied the far side in normal space, there was . . .
. . . black sand.
The light was brilliant, crystalline, in a black sky filled with stars.
"Ah. There really is a desert. Does everyone get this?" said Brutha.
WHO KNOWS?
"And what is at the end of the desert?"
JUDGEMENT.
Brutha considered this.
"Which end?"
Death grinned and stepped aside.
What Brutha had thought vas a rock in the sand was a hunched figure, sitting clutching its knees. It looked paralyzed with fear.
He stared.
"Vorbis?" he said.
He looked at Death.
"But Vorbis died a hundred years ago!"
YES. HE HAD TO WALK IT ALL ALONE. ALL ALONE WITH HIMSELF. IF HE DARED.
"He's been here for a hundred years?"
POSSIBLY NOT. TIME IS DIFFERENT HERE. IT IS . . . MORE PERSONAL.
"Ah. You mean a hundred years can pass like a few seconds?"
A HUNDRED YEARS CAN PASS LIKE INFINITY.
The black-on-black eyes stared imploringly at Brutha, who reached out automatically, without thinking . . . and then hesitated.
HE WAS A MURDERER, said Death. AND A CREATOR OF MURDERERS. A TORTURER. WITHOUT PASSION. CRUEL. CALLOUS. COMPASSIONLESS.
"Yes. I know. He's Vorbis," said Brutha. Vorbis changed people. Sometimes he changed them into dead people. But he always changed them. That was his triumph.
He sighed.
"But I'm me," he said.
Vorbis stood up, uncertainly, and followed Brutha across the desert.
Death watched them walk away.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Or, if you are a believer in Omnianism, the Pole.
[2] Which were of the one-size-fits-all, tighten-the-screws variety.
[3] Or would have done. If he had been there. But he wasn't. So he couldn't.
[4] It takes forty men with their feet on the ground to keep one man with his head in the air.
[5] Words are the litmus paper of the mind. If you find yourself in the power of someone who will use the word "commence" in cold blood, go somewhere else very quickly. But if they say "Enter," don't stop to pack.
[6] Provided that he wasn't poor, foreign, nor disqualified by reason of being mad, frivolous, or a woman.
[7] i.e., before the inhabitants had let goats graze everywhere. Nothing makes a desert like a goat.
[8] But not enough.
[9] Like many early thinkers, the Ephebians believed that thoughts originated in the heart and that the brain was merely a device to cool the blood.
[10] Fasta Benj's people had no word for war, since they had no one to fight and life was quite tough enough as it was. P'Tang-P'tang's words had arrived as: "remember when Pacha Moj hit his uncle with big rock? Like that, only more worse."

Now read on ...

When does it start?

There are very few starts. Oh, some things seem to be
beginnings. The curtain goes up, the first pawn moves, the
first shot is fired \a151but that's not the start. The play, the
game, the war is just a little window on a ribbon of events
that may extend back thousands of years. The point is,
there's always something before. It's always a case of Now
Read On.

Much human ingenuity has gone into finding the ulti-
mate Before.

The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus:

In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.

Other theories about the ultimate start involve gods cre-
ating the universe out of the ribs, entrails, and testicles of
their father.^ There are quite a lot of these. They are inter-
esting, not for what they tell you about cosmology, but for
what they say about people. Hey, kids, which part do you
think they made your town out of?

But this story starts on the Discworld, which travels
through space on the back of four giant elephants which
stand on the shell of an enormous turtle and is not made of
any bits of anyone's bodies.

But when to begin?

Thousands of years ago? When a great hot cascade of
stones came screaming out of the sky, gouged a hole out of
Copperhead Mountain, and flattened the forest for ten miles
around?

* Probably at the first pawn.
t Gods like a joke as much as anyone else.




Terry Pratchett

The dwarfs dug them up, because they were made of
a kind of iron, and dwarfs, contrary to general opinion,
love iron more than gold. It's just that although there's
more iron than gold it's harder to sing songs about.
Dwarfs love iron.

And that's what the stones contained. The love of iron.
A love so strong that it drew all iron things to itself. The
three dwarfs who found the first of the rocks only got free
by struggling out of their chain-mail trousers.

Many worlds are iron, at the core. But the Discworld is
as coreless as a pancake.

On the Disc, if you enchant a needle it will point to the
Hub, where the magical field is strongest. It's simple.

Elsewhere, on worlds designed with less imagination,
the needle turns because of the love of iron.

At the time, the dwarfs and the humans had a very
pressing need for the love of iron.

And now, spool time forward for thousands of years to a
point fifty years or more before the ever-moving now, to a
hillside and a young woman, running. Not running away
from something, exactly, or precisely running toward any-
thing, but running just fast enough to keep ahead of a young
man although, of course, not so far ahead that he'll give up.
Out from the trees and into the rushy valley where, on a
slight rise in the ground, are the stones.

They're about man-height, and barely thicker than a fat
man.

And somehow they don't seem worth it. If there's a stone
circle you mustn't go near, the imagination suggests, then
there should be big brooding trilithons and ancient altar
stones screaming with the dark memory of blood-soaked
sacrifice. Not these dull stubby lumps.

It will turn out that she was running a bit too fast this
time, and in fact the young man in laughing pursuit will get
lost and fed up and will eventually wander off back to the
town alone. She does not, at this point, know this, but

2

(.OR06 ftffO ifi0/\a1636

stands absentmindedly adjusting the flowers twined in her
hair. It's been that kind of afternoon.

She knows about the stones. No one ever gets told about
the stones. And no one is ever told not to go there, because
those who refrain from talking about the stones also know
how powerful is the attraction of prohibition. It's just that
going to the stones is not. . . what we do. Especially if we're
nice girls.

But what we have here is not a nice girl, as generally
understood. For one thing, she's not beautiful. There's a cer-
tain set to the jaw and arch to the nose that might, with a
following wind and in the right light, be called handsome by
a good-natured liar. Also, there's a certain glint in her eye
generally possessed by those people who have found that
they are more intelligent than most people around them but
who haven't yet learned that one of the most intelligent
things they can do is prevent said people ever finding this
out. Along with the nose, this gives her a piercing expression
which is extremely disconcerting. It's not a face you can talk
to. Open your mouth and you're suddenly the focus of a
penetrating stare which declares: what you're about to say
had better be interesting.

Now the eight little stones on their little hill are being
subjected to the same penetrating gaze.

Hmm.

And then she approaches, cautiously. It's not the caution
of a rabbit about to run. It's closer to the way a hunter
moves.

She puts her hands on her hips, such as they are.

There's a skylark in the hot summer sky. Apart from
that, there's no sound. Down in the little valley, and higher
in the hills, grasshoppers are sizzling and bees are buzzing
and the grass is alive with micro-noise. But it's always quiet
around the stones.

"I'm here," she says. "Show me."

A figure of a dark-haired woman in a red dress appears

Terry Pratehett

inside the circle. The circle is wide enough to throw a stone
across, but somehow the figure manages to approach from a
great distance.

Other people would have run away. But the girl doesn't,
and the woman in the circle is immediately interested.
"So you're real, then."
"Of course. What is your name, girl?"
"Esmerelda."

"And what do you want?"
"I don't want anything."

"Everyone wants something. Otherwise, why are you
here?"

"I just wanted to find out if you was real."
"To you, certainly ... you have good sight."
The girl nods. You could bounce rocks off her pride.
"And now you have learned this," said the woman in the
circle, "what is it that you really want?"
"Nothing."

"Really? Last week you went all the way up to the
mountains above Copperhead to talk to the trolls. What did
you want from them?"

The girl put her head on one side.
"How do you know I did that?"

"It's at the top of your mind, girl. Anyone could see it.
Anyone with ... good sight."

"I shall be able to do that one day," said the girl smugly.

"Who knows? Possibly. What did you want from the
trolls?"

"I ... wanted to talk to them. D'you know they think

time goes backward? Because you can see the past, they say,
and\a151"

The woman in the circle laughed.

"But they are like the stupid dwarfs! All they are inter-
ested in is pebbles. There is nothing of interest in pebbles."

The girl gives a kind of one-shoulder uni-shrug, as if
indicating that pebbles may be full of quiet interest.

4

LORDS ft/VD ift0f\a1636

"Why can't you come out from between the stones?"

There was a distinct impression that this was the wrong
question to have asked. The woman carefully ignored it.

"I can help you find far more than pebbles," she said.

"You can't come out of the circle, can you?"

"Let me give you what you want."

"I can go anywhere, but you're stuck in the circle," said
the girl.

"Can you go anywhere?"

"When I am a witch I shall be able to go anywhere."

"But you'll never be a witch."

"What?"

"They say you won't listen. They say you can't keep your
temper. They say you have no discipline."

The girl tossed her hair. "Oh, you know that too, do
you? Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? But I mean
to be a witch whatever they say. You can find things out for
yourself. You don't have to listen to a lot of daft old ladies
who've never had a life. And, circle lady, I shall be the best
witch there has ever been."

"With my help, I believe you may," said the woman in
the circle. "Your young man is looking for you, I think," she
added mildly

Another of those one-shoulder shrugs, indicating that
the young man can go on looking all day.

"I will, will I?"

"You could be a great witch. You could be anything.
Anything you want. Come into the circle. Let me show you."

The girl takes a few steps forward, and then hesitates.
There is something about the woman's tone. The smile is
pleasant and friendly, but there is something in the voice\a151
too desperate, too urgent, too hungry.

"But I'm learning a lot\a151"

"Step through the stones now!"

The girl hesitates again.

"How do I know\a151"

Terry Pratchett

"Circle time is nearly over! Think of what you can leam!
Now!"
"But\a151"
"Step through!"

But that was a long time ago, in the past. And besides,
the bitch is ...

... older.

A land of ice ...

Not winter, because that presumes an autumn and per-
haps one day a spring. This is a land of ice, not just a time of
ice.

And three figures on horseback, looking down the snow-
covered slope to a ring of eight stones. From this side they
look much bigger.

You might watch the figures for some time before you
realized what it was about them that was strange\a151stranger,
that is, than their clothing. The hot breath of their horses
hung in the freezing air. But the breath of the riders did not.

"And this time," said the figure in the center, a woman
in red, "there will be no defeat. The land will welcome us. It
must hate humans now."

"But there were witches," said one of the other riders. "I
remember the witches."

"Once, yes," said the woman. "But now . . . poor things,
poor things. Scarce any power in them at all. And sug-
gestible. Pliant minds. I have crept about, my deary. I have
crept about o' nights. I know the witches they have now.
Leave the witches to me."

"I remember the witches," said the third rider insistently.
"Minds like ... like metal."

"Not anymore. I tell you, leave them to me."
The Queen smiled benevolently at the stone circle.

* Which is another country.

6

LORDS fiNb LfiblES

"And then you can have them," she said. "For me, I
rather fancy a mortal husband. A special mortal. A union of
the worlds. To show them that this time we mean to stay."

"The King will not like that."

"And when has that ever mattered?"

"Never, lady."

"The time is right, Lankin. The circles are opening. Soon
we can return."

The second rider leaned on the saddlehom.

"And I can hunt again," it said. "When? When?"

"Soon," said the Queen. "Soon."

It was a dark night, the kind of darkness which is not simply
explainable by absence of moon or stars, but the darkness
that appears to flow in from somewhere else\a151so thick and
tangible that maybe you could snatch a handful of air and
squeeze the night out of it.

It was the kind of darkness which causes sheep to leap
fences and dogs to skulk in kennels.

Yet the wind was warm, and not so much strong as
loud\a151it howled around the forests and wailed in chimneys.

On nights like this, normal people would pull the covers
over their head, sensing that there were times when the
world belonged to something else. In the morning it would
be human again; there would be fallen branches, a few tiles
off the roof, but human. For now . . . better to snuggle
down.. .

But there was one man awake.

Jason Ogg, master blacksmith and farrier, pumped the
bellows of his forge once or twice for the look of the thing,
and sat down on his anvil again. It was always warm in the
forge, even with the wind whistling around the eaves.

"He could shoe anything, could Jason Ogg. They'd
brought him an ant once, for a joke, and he'd sat up all

Terry Pratchett

night with a magnifying glass and an anvil made out of the
head of a pin. The ant was still around, somewhere\a151some-
times he could hear it clatter across the floor.

But tonight. . . well, tonight, in some way, he was going
to pay the rent. Of course, he owned the forge. It had been
passed down for generations. But there was more to a forge
than bricks and mortar and iron. He couldn't put a name to
it, but it was there. It was the difference between being a
master farrier and just someone who bent iron in complicated
ways for a living. And it had something to do with iron. And
something to do with being allowed to be very good at his
job. Some kind of rent.

One day his dad had taken him aside and explained
what he had to do, on nights like this.

There'd be times, he said, there'd be times\a151and he'd
know when they were without being told\a151there'd be times
when someone would come with a horse to shoe. Make
them welcome. Shoe the horse. Don't let your mind wander.
And try not to think about anything except horseshoes.

He'd got quite used to it now.

The wind rose, and somewhere there was the creak of a
tree going over.

The latch rattled.

Then there was a knock at the door. Once. Twice.

Jason Ogg picked up his blindfold and put it on. That
was important, his dad had said. It saved you getting dis-
tracted.

He undid the door.

"Evening, m'lord," he said.

A WILD NIGHT.

He smelled wet horse as it was led into the forge, hooves
clattering on the stones.

"There's tea brewing on the forge and our Dreen done us
some biscuits in the tin with A Present from Ankh-Morpork
on it."

THANK YOU. I TRUST YOU ARE WELL.

8

LORQ6 ftWD Lft0f\a1636

"Yes, m'lord. I done the shoes already. Won't hold you
up long. I know you're ... very busy, like."

He heard the click-click of footsteps cross the floor to
the old kitchen chair reserved for customers, or at least for
the owners of customers.

Jason had laid the tools and the horseshoes and the nails
ready to hand on the bench beside the anvil. He wiped his
hands on his apron, picked up a file, and set to work. He
didn't like cold shoeing, but he'd shod horses ever since he
was ten. He could do it by feel. He picked up a rasp and set
to work.

And he had to admit it. It was the most obedient horse
he'd ever encountered. Pity he'd never actually seen it. It'd
be a pretty good horse, a horse like that. ..

His dad had said: don't try to sneak a look at it.

He heard the glug of the teapot and then the gling-glong
sound of a spoon being stirred and then the clink as the
spoon was laid down.

Never any sound, his dad had said. Except when he
walks and talks, you'll never hear him make a sound. No
smacking of lips, stuff like that.

No breathing.

Oh, and another thing. When you takes the old shoes off,
don't chuck 'em in the comer for to go for melt with the other
scrap. Keep 'em separate. Melt 'em separate. Keep a pot spe-
cial for it, and make the new shoes out of that metal. Whatever
else you do, never put that iron on another living thing.

In fact, Jason had saved one set of the old shoes for
pitching contests at the various village fairs, and never lost
when he used them. He won so often that it made him ner-
vous, and now they spent most of their time hanging on a
nail behind the door.

Sometimes the wind rattled the window frame, or made
the coals crackle. A series of thumps and a squawk a little
way off suggested that the chicken house at the end of the
garden had parted company with the ground.

9

Terry Pratchett

The customer's owner poured himself another cup of
tea.

Jason finished one hoof and let it go. Then he held out
his hand. The horse shifted its weight and raised the last
hoof.

This was a horse in a million. Perhaps more.

Eventually, he had finished. Funny, that. It never seemed
to take very long. Jason had no use for a clock, but he had a
suspicion that a job which took the best part of an hour was
at the same time over in a matter of minutes.

"There," he said. "Tis done."

THANK YOU. I MUST SAY THESE ARE VERY
GOOD BISCUITS. HOW DO THEY GET THE BITS OF
CHOCOLATE IN?

"Dunno, m'lord," said Jason, staring fixedly at the inside
of his blindfold.

I MEAN, THE CHOCOLATE OUGHT TO MELT OUT
WHEN THEY'RE BAKED. HOW DO THEY DO IT, DO
YOU THINK?

"Tis probably a craft secret," said Jason. "I never asks
that kind o' question."

GOOD MAN. VERY WISE. I MUST\a151

He had to ask, if only so's he'd always know that he had
asked.

"M'lord?"

YES, MR. OGG?

"I 'as got one question ..."

YES, MR. OGG?

Jason ran his tongue over his lips.

"If I were to ... take the blindfold off, what'd I see?"

There. It was done now.

There was a clicking sound on the flagstones, and a
change in the air movement which suggested to Jason that
the speaker was now standing in front of him.

ARE YOU A MAN OF FAITH, MR. OGG?

Jason gave this some swift consideration. Lancre was not

10

LORDS ft/YQ LfiQIEQ

knee-deep in religions. There were the Nine Day Wonderers,
and the Strict Offlians, and there were various altars to
small gods of one sort or another, tucked away in distant
clearings. He'd never really felt the need, just like the
dwarfs. Iron was iron and fire was fire\a151start getting meta-
physical and you were scraping your thumb on the bottom
of your hammer.

WHAT DO YOU REALLY HAVE FAITH IN, RIGHT
AT THIS MOMENT?

He's inches away, Jason thought. I could reach out and
touch . . .

There was a smell. It wasn't unpleasant. It was hardly
anything at all. It was the smell of air in old forgotten
rooms. If centuries could smell, then old ones would smell
like that.

MR. OGG?

Jason swallowed.

"Well, m'lord," he said, "right now ... I really believe in
this blindfold."

GOOD MAN. GOOD MAN. AND NOW ... I MUST
BE GOING.

Jason heard the latch lift. There was a thud as the doors
scraped back, driven by the wind, and then there was the
sound of hooves on the cobbles again.

YOUR WORK, AS ALWAYS, IS SUPERB.

"Thank you, m'lord."

I SPEAK AS ONE CRAFTSMAN TO ANOTHER.

"Thank you, m'lord."

WE WILL MEET AGAIN.

"Yes, m'lord."

WHEN NEXT MY HORSE NEEDS SHOEING.

"Yes, m'lord."

Jason closed the door and bolted it, although there was
probably no point, when you thought about it.

But that was the bargain\a151you shod anything they
brought to you, anything, and the payment was that you

11

Terry Pratchett

could shoe anything. There had always been a smith in
Lancre, and everyone knew the smith in Lancre was a very
powerful smith indeed.

It was an ancient bargain, and it had something to do
with iron.

The wind slackened. Now it was a whisper around the hori-
zons, as the sun rose.

This was the octarine grass country. Good growing
country, especially for corn.

And here was a field of it, waving gently between the
hedges. Not a big field. Not a remarkable one, really It was
just a field with corn in it, except of course during the win-
ter, when there were just pigeons and crows in it.

The wind dropped.

The corn still waved. They weren't the normal swells of
the wind. They spread out from the center of the field like
ripples from a dropped stone.

The air sizzled and was filled with an angry buzzing.

Then, in the center of the field, rustling as it bent, the
young corn lay down.

In a circle.

And in the sky the bees swarmed and teemed, buzzing
angrily.

It was a few weeks to midsummer. The kingdom of Lancre
dozed in the heat, which shimmered on the forests and the
fields.

Three dots appeared in the sky.

After a while, they became identifiable as three female
figures on broomsticks, flying in a manner reminiscent of
the famous three plaster flying ducks.

Observe them closely

The first one\a151let us call her the leader\a151flies sitting bolt

12

LQRQ6 ftffQ ift0/\a1636

upright, in defiance of air resistance, and seems to be win-
ning. She has features that would generally be described as
striking, or even handsome, but she couldn't be called beau-
tiful, at least by anyone who didn't want their nose to grow
by three feet.

The second is dumpy and bandy-legged with a face like
an apple that's been left for too long and an expression of
near-terminal good nature. She is playing a banjo and, until
a better word comes to mind, singing. It is a song about a
hedgehog.

Unlike the broomstick belonging to the first figure,
which is more or less unburdened except for a sack or two,
this one is overladen with things like fluffy purple toy don-
keys, corkscrews in the shape of small boys urinating, bot-
tles of wine in straw baskets, and other international
cultural items. Nestling among them is the smelliest and
most evil-minded cat in the world, currently asleep.

The third, and definitely the last, broomstick rider is also
the youngest. Unlike the other two, who dress like ravens,
she wears bright, cheerful clothes which don't suit her now
and probably didn't even suit her ten years ago. She travels
with an air of vague good-natured hopefulness. There are
flowers in her hair but they're wilting slightly, just like her.

The three witches pass over the borders of Lancre, the
kingdom, and very shortly afterward over the town of
Lancre itself. They begin their descent over the moorlands
beyond, eventually touching down near a standing stone
which happens to mark the boundaries of their territories.

They're back.

And everything's all right again.

For about five minutes.

' There was a badger in the privy.

Granny Weatherwax poked it with her broom until it got
the message and lumbered off. Then she took down the key

13

Terry Pratchett

which hung on the nail beside the copy of last year's
Almanack And Booke Of Dayes, and walked back up the
path to her cottage.

A whole winter away! There'd be a lot to do. Go and
pick the goats up from Mr. Skindle, get the spiders out of
the chimney, fish the frogs out of the well, and generally get
back into the business of minding everyone's business for
them because there'd be no telling what business people'd
get up to without a witch around . ..

But she could afford an hour with her feet up first.

There was a robin's nest in the kettle, too. The birds had
got in through a broken window pane. She carefully took
the kettle outside and wedged it over the door so's to be safe
from weasels, and boiled up some water in a saucepan.

Then she wound up the clock. Witches didn't have much
use for clocks, but she kept it for the tick . . . well, mainly
for the tick. It made a place seem lived in. It had belonged
to her mother, who'd wound it up every day.

It hadn't come as a surprise to her when her mother
died, firstly because Esme Weatherwax was a witch and
witches have an insight into the future and secondly
because she was already pretty experienced in medicine and
knew the signs. So she'd had a chance to prepare herself,
and hadn't cried at all until the day afterward, when the
clock stopped right in the middle of the funeral lunch.
She'd dropped a tray of ham rolls and then had to go and
sit by herself in the privy for a while, so that no one would
see.

Time to think about that sort of thing, now. Time to
think about the past...

The clock ticked. The water boiled. Granny Weatherwax
fished a bag of tea from the meager luggage on her broom-
stick, and swilled out the teapot.

The fire settled down. The clamminess of a room
unlived-in for months was gradually dispelled. The shadows
lengthened.

14

LOR06 fiNO LfiQ/\a1638

Time to think about the past. Witches have an insight
into the future. The business she'd have to mind soon
enough would be her own ...

And then she looked out of the window.

Nanny Ogg balanced carefully on a stool and ran a finger
along the top of the dresser. Then she inspected the finger. It
was spotless.

"Hummph," she said. "Seems to be moderately clean."

The daughters-in-law shivered with relief.

"So far," Nanny added.

The three young women drew together in their mute
terror.

Her relationship with her daughters-in-law was the only
stain on Nanny Ogg's otherwise amiable character. Sons-in-
law were different\a151she could remember their names, even
their birthdays, and they joined the family like overgrown
chicks creeping under the wings of a broody bantam. And
grandchildren were treasures, every one. But any woman
incautious enough to marry an Ogg son might as well resign
herself to a life of mental torture and nameless domestic
servitude.

Nanny Ogg never did any housework herself, but she
was the cause of housework in other people.

She got down from the stool and beamed at them.

"You kept the place quite nice," she said. "Well done."

Her smile faded.

"Under the bed in the spare room," she said. "Haven't
looked under there yet, have I?"

Inquisitors would have thrown Nanny Ogg out of their
ranks for being too nasty.

She turned as more members of the family filed into the
' room, and her face contorted into the misty grin with which
she always greeted grandchildren.

Jason Ogg pushed his youngest son forward. This was

15

Terry Pratehett

Pewsey Ogg, aged four, who was holding something in his
hands.

"What you got there, then?" said Nanny. "You can show
your Nan."

Pewsey held it up.

"My word, you have been a\a151"

It happened right there, right then, right in front of her.

And then there was Magrat.

She'd been away eight months.

Now panic was setting in. Technically she was engaged
to the king, Verence II. Well . . . not exactly engaged, as
such. There was, she was almost sure, a general unspoken
understanding that engagement was a definite option.
Admittedly she'd kept on telling him that she was a free
spirit and definitely didn't want to be tied down in any way,
and of course this was the case, more or less, but.. . but...

But. . . well . . . eight months. Anything could have hap-
pened in eight months. She should have come straight back
from Genua, but the other two had been enjoying themselves.

She wiped the dust off her mirror and examined herself
critically. Not a lot to work with, really. No matter what she
did with her hair it took about three minutes for it to tangle
itself up again, like a garden hosepipe left in a shed. She'd
bought herself a new green dress, but what had looked
exciting and attractive on the plaster model looked like a
furled umbrella on a Magrat.

Whereas Verence had been here reigning for eight
months. Of course, Lancre was so small that you couldn't lie
down without a passport, but he was a genuine king and
genuine kings tended to attract young women looking for
career opportunities in the queening department.

* Which, no matter how carefully coiled, will always uncoil overnight and
tie the lawnmower to the bicycles.

16

LORQ8 ft/VD ift0f\a1636

She did her best with the dress and dragged a vengeful
brush through her hair.

Then she went up to the castle.

Guard duty at Lancre castle was the province of anyone
who didn't have much of anything else to do at the moment.
On duty today was Nanny Ogg's youngest son Shawn, in ill-
fitting chain-mail. He brought himself to what he probably
thought was attention as Magrat pattered past, and then
dropped his pike and hurried after her.

"Can you slow down a bit, please, miss?"

He overtook her, ran up the steps to the door, picked up
a trumpet that was hanging from a nail by a bit of string,
and blew an amateurish fanfare. Then he looked panicky
again.

"Wait right there, miss, right there . ., count to five, and
then knock," he said, and darted through the door, slam-
ming it behind him.

Magrat waited, and then tried the knocker.

After a few seconds Shawn opened the door. He was red
in the face and had a powdered wig on back to front.

"Yeeeuss?" he drawled, and tried to look like a butler.

"You've still got your helmet on under the wig," said
Magrat helpfully.

Shawn deflated. His eyes swiveled upward.

"Everyone at the haymaking?" said Magrat.

Shawn raised his wig, removed the helmet, and put the
wig back. Then he distractedly put the helmet back on top
of the wig.

"Yes, and Mr. Spriggins the butler is in bed with his
trouble again," said Shawn. "There's only me, miss. And I've
got to get the dinner started before I'm off 'ome because
Mrs. Scorbic is poorly."

"You don't have to show me in," said Magrat. "I do
know the way."

"No, it's got to be done proper," said Shawn. "You just
keep movin' slow and leave it to me."

17

Terry Pratchett

He ran on ahead and flung open some double doors\a151

"Meeeyisss Magraaaaat Garrrrrli-ick!"

\a151and scurried toward the next set of doors.

By the third pair he was out of breath, but he did his
best.

"Meeeyisss . . . Magraaaaa . . . Garrrrrli-ick ... His
Majesteeeyyaa the Ki\a151Oh, bugger, now where's he gone?"

The throne room was empty.

They eventually found Verence II, King of Lancre, in the
stable yard.

Some people are born to kingship. Some achieve king-
ship, or at least Arch-Generalissimo-Father-of-His-
Countryship. But Verence had kingship thrust upon him. He
hadn't been raised to it, and had only arrived at the throne
by way of one of those complicated mix-ups of fraternity
and parentage that are all too common in royal families.

He had in fact been raised to be a Fool, a man whose job
it was to caper and tell jokes and have custard poured down
his trousers. This had naturally given him a grave and
solemn approach to life and a grim determination never to
laugh at anything ever again, especially in the presence of
custard.

In the role of ruler, then, he had started with the advan-
tage of ignorance. No one had ever told him how to be a
king, so he had to find out for himself. He'd sent off for
books on the subject. Verence was a great believer in the
usefulness of knowledge derived from books.

He had formed the unusual opinion that the job of a
king is to make the kingdom a better place for everyone to
live in.

Now he was inspecting a complicated piece of equip-
ment. It had a pair of shafts for a horse, and the rest of it
looked like a cartful of windmills.

He glanced up, and smiled in an absentminded way.

"Oh, hello," he said. "All back safe then?"

"Um\a151" Magrat began.

18

LORQ6 ft/VQ iftQ/\a1636

"It's a patent crop rotator," said Verence. He tapped the
machine. "Just arrived from Ankh-Morpork. The wave of the
future, you know. I've really been getting interested in agri-
cultural improvement and soil efficiency. We'll really have to
get cracking on this new three-field system."

Magrat was caught off balance.

"But I think we've only got three fields," she said, "and
there isn't much soil in\a151"

"It's very important to maintain the correct relationship
between grains, legumes, and roots," said Verence, raising
his voice. "Also, I'm seriously considering clover. I should be
interested to know what you think!"

"Um\a151"

"And I think we should do something about the pigs!"
Verence shouted, "The Lancre Stripe! Is very hardy! But we
could really bring the poundage up! By careful cross-breeding!
With, say, the Sto Saddleback! I'm having a boar sent up\a151
Shawn, will you stop blowing that damn trumpet!"

Shawn lowered the trumpet.

"I'm doin' a fanfare, your majesty."

"Yes, yes, but you're not supposed to go on. A few brief
notes are a sufficiency." Verence sniffed. "And something's
burning."

"Oh, blow .. . it's the carrots ..." Shawn hurried away

"That's better," said Verence. "Where were we?"

"Pigs, I think," said Magrat, "but I really came to\a151"

"It all comes down to the soil," said Verence. "Get the soil
right, and everything else follows. Incidentally, I'm arranging
the marriage for Midsummer Day I thought you'd like that."

Magrat's mouth formed an 0.

"We could move it, of course, but not too much because
of the harvest," said Verence.

"I've had some invitations sent out already, to the more
obvious guests," said Verence.

"And I thought it might be a nice idea to have some sort
of fair or festival beforehand," said Verence.

19

Terry Pratchett

"I asked Boggi's in Ankh-Morpork to send up their best
dressmaker with a selection of materials and one of the
maids is about your size and I think you'll be very pleased
with the result," said Verence.

"And Mr. Ironfoundersson, the dwarf, came down the
mountain specially to make the crown," said Verence.

"And my brother and Mr. Vittoller's Men can't come
because they're touring Klatch, apparently, but Hwel the
playsmith has written a special play for the wedding enter-
tainment. Something even rustics can't muck up, he says,"
said Verence.

"So that's all settled then?" said Verence.

Finally, Magrat's voice returned from some distant
apogee, slightly hoarse.

"Aren't you supposed to ask me?" she demanded.

"What? Urn. No, actually," said Verence. "No. Kings
don't ask. I looked it up. I'm the king, you see, and you are,
no offense meant, a subject. I don't have to ask."

Magrat's mouth opened for the scream of rage but, at
last, her brain jolted into operation.

Yes, it said, of course you can yell at him and sweep
away. And he'll probably come after you.

Very probably.

Urn.

Maybe not that probably. Because he might be a nice lit-
tle man with gentle runny eyes but he's also a king and he's
been looking things up. But very probably quite probably

But...

Do you want to bet the rest of your life? Isn't this what
you wanted anyway? Isn't it what you came here hoping for?
Really?

Verence was looking at her with some concern.

"Is it the witching?" he said. "You don't have to give that
up entirely, of course. I've got a great respect for witches.
And you can be a witch queen, although I think that means
you have to wear rather revealing clothes and keep cats and

20

LOR08 ft^O LfiDIEQ

give people poisoned apples. I read that somewhere. The
witching's a problem, is it?"

"No," Magrat mumbled, "it's not that... um ... did you
mention a crown?"

"You've got to have a crown," said Verence. "Queens do.
I looked it up."

Her brain cut in again. Queen Magrat, it suggested. It
held up the mirror of the imagination . . .

"You're not upset, are you?" said Verence.

"What? Oh. No. Me? No."

"Good. That's all sorted out, then. I think that just about
covers everything, don't you?"

"Um\a151"

Verence rubbed his hands together.

"We're doing some marvellous things with legumes," he
said, as if he hadn't just completely rearranged Magrat's life
without consulting her. "Beans, peas . . . you know. Nitrogen
fixers. And marl and lime, of course. Scientific husbandry.
Come and look at this."

He bounced away enthusiastically.

"You know," he said, "we could really make this king-
dom work."

Magrat trailed after him.

So that was all settled, then. Not a proposal, just a state-
ment. She hadn't been quite sure how the moment would
be, even in the darkest hours of the night, but she'd had an
idea that roses and sunsets and bluebirds might just possibly
be involved. Clover had not figured largely Beans and other
leguminous nitrogen fixers were not a central feature.

On the other hand Magrat was, at the core, far more
practical than most people believed who saw no further than
her vague smile and collection of more than three hundred
pieces of occult jewelry, none of which worked.

So this was how you got married to a king. It all got
arranged for you. There were no white horses. The past
flipped straight into the future, carrying you with it.

21

Terry Pratchett

Perhaps that was normal. Kings were busy people.
Magrat's experience of marrying them was limited.

"Where are we going?" she said.

"The old rose garden."

Ah ... well, this was more like it.

Except that there weren't any roses. The walled garden
had been stripped of its walks and arbors and was now
waist high in green stalks with white flowers. Bees were furi-
ously at work in the blossoms.

"Beans?" said Magrat.

"Yes! A specimen crop. I keep bringing the farmers up
here to show them," said Verence. He sighed. "They nod and
mumble and smile but I'm afraid they just go off and do the
same old things."

"I know," said Magrat. "The same thing happened when
I tried to give people lessons in natural childbirth."

Verence raised an eyebrow. Even to him the thought of
Magrat giving lessons in childbirth to the fecund and teak-
faced women of Lancre was slightly unreal.

"Really? How had they been having babies before?" he
said.

"Oh, any old way," said Magrat.
They looked at the little buzzing bean field.

"Of course, when you're queen, you won't need to\a151"
Verence began.

It happened softly, almost like a kiss, as light as the
touch of sunlight.

There was no wind, only a sudden heavy calmness that
made the ears pop.

The stems bent and broke, and lay down in a circle,
The bees roared, and fled.

The three witches arrived at the standing stone together.

They didn't even bother with explanations. There were
some things you know.

22

LOR06 ftWO Lft0/\a1636

"In the middle of my bloody herbs!" said Granny
Weatherwax.

"On the palace garden!" said Magrat.

"Poor little mite! And he was holding it up to show me,
too!" said Nanny Ogg.

Granny Weatherwax paused.

"What're you talking about, Gytha Ogg?" she said.

"Our Pewsey was growing mustard-and-cress on a flan-
nel for his Nan," said Nanny Ogg, patiently. "He shows it to
me, right enough, and just as I bends down and\a151splat!
Crop circle!"

"This," said Granny Weatherwax, "is serious. It's been
years since they've been as bad as this. We all know what it
means, don't we. What we've got\a151"

"Um," said Magrat.

"\a151to do now is\a151"

"Excuse me," said Magrat. There were some things you
had to be told.

"Yes?"

"I don't know what it means," said Magrat. "I mean, old
Goodie Whemper\a151"

"\a151maysherestinpeace\a151" the older witches chorused.

"\a151told me once that the circles were dangerous, but she
never said anything about why."

The older witches shared a glance.

"Never told you about the Dancers?" said Granny
Weatherwax.

"Never told you about the Long Man?" said Nanny Ogg.

"What Dancers? You mean those old stones up on the
moor?"

"All you need to know right now," said Granny
Weatherwax, "is that we've got to put a stop to Them."

"What Them?"

Granny radiated innocence ...

"The circles, of course," she said.

"Oh, no," said Magrat. "I can tell by the way you said it.

23

Terry Pratehett

You said Them as though it was some sort of curse. It wasn't
just a them, it was a them with a capital The."

The old witches looked awkward again.

"And who's the Long Man?" said Magrat.

"We do not," said Granny, "ever talk about the Long
Man."

"No harm in telling her about the Dancers, at any rate,"
mumbled Nanny Ogg.

"Yes, but ... you know ... I mean . . . she's Magrat,"
said Granny.

"What's that meant to mean?" Magrat demanded.

"You probably won't feel the same way about Them, is
what I am saying," said Granny.

"We're talking about the\a151" Nanny Ogg began.

"Don't name 'em!"

"Yeah, right. Sorry."

"Mind you, a circle might not find the Dancers," said
Granny. "We can always hope. Could be just random."

"But if one opens up inside the\a151" said Nanny Ogg.

Magrat snapped.

"You just do this on purpose! You talk in code the whole
time! You always do this! But you won't be able to when I'm
queen\\"

That stopped them.

Nanny Ogg put her head on one side.

"Oh?" she said. "Young Verence popped the question,
then?"

"Yes!"

"When's the happy event?" said Granny Weatherwax,
icily.

"Two weeks' time," said Magrat. "Midsummer Day."

"Bad choice, bad choice," said Nanny Ogg. "Shortest
night o' the year\a151"

"Gytha Ogg!"

"And you'll be my subjects," said Magrat, ignoring this.
"And you'll have to curtsy and everything!"

24

LOR06 ftlYD ift0f\a1636

She knew as soon as she said it that it was stupid, but
anger drove her on.

Granny Weatherwax's eyes narrowed.

"Hmm," she said. "We will, will we?"

"Yes, and if you don't," said Magrat, "you can get
thrown in prison."

"My word," said Granny. "Deary deary me. I wouldn't
like that. I wouldn't like that at all."

All three of them knew that the castle dungeons, which
in any case had never been its most notable feature, were
now totally unused. Verence II was the most amiable
monarch in the history of Lancre. His subjects regarded him
with the sort of good-natured contempt that is the fate of all
those who work quietly and conscientiously for the public
good. Besides, Verence would rather cut his own leg off than
put a witch in prison, since it'd save trouble in the long run
and probably be less painful.

"Queen Magrat, eh?" said Nanny Ogg, trying to lighten
the atmosphere a bit. "Cor. Well, the old castle could do
with a bit of lightening up\a151"

"Oh, it'll lighten up all right," said Granny.

"Well, anyway, I don't have to bother with this sort of
thing," said Magrat. "Whatever it is. It's your business. I just
shan't have time, I'm sure."

"I'm sure you can please yourself, your going-to-be-
majesty," said Granny Weatherwax.

"Hah!" said Magrat. "I can! You can jol\a151you can damn
well find another witch for Lancre! All right? Another soppy
girl to do all the dreary work and never be told anything and
be talked over the head of the whole time. I've got better
things to do!"

"Better things than being a witch?" said Granny

Magrat walked into it.
'   "Yes!"

"Oh, dear," murmured Nanny

"Oh. Well, then I expect you'll be wanting to be off,"

25

Terry Pratehett

said Granny, her voice like knives. "Back to your palace, I'll
be bound."

"Yes!"

Magrat picked up her broomstick.

Granny's arm shot out very fast and grabbed the handle.

"Oh, no," she said, "you don't. Queens ride around in
golden coaches and whatnot. Each to their own. Brooms is
for witches."

"Now come on, you two," began Nanny Ogg, one of
nature's mediators. "Anyway, someone can be a queen and a
w\a151"

"Who cares?" said Magrat, dropping the broomstick. "I
don't have to bother with that sort of thing anymore."

She turned, clutched at her dress, and ran. She became a
figure outlined against the sunset.

"You daft old besom, Esme," said Nanny Ogg. "Just
because she's getting wed."

"You know what she'd say if we told her," said Granny
Weatherwax. "She'd get it all wrong. The Gentry. Circles.
She'd say it was . .. nice. Best for her if she's out of it."

"They ain't been active for years and years," said Nanny.
"We'll need some help. I mean . . . when did you last go up
to the Dancers?"

"You know how it is," said Granny "When it's so quiet...
you don't think about 'em."

"We ought to have kept 'em cleared."

"True."

"We better get up there first thing tomorrow," said
Nanny Ogg.

"Yes."

"Better bring a sickle, too."

There isn't much of the kingdom of Lancre where you could
drop a football and not have it roll away from you. Most of
it is moorland and steeply forested hillside, giving way to

26

LOR06 ft/YD ift0f\a1636

sharp and ragged mountains where even trolls wouldn't go
and valleys so deep that they have to pipe the sunlight in.

There was an overgrown path up to the moorland where
the Dancers stood, even though it was only a few miles from
the town. Hunters tracked up there sometimes, but only by
accident. It wasn't that the hunting was bad but, well\a151

\a151there were the stones.

Stone circles were common enough everywhere in the
mountains. Druids built them as weather computers and
since it was always cheaper to build a new 33-MegaLith cir-
cle than upgrade an old slow one there were generally plenty
of ancient ones around.

No druids ever came near the Dancers.

The stones weren't shaped. They weren't even positioned
in any particularly significant way There wasn't any of that
stuff about the sun striking the right stone at dawn on the
right day. Someone had just dragged eight red rocks into a
rough circle.

But the weather was different. People said that, if it
started to rain, it always began to fall inside the circle a few
seconds after it had started outside, as if the rain was com-
ing from further away. If clouds crossed the sun, it'd be a
moment or two before the light faded inside the circle.

William Scrope is going to die in a couple of minutes. It
has to be said that he shouldn't have been hunting deer out
of season, and especially not the fine stag he was tracking,
and certainly not a fine stag of the Ramtop Red species,
which is officially endangered although not as endangered,
right now, as William Scrope.

It was ahead of him, pushing through the bracken, mak-
ing so much noise that a blind man could have tracked it.

Scrope waded through after it.

Mist was still hanging around the stones, not in a blan-
/ ket but in long raggedy strings.

The stag reached the circle now, and stopped. It trotted
back and forth once or twice, and then looked up at Scrope.

27

Terry Pratchett

He raised the crossbow.
The stag turned, and leapt between the stones.
There were only confused impressions from then on.
The first was of\a151

\a151distance. The circle was a few yards across, it
shouldn't suddenly appear to contain so much distance.
And the next was of\a151

\a151speed. Something was coming out of the circle, a
white dot growing bigger and bigger.

He knew he'd aimed the bow. But it was whirled out of
his hands as the thing struck, and suddenly there was only
the sensation of\a151

\a151peace.

And the brief remembrance of pain.

William Scrope died.

William Scrope looked through his hands at the crushed
bracken. The reason that it was crushed was that his own
body was sprawled upon it.

His newly deceased eyes surveyed the landscape.

There are no delusions for the dead. Dying is like wak-
ing up after a really good party, when you have one or two
seconds of innocent freedom before you recollect all the
things you did last night which seemed so logical and hilari-
ous at the time, and then you remember the really amazing
thing you did with a lampshade and two balloons, which
had them in stitches, and now you realize you're going to
have to look a lot of people in the eye today and you're
sober now and so are they but you can both remember.

"Oh," he said.

The landscape flowed around the stones. It was all so
obvious now, when you saw it from the outside ...

Obvious. No walls, only doors. No edges, only comers\a151

WILLIAM SCROPE.

"Yes?"

IF YOU WOULD PLEASE STEP THIS WAY.

"Are you a hunter?"

28

LORQ6 ft/YO LDDIE6

I LIKE TO THINK I AM A PICKER-UP OF UNCON-
SIDERED TRIFLES.

Death grinned hopefully. Scrope's post-physical brow
furrowed.

"What? Like . . . sherry, custard ... that sort of thing?"

Death sighed. Metaphors were wasted on people.
Sometimes he felt that no one took him seriously enough.

I TAKE AWAY PEOPLE'S LIVES IS WHAT I MEAN,
he said testily.

"Where to?"

WE SHALL HAVE TO SEE, WON'T WE?

William Scrope was already fading into the mist.

"That thing that got me\a151"

YES?

"I thought they were extinct!"

"NO. THEY JUST WENT AWAY.

"Where to?"

Death extended a bony digit.

OVER THERE.

Magrat hadn't originally intended to move into the palace
before the wedding, because people would talk. Admittedly
a dozen people lived in the palace, which had a huge num-
ber of rooms, but she'd still be under the same roof, and
that was good enough. Or bad enough.

That was before. Now her blood was sizzling. Let people
talk. She had a pretty good idea which people they'd be, too.
Which person, anyway. Witch person. Hah. Let them talk all
they liked.

She got up early and packed her possessions, such as
they were. It wasn't exactly her cottage, and most of the furni-
ture went with it. Witches came and went, but witches' cottages
went on for ever, usually with the same thatch they started with.

But she did own the set of magical knives, the mystic col-
ored cords, the assorted grails and crucibles, and a box full of

29

Terry Pratchett

rings, necklaces, and bracelets heavy with the hermetic sym-
bols of a dozen religions. She tipped them all into a sack.

Then there were the books. Goodie Whemper had been
something of a bookworm among witches. There were
almost a dozen. She hesitated about the books, and finally
she let them stay on the shelves.

There was the statutory pointy hat. She'd never liked it
anyway, and had always avoided wearing it. Into the sack
with it.

She looked around wild-eyed until she spotted the small
cauldron in the inglenook. That'd do. Into the sack with
that, and then tie the neck with string.

On the way up to the palace she crossed the bridge over
Lancre Gorge and tossed the sack into the river.

It bobbed for a moment in the strong current, and then sank.

She'd secretly hoped for a string of multicolored bub-
bles, or even a hiss. But it just sank. Just as if it wasn't any-
thing very important.

Another world, another castle .. .

The elf galloped over the frozen moat, steam billowing
from its black horse and from the thing it carried over its neck.

It rode up the steps and into the hall itself, where the
Queen sat amidst her dreams .. .

"My lord Lankin?"

"A stag!"

It was still alive. Elves were skilled at leaving things
alive, often for weeks.

"From out of the circle?"

"Yes, lady!"

"It's weakening. Did I not tell you?"

"How long? How long?"

"Soon. Soon. What went through the other way?"

The elf tried to avoid her face.

"Your ... pet, lady."

30

LORDS ftffO ift0/\a1636

"No doubt it won't go far." The Queen laughed. "No
doubt it will have an amusing time ..."

It rained briefly at dawn.

There's nothing nastier to walk through than shoulder-
high wet bracken. Well, there is. There are an uncountable
number of things nastier to walk through, especially if
they're shoulder-high. But here and now, thought Nanny
Ogg, it was hard to think of more than one or two.

They hadn't landed inside the Dancers, of course. Even
birds detoured rather than cross that airspace. Migrating spi-
ders on gossamer threads floating half a mile up curved
around it. Clouds split in two and flowed around it.

Mist hung around the stones. Sticky, damp mist.

Nanny hacked vaguely at the clinging bracken with her
sickle.

"You there, Esme?" she muttered.

Granny Weatherwax's head rose from a clump of bracken
a few feet away.

"There's been things going on," she said, in a cold and
deliberate tone.

"Like what?"

"All the bracken and weeds is trampled around the
stones. I reckon someone's been dancing."

Nanny Ogg gave this the same consideration as would a
nuclear physicist who'd just been told that someone was bang-
ing two bits of sub-critical uranium together to keep warm.

"They never," she said.

"They have. And another thing ..."

It was hard to imagine what other thing there could be,
but Nanny Ogg said "Yes?" anyway.

"Someone got killed up here."
" "Oh, no," moaned Nanny Ogg. "Not inside the circle too."

"Nope. Don't be daft. It was outside. A tall man. He had one
leg longer'n the other. And a beard. He was probably a hunter."

31




Terry Pratchett

"How'd you know all that?"

"I just trod on 'im."

The sun rose through the mists.

The morning rays were already caressing the ancient stones
of Unseen University, premier college of wizardry, five hun-
dred miles away.

Not that many wizards were aware of this.
For roost of the wizards of Unseen University their lunch
was the first meal of the day. They were not, by and large,
breakfast people. The Archchancellor and the Librarian
were the only two who knew what the dawn looked like
from the front, and they tended to have the entire campus to
themselves for several hours.

The Librarian was always up early because he was an
orang-utan, and they are naturally early risers, although in
his case he didn't bellow a few times to keep other males
off his territory. He just unlocked the Library and fed the
books.

And Mustrum Ridcully, the current Archchancellor,
liked to wander around the sleepy buildings, nodding to the
servants and leaving little notes for his subordinates, usually
designed for no other purpose than to make it absolutely
clear that he was up and attending to the business of the day
while they were still fast asleep.

* This happens all the time, everywhere in the multiverse, even on cold
planets awash with liquid methane. No one knows why it is, but in any
group of employed individuals the only naturally early riser is always the
office manager, who will always leave reproachful little notes (or, as it
might be, engraved helium crystals) on the desks of their subordinates. In
fact the only place this does not happen very often is the world Zyrix, and
this is only because Zyrix has eighteen suns and it is only possible to be
an early riser there once every 1,789.6 years, but even then, once every
1,789.6 years, resonating to some strange universal signal, smallminded
employers slither down to the office with a tentacle full of small reproach-
ful etched frimpt shells at the ready.

32

LQR06 ft/VQ iftQ/\a1638

Today, however, he had something else on his mind.
More or less literally.

It was round. There was healthy growth all around it. He
could swear it hadn't been there yesterday.

He turned his head this way and that, squinting at the
reflection in the mirror of the other mirror he was holding
above his head.

The next member of staff to wake up after Ridcully and
the Librarian was the Bursar; not because he was a naturally
early riser, but because by around ten o'clock the
Archchancellor's very limited supply of patience came to an
end and he would stand at the bottom of the stairs and shout:

"Bursaaar!"

\a151until the Bursar appeared.

In fact it happened so often that the Bursar, a natural
neurovore,* frequently found that he'd got up and dressed
himself in his sleep several minutes before the bellow. On
this occasion he was upright and fully clothed and halfway
to the door before his eyes snapped open.

Ridcully never wasted time on small talk. It was always
large talk or nothing.

"Yes, Archchancellor?" said the Bursar, glumly.

The Archchancellor removed his hat.

"What about this, then?" he demanded.

"Um, um, um ... what, Archchancellor?"

"This, man! This!"

Close to panic, the Bursar stared desperately at the top
of Ridcully's head.

"The what? Oh. The bald spot?"

"I have not got a bald spot!"

"Um, then\a151"

"I mean it wasn't there yesterday!"

"Ah. Well. Um." At a certain point something always
snapped inside the Bursar, and he couldn't stop himself. "Of

* He lived on his nerves.

33

Terry Pratchett

course these things do happen and my grandfather always
swore by a mixture of honey and horse manure, he rubbed it
on every day\a151"

"I'm not going bald!"

A tic started to dance across the Bursar's face. The
words started to come out by themselves, without the appar-
ent intervention of his brain.

"\a151and then he got this device with a glass rod and, and,
and you rubbed it with a silk cloth and\a151"

"I mean it's ridiculous! My family have never gone bald,
except for one of my aunts!"

"\a151and, and, and then he'd collect morning dew and
wash his head, and, and, and\a151"

Ridcully subsided. He was not an unkind man.

"What're you taking for it at the moment?" he murmured.

"Dried, dried, dried, dried," stuttered the Bursar.

"The old dried frog pills, right?"

"R-r-r-r."

"Left-hand pocket?"

"R-r-r-r."

"OK . .. right. . . swallow ..."

They stared at one another for a moment.

The Bursar sagged.

"M-m-much better now, Archchancellor, thank you."

"Something's definitely happening. Bursar. I can feel it in
my water."

"Anything you say, Archchancellor."

"Bursar?"

"Yes, Archchancellor?"

"You ain't a member of some secret society or somethin',
are you?"

"Me? No, Archchancellor."

"Then it'd be a damn good idea to take your underpants
off your head."

34

LOR06 hNb LORIES

"Know him?" said Granny Weatherwax.

Nanny Ogg knew everyone in Lancre, even the forlorn
thing on the bracken.

"It's William Scrope, from over Slice way," she said.
"One of three brothers. He married that Palliard girl,
remember? The one with the air-cooled teeth?"

"I hope the poor woman's got some respectable black
clothes," said Granny Weatherwax.

"Looks like he's been stabbed," said Nanny. She turned
the body over, gently but firmly. Corpses as such didn't
worryJier. Witches generally act as layers-out of the dead as
well as midwives; there were plenty of people in Lancre for
whom Nanny Ogg's face had been the first and last thing
they'd ever seen, which had probably made all the bit in the
middle seem quite uneventful by comparison.

"Right through," she said. "Stabbed right through.
Blimey Who'd do a thing like that?"

Both the witches turned to look at the stones.

"I don't know what, but I knows where it come from,"
said Granny.

Now Nanny Ogg could see that the bracken all around
the stones was indeed well trodden down, and quite brown.

"I'm going to get to the bottom of this," said Granny.

"You'd better not go into\a151"

"I knows exactly where I should go, thank you."

There were eight stones in the Dancers. Three of them
had names. Granny walked around the ring until she
reached the one known as the Piper.

She removed a hatpin from among the many that riveted
her pointy hat to her hair and held it about six inches from
the stone. Then she let it go, and watched what happened.

She went back to Nanny.

"There's still power there," she said. "Not much, but the
ring is holding."

"But who'd be daft enough to come up here and dance
around the stones?" said Nanny Ogg, and then, as a

35

Terry Pratchett

treacherous thought drifted across her mind, she added,
"Magrat's been away with us the whole time."

"We shall have to find out," said Granny, setting her face
in a grim smile. "Now help me up with the poor man."

Nanny Ogg bent to the task.

"Coo, he's heavy. We could've done with young Magrat
up here."

"No. Flighty," said Granny Weather-wax. "Head easily
turned."

"Nice girl, though."

"But soppy. She thinks you can lead your life as if fairy
stories work and folk songs are really true. Not that I don't
wish her every happiness."

"Hope she does all right as queen," said Nanny.

"We taught her everything she knows," said Granny
Weatherwax.

"Yeah," said Nanny Ogg, as they disappeared into the
bracken. "D'you think . .. maybe . .. ?"

"What?"

"D'you think maybe we ought to have taught her every-
thing we know?"

"It'd take too long."

"Yeah, right."

It took a while for letters to get as far as the Archchancellor.
The post tended to be picked up from the University gates
by anyone who happened to be passing, and then left lying
on a shelf somewhere or used as a pipe lighter or a book-
mark or, in the case of the Librarian, as bedding.

This one had only taken two days, and was quite intact
apart from a couple of cup rings and a bananary fingerprint.
It arrived on the table along with the other post while the
faculty were at breakfast. The Dean opened it with a spoon.

"Anyone here know where Lancre is?" he said.

"Why?" said Ridcully, looking up sharply.

36

LQRQ6 fitfQ LfiQIEQ

"Some king's getting married and wants us to come."

"Oh dear, oh dear," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
"Some tinpot king gets wed and he wants us to come?"

"It's up in the mountains," said the Archchancellor, qui-
etly "Good trout fishin' in those parts, as I recall. My word.
Lancre. Good grief. Hadn't thought about the place in years.
You know, there's glacier lakes up there where the fish've
never seen a rod. Lancre. Yes."

"And it's far too far," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

Ridcully wasn't listening. "And there's deer. Thousands
of head of deer. And elk. Wolves all over the place.
Mountain lions too, I shouldn't wonder. I heard that Ice
Eagles have been seen up there again, too."

His eyes gleamed.

"There's only half a dozen of 'em left," he said.

Mustrum Ridcully did a lot for rare species. For one
thing, he kept them rare.

"It's the back of beyond," said the Dean. "Right off the
edge of the map."

"Used to stay with my uncle up there, in the holidays,"
said Ridcully, his eyes misty with distance. "Great days I had
up there. Great days. The summers up there . . . and the
sky's a deeper blue than anywhere else, it's very . . . and the
grass ...and ..."

He returned abruptly from the landscapes of memory.

"Got to go, then," he said. "Duty calls. Head of state get-
tin' married. Important occasion. Got to have a few wizards
there. Look of the thing. Nobblyess obligay."

"Well, I'm not going," said the Dean. "It's not natural,
the countryside. Far too many trees. Never could stand it."

"The Bursar could do with an outing," said Ridcully.
"Seems a bit jumpy just lately, can't imagine why." He leaned
forward to look along the High Table. "Bursaaar!"

The Bursar dropped his spoon into his oatmeal.

"See what I mean?" said Ridcully. "Bundle o' nerves the
whole time. I WAS SAYING YOU COULD DO WITH

37

Terry Pratchett

SOME FRESH AIR, BURSAR." He nudged the Dean heavily.
"Hope he's not going off his rocker, poor fella," he said, in
what he chose to believe was a whisper. "Spends too much
time indoors, if you get my drift."

The Dean, who went outdoors about once a month,
shrugged his shoulders.

"I EXPECT YOU'D LIKE A LITTLE TIME AWAY
FROM THE UNIVERSITY, EH?" said the Archchancellor,
nodding and grimacing madly. "Peace and quiet? Healthy
country livin'?"

"I, I, I, I should like that very much, Archchancellor," said
the Bursar, hope rising in his face like an autumn mushroom.

"Good man. Good man. You shall come with me," said
Ridcully, beaming.

The Bursar's expression froze.

"Got to be someone else, too," said Ridcully. "Volunteers,
anyone?"

The wizards, townies to a man, bent industriously over
their food. They always bent industriously over their food in
any case, but this time they were doing it to avoid catching
Ridcully's eye.

"What about the Librarian?" said the Lecturer in Recent
Runes, throwing a random victim to the wolves.

There was a sudden babble of relieved agreement.

"Good choice," said the Dean. "Just the thing for him.
Countryside. Trees. And . .. and ... trees."

"Mountain air," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

"Yes, he's been looking peaky lately," said the Reader in
Invisible Writings.

"It'd be a real treat for him," said the Lecturer in Recent
Runes.

"Home away from home, I expect," said the Dean.
"Trees all over the place."

They all looked expectantly at the Archchancellor.

"He doesn't wear clothes," said Ridcully. "And he goes
'ook' all the time."

38

I.OR08 ft^fO LftQfEQ

"He does wear the old green robe thing," said the Dean.

"Only when he's had a bath."

Ridcully rubbed his beard. In fact he quite liked the
Librarian, who never argued with him and always kept him-
self in shape, even if that shape was a pear shape. It was the
right shape for an orang-utan.

The thing about the Librarian was that no one noticed
he was an orang-utan anymore, unless a visitor to the
University happened to point it out. In which case someone
would say, "Oh, yes. Some kind of magical accident, wasn't
it? Pretty sure it was something like that. One minute
human, next minute an ape. Funny thing, really . . . can't
remember what he looked like before. I mean, he must have
been human, I suppose. Always thought of him as an ape,
really. It's more him."

And indeed it had been an accident among the potent and
magical books of the University library that had as it were
bounced the Librarian's genotype down the evolutionary tree
and back up a different branch, with the significant difference
that now he could hang on to it upside down with his feet.

"Oh, all right," said the Archchancellor. "But he's got to
wear something during the ceremony,' if only for the sake of
the poor bride."

There was a whimper from the Bursar.

All the wizards turned toward him.

His spoon landed on the floor with a small thud. It was
wooden. The wizards had gently prevented him from having
metal cutlery since what was now known as the Unfortunate
Incident At Dinner.

"A-a-a-a," gurgled the Bursar, trying to push himself
away from the table.

"Dried frog pills," said the Archchancellor. "Someone
fish 'em out of his pocket."

/The wizards didn't rush this. You could find anything in
a wizard's pocket\a151peas, unreasonable things with legs,
small experimental universes, anything ...

Terry Pratehett

The Reader in Invisible Writings craned to see what had
unglued his colleague.

"Here, look at his porridge," he said.

There was a perfect round depression in the oatmeal.

"Oh dear, another crop circle," said the Dean.

The wizards relaxed.

"Damn things turning up everywhere this year," said the
Archchancellor. He hadn't taken his hat off to eat the meal.
This was because it was holding down a poultice of honey
and horse manure and a small mouse-powered electrostatic
generator he'd got those clever young fellas in the High
Energy Magic research building to knock together for him,
clever fellas they were, one day he might even understand
half of what they were always gabblin' on about...

In the meantime, he'd keep his hat on.

"Particularly strong, too," said the Dean. "The gardener
told me yesterday they're playing merry hell with the cabbages."

"I thought them things only turned up out in fields and
things," said Ridcully. "Perfectly normal natural phe-
nomenon."

"If there is a suitably high flux level, the inter-continuum
pressure can probably overcome quite a high base reality
quotient," said the Reader in Invisible Writings.

The conversation stopped. Everyone turned to look at
this most wretched and least senior member of the staff.

The Archancellor glowered.

"I don't even want you to begin to start explainin' that,"
he said. "You're probably goin' to go on about the universe
bein' a rubber sheet with weights on it again, right?"

"Not exactly a\a151"

"And the word 'quantum' is hurryin' toward your lips
again," said Ridcully.

"Well, the\a151"

"And 'continuinuinuum' too, I expect," said Ridcully.

The Reader in Invisible Writings, a young wizard whose
name was Ponder Stibbons, sighed deeply.

40

LOR06 ft/YO Lft0/\a1636

"No, Archchancellor, I was merely pointing out\a151"

"It's not wormholes again, is it?"

Stibbons gave up. Using a metaphor in front of a man as
unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red rag to a bu\a151was
like putting something very annoying in front of someone
who was annoyed by it.

It was very hard, being a reader in Invisible Writings.

"I reckon you'd better come too," said Ridcully.

"Me, Archchancellor?"

"Can't have you skulking around the place inventing mil-
lions of other universes that're too small to see and all the
rest of that continuinuinuum stuff," said Ridcully. "Anyway,
I shall need someone to carry my rods and crossbo\a151my
stuff," he corrected himself.

Stibbons stared at his plate. It was no good arguing.
What he had really wanted out of life was to spend the next
hundred years of it in the University, eating big meals and
not moving much in between them. He was a plump young
man with a complexion the color of something that lives
under a rock. People were always telling him to make some-
thing of his life, and that's what he wanted to do. He wanted
to make a bed of it.

"But, Archchancellor," said the Lecturer in Recent
Runes, "it's still too damn far."

"Nonsense," said Ridcully. "They've got that new turn-
pike open all the way to Sto Helit now. Coaches every
Wednesday, reg'lar. Bursaaar! Oh, give him a dried frog
pill, someone ... Mr. Stibbons, if you could happen to find

*The study of invisible writings was a new discipline made available by
the discovery of the bi-directional nature of Library-Space. The thaumic
mathematics are complex, but boil down to the fact that all books, every-
where, affect all other books. This is obvious: books inspire other books
written in the future, and cite books written in the past. But the General
Theory+ of L-Space suggests that, in that case, the contents of books as
'yet unwritten can be deduced from books now in existence.
tThere's a Special Theory as well, but no one bothers with it much because it's
self-evidently a load of marsh gas.

41

Terry Pratchett

yourself in this universe for five minutes, go and arrange
some tickets. There. All sorted out, right?"

Magrat woke up.

And knew she wasn't a witch anymore. The feeling just
crept over her, as part of the normal stock-taking that any
body automatically does in the first seconds of emergence
from the pit of dreams: arms: 2, legs: 2, existential dread:

58%, randomized guilt: 94%, witchcraft level: 00.00.

The point was, she couldn't remember ever being any-
thing else. She'd always been a witch. Magrat Garlick, third
witch, that was what she was. The soft one.

She knew she'd never been much good at it. Oh, she
could do some spells and do them quite well, and she was
good at herbs, but she wasn't a witch in the bone like the
old ones. They made sure she knew it.

Well, she'd just have to leam queening. At least she was
the only one in Lancre. No one'd be looking over her shoul-
der the whole time, saying things like "You ain't holding that
scepter right'."

Right. ..

Someone had stolen her clothes in the night.

She got up in her nightshirt and hopped over the cold
flagstones to the door. She was halfway there when it
opened of its own accord.

She recognized the small dark girl that came in, barely
visible behind a stack of linen. Most people in Lancre knew
everyone else.

"Millie Chillum?"

The linen bobbed a curtsy.

"Yes'm?"

Magrat lifted up part of the stack.

"It's me, Magrat," she said. "Hello."

"Yes'm." Another bob.

"What's up with you, Millie?"

"Yes'm." Bob, bob.

42

LQR06 fiNb Lft0/\a1636

"I said it's me. You don't have to look at me like that."

"Yes'm."

The nervous bobbing continued. Magrat found her own
knees beginning to jerk in sympathy but as it were behind
the beat, so that as she was bobbing down she overtook the
girl bobbing up.

"If you say 'yes'm' again, it will go very hard with you,"
she managed, as she went past.

"Y\a151right, your majesty, m'm."

Faint light began to dawn.

"I'm not queen yet, Millie. And you've known me for
twenty years," panted Magrat, on the way up.

"Yes'm. But you're going to be queen. So me mam told me
I was to be respectful," said Millie, still curtsying nervously

"Oh. Well. All right, then. Where are my clothes?"

"Got 'em here, your pre-majesty."

"They're not mine. And please stop going up and down
all the time. I feel a bit sick."

"The king ordered 'em from Sto Helit special, m'm."

"Did he, eh? How long ago?"

"Dunno, m'm."

He knew I was coming home, thought Magrat. How?
What's going on here?

There was a good deal more lace than Magrat was used
to, but that was, as it were, the icing on the cake. Magrat
normally wore a simple dress with not much underneath it
except Magrat. Ladies of quality couldn't get away with that
kind of thing. Millie had been provided with a sort of techni-
cal diagram, but it wasn't much help.

They studied it for some time.

"This is a standard queen outfit, then?"

"Couldn't say, m'm. I think his majesty just sent 'em a lot
of money and said to send you everything."
/ They spread out the bits on the floor.

"Is this the pantoffle?"

Outside, on the battlements, the guard changed. In fact

43

Terry Pratchett

he changed into his gardening apron and went off to hoe the
beans. Inside, there was considerable sartorial discussion.

"I think you've got it up the wrong way, m'm. Which
bit's the farthingale?"

"Says here Insert Tabbe A into Slotte B. Can't find
slotte B."

"These're like saddlebags. I'm not wearing these. And
this thing?"

"A ruff, m'm. Um. They're all the rage in Sto Helit, my
brother says."

"You mean they make people angry? And what's this?"

"Brocade, I think."

"It's like cardboard. Do I have to wear this sort of thing
everyday?"

"Don't know, I'm sure, m'm."

"But Verence just trots around in leather gaiters and an
old jacket!"

"Ah, but you're queen. Queens can't do that sort of
thing. Everyone knows that, m'm. It's all right for kings
to go wandering around with their arse half out their
trous\a151"

She rammed her hand over her mouth.

"It's all right," said Magrat. "I'm sure even kings have . ..
tops to their legs just like everyone else. Just go on with
what you were saying."