Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett [44]
He stopped and threw himself flat on the paving slabs.
“Get down now!”
But Lobsang was already headlong. He heard something pass overhead with a plangent sound. He looked back and saw the last ibis tumbling in the air, shedding feathers, and shrinking as it flew. It squawked and vanished with a “pop.”
Not vanished entirely. An egg followed the same trajectory for a few seconds, and then smashed on the stones.
“Random time! Come on, come on!” shouted Lu-Tze. He scrambled to his feet again, headed toward an ornamental grill in the cliff face ahead of them, and with surprising strength wrenched it out of the wall.
“It’s a bit of a drop but if you roll when you land you’ll be okay,” he said, lowering himself into the hole.
“Where does it go to?”
“The Procrastinators, of course!”
“But novices aren’t allowed in there under pain of death!”
“That’s a coincidence,” said Lu-Tze, lowering himself to the tips of his fingers. “Because death is what awaits you if you stay out there, too.”
He dropped into the darkness. A moment later there was an unenlightened curse from below.
Lobsang climbed in, hung by his fingertips, dropped, and rolled when he hit the floor below.
“Well done,” said Lu-Tze in the gloom. “When in doubt, choose to live. This way!”
The passageway opened into a wide corridor. The noise here was shattering. Something mechanical was in agony.
There was a “crump” and, a few moments after, a babble of voices.
Several dozen monks, wearing thick cork hats as well as their traditional robes, came running around the corner. Most of them were yelling. A few of the brighter ones were saving their breath in order to cover the ground more quickly. Lu-Tze grabbed one of them, who tried to struggle free.
“Let me go!”
“What’s happening?”
“Just get out of here before they all go!”
The monk shook himself free and sped after the rest of them.
Lu-Tze bent down, picked up a fallen cork helmet, and solemnly handed it to Lobsang.
“Health and safety at work,” he said. “Very important.”
“Will it protect me?” said Lobsang, putting it on.
“Not really. But when they find your head, it may be recognizable. When we get into the hall, don’t touch anything.”
Lobsang had been expecting some vaulted, magnificent structure. People talked about the Procrastinator Hall as if it was some kind of huge cathedral. But what there was, at the end of the passage, was a haze of blue smoke. It was only when his eyes got accustomed to the swirling gloom that he saw the nearest cylinder.
It was a squat pillar of rock, about three yards across and six yards high. It was spinning so fast that it was a blur. Around it the air flickered with slivers of silver-blue light.
“See? They’re dumping! Over here! Quick!”
He ran after Lu-Tze, and saw there were hundreds, no, thousands of the cylinders, some of them reaching all the way to the cavern roof…
There were still monks in here. Some of them were running to and from the wells with buckets of water, which flashed into steam when they threw it over the smoking stone bearings at the base of the cylinders.
“Idiots,” the sweeper muttered. He cupped his hands and shouted, “Where-is-the-overseer?”
Lobsang pointed down, to the edge of a wooden podium built onto the wall of the hall.
There was a rotting cork hat there, and a pair of ancient sandals. In between was a pile of gray dust.
“Poor fellow,” said Lu-Tze. “A full fifty thousand years in one jolt, I’d say.” He glared at the scurrying monks again. “Will you lot stop and come here! I ain’t going to ask you twice!”
Several of them swept the sweat out of their eyes and trotted toward the podium, relieved to hear any kind of order, while behind them the Procrastinators screamed.
“Right!” said Lu-Tze, as they were joined by more and more. “Now listen to me! This is just a surge cascade! You’ve all heard of them! We can deal with it! We just have to cross-link futures and pasts,