Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett [94]
“Oh, a superficial interpretation. You are an old man, monk. I can see the centuries on you. Tell me what this is, and know what I am.”
The coldness in the dairy got a little colder.
“It’s your middle finger,” said Lu-Tze.
“Pah!” said the man.
“Pah?”
“Yes, pah! You have a brain. Use it.”
“Look, it was good of you to—”
“You know the secret wisdoms which everyone seeks, monk.” The bottle washer paused. “No, I even suspect that you know the explicit wisdoms, the ones hidden in plain view, which practically no one looks for. Who am I?”
Lu-Tze stared at the solitary finger. The walls of the dairy faded. The cold grew deeper.
His mind raced, and the librarian of memory took over.
This wasn’t a normal place, that wasn’t a normal man. A finger. One finger. One of the five digits on a—One of five. One of Five. Faint echoes of an ancient legend signaled his attention.
One from five is four.
And one left over.
He very carefully hung the ladle back on its hook.
“One from Five,” he said. “The Fifth of Four.”
“There we are. I could see you were educated.”
“You were…you were the one who left before they became famous?”
“Yes.”
“But…this is a dairy, and you’re washing bottles!”
“Well? I had to do something with my time.”
“But…you were the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse!”
“And I bet you can’t remember my name.”
Lu-Tze hesitated.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think I ever heard it.”
The fifth horseman turned around. His eyes were black. Completely black. Shiny, and black, and without any whites at all.
“My name,” said the fifth horseman, “is…”
“Yes?”
“My name is Ronnie.”
Timelessness grew like ice. Waves froze on the sea. Birds were pinned to the air. The world went still.
But not quiet. There was a sound like a finger running around the rim of a very large glass.
“Come on,” said Susan.
“Can’t you hear it?” said Lobsang, stopping.
“But it’s no use to us—”
She pushed Lobsang back into the shadows. The robed gray shape of an Auditor appeared in the air halfway down the street and began to spin. The air around it filled with dust, which became a whirling cylinder, which became, slightly unsteady on its feet, something that looked human.
It rocked backward and forward for a moment. It raised its hands slowly and looked at them, turning them this way and that. Then it marched away purposefully. Halfway along the street it was joined by another one, emerging from an alley.
“This really isn’t like them,” said Susan, as the pair turned a corner. “They’re up to something. Let’s follow them.”
“What about Lu-Tze?”
“What about him? How old did you say he was?”
“He says he’s eight hundred years old.”
“Hard to kill, then. Ronnie’s safe enough if you’re alert and don’t argue. Come on.”
She set off along the streets.
The Auditors were joined by others, weaving through the silent carts and motionless people and along the street toward, as it turned out, Sator Square, one of the biggest open spaces in the city. It was a market day. Silent, motionless figures thronged the stalls. But, among them, there were scurrying gray shapes.
“There’s hundreds of them,” said Susan. “All human-shaped…and it looks like they’re having a meeting.”
Mr. White was losing patience. Up until now, he had never been aware that he had any, because, if anything, he had been all patience. But now he could feel it evaporating. It was a strange, hot sensation in his head. And how could a thought be hot?
The mass of incarnated Auditors watched him nervously.
“I am Mr. White!” he said to the luckless new Auditor that had been brought before him, and shuddered with the astonishment of using that singular word and surviving. “You cannot be Mr. White also. It would be a matter of confusion.”
“But we are running out of colors,” said Mr. Violet, intervening.
“That cannot be the case,” said Mr. White. “There are an infinite number of colors.”
“But there are not that many names,” said Miss Taupe.
“That is not possible. A color must have a name.”
“We can find only one hundred and three names for green before the color becomes noticeably