Thief of Time

vithit, but when the’th gone we experienthe new difficultieth.”
    “What are you suggesting, Igor?”
    “Me, thur? I’m not a thuggethtive perthon, thur. But latht time part of the divider array had cracked.”
    “You know I think that was because of dimensional instability!”
    “ Yeth , thur.”
    “Why are you giving me that funny look, Igor?”
    Igor shrugged. That is, one shoulder was momentarily as high as the other one. “Goeth with the fathe, thur.”
    “She’d hardly pay us so handsomely and then sabotage the project, would she? Why would she do that?”
    Igor hesitated. He had his back right up against the Code now.
    “I am thtill wondering if thhe ith all thhe theemth, thur.”
    “Sorry? I didn’t catch that.”
    “I wonder if we can trutht her, thur,” said Igor patiently.
    “Oh, go and calibrate the complexity resonator, will you?”
    Grumbling, Igor obeyed.
    The second time that he’d followed their benefactor she’d gone to a hotel. Next day she’d headed for a large house in Kings Way, where she’d been met by an oily man who’d made a great play of presenting her with a key. Igor had followed the oleaginous man back to his office in a nearby street where—because there are few things that are kept from a man with a face full of stitches—he’d learned that she’d just bought the lease for a very large bar of gold.
    After that, Igor had resorted to an ancient Ankh-Morpork tradition and paid someone to follow her ladyship. There was enough gold in the workshops, heavens knew, and the master took no interest in it.
    Lady LeJean went to the opera. Lady LeJean went to art galleries. Lady LeJean was living life to the fullest. Except that Lady LeJean, as far as Igor could determine, never visited restaurants and had no food delivered to the house.
    Lady LeJean was up to something. Igor could spot this easily. Lady LeJean also did not appear in Twurps’ Peerage or the Almanack de Gothic or any of the other reference books Igor had checked as a matter of course, which meant that she had something to hide. Of course, he had worked for masters who occasionally had a great deal to hide, sometimes in deep holes at midnight. But this situation was morally different for two reasons. Her ladyship wasn’t his master, Jeremy was, and that was where his loyalty lay. And Igor had decided it was morally different.
    Now he reached the glass clock.
    It looked almost complete. Jeremy had designed a mechanism to go behind the face and Igor had got it made up, all in glass. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the other mechanism, which flickered away down behind the pendulum and took up a disconcertingly small amount of room now that it was assembled; quite a few of its parts were no longer sharing the same set of dimensions as the rest of it. But the clock had a face, and a face needed hands, and so the glass pendulum swung and the glass hands moved and told normal, everyday time. The “tick” had a slightly bell-like quality, as though someone was flicking a wineglass with a fingernail.
    Igor looked at his hand-me-down hands. They were beginning to worry him.
    Now that the glass clock looked like a clock, they began to shake every time Igor came near it.
    Tick
    No one noticed Susan in the library of the Guild of Historians, leafing her way through a pile of books. Occasionally she’d make a note.
    She didn’t know if her other gift was from Death, but she’d always told the children that they had a lazy eye and a business eye. There were two ways of looking at the world. The lazy eye just saw the surface. The business eye saw through into the reality beneath.
    She turned a page.
    Seen through her business eyes, history was very strange indeed. The scars stood out. The history of the country of Ephebe was puzzling, for example. Either its famous philosophers lived for a very long time, or inherited their names, or extra bits had been stitched into history there. The history of Omnia was a mess . Two centuries had been folded into one, by the look of it, and it was only because of the mind-set of the Omnians, whose religion mixed the past and future with the present in any case, that it could possibly have passed unnoticed.
    And what about Koom Valley? Everyone knew that there had been a famous battle there, between dwarfs and trolls and mercenaries on both sides, but how many battles had there actually been ? Historians talked about the valley being in just the right place in disputed