Thief of Time

muffled.
    Lady LeJean’s party was down the street when Igor slipped out and moved quickly into the shadows.
    At the crossroads her ladyship waved one hand vaguely and the trolls headed off by themselves. Igor stayed with her. For all the trademark limp, Igors could move fast when they had to. They often had to, when the mob hit the windmill. *
    Out in the open, he could see more wrong things. She didn’t move quite right. It was as though she was controlling her body, rather than letting it control itself as normal humans do. Even zombies got the hang of things after a while. The effect was subtle, but Igors had very good eyesight. She moved like someone unused to wearing skin.
    The quarry headed down a narrow street, and Igor half hoped that some of the Thieves’ Guild were around. He’d very much like to see what happened if one of them gave her the tap on the noggin that was their prelude to negotiations. One had tried it with Igor yesterday, and if the man had been surprised at the metallic clang he’d been astonished to have his arm grabbed and broken with anatomical exactitude.
    In fact, she turned into an alleyway between a couple of the buildings.
    Igor hesitated. Letting yourself be outlined in the daylight at the mouth of an alley was item one on the local checklist of death. But, on the other hand, he wasn’t actually doing anything wrong, was he? And she didn’t look armed.
    There was no sound of footsteps in the alley. He waited a moment and stuck his head around the corner.
    There was no sign of Lady LeJean. There was also no way out of the alley—it was a dead end, full of rubbish.
    But there was a fading gray shape in the air that vanished even as he stared. It was a hooded robe, gray as fog. It merged into the general gloom and disappeared.
    She turned into an alleyway, and then she’s turned into…something else.
    Igor felt his hands twitch.
    Individual Igors might have their particular specialities, but all of them were expert surgeons and had an inbuilt desire not to see anybody wasted. Up in the mountains, where most of the employment was for woodchoppers and miners, having an Igor living locally was considered very fortunate. There was always the risk of an ax bouncing or a sawblade running wild, and then a man was glad to have an Igor around who could lend a hand—or even an entire arm, if you were lucky.
    And while they practiced their skills freely and generously in the community, the Igors were even more careful to use it among themselves. Magnificent eyesight, a stout pair of lungs, a wonderful digestive system…it was terrible to think of such exquisite workmanship going to the worms. So they made sure it didn’t. They kept it in the family.
    Igor really did have his grandfather’s hands. And now they were bunching into fists, all by themselves.
    Tick
    A very small kettle burned on a fire of wood shavings and dried yak dung.
    “It was…a long time ago,” said Lu-Tze. “Exactly when doesn’t matter, ’cos of what happened. In fact, asking exactly ‘when’ doesn’t make any sense anymore. It depends where you are. In some places it was hundreds of years ago. Some other places…well, maybe it hasn’t happened yet. There was this man in Uberwald. Invented a clock. An amazing clock. It measured the tick of the universe. Know what that is?”
    “No.”
    “Me neither. The abbot’s your man for that kind of stuff. Lemme see…okay…think of the smallest amount of time that you can. Really small. So tiny that a second would be like a billion years. Got that? Well, the cosmic quantum tick…that’s what the abbot calls it…the cosmic quantum tick is much smaller than that. It’s the time it takes to go from now to then. The time it takes an atom to think of wobbling. It’s—”
    “It’s the time it takes for the smallest thing that’s possible to happen to happen?” said Lobsang.
    “Exactly. Well done,” said Lu-Tze. He took a deep breath. “It’s also the time it takes for the whole universe to be destroyed in the past and rebuilt in the future. Don’t look at me like that, that’s what the abbot said.”
    “Has it been happening while we’ve been talking?” said Lobsang.
    “Millions of times. An oodleplex of times, probably.”
    “How many’s that?”
    “It’s one of the abbot’s words. It means more numbers than you can imagine in a yonk.”
    “What’s a yonk?”
    “A very long time.”
    “And we don’t feel it? The universe is destroyed,