Thief of Time

is, that’s all.”
    “You, er, you appreciate art?” Lobsang ventured.
    “I know what I like,” said Susan, still staring at the busy gray figures. “And right now I’d like quite a lot of weaponry.”
    “We’d better move—”
    “The bastards get into your head if you let them,” said Susan, not moving. “When you find yourself thinking ‘There ought to be a law,’ or ‘I don’t make the rules, after all,’ or—”
    “I really think we should leave,” said Lobsang carefully. “And I think this because there are some of them coming up the stairs.”
    Her head jerked around.
    “What are you standing about for, then?” she said.
    They ran through the next arch and into a gallery of pottery, turning to look only when they reached the far end. Three Auditors were following them. They weren’t running, but there was something about their synchronized step that had a horrible we’ll-keep-on-coming quality.
    “All right, let’s go this way—”
    “No, let’s go this way,” said Lobsang.
    “That’s not the way we need to go!” Susan snapped.
    “No, but the sign up there says ‘Arms and Armor’!”
    “So? Are you any good with weapons?”
    “No!” said Lobsang proudly, and then realized she’d taken this the wrong way.
    “You see, I’ve been taught to fight without—”
    “Maybe there’s a sword I can use,” Susan growled and strode forward.
    By the time the Auditors entered the gallery, there were more than three of them. The gray crowd paused.
    Susan had found a sword, part of a display of Agatean armor. It had been blunted by disuse, but anger flared along the blade.
    “Should we keep running?” said Lobsang.
    “No. They always catch up. I don’t know if we can kill them here but we can make them wish we could. You still haven’t got a weapon?”
    “No, because, you see, I’ve been trained to—”
    “Just keep out of my way then, okay?”
    The Auditors advanced cautiously, which struck Lobsang as odd.
    “We can’t kill them?” said Lobsang.
    “It depends on how alive they’ve let themselves become.”
    “But they look scared,” he said.
    “They’re human-shaped,” said Susan over her shoulder. “Human bodies. Perfect copies. Human bodies have had thousands and thousands of years of not wanting to be cut in half. That kind of leaks into the brain, don’t you think?”
    And then the Auditors were circling and moving in. Of course they would all attack at once. No one would want to be first.
    Three made a grab at Lobsang.
    He’d enjoyed the fighting, back in the training dojos. Of course, everyone was padded, and no one was actually trying to kill you, and that helped. But Lobsang had done well because he was good at slicing. He could always find that extra edge. And if you had that edge, you didn’t need quite so much skill.
    There was no edge here. There was no time to slice.
    He adopted a mixture of sna-fu and okidoki and anything that worked, because you were dead if you treated a real fight like the dojo. The gray men were no contest, in any case. They just attempted to grab and hug. A granny could fend them off.
    He sent two reeling and turned to the third, which was trying to grab him around the neck. He broke the hold, spun around ready to chop, and hesitated.
    “Oh, good grief!” said a voice.
    Susan’s blade whirled past Lobsang’s face.
    The head in front of him was parted from its former body in a shower not of blood but of colored, floating dust. The body evaporated, became very briefly a gray robed shape in the air, and vanished.
    Lobsang heard a couple of thumps behind him, and then Susan grabbed his shoulder.
    “You’re not supposed to hesitate , you know!” she said.
    “But it was a woman!”
    “It was not ! But it was the last one. Now let’s go, before the rest get here.” She nodded at a second group of Auditors that were watching them very carefully from the end of the hall.
    “They weren’t much of a contest anyway,” said Lobsang, getting his breath. “What are those doing?”
    “Learning. Can you fight better than that?”
    “Of course!”
    “Good, because next time they’ll be as good as you just were. Where to now?”
    “Er…this way!”
    The next gallery was full of stuffed animals. There’d been a vogue for it, a few centuries before. These weren’t the sad old hunting-trophy bears or geriatric tigers whose claws had faced a man armed with nothing more than five crossbows, twenty loaders, and a hundred