Thief of Time

claw.
    “Must be an old nest they’re repairing,” said Lu-Tze. “Can’t have got that advanced this early in the season.”
    “Looks like some kind of an old box to me,” said Lobsang. He squinted to see better. “Is it an old…clock?” he added.
    “Look at what the bird is nibbling,” suggested Lu-Tze.
    “Well, it looks like…a crude gearwheel? But why—”
    “Well spotted. That, lad, is a clock cuckoo. A young one, by the look of it, trying to build a nest that’ll attract a mate. Not much chance of that…see? It got the numerals all wrong and it’s stuck the hands on crooked.”
    “A bird that builds clocks? I thought a cuckoo clock was a clock with a mechanical cuckoo, which came out when—”
    “And where do you think people got such a strange idea from?”
    “But that’s some kind of miracle!”
    “Why?” said Lu-Tze. “They barely go for more than half an hour, they keep lousy time, and the poor dumb males go frantic trying to keep them wound.”
    “But even to—”
    “Everything happens somewhere, I suppose,” said Lu-Tze. “Not worth making too much of a fuss. Got any food left?”
    “No. We finished it last night,” said Lobsang. He added, hopefully, “Er…I heard tell that really advanced monks can live on the, er, life force in the actual air itself…”
    “Only on the planet Sausage, I expect,” said Lu-Tze. “No, we’ll skirt Copperhead and find something in the valleys on the other side. Let’s go, there’s not much time…”
    But time enough to watch a bird, thought Lobsang, as he let the world around him become blue and fade, and the thought was comforting.
    It was easier going without the snow on the ground, provided he avoided the strange resistance offered by bushes and long grass. Lu-Tze walked on ahead, looking oddly colorful and unreal against the faded landscape.
    They went past the entrance to dwarf mines, but saw no one above ground. Lobsang was glad of that. The statues that he had seen in the villages yesterday weren’t dead, he knew, but merely frozen at a different speed of time. Lu-Tze had forbidden him to go near anyone, but he needn’t have bothered. Walking around the living statues was invasive, somehow. It made it worse when you realized that they were moving, but very, very slowly…
    The sun had barely moved from the horizon when they came down through warmer woods on the Rim side of the mountain. Here the landscape had a more domesticated air. It was woodland rather than forest. The game trail they’d been following crossed a creek at a point where there were cart tracks, old but still not overgrown.
    Lobsang looked behind him after he’d walked across the ford, and watched the water very slowly reclaim the shape of his footprints in the stream.
    He’d been trained in time-slicing on the snowfields above the valley, like the rest of the novices. That was so they couldn’t come to any harm, the monks had said, although no one actually explained what harm they might come to. Outside the monastery, this was the first time Lobsang had sliced in a living landscape.
    It was marvelous! Birds hung in the sky. Early morning bumblebees hovered over the opening flowers. The world was a crystal made of living things.
    Lobsang slowed near a group of deer cropping the grass, and watched as the nearest eye of one of them swiveled, with geological slowness, to watch him. He saw the skin move as the muscles underneath started to bunch for flight…
    “Time for a smoko,” said Lu-Tze.
    The world around Lobsang speeded up. The deer fled, along with the magic of the moment.
    “What’s a smoko?” said Lobsang. He was annoyed. The quiet slow world had been fun.
    “You ever been to Fourecks?”
    “No. There’s a barman at the Bunch of Grapes from there, though.”
    Lu-Tze lit one of his skinny cigarettes.
    “Don’t mean much,” he said. “The barman everywhere is from there. Strange country. Big time-source right in the middle, very useful. Time and space all tangled up. Probably all that beer. Nice place, though. Now…you see that country down there?”
    On one side of the clearing the ground fell away steeply, showing treetops and, beyond, a small patchwork of fields tucked into a fold in the mountains. In the distance was a gorge, and Lobsang thought he could make out a bridge across it.
    “Doesn’t look much like a country,” he said. “Looks more like a shelf.”
    “That’s witch country,” said Lu-Tze. “And we’re going to