Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett [71]
TAKE THIS ALSO.
Without wanting to, Susan took a smaller lifetimer from her grandfather.
SHE MAY TALK TO YOU.
“And who is this?”
THE MIDWIFE, said Death. NOW…FIND THE SON.
He faded.
Susan looked down at the lifetimer in her hands. He’s done it to you again, she screamed at herself. You don’t have to do this and you can put this thing down and you can go back to the classroom and you can be normal again and you just know that you won’t, and so does he—
SQUEAK?
The Death of Rats was sitting between Binky’s ears, grasping a lock of the white mane with the general impression of someone anxious to be going. Susan raised a hand to slap him off, and then stopped herself. Instead, she pushed the heavy lifetimer into the rat’s paws.
“Make yourself useful,” she said, grasping the reins and mounting up. “Why do I do this?”
SQUEAK.
“I have not got a nice nature!”
Tick
There was not, surprisingly, a great deal of blood. The head rolled into the snow, and the body slowly toppled forward.
“Now you killed—” Lobsang began.
“Just a second,” said Lu-Tze. “Any moment now…”
The headless body vanished. The kneeling yeti turned his head to Lu-Tze, blinked, and said, “That stung a biit.”
“Sorry.”
Lu-Tze turned to Lobsang. “Now, hold on to that memory!” he commanded. “It’ll try to vanish, but you’ve had training. You’ve got to go on remembering that you saw something which now did not happen, understand? Remember that time’s a lot less unbending than people think, if you get your head right! Just a little lesson! Seeing is believing!”
“How did it do that?”
“Good question. They can save their life up to a certain point and go back to it if they get killed,” said Lu-Tze. “How it’s done…well, the abbot spent the best part of a decade working that one out. Not that anyone else can understand it. There’s a lot of quantum involved.” He took a pull of his permanent foul cigarette. “Gotta be good working-out, if no one else can understand it.”*
“How is der abboott dese daays?” said the yeti, getting to its feet again and picking up the pilgrims.
“Teething.”
“Ah. Reincarnation’s alwaays a problem,” said the yeti, falling into its long, ground-eating lope.
“Teeth are the worst, he says. Always coming or going.”
“How fast are we going?” said Lobsang.
The yeti’s stride was more like a continuous series of leaps from one foot to the other; there was so much spring in the long legs that each landing was a mere faint rocking sensation. It was almost restful.
“I reckon we’re doing thirty miles an hour or so, clock time,” said Lu-Tze. “Get some rest. We’ll be above Copperhead in the morning. It’s all downhill from there.”
“Coming back from the dead…” Lobsang murmured.
“It’s more like not actually ever going in the first place,” said Lu-Tze. “I’ve studied the technique a bit, but…well, unless it’s built in, you have to learn how to do it, and would you want to bet on getting it right first time? Tricky one. You’d have to be desperate. I hope I’m never that desperate.”
Tick
Susan recognized the country of Lancre from the air, a little bowl of woods and fields perched like a nest on the edge of the Ramtop Mountains. And she found the cottage, too, which was not the corkscrew-chimneyed compost-heap kind of witch’s house popularized by Grim Fairy Tales and other books, but a spanking new one with gleaming thatch and a manicured front lawn.
There were more ornaments—gnomes, toadstools, pink bunnies, big-eyed deer—around a tiny pond than any sensible gardener should have allowed. Susan spotted one brightly painted gnome fishi—no, that wasn’t a rod he was holding, was it? Surely a nice old lady wouldn’t put something like that in her garden, would she? Would she?
Susan was bright enough to go around to the back, because witches were allergic to front doors. It was opened by a small, fat, rosy-cheeked woman whose little currant eyes said, yep, that’s my gnome all right, and be thankful he’s only widdling in the pond.
“Mrs. Ogg? The midwife?”
There was a pause before Mrs. Ogg said, “The very same.”
“You don’t know me,