“The whole bloody scaffolding is moving, don’t be daft!” He stared goggle-eyed at his brother. “Tell me it’s the scaffolding,” he pleaded.

“No, I’m certain this time. It’s coming from inside.” They stared at one another, and then at the rickety ladder leading up to the tip, or to where the tip should be.

“Come on!” said IIb. “It can’t flare off, it’s trying to find ways of discharging-”

There was a sound as loud as the groaning of continents.

Teppic felt it. He felt that his skin was several sizes too small. He felt that someone was holding his ears and trying to twist his head off.

He saw the guard captain sag to his knees, fighting to get his helmet off, and he leapt the stall.

Tried to leap the stall. Everything was wrong, and he landed heavily on a floor that seemed undecided about becoming a wall. He managed to get to his feet and was pulled sideways, dancing awkwardly across the stable to keep his balance.

The stables stretched and shrank like a picture in a distorting mirror. He’d gone to see some once in Ankh, the three of them hazarding a half-coin each to visit the transient marvels of Dr Mooner’s Travelling Take Your Breath Away Emporium. But you knew then that it was only twisted glass that was giving you a head like a sausage and legs like footballs. Teppic wished he could be so certain that what was happening around him would allow of such a harmless explanation. You’d probably need a wobbly glass mirror to make it look normal.

He ran on taffy legs towards Ptraci and the high priest as the world was expanded and squeezed around him, and was momentarily gratified to see the girl squirm in Dios’s grip and fetch him a tidy thump on the ear.

He moved as though in a dream, with the distances changing as though reality was an elastic thing. Another step sent him cannoning into the pair of them. He grabbed Ptraci’s arm and staggered back to the camel stall, where the creature was still cudding and watching the scene with the nearest thing a camel will ever get to mild interest, and snatched its halter.

No-one seemed to be interested in stopping them as they helped each other through the doorway and out into the mad night.

“It helps if you shut your eyes,” said Ptraci.

Teppic tried it. It worked. A stretch of courtyard that his eyes told him was a quivering rectangle whose sides twanged like bowstrings became, well, just a courtyard under his feet.

“Gosh, that was clever,” he said. “How did you think of that?”

“I always shut my eyes when I’m frightened,” said Ptraci.

“Good plan.”

“What’s happening?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to find out. I think going away from here could be an amazingly sensible idea. How do you make a camel kneel, did you say? I’ve got any amount of sharp things.”

The camel, who had a very adequate grasp of human language as it applied to threats, knelt down graciously. They scrambled aboard and the landscape lurched again as the beast jacked itself back on to its feet.

The camel knew perfectly well what was happening. Three stomachs and a digestive system like an industrial distillation plant gave you a lot of time for sitting and thinking.

It’s not for nothing that advanced mathematics tends to be invented in hot countries. It’s because of the morphic resonance of all the camels, who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations.

It’s not generally realised that camels have a natural aptitude for advanced mathematics, particularly where they involve ballistics. This evolved as a survival trait, in the same way as a human’s hand and eye co-ordination, a chameleon’s camouflage and a dolphin’s renowned ability to save drowning swimmers if there’s any chance that biting them in half might be observed and commented upon adversely by other humans.

The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins.* (* Never trust a species that grins all the time. It’s up to something.)

They are so much brighter that they soon realised that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendants not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships or being patronised rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don’t find out about it. So they long ago plumped for a lifestyle that, in return for a certain amount of porterage and being prodded with sticks, allowed them adequate food and grooming and the chance to spit in a human’s eye and get away with it.

And this particular camel, the result of millions of years of selective evolution to produce a creature that could count the grains of sand it was walking over, and close its nostrils at will, and survive under the broiling sun for many days without water, was called You Bastard.

And he was, in fact, the greatest mathematician in the world.

You Bastard was thinking: there seems to be some growing dimensional instability here, swinging from zero to nearly forty-five degrees by the look of it. How interesting. I wonder what’s causing it? Let V equal 3. Let Tau equal Chi/4. cudcudcud Let Kappa/y be an Evil-Smelling-Bugger* (* Renowned as the greatest camel mathematician of all time, who invented a math of eight-dimensional space while lying down with his nostrils closed in a violent sandstorm.) differential tensor domain with four imaginary spin co-efficients. . .

Ptraci hit him across the head with her sandal. “Come on, get a move on!” she yelled. You Bastard thought: Therefore H to the enabling power equals V/s. cudcudcud Thus in hypersyllogic notation . . .

Teppic looked behind him. The strange distortions in the landscape seemed to be settling down, and Dios was . . .

Dios was striding out of the palace, and had actually managed to find several guards whose fear of disobedience overcame the terror of the mysteriously distorted world.

You Bastard stood stoically chewing. . . cudcudcud which gives us an interesting shortening oscillation. What would be the period of this? Let period = x. cudcudcud Let t = time. Let initial period . . .

Ptraci bounced up and down on his neck and kicked hard with her heels, an action which would have caused any anthropoid male to howl and bang his head against the wall.

“It won’t move! Can’t you hit it?”

Teppic brought his hand down as hard as he could on You Bastard’s hide, raising a cloud of dust and deadening every nerve in his fingers. It was like hitting a large sack full of coathangers.

“Come on,” he muttered.

Dios raised a hand.

“Halt, in the name of the king!” he shouted.

An arrow thudded into You Bastard’s hump.

. . . equals 6.3 recurring. Reduce. That gives us ouch . . . 314 seconds . . .

You Bastard turned his long neck around. His great hairy eyebrows made accusing curves as his yellow eyes narrowed and took a fix on the high priest, and he put aside the interesting problem for a moment and dredged up the familiar ancient maths that his race had perfected long ago:

Let range equal forty-one feet. Let windspeed equal 2. Vector one-eight. cud Let glutinosity equal 7 .

Teppic drew a throwing knife.

Dios took a deep breath. He’s going to order them to fire on us, Teppic thought. In my own name, in my own kingdom, I’m going to be shot.

Angle two-five, cud Fire.

It was a magnificent volley. The gob of cud had commendable lift and spin and hit with a sound like, a sound like half a pound of semi-digested grass hitting someone in the face. There was nothing else it could sound like.

The silence that followed was by way of being a standing ovation.

The landscape began to distort again. This was clearly not a place to linger. You Bastard looked down at his front legs.

Let legs equal four.

He lumbered into a run. Camels apparently have more knees than any other creature and You Bastard ran like a steam engine, with lots of extraneous movement at right angles to the direction of motion accompanied by a thunderous barrage of digestive noises.

“Bloody stupid animal,” muttered Ptraci, as they jolted away from the palace, “but it looks like it finally got the idea.”

. . . gauge-invariant repetition rate of 3.5/z. What’s she talking about, Bloody Stupid lives over in Tsort . . .

Though they swung through the air as though jointed with bad elastic You Bastard’s legs covered a lot of ground, and already they were bouncing through the sleeping packed-earth streets of the city.

“It’s starting again, isn’t it?” said Ptraci. “I’m going to shut my eyes.”

Teppic nodded. The firebrick-hot houses around them were doing their slow motion mirror dance again, and the road was rising and falling in a way that solid land had no right to adopt.

“It’s like the sea,” he said.

“I can’t see anything,” said Ptraci firmly.

“I mean the sea. The ocean. You know. Waves.”

“I’ve heard about it. Is anyone chasing us?”

Teppic turned in the saddle. “Not that I can make out,” he said. “It looks as-”

From here he could see past the long, low bulk of the palace and across the river to the Great Pyramid itself. It was almost hidden in dark clouds, but what he could see of it was definitely wrong. He knew it had four sides, and he could see all eight of them.

It seemed to be moving in and out of focus, which he felt instinctively was a dangerous thing for several million tons of rock to do. He felt a pressing urge to be a long way away from it. Even a dumb creature like the camel seemed to have the same idea.

You Bastard was thinking: . . Delta squared. Thus, dimensional pressure k will result in a ninety-degree transformation in Chi(16/x/pu)t for a K-bundle of any three invariables. Or four minutes, plus or minus ten seconds

The camel looked down at the great pads of his feet.

Let speed equal gallop.

“How did you make it do that?” said Teppic.

“I didn’t! It’s doing it by itself! Hang on!”

This wasn’t easy. Teppic had saddled the camel but neglected the harness. Ptraci had handfuls of camel hair to hang on to. All he had was handfuls of Ptraci. No matter where he tried to put his hands, they encountered warm, yielding flesh. Nothing in his long education had prepared him for this, whereas everything in Ptraci’s obviously had. Her long hair whipped his face and smelled beguilingly of rare perfume. * (* An effect achieved by distilling the testicles of a small tree-dwelling species of bear with the vomit of a whale, and adding a handful of rose petals. Teppic probably would have felt no better for knowing this.)

“Are you all right?” he shouted above the wind.

“I’m hanging on with my knees!”

“That must be very hard!”

“You get special training!”

Camels gallop by throwing their feet as far away from them as possible and then running to keep up. Knee joints clicking like chilly castanets, You Bastard thrashed up the sloping road out of the valley and windmilled along the narrow gorge that led, under towering limestone cliffs, to the high desert beyond.

And behind them, tormented beyond measure by the inexorable tide of geometry, unable to discharge its burden of Time, the Great Pyramid screamed, lifted itself off its base and, its bulk swishing through the air as unstoppably as something completely unstoppable, ground around precisely ninety degrees and did something perverted to the fabric of time and space.

You Bastard sped along the gorge, his neck stretched out to its full extent, his mighty nostrils flaring like jet intakes.

“It’s terrified!” Ptraci yelled. “Animals always know about this sort of thing!”

“What sort of thing!”

“Forest fires and things!”

“We haven’t got any trees!”

“Well, floods and - and things! They’ve got some strange natural instinct!”

. . . Phi* 1700[u/v]. Lateral e/v. Equals a tranche of seven to twelve . . .

The sound hit them. It was as silent as a dandelion clock striking midnight, but it had pressure. It rolled over them, suffocating as velvet, nauseating as a battered saveloy.

And was gone.

You Bastard slowed to a walk, a complicated procedure that involved precise instructions to each leg in turn.

There was a feeling of release, a sense of stress withdrawn. You Bastard stopped. In the pre-dawn glow he’d spotted a clump of thorned syphacia bushes growing in the rocks by the track.

. . angle left. x equals 37. y equals 19. z equals 43. Bite . . .

Peace descended. There was no sound except for the eructations of the camel’s digestive tract and the distant warbling of a desert owl.

Ptraci slid off her perch and landed awkwardly.

“My bottom,” she announced, to the desert in general, “is one huge blister.”

Teppic jumped down and half-ran, half-staggered up the scree by the roadside, then jogged across the cracked limestone plateau until he could get a good look at the valley.

It wasn’t there any more.

It was still dark when Dil the master embalmer woke up, his body twanging with the sensation that something was wrong. He slipped out of bed, dressed hurriedly, and pulled aside the curtain that did duty as a door.

The night was soft and velvety. Behind the chirrup of the insects there was another sound, a frying noise, a faint sizzling on the edge of hearing.

Perhaps that was what had woken him up.

The air was warm and damp. Curls of mist rose from the river, and-

The pyramids weren’t flaring.

He’d grown up in this house: it had been in the family of the master embalmers for thousands of years, and he’d seen the pyramids flare so often that he didn’t notice them, any more than he noticed his own breathing. But now they were dark and silent, and the silence cried out and the darkness glared.

But that wasn’t the worst part. As his horrified eyes stared up at the empty sky over the necropolis they saw the stars, and what the stars were stuck to.

Dil was terrified. And then, when he had time to think about it, he was ashamed of himself. After all, he thought, it’s what I’ve always been told is there. It stands to reason. I’m just seeing it properly for the first time.

There. Does that make me feel any better?

No.

He turned and ran down the street, sandals flapping, until he reached the house that held Gern and his numerous family. He dragged the protesting apprentice from the communal sleeping mat and pulled him into the street, turned his face to the sky and hissed. “Tell me what you can see!”

Gern squinted.

“I can see the stars, master,” he said.

“What are they on, boy?”

Gern relaxed slightly. “That’s easy, master. Everyone knows the stars are on the body of the goddess Nept who arches herself from . . . oh, bloody hell.”

“You can see her, too?”

“Oh, mummy,” whispered Gern, and slid to his knees.

Dil nodded. He was a religious man. It was a great comfort knowing that the gods were there. It was knowing they were here that was the terrible part.

Because the body of a woman arched over the heavens, faintly blue, faintly shadowy in the light of the watery stars.

She was enormous, her statistics interstellar. The shadow between her galactic breasts was a dark nebula, the curve of her stomach a vast wash of glowing gas, her navel the seething, dark incandescence in which new stars were being born. She wasn’t supporting the sky. She was the sky.

Her huge sad face, upside down on the turnwise horizon, stared directly at Dil. And Dil was realising that there are few things that so shake belief as seeing, clearly and precisely, the object of that belief. Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn’t believing. It’s where belief stops, because it isn’t needed any more.

“Oh, Sod,” moaned Gern.

Dil struck him across the arm.

“Stop that,” he said. “And come with me.”

“Oh, master, whatever shall we do?”

Dil looked around at the sleeping city. He hadn’t the faintest idea.

“We’ll go to the palace,” he said firmly. “It’s probably a trick of the, of the, of the dark. Anyway, the sun will be up presently.”

He strode off, wishing he could change places with Gern and show just a hint of gibbering terror. The apprentice followed him at a sort of galloping creep.

“I can see shadows against the stars, master! Can you see them, master? Around the edge of the world, master!”

“Just mists, boy,” said Dil, resolutely keeping his eyes fixed in front of him and maintaining a dignified posture as appropriate to the Keeper of the Left Hand Door of the Matron Lodge and holder of several medals for needlework.

“There,” he said. “See, Gern, the sun is coming up!”

They stood and watched it.

Then Gern whimpered, very quietly.

Rising up the sky, very slowly, was a great flaming ball. And it was being pushed by a dung beetle bigger than worlds.

BOOK III

The Book of the New Son

The sun rose and, because this wasn’t the Old Kingdom out here, it was a mere ball of flaming gas. The purple night of the high desert evaporated under its blowlamp glare. Lizards scuffled into cracks in the rocks. You Bastard settled himself down in the sparse shadow of what was left of the syphacia bushes, peered haughtily at the landscape, and began to chew cud and calculate square roots in base seven.

Teppic and Ptraci eventually found the shade of a limestone overhang, and sat glumly staring out at the waves of heat wobbling off the rocks.

“I don’t understand,” said Ptraci. “Have you looked everywhere?”

“It’s a country! It can’t just bloody well fall through a hole in the ground!”

“Where is it, then?” said Ptraci evenly.

Teppic growled. The heat struck like a hammer, but he strode out over the rocks as though three hundred square miles could perhaps have been hiding under a pebble or behind a bush.

The fact was that the track dipped between the cliffs, but almost immediately rose again and continued across the dunes into what was quite clearly Tsort. He’d recognised a wind-eroded sphinx that had been set up as a boundary marker; legend said it prowled the borders in times of dire national need, although legend wasn’t sure why.

He knew they had galloped into Ephebe. He should be looking across the fertile, pyramid-speckled valley of the Djel that lay between the two countries.

He’d spent an hour looking for it.

It was inexplicable. It was uncanny. It was also extremely embarrassing.

He shaded his eyes and stared around for the thousandth time at the silent, baking landscape. And moved his head. And saw Djelibeybi.

It flashed across his vision in an instant. He jerked his eyes back and saw it again, a brief flash of misty colour that vanished as soon as he concentrated on it.

Some minutes later Ptraci peered out of the shade and saw him get down on his hands and knees. When he started turning over rocks she decided it was time he should come back in out of the sun.

He shook her hand off his shoulder, and gestured impatiently. “I’ve found it!” He pulled a knife from his boot and started poking at the stones.

“Where?”

“Here!”

She laid a ringed hand on his forehead.

“Oh yes,” she said. “I see. Yes. Good. Now I think you’d better come into the shade.”

“No, I mean it! Here! Look!”

She hunkered down and stared at the rock, to humour him.

“There’s a crack,” she said, doubtfully.

“Look at it, will you? You have to turn your head and sort of look out of the corner of your eye.” Teppic’s dagger smacked into the crack, which was no more than a faint line on the rock.

“Well, it goes on a long way,” said Ptraci, staring along the burning pavement.

“All the way from the Second Cataract to the Delta,” said Teppic. “Covering your eye with one hand helps. Please give it a try. Please!”

She put one hesitant hand over her eye and squinted obediently at the rock.

Eventually she said. “It’s no good, I can’t - seeee-” She stayed motionless for a moment and then flung herself sideways on to the rocks. Teppic stopped trying to hammer the knife into the crack and crawled over to her.

“I was right on the edge!” she wailed.

“You saw it?” he said hopefully.

She nodded and, with great care, got to her feet and backed away.

“Did your eyes feel as though they were being turned inside out?” said Teppic.

“Yes,” said Ptraci coldly. “Can I have my bangles, please?”

“What?”

“My bangles. You put them in your pocket. I want them, please.”

Teppic shrugged, and fished in his pouch. The bangles were mostly copper, with a few bits of chipped enamel. Here and there the craftsman had tried, without much success, to do something interesting with twisted bits of wire and lumps of coloured glass. She took them and slipped them on.

“Do they have some occult significance?” he said.

“What’s occult mean?” she said vaguely.

“Oh. What do you need them for, then?”

“I told you. I don’t feel properly dressed without them on.” Teppic shrugged, and went back to rocking his knife in the crack.

“Why are you doing that?” she said. He stopped and thought about it.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But you did see the valley, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then?”

“Well what?”

Teppic rolled his eyes. “Didn’t you think it was a bit, well, odd? A whole country just more or less vanishing? It’s something you don’t bloody well see every day, for gods’ sake!”

“How should I know? I’ve never been out of the valley before. I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like from outside. And don’t swear.”

Teppic shook his head. “I think I will go and lie down in the shade,” he said. “What’s left of it,” he added, for the brass light of the sun was burning away the shadows. He staggered over to the rocks and stared at her.

“The whole valley has just closed up,” he managed at last. “All those people . .

“I saw cooking fires,” said Ptraci, slumping down beside him.

“It’s something to do with the pyramid,” he said. “It looked very strange just before we left. It’s magic, or geometry, or one of those things. How do you think we can get back?”

“I don’t want to go back. Why should I want to go back? It’s the crocodiles for me. I’m not going back, not just for crocodiles.”

“Um. Perhaps I could pardon you, or something,” said Teppic.

“Oh yes,” said Ptraci, looking at her nails. “You said you were the king, didn’t you.”

“I am the king! That’s my kingdom over-” Teppic hesitated, not knowing in which direction to point his finger - “somewhere. I’m king of it.”

“You don’t look like the king,” said Ptraci.

“Why not?”

“He had a golden mask on.”

“That was me!”

“So you ordered me thrown to the crocodiles?”

“Yes! I mean, no.” Teppic hesitated. “I mean, the king did. I didn’t. In a way. Anyway, I was the one who rescued you,” he added gallantly.

“There you are, then. Anyway, if you were the king, you’d be a god, too. You aren’t acting very god-like at the moment.”

“Yes? Well. Er.” Teppic hesitated again. Ptraci’s literal mindedness meant that innocent sentences had to be carefully examined before being sent out into the world.

“I’m basically good at making the sun rise,” he said. “I don’t know how, though. And rivers. You want any rivers flooding, I’m your man. God, I mean.”

He lapsed into silence as a thought struck him.

“I wonder what’s happening in there without me?” he said.

Ptraci stood up and set off down to the gorge.

“Where are you going?”

She turned. “Well, Mr King or God or assassin, or whatever, can you make water?”

“What, here?”

“I mean to drink. There may be a river hidden in that crack or there may not, but we can’t get at it, can we? So we have to go somewhere where we can. It’s so simple I should think even kings could understand it.”

He hurried after her, down the scree to where You Bastard was lying with his head and neck flat on the ground, flicking his ears in the heat and idly applying You Vicious Brute’s Theory of Transient Integrals to a succession of promising cissoid numbers. Ptraci kicked him irritably.

“Do you know where there is water, then?” said Teppic. . . . e/27. Eleven miles . . .

Ptraci glared at him from kohl-ringed eyes. “You mean you don’t know? You were going to take me into the desert and you don’t know where the water is?”

“Well, I rather expected I was going to be able to take some with me!”

“You didn’t even think about it!”

“Listen, you can’t talk to me like that! I’m a king!” Teppic stopped.

“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “I never thought about it. Where I come from it rains nearly every day. I’m sorry.”

Ptraci’s brows furrowed. “Who reigns nearly every day?” she said.

“No, I mean rain. You know. Very thin water coming out of the sky?”

“What a silly idea. Where do you come from?”

Teppic looked miserable. “Where I come from is Ankh-Morpork. Where I started from is here.” He stared down the track. From here, if you knew what you were looking for, you could just see a faint crack running across the rocks. It climbed the cliffs on either side, a new vertical fault the thickness of a line that just happened to contain a complete river kingdom and 7,000 years of history.

He’d hated every minute of his time there. And now it had shut him out. And now, because he couldn’t, he wanted to go back.

He wandered down to it and put his hand over one eye. If you jerked your head just right . . .

It flashed past his vision briefly, and was gone. He tried a few times more, and couldn’t see it again.

If I hacked the rocks away? No, he thought, that’s silly. It’s a line. You can’t get into a line. A line has no thickness. Well known fact of geometry.

He heard Ptraci come up behind him, and the next moment her hands were on his neck. For a second he wondered how she knew the Catharti Death Grip, and then her fingers were gently massaging his muscles, stresses melting under their expert caress like fat under a hot knife. He shivered as the tension relaxed.

“That’s nice,” he said.

“We’re trained for it. Your tendons are knotted up like ping-pong balls on a string,” said Ptraci.

Teppic gratefully subsided on to one of the boulders that littered the base of the cliff and let the rhythm of her fingers unwind the problems of the night.

“I don’t know what to do,” he murmured. “That feels good.”

“It’s not all peeling grapes, being a handmaiden,” said Ptraci. “The first lesson we learn is, when the master has had a long hard day it is not the best time to suggest the Congress of the Fox and the Persimmon. Who says you have to do anything?”

“I feel responsible.” Teppic shifted position like a cat.

“If you know where there is a dulcimer I could play you something soothing,” said Ptraci. “I’ve got as far as “Goblins Picnic” in Book I.”

“I mean, a king shouldn’t let his kingdom just vanish like that.”

“All the other girls can do chords and everything,” said Ptraci wistfully, massaging his shoulders. “But the old king always said he’d rather hear me. He said it used to cheer him up.”

“I mean, it’ll be called the Lost Kingdom,” said Teppic drowsily. “How will I feel then, I ask you?”

“He said he liked my singing, too. Everyone else said it sounded like a flock of vultures who’ve just found a dead donkey.”

“I mean, king of a Lost Kingdom. It’d be dreadful. I’ve got to get it back.”

You Bastard slowly turned his massive head to follow the flight of an errant blowfly; deep in his brain little columns of red numbers flickered, detailing vectors and speed and elevation. The conversation of human beings seldom interested him, but it crossed his mind that the males and females always got along best when neither actually listened fully to what the other one was saying. It was much simpler with camels.

Teppic stared at the line in the rock. Geometry. That was it. “We’ll go to Ephebe,” he said. “They know all about geometry and they have some very unsound ideas. Unsound ideas are what I could do with right now.”

“Why do you carry all these knives and things? I mean, really?”

“Hmm? Sorry?”

“All these knives. Why?”

Teppic thought about it. “I suppose I don’t feel properly dressed without them,” he said.

“Oh.”

Ptraci dutifully cast around for a new topic of conversation. Introducing Topics of Amusing Discourse was also part of a handmaiden’s duties. She’d never been particularly good at it. The other girls had come up with an astonishing assortment: everything from the mating habits of crocodiles to speculation about life in the netherworld. She’d found it heavy going after talking about the weather.

“So,” she said. “You’ve killed a lot of people, I expect?”

“Mm?”

“As an assassin, I mean. You get paid to kill people. Have you killed lots? Do you know you tense your back muscles a lot?”

“I don’t think I ought to talk about it,” he said.

“I ought to know. If we’ve got to cross the desert together and everything. More than a hundred?”

“Good heavens, no.,

“Well, less than fifty?”

Teppic rolled over.

“Look, even the most famous assassins never killed more than thirty people in all their lives,” he said.

“Less than twenty, then?”

“Yes.”

“Less than ten?”

“I think,” said Teppic, “it would be best to say a number between zero and ten.”

“Just so long as I know. These things are important.” They strolled back to You Bastard. But now it was Teppic who seemed to have something on his mind.

“All this senate . . .” he said.

“Congress,” corrected Ptraci.

“You . . . er . . . more than fifty people?”

“There’s a different name for that sort of woman,” said Ptraci, but without much rancour.

“Sorry. Less than ten?”

“Let’s say,” said Ptraci, “a number between zero and ten.” You Bastard spat. Twenty feet away the blowfly was picked cleanly out of the air and glued to the rock behind it.

“Amazing how they do it, isn’t it,” said Teppic. “Animal instinct, I suppose.”

You Bastard gave him a haughty glare from under his sweep-the-desert eyelashes and thought:

. . . Let z=ei0. cudcudcud Then dz=ie[i0]d0=izd0 or d0=dz/iz . . .

Ptaclusp, still in his nightshirt, wandered aimlessly among the wreckage at the foot of the pyramid.

It was humming like a turbine. Ptaclusp didn’t know why, knew nothing about the vast expenditure of power that had twisted the dimensions by ninety degrees and was holding them there against terrible pressures, but at least the disturbing temporal changes seemed to have stopped. There were fewer sons around than there used to be; in truth, he could have done with finding one or two.

First he found the capstone, which had shattered, its electrum sheathing peeling away. In its descent from the pyramid it had hit the statue of Hat the Vulture-Headed God, bending it double and giving it an expression of mild surprise.

A faint groan sent him tugging at the wreckage of a tent. He tore at the heavy canvas and unearthed IIb, who blinked at him in the grey light.

“It didn’t work, dad!” he moaned. “We’d almost got it up there, and then the whole thing just sort of twisted!”

The builder lifted a spar off his son’s legs.

“Anything broken?” he said quietly.

“Just bruised, I think.” The young architect sat up, wincing, and craned to see around.

“Where’s Two-ay?” he said. “He was higher up than me, nearly on the top-”

“I’ve found him,” said Ptaclusp.

Architects are not known for their attention to subtle shades of meaning, but IIb heard the lead in his father’s voice.

“He’s not dead, is he?” he whispered.

“I don’t think so. I’m not sure. He’s alive. But. He’s moving - he’s moving . . . well, you better come and see. I think something quantum has happened to him.”

You Bastard plodded onwards at about 1.247 metres per second, working out complex conjugate co-ordinates to stave off boredom while his huge, plate-like feet crunched on the sand.

Lack of fingers was another big spur to the development of camel intellect. Human mathematical development had always been held back by everyone’s instinctive tendency, when faced with something really complex in the way of triform polynomials or parametric differentials, to count fingers. Camels started from the word go by counting numbers.

Deserts were a great help, too. There aren’t many distractions. As far as camels were concerned, the way to mighty intellectual development was to have nothing much to do and nothing to do it with.

He reached the crest of the dune, gazed with approval over the rolling sands ahead of him, and began to think in logarithms.

“What’s Ephebe like?” said Ptraci.

“I’ve never been there. Apparently it’s ruled by a Tyrant.”

“I hope we don’t meet him, then.”

Teppic shook his head. “It’s not like that,” he said. “They have a new Tyrant every five years and they do something to him first.” He hesitated. “I think they ee-lect him.”

“Is that something like they do to tomcats and bulls and things?”

“Er.”

“You know. To make them stop fighting and be more peaceful.”

Teppic winced. “To be honest, I’m not sure,” he said. “But I don’t think so. They’ve got something they do it with, I think it’s called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man, one-” He paused. The political history lesson seemed a very long while ago, and had introduced concepts never heard of in Djelibeybi or in Ankh-Morpork, for that matter. He had a stab at it, anyway. “One man, one vet.”

“That’s for the eelecting, then?”

He shrugged. It might be, for all he knew. “The point is, though, that everyone can do it. They’re very proud of it. Everyone has-” he hesitated again, certain now that things were amiss - “the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It’s a very enlightened civilisation.”

Ptraci gave this some consideration.

“And that’s a mocracy, is it?”

“They invented it in Ephebe, you know,” said Teppic, feeling obscurely that he ought to defend it.

“I bet they had trouble exporting it,” said Ptraci firmly.

The sun wasn’t just a ball of flaming dung pushed across the sky by a giant beetle. It was also a boat. It depended on how you looked at it.

The light was wrong. It had a flat quality, like water left in a glass for weeks. There was no joy to it. It illuminated, but without life; like bright moonlight rather than the light of day.

But Ptaclusp was more worried about his son.

“Do you know what’s wrong with him?” he said.

His other son bit his stylus miserably. His hand was hurting. He’d tried to touch his brother, and the crackling shock had taken the skin off his fingers.

“I might,” he ventured.

“Can you cure it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What is it, then?”

“Well, dad. When we were up on the pyramid . . . well, when it couldn’t flare . . . you see, I’m sure it twisted around . . . time, you see, is just another dimension . . . um.”

Ptaclusp rolled his eyes. “None of that architect’s talk, boy,” he said. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I think he’s dimensionally maladjusted, dad. Time and space has got a bit mixed up for him. That’s why he’s moving sideways all the time.”

Ptaclusp IIb gave his father a brave little smile.

“He always used to move sideways,” said Ptaclusp. His son sighed. “Yes, dad,” he said. “But that was just normal. All accountants move like that. Now he’s moving sideways because that’s like, well, it’s like Time to him.” Ptaclusp frowned. Drifting gently sideways wasn’t IIa’s only problem. He was also flat. Not flat like a card, with a front, back and edge - but flat from any direction.

“Puts me exactly in mind of them people in the frescoes,” he said. “Where’s his depth, or whatever you call it?”

“I think that’s in Time,” said IIb, helplessly. “Ours, not his.”

Ptaclusp walked around his son, noting how the flatness followed him. He scratched his chin.

“So he can walk in Time, can he?” he said slowly.

“That may be possible, yes.”

“Do you think we could persuade him to stroll back a few months and tell us not to build that bloody pyramid?”

“He can’t communicate, dad.”

“Not much change there, then.” Ptaclusp sat down on the rubble, his head in his hands. It had come to this. One son normal and stupid, one flat as a shadow. And what sort of life could the poor flat kid have? He’d go through life being used to open locks, clean the ice off windscreens, and sleeping cheaply in trouser-presses in hotel bedrooms*. (* This is of course a loose translation, since Ptaclusp did not know the words for “ice”, “windscreens” or “hotel bedrooms”; interestingly, however, Squiggle Eagle Eagle Vase Wavyline Duck translates directly as “a press for barbarian leg coverings”.) Being able to get under doors and read books without opening them would not be much of a compensation. IIa drifted sideways, a flat cut-out on the landscape.

“Can’t we do anything?” he said. “Roll him up neatly, or something?”

IIb shrugged. “We could put something in the way. That might be a good idea. It would stop anything worse happening to him because it, er, wouldn’t have time to happen in. I think.”

They pushed the bent statue of Hat the Vulture-Headed God into the flat one’s path. After a minute or two his gentle sideways drift brought him up against it. There was a fat blue spark that melted part of the statue, but the movement stopped.

“Why the sparks?” said Ptaclusp.

“It’s a bit like flarelight, I think.”

Ptaclusp hadn’t got where he was today - no, he’d have to correct himself - hadn’t got to where he had been last night without eventually seeing the advantages in the Unlikeliest situations.

“He’ll save on clothing,” he said slowly. “I mean, he can just paint it on.”

“I don’t think you’ve quite got the idea, dad,” said IIb wearily. He sat down beside his father and stared across the river to the palace.

“Something going on over there,” said Ptaclusp. “Do you think they’ve noticed the pyramid?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s moved around ninety degrees, after all.”

Ptaclusp looked over his shoulder, and nodded slowly.

“Funny, that,” he said. “Bit of structural instability there.”

“Dad, it’s a pyramid! We should have flared it! I told you! The forces involved, well, it’s just too-”

A shadow fell across them. They looked around. They looked up. They looked up a bit more.

“Oh, my,” said Ptaclusp. “It’s Hat, the Vulture-Headed God . . .”

Ephebe lay beyond them, a classical poem of white marble lazing around its rock on a bay of brilliant blue-

“What’s that?” said Ptraci, after studying it critically for some time.

“It’s the sea,” said Teppic. “I told you, remember. Waves and things.”

“You said it was all green and rough.”

“Sometimes it is.”

“Hmm.” The tone of voice suggested that she disapproved of the sea but, before she could explain why, they heard the sound of voices raised in anger. They were coming from behind a nearby sand dune.

There was a notice on the dune.

It said, in several languages: AXIOM TESTING STATION.

Below it, in slightly smaller writing, it added: CAUTION - UNRESOLVED POSTULATES.

As they read it, or at least as Teppic read it and Ptraci didn’t, there was a twang from behind the dune, followed by a click, followed by an arrow zipping overhead. You Bastard glanced up at it briefly and then turned his head and stared fixedly at a very small area of sand.

A second later the arrow thudded into it.

Then he tested the weight on his feet and did a small calculation which revealed that two people had been subtracted from his back. Further summation indicated that they had been added to the dune.

“What did you do that for?” said Ptraci, spitting out sand.

“Someone fired at us!”

“I shouldn’t think so. I mean, they didn’t know we were here, did they? You needn’t have pulled me off like that.”

Teppic conceded this, rather reluctantly, and eased himself cautiously up the sliding surface of the dune. The voices were arguing again

“Give in?”

“We simply haven’t got all the parameters right.”

“I know what we haven’t got all right.”

“What is that, pray?”

“We haven’t got any more bloody tortoises. That’s what we haven’t got.”

Teppic carefully poked his head over the top of the dune. He saw a large cleared area, surrounded by complicated ranks of markers and flags. There were one or two buildings in it, mostly consisting of cages, and several other intricate constructions he could not recognise. In the middle of it all were two men - one small, fat and florid, the other tall and willowy and with an indefinable air of authority. They were wearing sheets. Clustered around them, and not wearing very much at all, was a group of slaves. One of them was holding a bow.

Several of them were holding tortoises on sticks. They looked a bit pathetic, like tortoise lollies.

“Anyway, it’s cruel,” said the tall man. “Poor little things. They look so sad with their little legs waggling.”

“It’s logically impossible for the arrow to hit them!” The fat man threw up his hands. “It shouldn’t do it! You must be giving me the wrong type of tortoise,” he added accusingly.

“We ough to try again with faster tortoises.”

“Or slower arrows?”

“Possibly, possibly.”

Teppic was aware of a faint scuffling by his chin. There was a small tortoise scurrying past him. It had several ricochet marks on its shell.

“We’ll have one last try,” said the fat man. He turned to the slaves. “You lot - go and find that tortoise.”

The little reptile gave Teppic a look of mingled pleading and hope. He stared at it, and then lifted it up carefully and tucked it behind a rock.

He slid back down the dune to Ptraci.

“There’s something really weird going on over there,” he said. “They’re shooting tortoises.”

“Why?”

“Search me. They seem to think the tortoise ought to be able to run away.

“What, from an arrow?”

“Like I said. Really weird. You stay here. I’ll whistle if it’s safe to follow me.”

“What will you do if it isn’t safe?”

“Scream.”

He climbed the dune again and, after brushing as much sand as possible off his clothing, stood up and waved his cap at the little crowd. An arrow took it out of his hands.

“Oops!” said the fat man. “Sorry!”

He scurried across the trampled sand to where Teppic was standing and staring at his stinging fingers.

“Just had it in my hand,” he panted. “Many apologies, didn’t realise it was loaded. Whatever will you think of me?”

Teppic took a deep breath.

“Xeno’s the name,” gasped the fat man, before he could speak. “Are you hurt? We did put up warning signs, I’m sure. Did you come in over the desert? You must be thirsty. Would you like a drink? Who are you? You haven’t seen a tortoise up there, have you? Damned fast things, go like greased thunderbolts, there’s no stopping the little buggers.”

Teppic deflated again.

“Tortoises?” he said. “Are we talking about those, you know, stones on legs?”

“That’s right, that’s right,” said Xeno. “Take your eyes off them for a second, and vazoom!”

“Vazoom?” said Teppic. He knew about tortoises. There were tortoises in the Old Kingdom. They could be called a lot of things - vegetarians, patient, thoughtful, even extremely diligent and persistent sex-maniacs - but never, up until now, fast. Fast was a word particularly associated with tortoises because they were not it.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“Fastest animal on the face of the Disc, your common tortoise,” said Xeno, but he had the grace to look shifty.

“Logically, that is,” he added*. (* To everyone without such a logical frame of reference the fastest animal** (** The fastest insect is the .303 bookworm. It evolved in magical libraries, where it is necessary to eat extremely quickly to avoid being affected by the thaumic radiations. An adult .303 bookworm can eat through a shelf of books so fast that it ricochets off the wall.) on the Disc is the extremely neurotic Ambiguous Puzuma, which moves so fast that it can actually achieve near light-speed in the Disc’s magical field. This means that if you can see a puzuma, it isn’t there. Most male puzumas die young of acute ankle failure caused by running very fast after females which aren’t there and, of course, achieving suicidal mass in accordance with relativistic theory. The rest of them die of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, since it is impossible for them to know who they are and where they are at the same time, and the see-sawing loss of concentration this engenders means that the puzuma only achieves a sense of identity when it is at rest - usually about fifty feet into the rubble of what remains of the mountain it just ran into at near light-speed. The puzuma is rumoured to be about the size of a leopard with a rather unique black and white check coat, although those specimens discovered by the Disc’s sages and philosophers have inclined them to declare that in its natural state the puzuma is flat, very thin, and dead.)

The tall man gave Teppic a nod.

“Take no notice of him, boy,” he said. “He’s just covering himself because of the accident last week.”

“The tortoise did beat the hare,” said Xeno sulkily.

“The hare was dead, Xeno,” said the tall man patiently.

“Because you shot it.”

“I was aiming at the tortoise. You know, trying to combine two experiments, cut down on expensive research time, make full use of available-” Xeno gestured with the bow, which now had another arrow in it.

“Excuse me,” said Teppic. “Could you put it down a minute? Me and my friend have come a long way and it would be nice not to be shot at again.”

These two seem harmless, he thought, and almost believed it.

He whistled. On cue, Ptraci came around the dune, leading You Bastard. Teppic doubted the capability of her costume to hold any pockets whatsoever, but she seemed to have been able to repair her make-up, re-kohl her eyes and put up her hair. She undulated towards the group like a snake in a skid, determined to hit the strangers with the full force of her personality. She was also holding something in her other hand.

“She’s found the tortoise!” said Xeno. “Well done!”

The reptile shot back into its shell. Ptraci glared. She didn’t have much in the world except herself, and didn’t like to be hailed as a mere holder of testudinoids.

The tall man sighed. “You know, Xeno,” he said, “I can’t help thinking you’ve got the wrong end of the stick with this whole tortoise-and-arrow business.”

The little man glared at him.

“The trouble with you, Ibid,” he said, “is that you think you’re the biggest bloody authority on everything.”

The Gods of the Old Kingdom were awakening.

Belief is a force. It’s a weak force, by comparison with gravity; when it comes to moving mountains, gravity wins every time. But it still exists, and now that the Old Kingdom was enclosed upon itself, floating free of the rest of the universe, drifting away from the general consensus that is dignified by the name of reality, the power of belief was making itself felt.

For seven thousand years the people of Djelibeybi had believed in their gods.

Now their gods existed. They had, as it were, the complete Set.

And the people of the Old Kingdom were learning that, for example, Vut the Dog-Headed God of the Evening looks a lot better painted on a pot than he does when all seventy feet of him, growling and stinking, is lurching down the Street outside.

Dios sat in the throne room, the gold mask of the king on his knees, staring out across the sombre air. The cluster of lesser priests around the door finally plucked up the courage to approach him, in the same general frame of mind as you would approach a growling lion. No-one is more worried by the actual physical manifestation of a god than his priests; it’s like having the auditors in unexpectedly.

Only Koomi stood a little aside from the others. He was thinking hard. Strange and original thoughts were crowding along rarely-trodden neural pathways, heading in unthinkable directions. He wanted to see where they led.

“O Dios,” murmured the high priest of Ket, the This-Headed God of Justice. “What is the king’s command? The gods are striding the land, and they are fighting and breaking houses, O Dios. Where is the king? What would he have us do?”

“Yea,” said the high priest of Scrab, the Pusher of the Ball of the Sun. He felt something more was expected of him. “And verily,” he added. “Your lordship will have noticed that the sun is wobbling, because all the Gods of the Sun are fighting for it and-” he shuffled his feet - “the blessed Scrab made a strategic withdrawal and has, er, made an unscheduled landing on the town of Hort. A number of buildings broke his fall.”

“And rightly so,” said the high priest of Thrrp, the Charioteer of the Sun. “For, as all know, my master is the true god of the-”

His words tailed off.

Dios was trembling, his body rocking slowly back and forth. His eyes stared at nothing. His hands gripped the mask almost hard enough to leave fingerprints in the gold, and his lips soundlessly shaped the words of the Ritual of the Second Hour, which had been said at this time for thousands of years.

“I think it’s the shock,” said one of the priests. “You know, he’s always been so set in his ways.”

The others hastened to show that there was at least something they could advise on.

“Fetch him a glass of water.”

“Put a paper bag over his head.”

“Sacrifice a chicken under his nose.”

There was a high-pitched whistling noise, the distant crump of an explosion, and a long hissing. A few tendrils of steam curled into the room.

The priests rushed to the balcony, leaving Dios in his unnerving pool of trauma, and found that the crowds around the palace were staring at the sky.

“It would appear,” said the high priest of Cephut, God of Cutlery, who felt that he could take a more relaxed view of the immediate situation, “that Thrrp has fumbled it and has fallen to a surprise tackle from Jeht, Boatman of the Solar Orb.”

There was a distant buzzing, as of several billion bluebottles taking off in a panic, and a huge dark shape passed over the palace.

“But,” said the high priest of Cephut, “here comes Scrab again . . . yes, he’s gaining height . . . Jeht hasn’t seen him yet, he’s progressing confidently towards the meridian, and here comes Sessifet, Goddess of the Afternoon! This is a surprise! What a surprise this is! A young goddess, yet to make her mark, but my word, what a lot of promise there, this is an astonishing bid, eunuchs and gentlemen, and . . yes . . . Scrab has fumbled it! He’s fumbled it! . . .”

The shadows danced and spun on the stones of the balcony.

“. . . and . . . what’s this? The elder gods are, there’s no other word for it, they’re co-operating against these brash newcomers! But plucky young Sessifet is hanging in there, she’s exploiting the weakness. . . she’s in! . . . and pulling away now, pulling away, Gil and Scrab appear to be fighting, she’s got a clear sky and, yes, yes . . . yes! . . . it’s noon! It’s noon! It’s noon!”

Silence. The priest was aware that everyone was staring at him.

Then someone said, “Why are you shouting into that bulrush?”

“Sorry. Don’t know what came over me there.”

The priestess of Sarduk, Goddess of Caves, snorted at him.

“Suppose one of them had dropped it?” she snapped.

“But . . . but . . .” He swallowed. “It’s not possible, is it? Not really? We all must have eaten something, or been out in the sun too long, or something. Because, I mean, everyone knows that the gods aren’t . . . I mean, the sun is a big flaming ball of gas, isn’t it, that goes around the whole world every day, and, and, and the gods. . . well, you know, there’s a very real need in people to believe, don’t get me wrong here-”

Koomi, even with his head buzzing with thoughts of perfidy, was quicker on the uptake than his colleagues.

“Get him, lads!” he shouted.

Four priests grabbed the luckless cutlery worshipper by his arms and legs and gave him a high-speed run across the stones to the edge of the balcony, over the parapet and into the mud-coloured waters of the Djel.

He surfaced, spluttering.

“What did you go and do that for?” he demanded. “You all know I’m right. None of you really-”

The waters of the Djel opened a lazy jaw, and he vanished, just as the huge winged shape of Scrab buzzed threateningly over the palace and whirred off towards the mountains.

Koomi mopped his forehead.

“Bit of a close shave there,” he said. His colleagues nodded, staring at the fading ripples. Suddenly, Djeibeybi was no place for honest doubt. Honest doubt could get you seriously picked up and your arms and legs torn off.

“Er,.” said one of them. “Cephut’s going to be a bit upset, though, isn’t he?”

“All hail Cephut,” they chorused. Just in case.

“Don’t see why,” grumbled an elderly priest at the back of the crowd. “Bloody knife and fork artist.”

They grabbed him, still protesting, and hurled him into the river.

“All hail-” They paused. “Who was he high priest of, anyway?”

“Bunu, the Goat-headed God of Goats? Wasn’t he?”

“All hail Bunu, probably,” they chorused, as the sacred crocodiles homed in like submarines.

Koomi raised his hands, imploring. It is said that the hour brings forth the man. He was the kind of man that is brought forth by devious and unpleasant hours, and underneath his bald head certain conclusions were beginning to unfold, like things imprisoned for years inside stones. He wasn’t yet sure what they were, but they were broadly on the subject of gods, the new age, the need for a firm hand on the helm, and possibly the inserting of Dios into the nearest crocodile. The mere thought filled him with forbidden delight.

“Brethren!” he cried.

“Excuse me,” said the priestess of Sarduk.

“And sistren-”

“Thank you.”

“-let us rejoice!” The assembled priests stood in total silence. This was a radical approach which had not hitherto occurred to them. And Koomi looked at their upturned faces and felt a thrill the like of which he had never experienced before. They were frightened out of their wits, and they were expecting him - him - to tell them what to do.

“Yea!” he said. “And, indeed, verily, the hour of the gods-”

“-and goddesses-”

“-yes, and goddesses, is at hand. Er.”

What next? What, when you got right down to it, was he going to tell them to do? And then he thought: it doesn’t matter. Provided I sound confident enough. Old Dios always drove them, he never tried to lead them. Without him they’re wandering around like sheep.

“And, brethren - and sistren, of course - we must ask ourselves, we must ask ourselves, we, er, yes.” His voice waxed again with new confidence. “Yes, we must ask ourselves why the gods are at hand. And without doubt it is because we have not been assiduous enough in our worship, we have, er, we have lusted after graven idols.”

The priests exchanged glances. Had they? How did you do it, actually?

“And, yes, and what about sacrifices? Time was when a sacrifice was a sacrifice, not some messing around with a chicken and flowers.”

This caused some coughing in the audience.

“Are we talking maidens here?” said one of the priests uncertainly.

“Ahem.”

“And inexperienced young men too, certainly,” he said quickly. Sarduk was one of the older goddesses, whose female worshippers got up to no good in sacred groves; the thought of her wandering around the landscape somewhere, bloody to the elbows, made the eyes water.

Koomi’s heart thumped. “Well, why not?” he said. “Things were better then, weren’t they?”

“But, er, I thought we stopped all that sort of thing. Population decline and so forth.”

There was a monstrous splash out in the river. Tzut, the Snake-Headed God of the Upper Djel, surfaced and regarded the assembled priesthood solemnly. Then Fhez, the Crocodile-Headed God of the Lower Djel, erupted beside him and made a spirited attempt at biting his head off. The two submerged in a column of spray and a minor tidal wave which slopped over the balcony.

“Ah, but maybe the population declined because we stopped sacrificing virgins - of both sexes, of course,” said Koomi, hurriedly. “Have you ever thought of it like that?” They thought of it. Then they thought of it again.

“I don’t think the king would approve-” said one of the priests cautiously.

“The king?” shouted Koomi. “Where is the king? Show me the king! Ask Dios where the king is!”

There was a thud by his feet. He looked down in horror as the gold mask bounced, and rolled towards the priests. They scattered hurriedly, like skittles.

Dios strode out into the light of the disputed sun, his face grey with fury.

“The king is dead,” he said.

Koomi swayed under the sheer pressure of anger, but rallied magnificently.

“Then his successor-” he began.

“There is no successor,” said Dios. He stared up at the sky. Few people can look directly at the sun, but under the venom of Dios’s gaze the sun itself might have flinched and looked away. Dios’s eyes sighted down that fearsome nose like twin range finders.

To the air in general he said: “Coming here as if they own the place. How dare they?”

Koomi’s mouth dropped open. He started to protest, and a kilowatt stare silenced him.

Koomi sought support from the crowd of priests, who were busily inspecting their nails or staring intently into the middle distance. The message was clear. He was on his own. Although, if by some chance he won the battle of wills, he’d be surrounded by people assuring him that they had been behind him all along.

“Anyway, they do own the place,” he mumbled.

“What?”

“They, er, they do own the place, Dios,” Koomi repeated. His temper gave out. “They’re the sodding gods, Dios!”

“They’re our gods,” Dios hissed. “We’re not their people. They’re my gods and they will learn to do as they are instructed!”

Koomi gave up the frontal assault. You couldn’t outstare that sapphire stare, you couldn’t stand the war-axe nose and, most of all, no man could be expected to dent the surface of Dios’s terrifying righteousness.

“But-” he managed.

Dios waved him into silence with a trembling hand.

“They’ve no right! “ he said. “I did not give any orders! They have no right!”

“Then what are you going to do?” said Koomi.

Dios’s hands opened and closed fitfully. He felt like a royalist might feel - a good royalist, a royalist who cut out pictures of all the Royals and stuck them in a scrapbook, a royalist who wouldn’t hear a word said about them, they did such a good job and they can’t answer back - if suddenly all the Royals turned up in his living room and started rearranging the furniture. He longed for the necropolis, and the cool silence among his old friends, and a quick sleep after which he’d be able to think so much more clearly . . .

Koomi’s heart leapt. Dios’s discomfort was a crack which, with due care and attention, could take a wedge. But you couldn’t use a hammer. Head on, Dios could outfight the world.

The old man was shaking again. “I do not presume to tell them how to run affairs in the Hereunder,” he said. “They shall not presume to instruct me in how to run my kingdom.”

Koomi salted this treasonable statement away for further study and patted him gently on the back.

“You’re right, of course,” he said. Dios’s eyes swivelled.

“I am?” he said, suspiciously.

“I’m sure that, as the king’s minister, you will find a way. You have our full support, O Dios.” Koomi waved an uplifted hand at the priests, who chorused wholehearted agreement. If you couldn’t depend on kings and gods, you could always rely on old Dios. There wasn’t one of them that wouldn’t prefer the uncertain wrath of the gods to a rebuke from Dios. Dios terrified them in a very positive, human way that no supernatural entity ever could. Dios would sort it out.

“And we take no heed to these mad rumours about the king’s disappearance. They are undoubtedly wild exaggerations, with no foundation,” said Koomi.

The priests nodded while, in each mind, a tiny rumour uncurled the length of its tail.

“What rumours?” said Dios out of the corner of his mouth.

“So enlighten us, master, as to the path we must now take,” said Koomi.

Dios wavered.

He did not know what to do. For him, this was a new experience. This was Change.

All he could think of, all that was pressing forward in his mind, were the words of the Ritual of the Third Hour, which he had said at this time for - how long? Too long, too long! - And he should have gone to his rest long before, but the time had never been right, there was never anyone capable, they would have been lost without him, the kingdom would founder, he would be letting everyone down, and so he’d crossed the river. . . he swore every time that it was the last, but it never was, not when the chill fetched his limbs, and the decades had become - longer. And now, when his kingdom needed him, the words of a Ritual had scored themselves into the pathways of his brain and bewildered all attempts at thought.

“Er,” he said.

You Bastard chewed happily. Teppic had tethered him too near an olive tree, which was getting a terminal pruning. Sometimes the camel would stop, gaze up briefly at the seagulls that circled everywhere above Ephebe city, and subject them to a short, deadly burst of olive stones.

He was turning over in his mind an interesting new concept in Thau-dimensional physics which unified time, space, magnetism, gravity and, for some reason, broccoli. Periodically he would make noises like distant quarry blasting, but which merely indicated that all stomachs were functioning perfectly.

Ptraci sat under the tree, feeding the tortoise on vine leaves.

Heat crackled off the white walls of the tavern but, Teppic thought, how different it was from the Old Kingdom. There even the heat was old; the air was musty and lifeless, it pressed like a vice, you felt it was made of boiled centuries. Here it was leavened by the breeze from the sea. It was edged with salt crystals. It carried exciting hints of wine; more than a hint in fact, because Xeno was already on his second amphora. This was the kind of place where things rolled up their sleeves and started.

“But I still don’t understand about the tortoise,” he said, with some difficulty. He’d just taken his first mouthful of Ephebian wine, and it had apparently varnished the back of his throat.

“S quite simple,” said Xeno. “Look, let’s say this olive stone is the arrow and this, and this-” he cast around aimlessly - “and this stunned seagull is the tortoise, right? Now, when you fire the arrow it goes from here to the seag - the tortoise, am I right?”

“I suppose so, but-”

“But, by this time, the seagu - the tortoise has moved on a bit, hasn’t he? Am I right?”

“I suppose so,” said Teppic, helplessly. Xeno gave him a look of triumph.

“So the arrow has to go a bit further, doesn’t it, to where the tortoise is now. Meanwhile the tortoise has flow - moved on, not much, I’ll grant you, but it doesn’t have to be much. Am I right? So the arrow has a bit further to go, but the point is that by the time it gets to where the tortoise is now the tortoise isn’t there. So, if the tortoise keeps moving, the arrow will never hit it. It’ll keep getting closer and closer but never hit it. QED.”

“Are you right?” said Teppic automatically.

“No,” said Ibid coldly. “There’s a dozen tortoise kebabs to prove him wrong. The trouble with my friend here is that he doesn’t know the difference between a postulate and a metaphor of human existence. Or a hole in the ground.”

“It didn’t hit it yesterday,” snapped Xeno.

“Yes, I was watching. You hardly pulled the string back. I saw you,” said Ibid.

They started to argue again.

Teppic stared into his wine mug. These men are philosophers, he thought. They had told him so. So their brains must be so big that they have room for ideas that no-one else would consider for five seconds. On the way to the tavern Xeno had explained to him, for example, why it was logically impossible to fall out of a tree.

Teppic had described the vanishing of the kingdom, but he hadn’t revealed his position in it. He hadn’t a lot of experience of these matters, but he had a very clear feeling that kings who hadn’t got a kingdom any more were not likely to be very popular in neighbouring countries. There had been one or two like that in Ankh-Morpork - deposed royalty, who had fled their suddenly-dangerous kingdoms for Ankh’s hospitable bosom carrying nothing but the clothes they stood up in and a few wagonloads of jewels. The city, of course, welcomed anyone - regardless of race, colour, class or creed - who had spending money in incredible amounts, but nevertheless the inhumation of surplus monarchs was a regular source of work for the Assassins” Guild. There was always someone back home who wanted to be certain that deposed monarchs stayed that way. It was usually a case of heir today, gone tomorrow.

“I think it got caught up in geometry,” he said, hopefully. “I heard you were very good at geometry here,” he added, “and perhaps you could tell me how to get back.”

“Geometry is not my forte,” said Ibid. “As you probably know.”

“Sorry?”

“Haven’t you read my Principles of Ideal Government?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Or my Discourse on Historical Inevitability?”

“No.”

Ibid looked crestfallen. “Oh,” he said.

“Ibid is a well-known authority on everything,” said Xeno. “Except for geometry. And interior decorating. And elementary logic.” Ibid glared at him.

“What about you, then?” said Teppic.

Xeno drained his mug. “I’m more into the destruct testing of axioms,” he said. “The chap you need is Pthagonal. A very acute man with an angle.”

He was interrupted by the clatter of hooves. Several horsemen galloped with reckless speed past the tavern and on up the winding, cobbled streets of the city. They seemed very excited about something.

Ibid picked a stunned seagull out of his wine cup and laid it on the table. He was looking thoughtful.

“If the Old Kingdom has really disappeared-” he said.

“It has,” said Teppic firmly. “It’s not something you can be mistaken about, really.”

“Then that means our border is concurrent with that of Tsort,” said Ibid ponderously.

“Pardon?” said Teppic.

“There’s nothing between us,” explained the philosopher.

“Oh, dear. That means we shall be forced to make war.”

“Why?”

Ibid opened his mouth, stopped, and turned to Xeno.

“Why does it mean we’ll be forced to make war?” he said.

“Historical imperative,” said Xeno.

“Ah, yes. I knew it was something like that. I am afraid it is inevitable. It’s a shame, but there you are.”

There was another clatter as another party of horsemen rounded the corner, heading downhill this time. They wore the high plumed helmets of Ephebian soldiery, and were shouting enthusiastically.

Ibid settled himself more comfortably on the bench and folded his bands.

“That’ll be the Tyrant’s men,” he said, as the troop galloped through the city gates and out on to the desert. “He’s sending them to check, you may depend upon it.”

Teppic knew about the enmity between Ephebe and Tsort, of course. The Old Kingdom had profited mightily by it, by seeing that the merchants of both sides had somewhere discreet in which to trade with one another. He drummed his fingers on the table.

“You haven’t fought each other for thousands of years,” he said. “You were tiny countries in those days. It was just a scrap. Now you’re huge. People could get hurt. Doesn’t that worry you?”

“It’s a matter of pride,” said Ibid, but his voice was tinged with uncertainty. “I don’t think there’s much choice.”

“It was that bloody wooden cow or whatever,” said Xeno. “They’ve never forgiven us for it.”

“If we don’t attack them, they’ll attack us first,” said Ibid.

“S’right,” said Xeno. “So we’d better retaliate before they have a chance to strike.”

The two philosophers stared uncomfortably at one another.

“On the other hand,” said Thid, “war makes it very difficult to think straight.”

“There is that,” Xeno agreed. “Especially for dead people.” There was an embarrassed silence, broken only by Ptraci’s voice singing to the tortoise and the occasional squeak of stricken seagulls.

“What day is it?” said Ibid.

“Tuesday,” said Teppic.

“I think,” said Thid, “that it might be a good idea if you came to the symposium. We have one every Tuesday,” he added. “All the greatest minds in Ephebe will be there. All this needs thinking about.”

He glanced at Ptraci.

“However,” he said, “your young woman cannot attend, naturally. Females are absolutely forbidden. Their brains overheat.”

King Teppicymon XXVII opened his eyes. It’s bloody dark in here, he thought.

And he realised that he could hear his own heart beating, but muffled, and some way off.

And then he remembered.

He was alive. He was alive again. And, this time, he was in bits.

Somehow, he’d assumed that you got assembled again once you got to the netherworld, like one of Grinjer’s kits.

Get a grip on yourself, man, he thought.

It’s up to you to pull yourself together.

Right, he thought. There were at least six jars. So my eyes are in one of them. Getting the lid off would be favourite, so we can see what we’re at.

That’s going to involve arms and legs and fingers.

This is going to be really tricky.

He reached out, tentatively, with stiff joints, and located something heavy. It felt as though it might give, so he moved his other arm into position, with a great deal of awkwardness, and pushed.

There was a distant thump, and a definite feeling of openness above him. He sat up, creaking all the way.

The sides of the ceremonial casket still hemmed him in, but to his surprise he found that one slow arm movement brushed them out of the way like paper. Must be all the pickle and stuffing, he thought. Gives you a bit of weight.

He felt his way to the edge of the slab, lowered his heavy legs to the ground and, after a pause out of habit to wheeze a bit, took the first tottering lurch of the newly undead.

It is astonishingly difficult to walk with legs full of straw when the brain doing the directing is in a pot ten feet away, but he made it as far as the wall and felt his way along it until a crash indicated that he’d reached the shelf of jars. He fumbled the lids of the first one and dipped his hand gently inside.

It must be brains, he thought maniacally, because semolina doesn’t squidge like that. I’ve collected my own thoughts, haha.

He tried one or two more jars until an explosion of daylight told him he’d found the one with his eyes in. He watched his own bandaged hand reach down, growing gigantic, and scoop them up carefully.

That seems to be the important bits, he thought. The rest can wait until later. Maybe when I need to eat something, and so forth.

He turned around, and realised that he was not alone. Dil and Gern were watching him. To squeeze any further into the far corner of the room, they would have needed triangular backbones.

“Ah. Ho there, good people,” said the king, aware that his voice was a little hollow. “I know so much about you, I’d like to shake you by the hand.” He looked down. “Only they’re rather full at the moment,” he added.

“Gkkk,” said Gern.

“You couldn’t do a bit of reassembly, could you?” said the king, turning to Dil. “Your stitches seem to be holding up nicely, by the way. Well done, that man.”

Professional pride broke through the barrier of Dil’s terror.

“You’re alive?” he said.

“That was the general idea, wasn’t it?” said the king.

Dil nodded. Certainly it was. He’d always believed it to be true. He’d just never expected it ever actually to happen. But it had, and the first words, well, nearly the first words that had been said were in praise of his needlework. His chest swelled. No-one else in the Guild had ever been congratulated on their work by a recipient.

“There,” he said to Gern, whose shoulderblades were making a spirited attempt to dig their way through the wall. “Hear what has been said to your master.

The king paused. It was beginning to dawn on him that things weren’t quite right here. Of course the netherworld was like this world, only better, and no doubt there were plenty of servants and so forth. But it seemed altogether far too much like this world. He was pretty sure that Dil and Gern shouldn’t be in it yet. Anyway, he’d always understood that the common people had their own netherworld, where they would be more at ease and could mingle with their own kind and wouldn’t feel awkward and socially out of place.

“I say,” he said. “I may have missed a bit here. You’re not dead, are you?”

Dil didn’t answer immediately. Some of the things he’d seen so far today had made him a bit uncertain on the subject. In the end, though, he was forced to admit that he probably was alive.

“Then what’s happening?” said the king.

“We don’t know, O king,” said Dil. “Really we don’t. It’s all come true, O fount of waters!”

“What has?”

“Everything!”

“Everything?”

“The sun, O lord. And the gods! Oh, the gods! They’re everywhere, O master of heaven!”

“We come in through the back way,” said Gern, who had dropped to his knees. “Forgive us, O lord of justice, who has come back to deliver his mighty wisdom and that. I am sorry about me and Glwenda, it was a moment of wossname, mad passion, we couldn’t control ourselves. Also, it was me-”

Dil waved him into a devout silence.

“Excuse me,” he said to the king’s mummy. “But could we have a word away from the lad? Man to-”

“Corpse?” said the king, trying to make it easy for him. “Certainly.”

They wandered over to the other side of the room.

“The fact is, O gracious king of-” Dil began, in a conspiratorial whisper.

“I think we can dispense with all that,” said the king briskly. “The dead don’t stand on ceremony. “King” will be quite sufficient.”

“The fact is, then - king,” said Dil, experiencing a slight thrill at this equitable treatment, “young Gern thinks it’s all his fault. I’ve told him over and over again that the gods wouldn’t go to all this trouble just because of one growing lad with urges, if you catch my drift.” He paused, and added carefully, “They wouldn’t, would they?”

“Shouldn’t think so for one minute,” said the king briskly. “We’d never see the back of them, otherwise.”

“That’s what I told him,” said Dil, immensely relieved. “He’s a good boy, sir, it’s just that his mum is a bit funny about religion. We’d never see the back of them, those were my very words. I’d be very grateful if you could have a word with him, sir, you know, set his mind at rest-”

“Be happy to,” said the king graciously.

Dil sidled closer.

“The fact is, sir, these gods, sir, they aren’t right. We’ve been watching, sir. At least, I have. I climbed on the roof. Gern didn’t, he hid under the bench. They’re not right, sir!”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Well, they’re here, sir! That’s not right, is it? I mean, not to be really here. And they’re just striding around and fighting amongst themselves and shouting at people.” He looked both ways before continuing. “Between you and me, sir,” he said, “they don’t seem too bright.”

The king nodded. “What are the priests doing about this?” he said.

“I saw them throwing one another in the river, sir.”

The king nodded again. “That sounds about right,” he said. “They’ve come to their senses at last.”

“You know what I think, sir?” said Dil earnestly. “Everything we believe is coming true. And I heard something else, sir. This morning, if it was this morning, you understand, because the sun’s all over the place, sir, and it’s not the right sort of sun, but this morning some of the soldiers tried to get out along the Ephebe road, sir, and do you know what they found?”

“What did they find?”

“The road out, sir, leads in!” Dil took a step backwards the better to illustrate the seriousness of the revelations. “They got up into the rocks and then suddenly they were walking down the Tsort road. It all sort of curves back on itself. We’re shut in, sir. Shut in with our gods.”

And I’m shut in my body, thought the king. Everything we believe is true? And what we believe isn’t what we think we believe.

I mean, we think we believe that the gods are wise and just and powerful, but what we really believe is that they are like our father after a long day. And we think we believe the netherworld is a sort of paradise, but we really believe it’s right here and you go to it in your body and I’m in it and I’m never going to get away. Never, ever.

“What’s my son got to say about all this?” he said. Dil coughed. It was the ominous cough. The Spanish use an upside-down question mark to tell you what you’re about to hear is a question; this was the kind of cough that tells you what you’re about to hear is a dirge.

“Don’t know how to tell you this, sir,” he said.

“Out with it, man.”

“Sir, they say he’s dead, sir. They say he killed himself and ran away.

“Killed himself?”

“Sorry, sir.”

“And ran away afterwards?”

“On a camel, they say.”

“We lead an active afterlife in our family, don’t we?” observed the king dryly.

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“I mean, the two statements could be held to be mutually exclusive.”

Dil’s face became a well-meaning blank.

“That is to say, they can’t both be true,” supplied the king, helpfully.

“Ahem,” said Dil.

“Yes, but I’m a special case,” said the king testily. “In this kingdom we believe you live after death only if you’ve been mumm-”

He stopped.

It was too horrible to think about. He thought about it, nevertheless, for some time.

Then he said, “We must do something about it.”

Dil said, “Your son, sir?”

“Never mind about my son, he’s not dead, I’d know about it,” snapped the king. “He can look after himself, he’s my son. It’s my ancestors I’m worried about.”

“But they’re dead-” Dil began.

It has already been remarked that Dil had a very poor imagination. In a job like his a poor imagination was essential. But his mind’s eye opened on a panorama of pyramids, stretching along the river, and his mind’s ear swooped and curved through solid doors that no thief could penetrate.

And it heard the scrabbling.

And it heard the hammering.

And it heard the muffled shouting.

The king put a bandaged arm over his trembling shoulders.

“I know you’re a good man with a needle, Dil,” he said. “Tell me - how are you with a sledgehammer?”

Copolymer, the greatest storyteller in the history of the world, sat back and beamed at the greatest minds in the world, assembled at the dining table.

Teppic had added another iota to his store of new knowledge. “Symposium” meant a knife-and-fork tea.

“Well,” said Copolymer, and launched into the story of the Tsortean Wars.

“You see, what happened was, he’d taken her back home, and her father - this wasn’t the old king, this was the one before, the one with the wossname, he married some girl from over Elharib way, she had a squint, what was her name now, began with a P. Or an L. One of them letters, anyway. Her father owned an island out on the bay there, Papylos I think it was. No, I tell a lie, it was Crinix. Anyway, the king, the other king, he raised an army and they . . . Elenor, that was her name. She had a squint, you know. But quite attractive, they say. When I say married, I trust I do not have to spell it out for you. I mean, it was a bit unofficial. Er. Anyway, there was this wooden horse and after they’d got in . . . Did I tell you about this horse? It was a horse. I’m pretty sure it was a horse. Or maybe it was a chicken. Forget my own name next! It was wossname’s idea, the one with the limp. Yes. The limp in his leg, I mean. Did I mention him? There’d been this fight. No, that was the other one, I think. Yes. Anyway, this wooden pig, damn clever idea, they made it out of thing. Tip of my tongue. Wood. But that was later, you know. The fight! Nearly forgot the fight. Yes. Damn good fight. Everyone banging on their shields and yelling. Wossname’s armour shone like shining armour. Fight and a half, that fight. Between thingy, not the one with the limp, the other one, wossname, had red hair. You know. Tall fellow, talked with a lisp. Hold on, just remembered, he was from some other island. Not him. The other one, with the limp. Didn’t want to go, he said he was mad. Of course, he was bloody mad, definitely. I mean, a wooden cow! Like wossname said, the king, no, not that king, the other one, he saw the goat, he said, “I fear the Ephebians, especially when they’re mad enough to leave bloody great wooden livestock on the doorstep, talk about nerve, they must think we was born yesterday, set fire to it,” and, of course, wossname had nipped in round the back and put everyone to the sword, talk about laugh. Did I say she had a squint? They said she was pretty, but it takes all sorts. Yes. Anyway, that’s how it happened. Now, of course, wossname - I think he was called Melycanus, had a limp - he wanted to go home, well, you would, they’d been there for years, he wasn’t getting any younger. That’s why he dreamt up the thing about the wooden wossname. Yes. I tell a lie, Lavaelous was the one with the knee. Pretty good fight, that fight, take it from me.”

He lapsed into self-satisfied silence.

“Pretty good fight,” he mumbled and, smiling faintly, dropped off to sleep.

Teppic was aware that his own mouth was hanging open. He shut it. Along the table several of the diners were wiping their eyes.

“Magic,” said Xeno. “Sheer magic. Every word a tassel on the canopy of Time.”

“It’s the way he remembers every tiny detail. Pin-sharp,” murmured Ibid.

Teppic looked down the length of the table, and then nudged Xeno beside him. “Who is everyone?” he said.

“Well, Ibid you already know. And Copolymer. Over there, that’s Iesope, the greatest teller of fables in the world. And that’s Antiphon, the greatest writer of comic plays in the world.”

“Where is Pthagonal?” said Teppic. Xeno pointed to the far end of the table, where a glum-looking, heavy-drinking man was trying to determine the angle between two bread rolls. “I’ll introduce you to him afterwards,” he said.

Teppic looked around at the bald heads and long white beards, which seemed to be a badge of office. If you had a bald head and a long white beard, they seemed to indicate, whatever lay between them must be bursting with wisdom. The only exception was Antiphon, who looked as though he was built of pork.

They are great minds, he told himself. These are men who are trying to work out how the world fits together, not by magic, not by religion, but just by inserting their brains in whatever crack they can find and trying to lever it apart.

Ibid rapped on the table for silence.

“The Tyrant has called for war on Tsort,” he said. “Now, let us consider the place of war in the ideal republic,” he said. “We would require-”

“Excuse me, could you just pass me the celery?” said Iesope. “Thank you.”

“-the ideal republic, as I was saying, based on the fundamental laws that govern-”

“And the salt. It’s just by your elbow.”

“-the fundamental laws, that is, which govern all men. Now, it is without doubt true that war. . . could you stop that, please?”

“It’s celery,” said Iesope, crunching cheerfully. “You can’t help it with celery.”

Xeno peered suspiciously at what was on his fork.

“Here, this is squid,” he said. “I didn’t ask for squid. Who ordered squid?”

“-without doubt,” repeated Thid, raising his voice, “without doubt, I put it to you-

“I think this is the lamb couscous,” said Antiphon.

“Was yours the squid?”

“I asked for marida and dolmades.”

“I ordered the lamb. Just pass it along, will you?”

“I don’t remember anyone asking for all this garlic bread,” said Xeno.

“Look, some of us are trying to float a philosophical concept here,” said Ibid sarcastically. “Don’t let us interrupt you, will you?”

Someone threw a breadstick at him.

Teppic looked at what was on his fork. Seafood was unknown in the kingdom, and what was on his fork had too many valves and suckers to be reassuring. He lifted a boiled vine leaf with extreme care, and was sure he saw something scuttle behind an olive.

Ah. Something else to remember, then. The Ephebians made wine out of anything they could put in a bucket, and ate anything that couldn’t climb out of one.

He pushed the food around on his plate. Some of it pushed back.

And philosophers didn’t listen to one another. And they don’t stick to the point. This probably is mocracy at work.

A bread roll bounced past him. Oh, and they get over-excited.

He noticed a skinny little man sitting opposite him, chewing primly on some anonymous tentacle. Apart from Pthagonal the geometrician, who was now gloomily calculating the radius of his plate, he was the only person not speaking his mind at the top of his voice. Sometimes he’d make little notes on a piece of parchment and slip it into his toga.

Teppic leaned across. Further down the table Iesope, encouraged by occasional olive stones and bread rolls, started a long fable about a fox, a turkey, a goose and a wolf, who had a wager to see who could stay longest underwater with heavy weights tied to their feet.

“Excuse me,” said Teppic, raising his voice above the din. “Who are you?”

The little man gave him a shy look. He had extremely large ears. In a certain light, he could have been mistaken for a very thin jug.

“I’m Endos,” he said.

“Why aren’t you philosophising?”

Endos sliced a strange mollusc.

“I’m not a philosopher, actually,” he said.

“Or a humorous playwright or something?” said Teppic.

“I’m afraid not. I’m a Listener. Endos the Listener, I’m known as.”

“That’s fascinating,” said Teppic automatically. “What does that involve?”

“Listening.”

“Just listening?”

“That’s what they pay me for,” said Endos. “Sometimes I nod. Or smile. Or nod and smile at the same time. Encouragingly, you know. They like that.”

Teppic felt he was called upon to comment at this point. “Gosh,” he said.

Endos gave him an encouraging nod, and a smile that suggested that of all the things Endos could be doing in the world right at this minute there was nothing so basically riveting as listening to Teppic. It was something about his ears. They appeared to be a vast aural black hole, begging to be filled up with words. Teppic felt an overpowering urge to tell him all about his life and hopes and dreams. . .

“I bet,” he said, “that they pay you an awful lot of money.”

Endos gave him a heartening smile.

“Have you listened to Copolymer tell his story lots of times?”

Endos nodded and smiled, although there was a faint trace of pain right behind his eyes.

“I expect,” said Teppic, “that your ears develop protective rough surfaces after a while?”

Endos nodded. “Do go on,” he urged.

Teppic glanced across at Pthagonal, who was moodily drawing right angles in his taramasalata.

“I’d love to stay and listen to you listening to me all day,” he said. “But there’s a man over there I’d like to see.”

“That’s amazing,” said Endos, making a short note and turning his attention to a conversation further along the table. A philosopher had averred that although truth was beauty, beauty was not necessarily truth, and a fight was breaking out. Endos listened carefully*. (* The role of listeners has never been fully appreciated. However, it is well known that most people don’t listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they’re going to say next. True Listeners have always been revered among oral cultures, and prized for their rarity value; bards and poets are ten a cow, but a good Listener is hard to find, or at least hard to find twice.)

Teppic wandered along the table to where Pthagonal was sitting in unrelieved misery, and currently peering suspiciously over the crust of a pie.

Teppic looked over his shoulder.

“I think I saw something moving in there,” he said.

“Ah,” said the geometrician, taking the cork out of an amphora with his teeth. “The mysterious young man in black from the lost kingdom.”

“I was hoping you could help me find it again?” said Teppic.

“I heard that you have some very unusual ideas in Ephebe.”

“It had to happen,” said Pthagonal. He pulled a pair of dividers from the folds of his robe and measured the pie thoughtfully. “Is it a constant, do you think? It’s a depressing concept.”

“Sorry?” said Teppic.

“The diameter divides into the circumference, you know. It ought to be three times. You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But does it? No. Three point one four one and lots of other figures. There’s no end to the buggers. Do you know how pissed off that makes me?”

“I expect it makes you extremely pissed off,” said Teppic politely.

“Right. It tells me that the Creator used the wrong kind of circles. It’s not even a proper number! I mean, three point five, you could respect. Or three point three. That’d look right.” He stared morosely at the pie.

“Excuse me, you said something about it had to happen?”

“What?” said Pthagonal, from the depths of his gloom. “Pie!” he added.

“What had to happen?” Teppic prompted.

“You can’t mess with geometry, friend. Pyramids? Dangerous things. Asking for trouble. I mean,” Pthagonal reached unsteadily for his wine cup, “how long did they think they could go on building bigger and bigger pyramids for? I mean, where did they think power comes from? I mean,” he hiccuped, “you’ve been in that place, haven’t you? Ever noticed how slow it all seems to be?”

“Oh, yes,” said Teppic flatly.

“That’s because the time is sucked up, see? Pyramids. So they have to flare it off. Flarelight, they call it. They think it looks pretty! It’s their time they’re burning off!”

“All I know is the air feels as though it’s been boiled in a sock,” said Teppic. “And nothing actually changes, even if it doesn’t stay the same.

“Right,” said Pthagonal. “The reason being, it’s past time. They use up past time, over and over again. The pyramids take all the new time. And if you don’t let the pyramids flare, the power build up”ll-“ he paused. “I suppose,” he went on, “that it’d escape along a wossname, a fracture. In space.”

“I was there before the kingdom, er, went,” said Teppic. “I thought I saw the big pyramid move.”

“There you are then. It’s probably moved the dimensions around by ninety degrees,” said Pthagonal, with the assurance of the truly drunk.

“You mean, so length is height and height is width?”

Pthagonal shook an unsteady finger.

“Nonono,” he said. “So that length is height and height is breadth and breadth is width and width is a”, he burped “A “time. S”nother dimessnon, see? Four of the bastards. Time’s one of them. Ninety thingys to the other three. Degrees is what I mean. Only, only, it can’t exist in this world like that, so the place had to sort of pop outside for a bit, see? Otherwise you’d have people getting older by walking sideways. He looked sadly into the depths of his cup. “And every birthday you’d age another mile,” he added. Teppic looked at him aghast.

“That’s time and space for you,” Pthagonal went on. “You can twist them all over the place if you’re not careful. Three point one four one. What sort of a number d’you call that?”

“It sounds horrible,” said Teppic.

“Damn right. Somewhere,” Pthagonal was beginning to sway on his bench, “somewhere someone built a universe with a decent, respectable value of, of,” he peered blankly at the table, “of pie. Not some damn number that never comes to an end, what kind of a”

“I meant, people getting older just by walking along!”

“I dunno, though. You could have a stroll back to where you were eighteen. Or wander up and see what you are going to look like when you’re seventy. Travelling in width, though, that’d be the real trick.”

Pthagonal smiled vacantly and then, very slowly, keeled over into his dinner, some of which moved out of the way*. (* He was wrong. Nature abhors dimensional abnormalities, and seals them neatly away so that they don’t upset people. Nature, in fact, abhors a lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the Marie Celeste, and the chuck keys for electric drills.)

Teppic became aware that the philosophic din around him had subsided a bit. He stared along the line until he spotted Ibid.

“It won’t work,” said Ibid. “The Tyrant won’t listen to us. Nor will the people. Anyway” he glanced at Antiphon - “we’re not all of one mind on the subject.”

“Damn Tsorteans need teaching a lesson,” said Antiphon sternly. “Not room for two major powers on this continent. Damn bad sports, anyway, just because we stole their queen. Youthful high spirits, love will have its way”

Copolymer woke up.

“You’ve got it wrong,” he said mildly. “The great war, that was because they stole our queen. What was her name now, face that launched a thousand camels, began with an A or a T or-”

“Did they?” shouted Antiphon. “The bastards!”

“I’m reasonably certain,” said Copolymer.

Teppic sagged, and turned to Endos the Listener. He was still eating his dinner, with the air of one who is determined to preserve his digestion.

“Endos?”

The Listener laid his knife and fork carefully on either side of his plate.

“Yes?”

“They’re really all mad, aren’t they?” said Teppic wearily. “That’s extremely interesting,” said Endos. “Do go on.” He reached shyly into his toga and brought forth a scrap of parchment, which he pushed gently towards Teppic.

“What’s this?”

“My bill,” said Endos. “Five minutes Attentive Listening. Most of my gentlemen have monthly accounts, but I understand you’ll be leaving in the morning?”

Teppic gave up. He wandered away from the table and into the cold garden surrounding the citadel of Ephebe. White marble statues of ancient Ephebians doing heroic things with no clothes on protruded through the greenery and, here and there, there were statues of Ephebian gods. It was hard to tell the difference. Teppic knew that Dios had hard words to say about the Ephebians for having gods that looked just like people. If the gods looked just like everyone else, he used to say, how would people know how to treat them?

Teppic had rather liked the idea. According to legend the Ephebians” gods were just like humans, except that they used their godhood to get up to things humans didn’t have the nerve to do. A favourite trick of Ephebian gods, he recalled, was turning into some animal in order to gain the favours of highly-placed Ephebian women. And one of them had reputedly turned himself into a golden shower in pursuit of his intended. All this raised interesting questions about everyday night life in sophisticated Ephebe.

He found Ptraci sitting on the grass under a poplar tree, feeding the tortoise. He gave it a suspicious look, in case it was a god trying it on. It did not look like a god. If it was a god, it was putting on an incredibly good act.

She was feeding it a lettuce leaf.

“Dear little ptortoise,” she said, and then looked up. “Oh, it’s you,” she said flatly.

“You didn’t miss much,” said Teppic, sagging on to the grass. “They’re a bunch of maniacs. When I left they were smashing the plates.”

“That’s ptraditional at the end of an Ephebian meal,” said Ptraci.

Teppic thought about this. “Why not before?” he said.

“And then they probably dance to the sound of the bourzuki,” Ptraci added. “I think it’s a sort of dog.”

Teppic sat with his head in his hands.

“I must say you speak Ephebian well,” he said.

“Pthank you.”

“Just a trace of an accent, though.”

“Languages is part of the ptraining,” she said. “And my grandmother told me that a ptrace of foreign accent is more fascinating.”

“We learned the same thing,” said Teppic. “An assassin should always be slightly foreign, no matter where he is. I’m good at that part,” he added bitterly.

She began to massage his neck.

“I went down to the harbour,” she said. “There’s those things like big rafts, you know, camels of the sea”

“Ships,” said Teppic.

“And they go everywhere. We could go anywhere we want. The world is our pthing with pearls in it, if we like.”

Teppic told her about Pthagonal’s theory. She didn’t seem surprised.

“Like an old pond where no new water comes in,” she observed. “So everyone goes round and round in the same old puddle. All the ptime you live has been lived already. It must be like other people’s bathwater.”

“I’m going to go back.”

Her fingers stopped their skilled kneading of his muscles.

“We could go anywhere,” she repeated. “We’ve got ptrades, we could sell that camel. You could show me that Ankh-Morpork place. It sounds interesting.”

Teppic wondered what effect Ankh-Morpork would have on the girl. Then he wondered what effect she would have on the city. She was definitely flowering. Back in the Old Kingdom she’d never apparently had any original thoughts beyond the choice of the next grape to peel, but since she was outside she seemed to have changed. Her jaw hadn’t changed, it was still quite small and, he had to admit, very pretty. But somehow it was more noticeable. She used to look at the ground when she spoke to him. She still didn’t always look at him when she spoke to him, but now it was because she was thinking about something else.

He found he kept wanting to say, politely, without stressing it in any way, just as a very gentle reminder, that he was king. But he had a feeling that she’d say she hadn’t heard, and would he please repeat it, and if she looked at him he’d never be able to say it twice.

“You could go,” he said. “You’d get on well. I could give you a few names and addresses.”

“And what would you do?”

“I dread to think what’s going on back home,” said Teppic. “I ought to do something.”

“You can’t. Why ptry? Even if you didn’t want to be an assassin there’s lots of pthings you could do. And you said the man said it’s not a place people could get into any more. I hate pyramids.”

“Surely there’s people there you care about?”

Ptraci shrugged. “If they’re dead there’s nothing I can do about it,” she said. “And if they’re alive, there’s nothing I can do about it. So I shan’t.”

Teppic stared at her in a species of horrified admiration. It was a beautiful summary of things as they were. He just couldn’t bring himself to think that way. His body had been away for seven years but his blood had been in the kingdom for a thousand times longer. Certainly he’d wanted to leave it behind, but that was the whole point. It would have been there. Even if he’d avoided it for the rest of his life, it would have still been a sort of anchor.

“I feel so wretched about it,” he repeated. “I’m sorry. That’s all there is to it. Even to go back for five minutes, just to say, well, that I’m not coming back. That’d be enough. It’s probably all my fault.”

“But there isn’t a way back! You’ll just hang around sadly, like those deposed kings you ptold me about. You know, with pthreadbare cloaks and always begging for their food in a high-class way. There’s nothing more useless than a king without a kingdom, you said. Just think about it.”

They wandered through the sunset streets of the city, and towards the harbour. All streets in the city led towards the harbour.

Someone was just putting a torch to the lighthouse, which was one of the More Than Seven Wonders of the World and had been built to a design by Pthagonal using the Golden Rule and the Five Aesthetic Principles. Unfortunately it had then been built in the wrong place because putting it in the right place would have spoiled the look of the harbour, but it was generally agreed by mariners to be a very beautiful lighthouse and something to look at while they were waiting to be towed off the rocks.

The harbour below it was thronged with ships. Teppic and Ptraci picked their way past crates and bundles until they reached the long curved guard wall, harbour calm on one side, choppy with waves on the other. Above them the lighthouse flared and sparked.

Those boats would be going to places he’d only ever heard of, he knew. The Ephebians were great traders. He could go back to Ankh and get his diploma, and then the world would indeed be the mollusc of his choice and he had any amount of knives to open it with.

Ptraci put her hand in his.

And there’d be none of this marrying relatives business. The months in Djelibeybi already seemed like a dream, one of those circular dreams that you never quite seem able to shake off and which make insomnia an attractive prospect. Whereas here was a future, unrolling in front of him like a carpet.

What a chap needed at a time like this was a sign, some sort of book of instructions. The trouble with life was that you didn’t get a chance to practise before doing it for real. You only-

“Good grief? It’s Teppic, isn’t it?” The voice was addressing him from ankle height. A head appeared over the stone of the jetty, quickly followed by its body. An extremely richly dressed body, one on which no expense had been spared in the way of gems, furs, silks and laces, provided that all of them, every single one, was black.

It was Chidder.

“What’s it doing now?” said Ptaclusp.

His son poked his head cautiously over the ruins of a pillar and watched Hat, the Vulture-Headed God.

“It’s sniffing around,” he said. “I think it likes the statue. Honestly, dad, why did you have to go and buy a thing like that?”

“It was in a job lot,” said Ptaclusp. “Anyway, I thought it would be a popular line.”

“With who?”

“Well, he likes it.”

Ptaclusp IIb risked another squint at the angular monstrosity that was still hopping around the ruins.

“Tell him he can have it if he goes away,” he suggested.

“Tell him he can have it at cost.”

Ptaclusp winced. “At a discount,” he said. “A special cut rate for our supernatural customers.”

He stared up at the sky. From their hiding place in the ruins of the construction camp, with the Great Pyramid still humming like a powerhouse behind them, they’d had an excellent view of the arrival of the gods. At first he’d viewed them with a certain amount of equanimity. Gods would be good customers, they always wanted temples and statues, he could deal directly, cut out the middle man.

And then it had occurred to him that a god, when he was unhappy about the product, as it might be, maybe the plasterwork wasn’t exactly as per spec, or perhaps a corner of the temple was a bit low on account of unexpected quicksand, a god didn’t just come around demanding in a loud voice to see the manager. No. A god knew exactly where you were, and got to the point. Also, gods were notoriously bad payers. So were humans, of course, but they didn’t actually expect you to die before they settled the account.

His gaze turned to his other son, a painted silhouette against the statue, his mouth a frozen O of astonishment, and Ptaclusp reached a decision.

“I’ve just about had it with pyramids,” he said. “Remind me, lad. If we ever get out of here, no more pyramids. We’ve got set in our ways. Time to branch out, I reckon.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you for ages, dad!” said IIb. “I’ve told you, a couple of decent aqueducts will make a tremendous-”

“Yes, yes, I remember,” said Ptaclusp. “Yes. Aqueducts. All those arches and things. Fine. Only I can’t remember where you said you have to put the coffin in.”

“Dad!”

“Don’t mind me, lad. I think I’m going mad.”

I couldn’t have seen a mummy and two men over there, carrying sledgehammers.

It was, indeed, Chidder.

And Chidder had a boat.

Teppic knew that further along the coast the Seriph of Al-Khali lived in the fabulous palace of the Rhoxie, which was said to have been built in one night by a genie and was famed in myth and legend for its splendour*. (* It was, therefore, colloquially known as the Djinn palace.)

The Unnamed was the Rhoxie afloat, but more so. Its designer had a gilt complex, and had tried every trick with gold paint, curly pillars and expensive drapes to make it look less like a ship and more like a boudoir that had collided with a highly suspicious type of theatre.

In fact, you needed an assassin’s eyes for hidden detail to notice how innocently the gaudiness concealed the sleekness of the hull and the fact, even when you added the cabin space and the holds together, that there still seemed to be a lot of capacity unaccounted for. The water around what Ptraci called the pointed end was strangely rippled, but it would be totally ridiculous to suspect such an obvious merchantman of having a concealed ramming spike underwater, or that a mere five minutes” work with an axe would turn this wallowing Alcdzar into something that could run away from nearly everything else afloat and make the few that could catch up seriously regret it.

“Very impressive,” said Teppic.

“It’s all show, really,” said Chidder.

“Yes. I can see that.”

“I mean, we’re poor traders.”

Teppic nodded. “The usual phrase is “poor but honest traders”,” he said.

Chidder smiled a merchant’s smile. “Oh, I think we’ll stick on “poor” at the moment. How the hell are you, anyway? Last we heard you were going off to be king of some place no-one’s ever heard of. And who is this lovely young lady?”

“Her name” Teppic began.

“Ptraci,” said Ptraci.

“She’s a hand-” Teppic began.

“She must surely be a royal princess,” said Chidder smoothly. “And it would give me the greatest pleasure if she, if indeed both of you, would dine with me tonight. Humble sailor’s fare, I’m afraid, but we muddle along, we muddle along.”

“Not Ephebian, is it?” said Teppic.

“Ship’s biscuit, salt beef, that sort of thing,” said Chidder, without taking his eyes off Ptraci. They hadn’t left her since she came on board.

Then he laughed. It was the old familiar Chidder laugh, not exactly without humour, but clearly well under the control of its owner’s higher brain centres.

“What an astonishing coincidence,” he said. “And us due to sail at dawn, too. Can I offer you a change of clothing? You both look somewhat, er, travel-stained.”

“Rough sailor clothing, I expect,” said Teppic. “As befits a humble merchant, correct me if I’m wrong?”

In fact Teppic was shown to a small cabin as exquisitely and carefully furnished as a jewelled egg, where there was laid upon the bed as fine an assortment of clothing as could be found anywhere on the Circle Sea. True, it all appeared second-hand, but carefully laundered and expertly stitched so that the sword cuts hardly showed at all. He gazed thoughtfully at the hooks on the wall, and the faint patching on the wood which hinted that various things had once been hung there and hastily removed.

He stepped out into the narrow corridor, and met Ptraci. She’d chosen a red court dress such as had been the fashion in Ankh-Morpork ten years previously, with puffed sleeves and vast concealed underpinnings and ruffs the size of millstones.

Teppic learned something new, which was that attractive women dressed in a few strips of gauze and a few yards of silk can actually look far more desirable when fully clad from neck to ankle. She gave an experimental twirl.

“There are any amount of things like this in there,” she said. “Is this how women dress in Ankh-Morpork? It’s like wearing a house. It doesn’t half make you sweaty.”

“Look, about Chidder,” said Teppic urgently. “I mean, he’s a good fellow and everything, but-”

“He’s very kind, isn’t he,” she agreed.

“Well. Yes. He is,” Teppic admitted, hopelessly. “He’s an old friend.”

“That’s nice.”

One of the crew materialised at the end of the corridor and bowed them into the state cabin, his air of old retainership marred only by the criss-cross pattern of scars on his head and some tattoos that made the pictures in The Shuttered Palace look like illustrations in a DIY shelving manual. The things he could make them do by flexing his biceps could keep entire dockside taverns fascinated for hours, and he was not aware that the worst moment of his entire life was only a few minutes away.

“This is all very pleasant,” said Chidder, pouring some wine. He nodded at the tattooed man. “You may serve the soup, Alfonz,” he added.

“Look, Chiddy, you’re not a pirate, are you?” said Teppic, desperately.

“Is that what’s been worrying you?” Chidder grinned his lazy grin.

It wasn’t everything that Teppic had been worrying about, but it had been jockeying for top position. He nodded.

“No, we’re not. We just prefer to, er, avoid paperwork wherever possible. You know? We don’t like people to have all the worry of having to know everything we do.”

“Only there’s all the clothes-”

“Ah. We get attacked by pirates a fair amount. That’s why father had the Unnamed built. It always surprises them. And the whole thing is morally sound. We get their ship, their booty, and any prisoners they may have get rescued and given a ride home at competitive rates.”

“What do you do with the pirates?”

Chidder glanced at Alfonz.

“That depends on future employment prospects,” he said. “Father always says that a man down on his luck should be offered a helping hand. On terms, that is. How’s the king business?”

Teppic told him. Chidder listened intently, swilling the wine around in his glass.

“So that’s it,” he said at last. “We heard there was going to be a war. That’s why we’re sailing tonight.”

“I don’t blame you,” said Teppic.

“No, I mean to get the trade organised. With both sides, naturally, because we’re strictly impartial. The weapons produced on this continent are really quite shocking. Down-right dangerous. You should come with us, too. You’re a very valuable person.”

“Never felt more valueless than right now,” said Teppic despondently.

Chidder looked at him in amazement.

“But you’re a king!” he said.

“Well, yes, but-”

“Of a country which technically still exists, but isn’t actually reachable by mortal man?”

“Sadly so.”

“And you can pass laws about, well, currency and taxation, yes?”

“I suppose so, but-”

“And you don’t think you’re valuable? Good grief, Tep, our accountants can probably think up fifty different ways to . . . well, my hands go damp just to think about it. Father will probably ask to move our head office there, for a start.”

“Chidder, I explained. You know it. No-one can get in,” said Teppic.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter?”

“No, because we’ll just make Ankh our main branch office and pay our taxes in wherever the place is. All we need is an official address in, I don’t know, the Avenue of the Pyramids or something. Take my tip and don’t give in on anything until father gives you a seat on the board. You’re royal, anyway, that’s always impressive . .

Chidder chattered on. Teppic felt his clothes growing hotter. So this was it. You lost your kingdom, and then it was worth more because it was a tax haven, and you took a seat on the board, whatever that was, and that made it all right.

Ptraci defused the situation by grabbing Alfonz’s arm as he was serving the pheasant.

“The Congress of The Friendly Dog and the Two Small Biscuits!” she exclaimed, examining the intricate tattoo. “You hardly ever see that these days. Isn’t it well done? You can even make out the yoghurt.”

Alfonz froze, and then blushed. Watching the glow spread across the great scarred head was like watching sunrise over a mountain range.

“What’s the one on your other arm?”

Alfonz, who looked as though his past jobs had included being a battering ram, murmured something and, very shyly, showed her his forearm.

“S’not really suitable for ladies,” he whispered.

Ptraci brushed aside the wiry hair like a keen explorer, while Chidder stared at her with his mouth hanging open.

“Oh, I know that one,” she said dismissively. “That’s out of 130 Days of Pseudopolis. It’s physically impossible.” She let go of the arm, and turned back to her meal. After a moment she looked up at Teppic and Chidder.

“Don’t mind me,” she said brightly. “Do go on.

“Alfonz, please go and put a proper shirt on,” said Chidder, hoarsely.

Alfonz backed away, staring at his arm.

“Er. What was I, er, saying?” said Chidder. “Sorry. Lost the thread. Er. Have some more wine, Tep?”

Ptraci didn’t just derail the train of thought, she ripped up the rails, burned the stations and melted the bridges for scrap. And so the dinner trailed off into beef pie, fresh peaches, crystallised sea urchins and desultory small talk about the good old days at the Guild. They had been three months ago. It seemed like a lifetime. Three months in the Old Kingdom was a lifetime.

After some time Ptraci yawned and went to her cabin, leaving the two of them alone with a fresh bottle of wine. Chidder watched her go in awed silence.

“Are there many like her back at your place?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Teppic admitted. “There could be. Usually they lie around the place peeling grapes or waving fans.”

“She’s amazing. She’ll take them by storm in Ankh, you know. With a figure like that and a mind like . . .” He hesitated. “Is she . . . ? I mean, are you two . . .

“No,” said Teppic.

“She’s very attractive.”

“Yes,” said Teppic.

“A sort of cross between a temple dancer and a bandsaw.” They took their glasses and went up on deck, where a few lights from the city paled against the brilliance of the stars. The water was flat calm, almost oily.

Teppic’s head was beginning to spin slowly. The desert, the sun, two gloss coats of Ephebian retsina on his stomach lining and a bottle of wine were getting together to beat up his synapses.

“I mus’ say,” he managed, leaning on the rail, “you’re doing all right for yourself.”

“It’s okay,” said Chidder. “Commerce is quite interesting. Building up markets, you know. The cut and thrust of competition in the privateering sector. You ought to come in with us, boy. It’s where the future lies, my father says. Not with wizards and kings, but with enterprising people who can afford to hire them. No offence intended, you understand.”

“We’re all that’s left,” said Teppic to his wine glass. “Out of the whole kingdom. Me, her, and a camel that smells like an old carpet. An ancient kingdom, lost.”

“Good job it wasn’t a new one,” said Chidder. “At least people got some wear out of it.”

“You don’t know what it’s like,” said Teppic. “It’s like a whole great pyramid. But upside down, you understand? All that history, all those ancestors, all the people, all funnelling down to me. Right at the bottom.”

He slumped on to a coil of rope as Chidder passed the bottle back and said, “It makes you think, doesn’t it? There’s all these lost cities and kingdoms around. Like Ee, in the Great Nef. Whole countries, just gone. Just out there somewhere. Maybe people started mucking about with geometry, what do you say?”

Teppic snored.

After some moments Chidder swayed forward, dropped the empty bottle over the side, it went plunk - and for a few seconds a stream of bubbles disturbed the flat calm - and staggered off to bed.

Teppic dreamed.

And in his dream he was standing on a high place, but unsteadily, because he was balancing on the shoulders of his father and mother, and below them he could make out his grandparents, and below them his ancestors stretching away and out in a vast, all right, a vast pyramid of humanity whose base was lost in clouds.

He could hear the murmur of shouted orders and instructions floating up to him.

If you do nothing, we shall never have been.

“This is just a dream,” he said, and stepped out of it into a palace where a small, dark man in a loincloth was sitting on a stone bench, eating figs.

“Of course it’s a dream,” he said. “The world is the dream of the Creator. It’s all dreams, different kinds of dreams. They’re supposed to tell you things. Like: don’t eat lobster last thing at night. Stuff like that. Have you had the one about the seven cows?”

“Yes,” said Teppic, looking around. He’d dreamed quite good architecture. “One of them was playing a trombone.”

“It was smoking a cigar in my day. Well-known ancestral dream, that dream.”

“What does it mean?”

The little man picked a seed from between his teeth.

“Search me,” he said. “I’d give my right arm to find out. I don’t think we’ve met, by the way. I’m Khuft. I founded this kingdom. You dream a good fig.”

“I’m dreaming you, too?”

“Damn right. I had a vocabulary of eight hundred words, do you think I’d really be talking like this? If you’re expecting a bit of helpful ancestral advice, forget it. This is a dream. I can’t tell you anything you don’t know yourself.”

“You’re the founder?”

“That’s me.”

“I . . . thought you’d be different,” said Teppic.

“How d’you mean?”

“Well . . . on the statue . .

Khuft waved a hand impatiently.

“That’s just public relations,” he said. “I mean, look at me. Do I look patriarchal?”

Teppic gave him a critical appraisal. “Not in that loincloth,” he admitted. “It’s a bit, well, ragged.”

“It’s got years of wear left in it,” said Khuft.

“Still, I expect it’s all you could grab when you were fleeing from persecution,” said Teppic, anxious to show an understanding nature.

Khuft took another fig and give him a lopsided look. “How’s that again?”

“You were being persecuted,” said Teppic. “That’s why you fled into the desert.”

“Oh, yes. You’re right. Damn right. I was being persecuted for my beliefs.”

“That’s terrible,” said Teppic.

Khuft spat. “Damn right. I believed people wouldn’t notice I’d sold them camels with plaster teeth until I was well out of town.”

It took a little while for this to sink in, but it managed it with all the aplomb of a concrete block in a quicksand.

“You’re a criminal?” said Teppic.

“Well, criminal’s a dirty word, know what I mean?” said the little ancestor. “I’d prefer entrepreneur. I was ahead of my time, that’s my trouble.”

“And you were running away?” said Teppic weakly.

“It wouldn’t,” said Khuft, “have been a good idea to hang about.”

“”And Khuft the camel herder became lost in the Desert, and there opened before him, as a Gift from the Gods, a Valley flowing with Milk and Honey”,” quoted Teppic, in a hollow voice. He added, “I used to think it must have been awfully sticky.”

“There I was, dying of thirst, all the camels kicking up a din, yelling for water, next minute - whoosh - a bloody great river valley, reed beds, hippos, the whole thing. Out of nowhere. I nearly got knocked down in the stampede.”

“No!” said Teppic. “It wasn’t like that! The gods of the valley took pity on you and showed you the way in, didn’t they?” He shut up, surprised at the tones of pleading in his own voice.

Khuft sneered. “Oh, yes? And I just happened to stumble across a hundred miles of river in the middle of the desert that everyone else had missed. Easy thing to miss, a hundred miles of river valley in the middle of a desert, isn’t it? Not that I was going to look a gift camel in the mouth, you understand, I went and brought my family and the rest of the lads in soon enough. Never looked back.”

“One minute it wasn’t there, the next minute it was?” said Teppic.

“Right enough. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

“No,” said Teppic. “No. Not really.” Khuft poked him with a wrinkled finger. “I always reckoned it was the camels that did it,” he said. “I always thought they sort of called it into place, like it was sort of potentially there but not quite, and it needed just that little bit of effort to make it real. Funny things, camels.”

“I know.”

“Odder than gods. Something the matter?”

“Sorry,” said Teppic, “it’s just that this is all a bit of a shock. I mean, I thought we were really royal. I mean, we’re more royal than anyone.

Khuft picked a fig seed from between two blackened stumps which, because they were in his mouth, probably had to be called his teeth. Then he spat.

“That’s up to you,” he said, and vanished.

Teppic walked through the necropolis, the pyramids a saw-edged skyline against the night. The sky was the arched body of a woman, and the gods stood around the horizon. They didn’t look like the gods that had been painted on the walls for thousands of years. They looked worse. They looked older than Time. After all, the gods hardly ever meddled in the affairs of men. But other things were proverbial for it.

“What can I do? I’m only human,” he said aloud.

Someone said, Not all of you.

Teppic awoke, to the screaming of seagulls.

Alfonz, who was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and the expression of one who never means to take it off again, ever, was helping several other men unfurl one of Unnamed’s sails. He looked down at Teppic in his bed of rope and gave him a nod.

They were moving. Teppic sat up, and saw the dock-side of Ephebe slipping silently away in the grey morning light.

He stood up unsteadily, groaned, clutched at his head, took a run and dived over the rail.

Heme Krona, owner of the Camels-R-Us livery stable, walked slowly around You Bastard, humming. He examined the camel’s knees. He gave one of its feet an experimental kick. In a swift movement that took You Bastard completely by surprise he jerked open the beast’s mouth and examined his great yellow teeth, and then jumped away.

He took a plank of wood from a heap in the corner, dipped a brush in a pot of black paint, and after a moment’s thought carefully wrote, ONE OWNER.

After some further consideration he added, LO MILEAGE. He was just brushing in GOOD RUNER when Teppic staggered in and leaned, panting, against the doorframe. Pools of water formed around his feet.

“I’ve come for my camel,” he said.

Krona sighed.

“Last night you said you’d be back in an hour,” he said. “I’m going to have to charge you for a whole day’s livery, right? Plus I gave him a rub down and did his feet, the full service. That’ll be five cercs, okay emir?”

“Ah.” Teppic patted his pocket.

“Look,” he said. “I left home in a bit of a hurry, you see. I don’t seem to have any cash on me.”

“Fair enough, emir.” Krona turned back to his board. “How do you spell YEARS WARENTY?”

“I will definitely have the money sent to you,” said Teppic. Krona gave him the withering smile of one who has seen it all - asses with bodywork re-haired, elephants with plaster tusks, camels with false humps glued on - and knows the festering depths of the human soul when it gets down to business.

“Pull the other one, rajah,” he said. “It has got bells on.”

Teppic fumbled in his tunic.

“I could give you this valuable knife,” he said.

Krona gave it a passing glance, and sniffed.

“Sorry, emir. No can do. No pay, no camel.”

“I could give it to you point first,” said Teppic desperately, knowing that the mere threat would get him expelled from the Guild. He was also aware that as a threat it wasn’t very good. Threats weren’t on the syllabus at the Guild school.

Whereas Krona had, sitting on straw bales at the back of the stables, a couple of large men who were just beginning to take an interest in the proceedings. They looked like Alfonz’s older brothers.

Every vehicle depot of any description anywhere in the multiverse has them. They’re never exactly grooms or mechanics or customers or staff. Their function is always unclear. They chew straws or smoke cigarettes in a surreptitious fashion. If there are such things as newspapers around, they read them, or at least look at the pictures.

They started to watch Teppic closely. One of them picked up a couple of bricks and began to toss them up and down.

“You’re a young lad, I can see that,” said Krona, kindly. “You’re just starting out in life, emir. You don’t want trouble.” He stepped forward.

You Bastard’s huge shaggy head turned to look at him. In the depths of his brain columns of little numbers whirred upwards again.