Pyramids

too?”
    “Oh, mummy,” whispered Gern, and slid to his knees.
    Dil nodded. He was a religious man. It was a great comfort knowing that the gods were there. It was knowing they were here that was the terrible part.
    Because the body of a woman arched over the heavens, faintly blue, faintly shadowy in the light of the watery stars.
    She was enormous, her statistics interstellar. The shadow between her galactic breasts was a dark nebula, the curve of her stomach a vast wash of glowing gas, her navel the seething, dark incandescence in which new stars were being born. She wasn’t supporting the sky. She was the sky.
    Her huge sad face, upside down on the turnwise horizon, stared directly at Dil. And Dil was realizing that there are few things that so shake belief as seeing, clearly and precisely, the object of that belief. Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn’t believing. It’s where belief stops, because it isn’t needed anymore.
    “Oh, Sod,” moaned Gern.
    Dil struck him across the arm.
    “Stop that,” he said. “And come with me.”
    “Oh, master, whatever shall we do?”
    Dil looked around at the sleeping city. He hadn’t the faintest idea.
    “We’ll go to the palace,” he said firmly. “It’s probably a trick of the, of the, of the dark. Anyway, the sun will be up presently.”
    He strode off, wishing he could change places with Gern and show just a hint of gibbering terror. The apprentice followed him at a sort of galloping creep.
    “I can see shadows against the stars, master! Can you see them, master? Around the edge of the world, master!”
    “Just mists, boy,” said Dil, resolutely keeping his eyes fixed in front of him and maintaining a dignified posture as appropriate to the Keeper of the Left Hand Door of the Natron Lodge and holder of several medals for needlework.
    “There,” he said. “See, Gern, the sun is coming up!”
    They stood and watched it.
    Then Gern whimpered, very quietly.
    Rising up the sky, very slowly, was a great flaming ball. And it was being pushed by a dung beetle bigger than worlds.

 
    The sun rose and, because this wasn’t the Old Kingdom out here, it was a mere ball of flaming gas. The purple night of the high desert evaporated under its blowlamp glare. Lizards scuttled into cracks in the rocks. You Bastard settled himself down in the sparse shadow of what was left of the syphacia bushes, peered haughtily at the landscape, and began to chew cud and calculate square roots in base seven.
    Teppic and Ptraci eventually found the shade of a limestone overhang, and sat glumly staring out at the waves of heat wobbling off the rocks.
    “I don’t understand,” said Ptraci. “Have you looked everywhere?”
    “It’s a country! It can’t just bloody well fall through a hole in the ground!”
    “Where is it, then?” said Ptraci evenly.
    Teppic growled. The heat struck like a hammer, but he strode out over the rocks as though three hundred square miles could perhaps have been hiding under a pebble or behind a bush.
    The fact was that the track dipped between the cliffs, but almost immediately rose again and continued across the dunes into what was quite clearly Tsort. He’d recognized a wind-eroded sphinx that had been set up as a boundary marker; legend said it prowled the borders in times of dire national need, although legend wasn’t sure why.
    He knew they had galloped into Ephebe. He should be looking across the fertile, pyramid-speckled valley of the Djel that lay between the two countries.
    He’d spent an hour looking for it.
    It was inexplicable. It was uncanny. It was also extremely embarrassing.
    He shaded his eyes and stared around for the thousandth time at the silent, baking landscape. And moved his head. And saw Djelibeybi.
    It flashed across his vision in an instant. He jerked his eyes back and saw it again, a brief flash of misty color that vanished as soon as he concentrated on it.
    Some minutes later Ptraci peered out of the shade and saw him get down on his hands and knees. When he started turning over rocks she decided it was time he should come back in out of the sun.
    He shook her hand off his shoulder, and gestured impatiently.
    “I’ve found it!” He pulled a knife from his boot and started poking at the stones.
    “Where?”
    “Here!”
    She laid a ringed hand on his forehead.
    “Oh yes,” she said. “I see. Yes. Good. Now I think you’d better come into the shade.”
    “No, I mean it! Here! Look!”
    She hunkered down