Thief of Time

past. A small baby should be easy for something…someone that rebuilds the universe once every instant.
    Susan sighed. And you had to remember that Time probably wasn’t time, in the same way that Death wasn’t exactly the same as death and War wasn’t exactly the same as war. She’d met War, a big fat man with an inappropriate sense of humor and a habit of repeating himself, and he certainly didn’t personally attend every minor fracas. She disliked Pestilence, who gave her funny looks, and Famine was just wasted and weird. None of them ran their…call it their discipline. They personified it.
    Given that she’d met the Tooth Fairy, the Soul Cake Duck, and Old Man Trouble, it amazed Susan that she had grown up to be mostly human, nearly normal.
    As she stared at her notes, her hair unwound itself from its tight bun and took up its ground-state position, which was that of someone who had just touched something highly electrical. It spread out around her head like a cloud, with one black streak of nearly normal hair.
    Grandfather might be an ultimate destroyer of worlds and the final truth of the universe, but that wasn’t to say he didn’t take an interest in the little people. Perhaps Time did, too.
    She smiled.
    Time waited for no man, they said.
    Perhaps she’d waited for one, once.
    Susan was aware that someone was looking at her, turned, and saw the Death of Rats peering through the lens of the glasses that a mildly distracted man was searching for on the other side of the room. Up on a long-disregarded bust of a former historian the raven preened himself.
    “Well?” she said.
    S QUEAK!
    “Oh, he is, is he?”
    The doors of the library were nuzzled open and a white horse walked in. There is a terrible habit among horsey people to call a white horse “gray,” but even one of that bowlegged fraternity would have had to admit that this one, at least, was white—not as white as snow, which is a dead white, but at least as white as milk, which is alive. His bridle and reins were black, and so was the saddle, but all of them were, in a sense, just for show. If the horse of Death was inclined to let you ride him, then you’d stay on, saddle or no. And there was no upper limit to the amount of people he could carry. After all, plagues sometimes happened suddenly.
    The historians paid him no attention. Horses did not walk into libraries.
    Susan mounted. There were plenty of times when she wished she’d been born completely human and wholly normal. She’d give up all the immortality tomorrow—
    —apart from Binky.
    A moment later, four hoofprints glowed like plasma in the air above the museum and faded away.
    Tick
    The crunch-crunch of the yeti’s feet over the snow, and the eternal wind of the mountains were the only sounds.
    Then Lobsang said: “By ‘cut off his head,’ you actually mean…?”
    “Sever the head from the body,” said Lu-Tze.
    “And,” said Lobsang, still in the tones of one carefully exploring every aspect of the haunted cave, “he doesn’t mind?”
    “Waal, it’s a nuisance,” said the yeti. “A bit of a paarty trick. But it okaay, if it helps. The Sweeper haas alwaays been a goood friend to us. We owe him faavors.”
    “I’ve tried teaching ’em the Way,” said Lu-Tze proudly.
    “Yaas. Ver’ usefuul. ‘A washed pot never boils,’” said the yeti.
    Curiosity vied with annoyance in Lobsang’s head, and won.
    “What have I missed here?” he said. “You don’t die?”
    “I doon’t die? Wit my head cut off? For laughing! Ho. Ho,” said the yeti. “Of course I die. But this is not such a sizeaable traansaaction.”
    “It took us years to work out what the yetis were up to,” said Lu-Tze. “Their loops played hob with the Mandala until the abbot worked out how to allow for them. They’ve been extinct three times.”
    “Three times, eh?” said Lobsang. “That’s a lot of times to go extinct. I mean, most species only manage it once, don’t they?”
    The yeti was now entering taller forest, of ancient pines.
    “This’d be a good place,” said Lu-Tze. “Put us down, sir.”
    “And we’ll chop your head off,” said Lobsang weakly. “What am I saying? I’m not going to chop anyone’s head off!”
    “You heard him say it doesn’t bother him,” said Lu-Tze, as they were gently lowered to the ground.
    “That’s not the point!” said Lobsang hotly.
    “It’s his head,” Lu-Tze pointed out.
    “But I mind!”
    “Oh, well, in that