Hogfather

Went a long way very fast. As for your grandfather…honestly, that motto. Is that good taste? Of course, you don’t need to fear him, do you? Or do you?”
    Susan tried to fade. It didn’t work. She could feel herself staying embarrassingly solid.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Who are you, anyway?”
    “I beg your pardon. My name is Teatime, Jonathan Teatime. At your service.”
    Susan lined up the syllables in her head.
    “You mean…like around four o’clock in the afternoon?” she said.
    “No. I did say Teh-ah-tim-eh,” said Teatime. “I spoke very clearly. Please don’t try to break my concentration by annoying me. I only get annoyed at important things. How are you getting on, Mr. Sideney? If it’s just according to Woddeley’s Sequence, number six should be copper and blue-green light. Unless, of course, there are any subtleties …”
    “Er, doing it right now, Mister Teatime—”
    “Do you think your grandfather will try to rescue you? Do you think he will? But now I have his sword, you see. I wonder—”
    There was another click.
    “Sixth lock, Mister Teatime!”
    “Really.”
    “Er…don’t you want me to start on the seventh?”
    “Oh, well, if you like. Pure white light will be the key,” said Teatime, still not looking away from Susan. “But it may not be all important now. Thank you, anyway. You’ve been most helpful.”
    “Er—”
    “Yes, you may go.”
    Susan noticed that Sideney didn’t even bother to pick up his books and tools, but hurried down the stairs as if he expected to be called back and was trying to run faster than the sound.
    “Is that all you’re here for?” she said. “A robbery?” He was dressed like an Assassin, after all, and there was always one way to annoy an Assassin. “Like a thief?”
    Teatime danced excitedly. “A thief? Me? I’m not a thief, madam. But if I were, I would be the kind that steals fire from the gods.”
    “We’ve already got fire.”
    “There must be an upgrade by now. No, these gentlemen are thieves. Common robbers. Decent types, although you wouldn’t necessarily want to watch them eat, for example. That’s Medium Dave and exhibit B is Banjo. He can talk.”
    Medium Dave nodded at Susan. She saw the look in his eyes. Maybe there was something she could use…
    She’d need something. Even her hair was a mess. She couldn’t step behind time, she couldn’t fade into the background, and now even her hair had let her down.
    She was normal. Here, she was what she’d always wanted to be.
    Bloody, bloody damn.

    Sideney prayed as he ran down the stairs. He didn’t believe in any gods, since most wizards seldom like to encourage them, but he prayed anyway the fervent prayers of an atheist who hopes to be wrong.
    But no one called him back. And no one ran after him.
    So, being of a serious turn of mind under his normal state of sub-critical fear, he slowed down in case he lost his footing.
    It was then that he noticed that the steps underfoot weren’t the smooth whiteness they had been everywhere else but were very large, pitted flagstones. And the light had changed, and then they weren’t stairs any more and he staggered as he encountered flat ground where steps should have been.
    His outstretched hand brushed against a crumbling brick.
    And the ghosts of the past poured in, and he knew where he was. He was in the yard of Gammer Wimblestone’s dame school. His mother wanted him to learn his letters and be a wizard, but she also thought that long curls on a five-year-old boy looked very smart.
    This was the hunting ground of Ronnie Jenks.
    Adult memory and understanding said that Ronnie was just an unintelligent bullet-headed seven-year-old bully with muscles where his brain should have been. The eye of childhood, rather more accurately, dreaded him as a force like a personalized earthquake with one nostril bunged up with bogies, both knees scabbed, both fists balled and all five brain cells concentrated in a kind of cerebral grunt.
    Oh, gods. There was the tree Ronnie used to hide behind. It looked as big and menacing as he remembered it.
    But…if somehow he’d ended up back there, gods knew how, well, he might be a bit on the skinny side but he was a damn sight bigger than Ronnie Jenks now. Gods, yes , he’d kick those evil little trousers all the—
    And then, as a shadow blotted out the sun, he realized he was wearing curls.

    Teatime looked thoughtfully at the door.
    “I suppose