Thief of Time

actually ever had a grave, have you?” said Jeremy.
    “Jutht a figure of thpeech, thur, jutht a figure of thpeech,” said Igor, looking hurt.
    “This is an idea I’ve…I’ve had for a clock…”
    “The Glath Clock,” said Igor. “Yeth. I know about it. My grandfather Igor helped build the firtht one.”
    “The first one? But it’s just a story for children! And I dreamed about it, and—”
    “Grandfather Igor alwayth thed there wath thomething very thtrange about all that,” said Igor. “The explothion and everything.”
    “It exploded? Because of the metal spring?”
    “Not exactly an explothion,” said Igor. “We’re no thtrangerth to explothionth, uth Igorth. It wath… very odd . And we’re no thtrangerth to odd, either.”
    “Are you telling me it really existed?”
    Igor seemed embarrassed about this.
    “Yeth,” he said, “and then again, no.”
    “Things either exist or they don’t,” said Jeremy. “I am very clear about that. I have medicine.”
    “It exithted,” said Igor, “and then, after it did, it never had. Thith ith what my grandfather told me, and he built that clock with thethe very handth!”
    Jeremy looked down. Igor’s hands were gnarled, and, now he came to look at them, had a lot of scar tissue around the wrists.
    “We really believe in heirloomth in our family,” said Igor, catching his gaze.
    “Sort of…hand-me-downs, ahahaha,” said Jeremy. He wondered where his medicine was.
    “Very droll, thur,” said Igor. “But Grandfather Igor alwayth thaid that afterward it wath like…a dream, thur.”
    “A dream…”
    “The workthop wath different. The clock wathn’t there. Demented Doctor Wingle, that wath hith marthter at the time, wathn’t working on the glath clock at all but on a way of extracting thunthine from orangeth. Thingth were different and they alwayth had been, thur. Like it never happened.”
    “But it turned up in a book for children!”
    “Yeth, thur. Bit of a conundrum, thur.”
    Jeremy stared at the sheet with its burden of scribbles. An accurate clock. That’s all it was. A clock that’d make all other clocks unnecessary, Lady LeJean had said. Building a clock like that would mean the clockmaker went down in timekeeping history. True, the book had said that Time had got trapped in the clock, but Jeremy had no interest whatsoever in things that were Made Up. Anyway, a clock measured. Distance didn’t get tangled up in a tape measure. All a clock did was count teeth on a wheel. Or…light…
    Light with teeth. He’d seen that in the dream. Light not as something bright in the sky, but as an excited line, going up and down like a wave…
    “Could you …build something like this?” he said.
    Igor looked at the drawings again.
    “Yeth,” he said, nodding. Then he pointed to several large glass containers around the drawing of the central column of the clock. “And I know what thethe are,” he said.
    “In my dr—I mean, I imagined them as fizzing,” said Jeremy.
    “Very, very thecret knowledge, thothe jarth,” said Igor. “Can you get copper rodth here, thur?”
    “In Ankh-Morpork? Easily.”
    “And thinc?”
    “Lots of it, yes.”
    “Thulphuric athid?”
    “By the carboy, yes.”
    “I mutht have died and gone to heaven,” said Igor. “Jutht put me near enough copper and thinc and athid, thur,” he said, “and then we thall thee thparkth.”
    Tick
    “My name,” said Lu-Tze, leaning on his broom as the irate ting raised a hand, “is Lu-Tze.”
    The dojo went silent. The attacker paused in midbellow.
    “—Ai! Hao— gng! Gnh? Ohsheeeeeeohsheeeeeee …”
    The man did not move but seemed instead to turn in on himself, sagging from the martial stance into a kind of horrified, penitent crouch.
    Lu-Tze bent over and struck a match on his unprotesting chin.
    “What’s your name, lad?” he said, lighting his ragged cigarette.
    “His name is mud, Lu-Tze,” said the dojo master, striding forward. He gave the unmoving challenger a kick. “Well, Mud, you know the rules. Face the man you have challenged, or give up the belt.”
    The figure remained very still for a moment, and then cautiously, in a manner almost theatrically designed not to give offense, started to fumble with his belt.
    “No, no, we don’t need that,” said Lu-Tze kindly. “It was a good challenge. A decent ‘Ai!’ and a very passable ‘Hai-eee!,’ I thought. Good martial gibberish all around, such as you don’t often hear these days.