Small Gods

creature,” said Didactylos. “I said to Urn, there’s tomorrow’s dinner, and then he says no, it’s dragging its tail in the sand and doing geometry. That doesn’t come natural to a tortoise, geometry.”
    Om’s eye turned to Brutha.
    “I had to,” he said. “It was the only way to get his attention. Now I’ve got him by the curiosity. When you’ve got ’em by the curiosity, their hearts and minds will follow.”
    “He’s a God,” said Brutha.
    “Really? What’s his name?” said the philosopher.
    “Don’t tell him! Don’t tell him! The local gods’ll hear!”
    “I don’t know,” said Brutha.
    Didactylos turned Om over.
    “The Turtle Moves,” said Urn thoughtfully.
    “What?” said Brutha.
    “Master did a book,” said Urn.
    “Not really a book,” said Didactylos modestly. “More a scroll. Just a little thing I knocked off.”
    “Saying that the world is flat and goes through space on the back of a giant turtle?” said Brutha.
    “Have you read it?” Didactylos’s gaze was unmoving. “Are you a slave?”
    “No,” said Brutha. “I am a—”
    “Don’t mention my name! Call yourself a scribe or something!”
    “—scribe,” said Brutha weakly.
    “Yeah,” said Urn. “I can see that. The telltale callus on the thumb where you hold the pen. The inkstains all over your sleeves.”
    Brutha glanced at his left thumb. “I haven’t—”
    “Yeah,” said Urn, grinning. “Use your left hand, do you?”
    “Er, I use both,” said Brutha. “But not very well, everyone says.”
    “Ah,” said Didactylos. “Ambi-sinister?”
    “What?”
    “He means incompetent with both hands,” said Om.
    “Oh. Yes. That’s me.” Brutha coughed politely. “Look…I’m looking for a philosopher. Um. One that knows about gods.”
    He waited.
    Then he said, “You aren’t going to say they’re a relic of an outmoded belief system?”
    Didactylos, still running his fingers over Om’s shell, shook his head.
    “Nope. I like my thunderstorms a long way off.”
    “Oh. Could you stop turning him over and over? He’s just told me he doesn’t like it.”
    “You can tell how old they are by cutting them in half and counting the rings,” said Didactylos.
    “Um. He hasn’t got much of a sense of humor, either.”
    “You’re Omnian, by the sound of it.”
    “Yes.”
    “Here to talk about the treaty?”
    “I do the listening.”
    “And what do you want to know about gods?”
    Brutha appeared to be listening.
    Eventually he said: “How they start. How they grow. And what happens to them afterwards.”
    Didactylos put the tortoise into Brutha’s hands.
    “Costs money, that kind of thinking,” he said.
    “Let me know when we’ve used more than fifty-two obols’ worth,” said Brutha. Didactylos grinned.
    “Looks like you can think for yourself,” he said. “Got a good memory?”
    “No. Not exactly a good one.”
    “Right? Right. Come on into the Library. It’s got an earthed copper roof, you know. Gods really hate that sort of thing.”
    Didactylos reached down beside him and picked up a rusty iron lantern.
    Brutha looked up at the big white building.
    “That’s the Library?” he said.
    “Yes,” said Didactylos. “That’s why it’s got LIBRVM carved over the door in such big letters. But a scribe like you’d know that, of course.”

    The Library of Ephebe was—before it burned down—the second biggest on the Disc.
    Not as big as the library in Unseen University, of course, but that library had one or two advantages on account of its magical nature. No other library anywhere, for example, has a whole gallery of unwritten books—books that would have been written if the author hadn’t been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases of imaginary places. Dictionaries of illusory words. Spotters’ guides to invisible things. Wild thesauri in the Lost Reading Room. A library so big that it distorts reality and has opened gateways to all other libraries, everywhere and everywhen…
    And so unlike the Library at Ephebe, with its four or five hundred volumes. Many of them were scrolls, to save their readers the fatigue of having to call a slave every time they wanted a page turned. Each one lay in its own pigeonhole, though. Books shouldn’t be kept too close together, otherwise they interact in strange and unforeseeable ways.
    Sunbeams lanced through the shadows, as palpable as pillars in the dusty air.
    Although it was the least of the wonders in