Pyramids

hidden in that crack or there may not, but we can’t get at it, can we? So we have to go somewhere where we can. It’s so simple I should think even kings could understand it.”
    He hurried after her, down the scree to where You Bastard was lying with his head and neck flat on the ground, flicking his ears in the heat and idly applying You Vicious Brute’s Theory of Transient Integrals to a succession of promising cissoid numbers. Ptraci kicked him irritably.
    “Do you know where there is water, then?” said Teppic.
    …e/27. Eleven miles…
    Ptraci glared at him from kohl-ringed eyes. “You mean you don’t know? You were going to take me into the desert and you don’t know where the water is?”
    “Well, I rather expected I was going to be able to take some with me!”
    “You didn’t even think about it!”
    “Listen, you can’t talk to me like that! I’m a king!” Teppic stopped.
    “You’re absolutely right,” he said. “I never thought about it. Where I come from it rains nearly every day. I’m sorry.”
    Ptraci’s brows furrowed. “Who reigns nearly every day?” she said.
    “No, I mean rain. You know. Very thin water coming out of the sky?”
    “What a silly idea. Where do you come from?”
    Teppic looked miserable. “Where I come from is Ankh-Morpork. Where I started from is here.” He stared down the track. From here, if you knew what you were looking for, you could just see a faint crack running across the rocks. It climbed the cliffs on either side, a new vertical fault the thickness of a line that just happened to contain a complete river kingdom and 7,000 years of history.
    He’d hated every minute of his time there. And now it had shut him out. And now, because he couldn’t, he wanted to go back.
    He wandered down to it and put his hand over one eye. If you jerked your head just right…
    It flashed past his vision briefly, and was gone. He tried a few times more, and couldn’t see it again.
    If I hacked the rocks away? No, he thought, that’s silly. It’s a line. You can’t get into a line. A line has no thickness. Well-known fact of geometry.
    He heard Ptraci come up behind him, and the next moment her hands were on his neck. For a second he wondered how she knew the Catharti Death Grip, and then her fingers were gently massaging his muscles, stresses melting under their expert caress like fat under a hot knife. He shivered as the tension relaxed.
    “That’s nice,” he said.
    “We’re trained for it. Your tendons are knotted up like ping-pong balls on a string,” said Ptraci.
    Teppic gratefully subsided onto one of the boulders that littered the base of the cliff and let the rhythm of her fingers unwind the problems of the night.
    “I don’t know what to do,” he murmured. “That feels good .”
    “It’s not all peeling grapes, being a handmaiden,” said Ptraci. “The first lesson we learn is, when the master has had a long hard day it is not the best time to suggest the Congress of the Fox and the Persimmon. Who says you have to do anything?”
    “I feel responsible.” Teppic shifted position like a cat.
    “If you know where there is a dulcimer I could play you something soothing,” said Ptraci. “I’ve got as far as ‘Goblins Picnic’ in Book I.”
    “I mean, a king shouldn’t let his kingdom just vanish like that.”
    “All the other girls can do chords and everything,” said Ptraci wistfully, massaging his shoulders. “But the old king always said he’d rather hear me. He said it used to cheer him up.”
    “I mean, it’ll be called the Lost Kingdom,” said Teppic drowsily. “How will I feel then, I ask you?”
    “He said he liked my singing, too. Everyone else said it sounded like a flock of vultures who’ve just found a dead donkey.”
    “I mean, king of a Lost Kingdom. It’d be dreadful. I’ve got to get it back.”
    You Bastard slowly turned his massive head to follow the flight of an errant blowfly; deep in his brain little columns of red numbers flickered, detailing vectors and speed and elevation. The conversation of human beings seldom interested him, but it crossed his mind that the males and females always got along best when neither actually listened fully to what the other one was saying. It was much simpler with camels.
    Teppic stared at the line in the rock. Geometry. That was it.
    “We’ll go to Ephebe,” he said. “They know all about geometry and they have some very unsound ideas. Unsound ideas are what I could