Thief of Time

in the world. People like Soto spent every day in the world of time. They learned flexibility, because if you were stiff out there, you were dead. People like Soto…now, there was an idea…
    He looked toward the other end of the terrace, where a couple of servants were sweeping up the fallen cherry blossom.
    “I see a harmonious solution,” he said.
    “Oh, yes?”
    “An unusually talented boy like Ludd needs a master, not the discipline of the schoolroom.”
    “Possibly, but—”
    The Master of Novices followed Rinpo’s gaze.
    “Oh,” he said, and he smiled in a way that was not entirely nice. This smile contained a certain anticipatory element, a hint that trouble might be in store for someone who, in his opinion, richly deserved it.
    “A name occurs,” said Rinpo.
    “To me also,” said the Master of Novices.
    “A name I’ve heard too often,” Rinpo went on.
    “I suppose that either he will break the boy, or the boy will break him, or it is always possible that they will break each other…” the master mused.
    “So, in the patois of the world,” said Rinpo, “there is no actual downside .”
    “Would the abbot approve, though?” said the Master, testing a welcome idea for any weak points. “He has always had a certain rather tiresome regard for…the sweeper.”
    “The abbot is a dear kind man but at the moment his teeth are giving him trouble and he is not walking at all well,” said Rinpo. “And these are difficult times. I’m sure he will be pleased to accept our joint recommendation. Why, it’s practically a minor matter of day-to-day affairs.”
    And thus the future was decided.
    They were not bad men. They had worked hard on behalf of the valley for hundreds of years. But it is possible, after a while, to develop certain dangerous habits of thought. One is that, while all important enterprises need careful organization, it is the organization that needs organizing, rather than the enterprise. And another is that tranquillity is always a good thing.
    Tick
    There was a row of alarm clocks on the table by Jeremy’s bed. He did not need them, because he woke up when he wanted to. They were there for testing. He set them for seven, and woke up at 6:59 to check that they went off on time.
    Tonight he went to bed early, with a drink of water and the Grim Fairy Tales.
    He had never been interested in stories, at any age, and had never quite understood the basic concept. He’d never read a work of fiction all the way through. He did remember, as a small boy, being really annoyed at the depiction of Hickory Dickory Dock in a rag book of nursery rhymes because the clock in the drawing was completely wrong for the period.
    He tried to read Grim Fairy Tales . They had titles like “How the Wicked Queen Danced in Red-Hot Shoes!” and “The Old Lady in the Oven.” There was simply no mention of clocks of any sort in any of them. Their authors seemed to have a thing about not mentioning clocks.
    “The Glass Clock of Bad Schüschein,” on the other hand, did have a clock. Of a sort. And it was…odd. A wicked man—readers could see he was wicked because it said he was wicked, right there on the page—built a clock of glass in which he captured Time herself, but things went wrong because there was one part of the clock, a spring, that he couldn’t make out of glass, and it broke under the strain, and Time was set free, and the man aged ten thousand years in a second and crumbled to dust and—not surprisingly, in Jeremy’s opinion—was never seen again. The story ended with a moral: Large Enterprises Depend Upon Small Details. Jeremy couldn’t see why it couldn’t have just as well been: It’s Wrong To Trap Nonexistent Women in Clocks, or: It Would Have Worked With A Glass Spring.
    But even to Jeremy’s inexperienced eye, there was something wrong with the whole story. It read as though the writer was trying to make sense of something he’d seen, or been told, and had misunderstood things. And—hah!—although it was set hundreds of years ago when even in Uberwald there were only natural cuckoo clocks, the artist had drawn a long case clock of the sort that wasn’t around even fifteen years ago. The stupidity of some people! You’d laugh if it wasn’t so tragic!
    He put the book aside and spent the rest of the evening doing a little design work for the guild. They paid him handsomely for this, provided he promised never to turn up in person.
    Then he put the work on the