Thief of Time

escaped as he did so, forming brief pictures in the air before the page turned, and then went flying and fading into the distant, dark corners of the room. There were snatches of sound, too, of laughter, tears, screams, and, for some reason, a brief burst of xylophone music that caused him to pause for a moment.
    An immortal has a great deal to remember. Sometimes it’s better to put things where they will be safe.
    One ancient memory, brown and cracking around the edges, lingered in the air over the desk. It showed five figures, four on horseback, one in a chariot, all apparently riding out of a thunderstorm. The horses were at a full gallop. There was a lot of smoke and flame and general excitement.
    A H, THE OLD DAYS , said Death, BEFORE THERE WAS THIS FASHION FOR HAVING A SOLO CAREER.
    S QUEAK? the Death of Rats inquired.
    O H, YES, said Death. O NCE THERE WERE FIVE OF US. F IVE HORSEMEN . B UT YOU KNOW HOW THINGS ARE. T HERE’S ALWAYS A ROW. C REATIVE DISAGREEMENTS, ROOMS BEING TRASHED, THAT SORT OF THING. He sighed. A ND THINGS SAID THAT PERHAPS SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SAID.
    He turned a few more pages and sighed again. When you needed an ally, and you were Death, on whom could you absolutely rely?
    His thoughtful gaze fell on the teddy bear mug.
    Of course, there was always family. Yes. He’d promised not to do this again, but he’d never got the hang of promises.
    He got up and went back to the mirror. There was not a lot of time. Things in the mirror were closer than they appeared.
    There was slithering noise, a breathless moment of silence, and a crash like a bag of skittles being dropped.
    The Death of Rats winced. The raven took off hurriedly.
    H ELP ME UP, PLEASE, said a voice from the shadows. A ND THEN PLEASE CLEAN UP THE DAMN BUTTER.
    Tick
    This desk was a field of galaxies.
    Things twinkled. There were complex wheels and spirals, brilliant against the blackness…
    Jeremy always liked the moment when he had a clock in pieces, with every wheel and spring carefully laid out on the black velvet cloth in front of him. It was like looking at Time, dismantled, controllable, every part of it understood…
    He wished his life was like that. It would be nice to reduce it to bits, spread them all out on the table, clean and oil them properly, and put them together so that they coiled and spun as they ought to. But sometimes it seemed that the life of Jeremy had been assembled by a not very competent craftsman who had allowed a number of small but important things to go ping into the corners of the room.
    He wished he liked people more, but somehow he could never get on with them. He never knew what to say. If life was a party, he wasn’t even in the kitchen. He envied the people who made it as far as the kitchen. There would probably be the remains of the dip to eat, and a bottle or two of cheap wine that someone had brought along that’d probably be okay if you took out the drowned cigarette stubs. There might even be a girl in the kitchen, perhaps, although Jeremy knew the limits of his imagination.
    But Jeremy never even got an invitation.
    Clocks, now…clocks were different. He knew what made clocks tick.
    His full name was Jeremy Clockson, and that was no accident. He’d been a member of the Guild of Clockmakers since he was a few days old, and everyone knew what that meant. It meant his life had begun in a basket, on a doorstep. Everyone knew how it worked. All the guilds took in the foundlings that arrived with the morning milk. It was an ancient form of charity, and there were far worse fates. The orphans got a life, and an upbringing of a sort, and a trade, and a future, and a name. Many a fine lady or master craftsman or city dignitary had telltale surnames like Ludd or Doughy or Pune or Clockson. They’d been named after trade heroes or patron deities, and this turned them into a kind of family. The older ones remembered where they came from, and at Hogswatch they were liberal with donations of food and clothing to the various younger brothers and sisters of the basket. It wasn’t perfect, but then, what is?
    So Jeremy had grown up healthy, and rather strange, and with a gift for his adoptive craft that almost made up for every other personal endowment that he did not possess.
    The shop bell rang. He sighed and put down his eyeglass. He didn’t rush, though. There was a lot to look at in the shop. Sometimes he even had to cough to attract the customer’s attention. That being said,