Thief of Time

it? Everyone thinks you’re a great hero and…you don’t fight, and they think you possess all kinds of strange knowledge and…and it’s just… tricking people. Isn’t it? Even the abbot? I thought you’d teach me…things worth knowing…”
    “I’ve got her address, if that’s what you want. If you mention my name—oh. I see you don’t mean that, right?”
    “I don’t want to be ungrateful, I just thought—”
    “You thought I should use mysterious powers derived from a lifetime of study just to keep my legs warm? Eh?”
    “Well—”
    “Debase the sacred teachings for the sake of my knees, you think?”
    “If you put it like that—”
    Then something made Lobsang look down.
    He was standing in six inches of snow. Lu-Tze was not. His sandals were standing in two puddles. The ice was melting away around his toes. His pink, warm toes.
    “Toes, now, that’s another matter,” said the sweeper. “Mrs. Cosmopilite is a wizard with longjohns, but she can’t turn a heel worth a damn.” Lobsang looked up into a wink. “Always remember Rule One, eh?”
    Lu-Tze patted the shaken boy on the arm. “But you’re doing well,” he said. “Let’s have a quiet sit down and a brew up.” He pointed to some rocks, that at least offered some protection from the wind; snow had piled up against them in big white mounds.
    “Lu-Tze?”
    “Yes, lad?”
    “I’ve got a question. Can you give me a straight answer?” “I’ll try, of course.” “What the hell is going on?”
    Lu-Tze brushed the snow off a rock. “Oh,” he said. “One of the difficult questions.”
    Tick
    Igor had to admit it. When it came to getting weird things done, sane beat mad hands down.
    He’d been used to masters who, despite doing wonderful handstands on the edge of the mental catastrophe curve, couldn’t put their own trousers on without a map. Like all Igors, he’d learned how to deal with them. In truth, it wasn’t a difficult job (although sometimes you had to work the graveyard shift), and once you got them settled into their routine you could get on with your own work and they wouldn’t bother you until the lightning rod needed raising.
    It wasn’t like that with Jeremy. He was truly a man you could set your watch by. Igor had never seen a life so organized, so slimmed down, so timed. He found himself thinking of his new master as the tick-tock man.
    One of Igor’s former masters had made a tick-tock man, all levers and gearwheels and cranks and clockwork. Instead of a brain, it had a long tape punched with holes. Instead of a heart, it had a big spring. Provided everything in the kitchen was very carefully positioned, the thing could sweep the floor and make a passable cup of tea. If it wasn’t carefully positioned, or if the ticking, clicking thing hit an unexpected bump, then it’d strip the plaster off the walls and make a furious cup of cat.
    Then his master had conceived the idea of making the thing live, so that it could punch its own tapes and wind its own spring. Igor, who knew exactly when to follow instructions to the letter, dutifully rigged up the classic rising-table-and-lightning rod arrangement on the evening of a really good storm. He didn’t see exactly what happened thereafter, because he wasn’t there when the lightning hit the clockwork. No, Igor was at a dead run halfway down the hill to the village, with all his possessions in a carpetbag. Even so, a white-hot cogwheel had whirred over his head and buried itself in a tree trunk.
    Loyalty to a master was very important, but it took second place to loyalty to Igordom. If the world was going to be full of lurching servants, then they were damn well going to be called Igor.
    It seemed to this Igor that if you could make a tick-tock man live, he’d be like Jeremy. And Jeremy was ticking faster as the clock neared completion.
    Igor didn’t much like the clock. He was a people person. He preferred things that bled. And as the clock grew, with its shimmering crystal parts that didn’t seem entirely all here , so Jeremy grew more absorbed and Igor grew more tense. There was definitely something new happening here, and Igors were avid to learn new things. But there were limits. Igors did not believe in “Forbidden Knowledge” and “Things Man Was Not Meant to Know” but obviously there were some things a man was not meant to know, such as what it felt like to have every single particle of your body sucked into a little hole, and that seemed