Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett [54]
“We learned a bit of the theory but—”
“Soto said you stopped time for yourself back in the city. The Stance of the Coyote, it’s called. Very hard to do, and I don’t reckon they teach it in the Thieves’ Guild, eh?”
“I suppose I was lucky, Sweeper.”
“Good. Keep it up. We’ll have plenty of time for you to practice before we leave the snow. Get it right before you tread on grass, or kiss your feet goodbye.”
They called it slicing time…
There is a way of playing certain musical instruments that is called “circular breathing,” devised to allow people to play the didgeridoo or the bagpipes without actually imploding or being sucked down the tube. “Slicing time” was very much the same, except time was substituted for air and it was a lot quieter. A trained monk could stretch a second further than an hour…
But that wasn’t enough. He’d be moving in a rigid world. He’d have to learn to see by echo light and hear by ghost sound and let time leach into his immediate universe. It wasn’t hard, once he found the confidence; the sliced world could almost seem normal, apart from the colors…
It was like walking in sunsets, although the sun was fixed high in the sky and barely moved. The world ahead shaded toward violet and the world behind, when Lobsang looked around, was the shade of old blood. And it was lonely. But the worst of it, Lobsang realized, was the silence. There was noise, of a sort, but it was just a deep sizzle at the edge of hearing. His footsteps sounded strange and muffled, and the sound arrived in his ears out of sync with the tread of his feet.
They reached the edge of the valley and stepped out of the perpetual springtime into the real world of the snows. Now the cold crept in, slowly, like a sadist’s knife.
Lu-Tze strode on ahead, seemingly oblivious to it.
Of course, that was one of the stories about him. Lu-Tze, it was said, would walk for miles during weather when the clouds themselves would freeze and crash out of the sky. Cold did not affect him, they said.
And yet—
In the stories Lu-Tze had been bigger, stronger…not a skinny little bald man who preferred not to fight—
“Sweeper!”
Lu-Tze stopped and turned. His outline blurred slightly, and Lobsang unwrapped himself from time. Color came back into the world, and while the cold ceased to have the force of a drill it still struck hard.
“Yes, lad?”
“You’re going to teach me, right?”
“If there’s anything left that you don’t know, wonder boy,” said Lu-Tze drily. “You’re slicing well, I can see that.”
“I don’t know how you can stand this cold!”
“Ah…you don’t know the secret?”
“Is it the Way of Mrs. Cosmopilite that gives you such power?”
Lu-Tze hitched up his robe and did a little dance in the snow, revealing skinny legs encased in thick, yellowing tubes.
“Very good, very good,” he said. “She still sends me these double-knit combinations, silk on the inside, then three layers of wool, reinforced gussets, and a couple of handy trapdoors. Very reasonably priced at six dollars a pair because I’m an old customer. For it is written, ‘Wrap up warm or you’ll catch your death.’”
“It’s just a trick?”
Lu-Tze looked surprised.
“What?” he said.
“Well…I mean…it’s all tricks, isn’t it? Everyone thinks you’re a great hero and…you don’t fight, and they think you possess all kinds of strange knowledge and…and it’s just…tricking people. Isn’t it? Even the abbot? I thought you’d teach me…things worth knowing…”
“I’ve got her address, if that’s what you want. If you mention my name—oh. I see you don’t mean that, right?”
“I don’t want to be ungrateful, I just thought—”
“You thought I should use mysterious powers derived from a lifetime of study just to keep my legs warm? Eh?”
“Well—”
“Debase the sacred teachings for the sake of my knees, you think?”
“If you put it like that—”
Then something made Lobsang look down.
He was standing in six inches of snow. Lu-Tze was not. His sandals were standing in two puddles. The ice was melting away around his toes. His pink, warm toes.
“Toes, now, that’s another matter,” said