Small Gods

slowly, walked towards the exit.
    Vorbis watched him go.
    Brutha saw him half-raise his hand to signal the guards, and then lower it again.
    Vorbis turned to the Tyrant.
    “So much for your—” he began.
    “Coo-ee!”
    The lantern sailed through the doorway and shattered against Vorbis’s skull.
    “Nevertheless…the Turtle Moves!”
    Vorbis leapt to his feet.
    “I—” he screamed, and then got a grip on himself. He waved irritably at a couple of the guards. “I want him caught. Now. And…Brutha?”
    Brutha could hardly hear him for the rush of blood in his ears. Didactylos had been a better thinker than he’d thought.
    “Yes, lord?”
    “You will take a party of men, and you will take them to the Library…and then, Brutha, you will burn the Library.”

    Didactylos was blind, but it was dark. The pursuing guards could see, except that there was nothing to see by. And they hadn’t spent their lives wandering the twisty, uneven and above all many-stepped lanes of Ephebe.
    “—eight, nine, ten, eleven,” muttered the philosopher, bounding up a pitch-dark flight of steps and haring around a corner.
    “Argh, ow, that was my knee ,” muttered most of the guards, in a heap about halfway up.
    One made it to the top, though. By starlight he could just make out the skinny figure, bounding madly along the street. He raised his crossbow. The old fool wasn’t even dodging…
    A perfect target.
    There was a twang.
    The guard looked puzzled for a moment. The bow toppled from his hands, firing itself as it hit the cobbles and sending its bolt ricocheting off a statue. He looked down at the feathered shaft sticking out of his chest, and then at the figure detaching itself from the shadows.
    “Sergeant Simony?” he whispered.
    “I’m sorry,” said Simony. “I really am. But the Truth is important.”
    The soldier opened his mouth to give his opinion of the truth and then slumped forward.
    He opened his eyes.
    Simony was walking away. Everything looked lighter. It was still dark. But now he could see in the darkness. Everything was shades of gray. And the cobbles under his hand had somehow become a coarse black sand.
    He looked up.
    O N YOUR FEET , P RIVATE I CHLOS .
    He stood up sheepishly. Now he was more than just a soldier, an anonymous figure to chase and be killed and be no more than a shadowy bit-player in other people’s lives. Now he was Dervi Ichlos, aged thirty-eight, comparatively blameless in the general scheme of things, and dead.
    He raised a hand to his lips uncertainly.
    “You’re the judge?” he said.
    N OT ME .
    Ichlos looked at the sands stretching away. He knew instinctively what he had to do. He was far less sophisticated than General Fri’it, and took more notice of songs he’d learned in his childhood. Besides, he had an advantage. He’d had even less religion than the general.
    J UDGMENT IS AT THE END OF THE DESERT .
    Ichlos tried to smile.
    “My mum told me about this,” he said. “When you’re dead, you have to walk a desert. And you see everything properly, she said. And remember everything right.”
    Death studiously did nothing to indicate his feelings either way.
    “Might meet a few friends on the way, eh?” said the soldier.
    P OSSIBLY .
    Ichlos set out. On the whole, he thought, it could have been worse.

    Urn clambered across the shelves like a monkey, pulling books out of their racks and throwing them down to the floor.
    “I can carry about twenty,” he said. “But which twenty?”
    “ Always wanted to do that,” murmured Didactylos happily. “Upholding truth in the face of tyranny and so on. Hah! One man, unafraid of the—”
    “What to take? What to take?” shouted Urn.
    “We don’t need Grido’s Mechanics ,” said Didactylos. “Hey, I wish I could have seen the look on his face! Damn good shot, considering. I just hope someone wrote down what I—”
    “Principles of gearing! Theory of water expansion!” shouted Urn. “But we don’t need Ibid’s Civics or Gnomon’s Ectopia , that’s for sure—”
    “What? They belong to all mankind!” snapped Didactylos.
    “Then if all mankind will come and help us carry them, that’s fine,” said Urn. “But if it’s just the two of us, I prefer to carry something useful.”
    “Useful? Books on mechanisms?”
    “Yes! They can show people how to live better!”
    “And these show people how to be people,” said Didactylos. “Which reminds me. Find me another lantern. I feel quite blind