Thief of Time

you.”
    “Fair enough. Fair enough.” Nanny Ogg put the bottle aside and took a draught of the brandy as though it was beer.
    “A man came knocking,” she said. “Three times he came, in my life. Last time was, oh, maybe ten days ago. Same man every time. He wanted a midwife—”
    “Ten days ago?” said Susan. “But the child’s at least sixt—” She stopped.
    “Ah, you’ve got it,” said Mrs. Ogg. “I could see you was bright. Time didn’t matter to him. He wanted the best midwife. And it was like, he’d found out about me, but got the date wrong, just like you or me could knock on the wrong door. Can you understand what I mean?”
    “More than you think,” said Susan.
    “The third time”—another gulp at the brandy—“he was in a bit of a state,” said Mrs. Ogg. “That’s how I knew he was just a man, despite everything that happened after. It was because he was panicking, to tell you the truth. Pregnant fathers often panic. He was going on about me coming right away and how there was no time. He had all the time in the world, he just wasn’t thinking properly, ’cos husbands never do when the time comes. They panic, ’cos it ain’t their world anymore.”
    “And what happened next?” said Susan.
    “He took me in his, well, it was like one of them old chariots, he took me to…” Mrs. Ogg hesitated. “I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my life, I’ll have you know,” she said, as if preparing the ground for a revelation.
    “I can believe it.”
    “It was a castle made of glass.” Mrs. Ogg gave Susan a look that dared her to disbelieve. Susan decided to hurry things up.
    “Mrs. Ogg, one of my earliest memories is of helping to feed the Pale Horse. You know? The one outside? The horse of Death? His name is Binky. So please don’t keep stopping. There is practically no limit to the things I find normal.”
    “There was a woman…well, eventually there was a woman,” said the witch. “Can you imagine someone exploding into a million pieces? Yes, I expect you can. Well, imagine it happening the other way. There’s a mist and it’s all flying together and then, whoosh, there’s a woman. Then, whoosh, back into a mist again. And all the time, this noise…” Mrs. Ogg ran her finger around the edge of the brandy glass, making it hum.
    “A woman kept…incarnating and then disappearing again? Why?”
    “Because she was frightened, of course! First time, see?” Mrs. Ogg grinned. “I person’ly never had any problems in that area but I’ve been at a lot of births when it’s all new to the girl and she’ll be frightened as hell and when push comes to shove, if you take my meaning, old midwifery term there, she’ll be yellin’ and swearin’ at the father and I reckon that she’d give anything to be somewhere else. Well, this lady could be somewhere else. We’d have been in a real pickle if it wasn’t for the man, as it turned out.”
    “The man that brought you?”
    “He was kind of foreign, you know? Like the Hub people. Bald as a coot. I remember thinking, ‘you look like a young man, mister, but you look like you’ve been a young man for a long, long time if I’m any judge.’ Normally I wouldn’t have any man there, but he sat and talked to her in his foreign lingo and sang her songs and little poems and soothed her, and back she came, out of thin air, and I was ready and it was one, two, done . And then she was gone. Except that she was still there, I think. In the air.”
    “What did she look like?” said Susan.
    Mrs. Ogg gave her a Look.
    “You’ve got to remember the view I got where I was sitting,” she said. “The kind of description I might give you ain’t a thing anyone’d put on a poster, if you understand me. And no woman looks at her best at a time like that. She was young, she had dark hair…”
    Mrs. Ogg refilled her brandy glass, and this meant the pause went on for some time, “And she was old, too, if you’re after the truth of it. Not old like me. I mean old .”
    She stared at the fire.
    “Old like darkness and stars,” she said, to the flames.
    “The boy was left outside the Thieves’ Guild,” said Susan, to break the silence. “I suppose they thought that with gifts like that he’d be all right.”
    “He?” said Mrs. Ogg. “Why he ? Why are you talking about he ?”
    Tick
    Lady LeJean was being strong.
    She’d never realized how much humans were controlled by their bodies. The thing nagged night and day. It