Thief of Time

to repair.”
    He stared at the embers.
    “Funny thing,” he said. “Wen himself had some very funny ideas about time, come the finish. Wrote some very strange stuff. He reckoned Time was alive. He said it acted like a living thing, anyway. Very strange ideas indeed. He said he’d met Time, and she was a woman. To him, anyway. Everyone says that was just a very complicated metaphor, and maybe I was just hit on the head or something, but on that day I looked at the glass clock just as it exploded and—”
    He stood up and grabbed his broom.
    “Best foot forward, lad. Another two or three seconds and we’ll be down in Bong Phut.”
    “What were you going to say?” said Lobsang, hurrying to his feet.
    “Oh, just an old man rambling,” said Lu-Tze. “The mind wanders a bit when you get over seven hundred. Let’s get moving.”
    “Sweeper?”
    “Yes, lad?”
    “Why are we carrying spinners on our backs?”
    “All in good time, lad. I hope.”
    “We’re carrying time, right? If time stops, we can keep going? Like…divers?”
    “Full marks.”
    “And—?”
    “Another question?”
    “Time is a ‘she’? None of the teachers have mentioned it and I don’t recall anything in the scrolls.”
    “Don’t you think about that. Wen wrote…well, the Secret Scroll, it’s called. They keep it in a locked room. Only the abbots and the most senior monks ever get to see it.”
    Lobsang couldn’t let that one pass.
    “So how did you—?” he began.
    “Well, you wouldn’t expect men like that to do the sweeping up in there, would you?” said Lu-Tze. “Terribly dusty, it got.”
    “What was it about?”
    “I didn’t read much of it. Didn’t feel it was right,” said Lu-Tze.
    “You? What was it about, then?”
    “It was a love poem. And it was a good one…”
    Lu-Tze’s image blurred, as he sliced time. Then it faded and vanished. A line of footprints appeared across the snowfield.
    Lobsang wrapped time around himself, and followed. And a memory came from nowhere at all: Wen was right .
    Tick
    There were lots of places like the warehouse. There always are, in every old city, no matter how valuable the building land is. Sometimes, space just gets lost.
    A workshop is built, and then another beside it. Factories and storerooms and sheds and temporary lean-tos crawl toward one another, meet, and merge. Spaces between outside walls are roofed with tar paper. Odd-shaped bits of ground are colonized by someone’s nailing up a bit of wall and cutting a doorway. Old doorways are masked by piles of lumber or new tool racks. The old men who knew what was where move on and die, just like the flies who punctuate the thick cobwebs on the grubby windows. Young men, in this noisome world of whirring lathes and paint shops and cluttered workbenches, don’t have time to explore.
    And so there are spaces like this, a small warehouse with a crusted skylight that no fewer than four factory owners think is owned by one of the other three, when they think about it at all. In fact, each of them own one wall, and certainly no one now recalls who roofed the space. Beyond the walls on all four sides men and dwarfs bend iron, saw planks, make string, and turn screws. But in here is a silence known only to rats.
    The air moved, for the first time in years. Dust balls rolled across the floor. Little motes sparkled and spun in the light that forced its way down from the roof. In the surrounding area, invisible and subtle, matter began to move. It came from workmen’s sandwiches and gutter dirt and pigeon feathers, an atom here, a molecule there, and streamed, unheeded, into the center of the space.
    It spiraled. Eventually it became, after passing through some strange, ancient, and horrible shapes, Lady LeJean.
    She staggered but managed to stay upright.
    Other Auditors also appeared and, as they did so, it seemed for the first time that they had never really not been there. The dead grayness of the light merely took on shapes; they emerged like ships from a fog. You stare at the fog, and suddenly part of the fog is hull which has been there all along, and now there is nothing for it but the race for the lifeboats…
    Lady LeJean said: “I cannot keep doing this. It is too painful.”
    One said, Ah…can you tell us what pain is like? We have often wondered.
    “No. No, I don’t think I can. It is…a body thing. It is not pleasant. From now on, I will retain the body.”
    One said, That could be dangerous.
    Lady LeJean