Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett [74]
“And what happened next?” said Susan.
“He took me in his, well, it was like one of them old chariots, he took me to…” Mrs. Ogg hesitated. “I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my life, I’ll have you know,” she said, as if preparing the ground for a revelation.
“I can believe it.”
“It was a castle made of glass.” Mrs. Ogg gave Susan a look that dared her to disbelieve. Susan decided to hurry things up.
“Mrs. Ogg, one of my earliest memories is of helping to feed the Pale Horse. You know? The one outside? The horse of Death? His name is Binky. So please don’t keep stopping. There is practically no limit to the things I find normal.”
“There was a woman…well, eventually there was a woman,” said the witch. “Can you imagine someone exploding into a million pieces? Yes, I expect you can. Well, imagine it happening the other way. There’s a mist and it’s all flying together and then, whoosh, there’s a woman. Then, whoosh, back into a mist again. And all the time, this noise…” Mrs. Ogg ran her finger around the edge of the brandy glass, making it hum.
“A woman kept…incarnating and then disappearing again? Why?”
“Because she was frightened, of course! First time, see?” Mrs. Ogg grinned. “I person’ly never had any problems in that area but I’ve been at a lot of births when it’s all new to the girl and she’ll be frightened as hell and when push comes to shove, if you take my meaning, old midwifery term there, she’ll be yellin’ and swearin’ at the father and I reckon that she’d give anything to be somewhere else. Well, this lady could be somewhere else. We’d have been in a real pickle if it wasn’t for the man, as it turned out.”
“The man that brought you?”
“He was kind of foreign, you know? Like the Hub people. Bald as a coot. I remember thinking, ‘you look like a young man, mister, but you look like you’ve been a young man for a long, long time if I’m any judge.’ Normally I wouldn’t have any man there, but he sat and talked to her in his foreign lingo and sang her songs and little poems and soothed her, and back she came, out of thin air, and I was ready and it was one, two, done. And then she was gone. Except that she was still there, I think. In the air.”
“What did she look like?” said Susan.
Mrs. Ogg gave her a Look.
“You’ve got to remember the view I got where I was sitting,” she said. “The kind of description I might give you ain’t a thing anyone’d put on a poster, if you understand me. And no woman looks at her best at a time like that. She was young, she had dark hair…”
Mrs. Ogg refilled her brandy glass, and this meant the pause went on for some time, “And she was old, too, if you’re after the truth of it. Not old like me. I mean old.”
She stared at the fire.
“Old like darkness and stars,” she said, to the flames.
“The boy was left outside the Thieves’ Guild,” said Susan, to break the silence. “I suppose they thought that with gifts like that he’d be all right.”
“He?” said Mrs. Ogg. “Why he? Why are you talking about he?”
Tick
Lady LeJean was being strong.
She’d never realized how much humans were controlled by their bodies. The thing nagged night and day. It was always too hot, too cold, too empty, too full, too tired…
The key was discipline, she was sure. Auditors were immortal. If she couldn’t tell her body what to do, she didn’t deserve to have one. Bodies were a major human weakness.
Senses, too. The Auditors had hundreds of senses, since every possible phenomenon had to be witnessed and recorded. She could only find five available now. Five ought to be easy to deal with. But they were wired directly into the rest of the body! They didn’t just submit information, they made demands!
She’d walked past a stall selling roasted meats and her mouth had started to drool! The sense of smell wanted the body to eat without consulting the brain! But that wasn’t the worst part! The brain itself did its own thinking!
That was the hardest part. The bag of soggy tissue behind the eyes worked away independently of its owner. It took in information