“No! Anyway, you said you had a feeling things would happen in Ankh-Morpork!”
“Yes, but I've had a lifetime of experience and cynicism!” Lu-Tze scooped the sand back into its bag. “You're just gifted. Come on.”
Four more seconds, sliced thinly, took them below the snowline, into scree slopes that slid under their feet and then through alder forests not much taller than themselves. And it was there they met the hunters, gathered round in a wide circle.
The men did not pay them much attention. Monks were commonplace in these parts. The leader, or at least the one who was shouting, and this is usually the leader, looked up and waved them past.
Lu-Tze stopped, though, and looked amiably at the thing in the centre of the circle. It looked back at him.
“Good catch,” he said. “What're you going to do now, boys?”
“Is it any business of yours?” said the leader.
“No, no, just asking,” said Lu-Tze. “You boys up from the lowlands, yes?”
“Yeah. You'd be amazed at what you can get for catching one of these.”
“Yes,” said Lu-Tze. “You would be amazed.”
Lobsang looked at the hunters. There were more than a dozen of them, all heavily armed and watching Lu-Tze carefully.
“Nine hundred dollars for a good pelt and another thousand for the feet,” said their leader.
“That much, eh?” said Lu-Tze. “That's a lot of money for a pair of feet.”
“That's 'cos they're big feet,” said the hunter. “And you know what they say about men with big feet, eh?”
“They need bigger shoes?”
“Yeah, right,” said the hunter, grinning. “Load of nonsense, really, but there's rich old boys with young wives over on the Counterweight Continent who'll pay a fortune for a powdered yeti foot.”
“And there was me thinking they're a protected species,” said Lu-Tze, leaning his broom against a tree.
“They're only a kind of troll. Who's going to protect them out here?” said the hunter. Behind him, the local guides, who did know Rule One, turned and ran.
“Me,” said Lu-Tze.
“Oh?” said the hunter, and this time the grin was nasty. “You don't even have a weapon.” He turned to look at the fleeing guides. “You're one of the weird monks from up in the valleys, aren't you?”
“That's right,” said Lu-Tze. “Small smiling, weird monk. Totally unarmed.”
“And there's fifteen of us,” said the hunter. “Well armed, as you can see.”
“It's very important that you are all heavily armed,” said Lu-Tze, pulling his sleeves out of the way. “It makes it fairer.”
He rubbed his hands together. No one seemed inclined to retreat. “Er, any of you boys heard of any rules?” he said, after a while.
“Rules?” said one of the hunters. “What rules?”
“Oh, you know,” said Lu-Tze. “Rules like… Rule Two, say, or Rule Twenty-seven. Any kind of rules of that sort of description.”
The leading hunter frowned. “What in damnation are you talking about, mister?”
“Er, not so much a ‘mister’ as a small rather knowing, elderly, entirely unarmed, weird monk,” said Lu-Tze. “I'm just wondering if there is anything about this situation that makes you, you know… slightly nervous?”
“You mean, us being well armed and outnumbering you, and you backing away like that?” said one of the hunters.
“Ah. Yes,” said Lu-Tze. “Perhaps we're up against a cultural thing here. I know, how about… this?” He stood on one leg, wobbling a little, and raised both hands. “Ai! Hai-eee! Ho? Ye-hi? No? Anyone?”
There was a certain amount of bewilderment amongst the hunters.
“Is it a book?” said one who was slightly intellectual. “How many words?”
“What I'm trying to find out here,” said Lu-Tze, “is whether you have any idea what happens when a lot of big armed men try to attack a small, elderly, unarmed monk?”
“To the best of my knowledge,” said the intellectual of the group, “he turns out to be a very unlucky monk.”
Lu-Tze shrugged. “Oh, well,” he said, “then we'll just have to try it the hard way.”
A blur in the air hit the intellectual on the back of the neck. The leader stirred to step forward, and learned too late that his boot laces were tied together. Men reached for knives that were no longer in sheaths, for swords that were inexplicably leaning against a tree on the far side of the clearing. Legs were swept from underneath them, invisible elbows connected with soft parts of their bodies. Blows rained out of empty air. Those who fell down learned to stay that way. A raised head hurt.
The group was reduced to men lying humbly on the ground, groaning gently. It was then that they heard a low, rhythmic sound.
The yeti was clapping. It had to be a slow handclap, because of the creature's long arms. But when the hands met, they'd come a long way and were glad to see one another. They echoed around the mountains.
Lu-Tze reached down and raised the leader's chin.
“If you have enjoyed this afternoon, please tell your friends,” he said. “Tell them to remember Rule One.”
He let the chin go, and walked across to the yeti and bowed.
“Shall I release you, sir, or would you like to do it yourself?” he said.
The yeti stood up, looked down at the cruel iron trap around one leg, and concentrated for a moment.
At the end of the moment, the yeti was a little way from the trap, which was still set and almost hidden in leaves.
“Well done,” said Lu-Tze. “Methodical. And very smooth. Headed down to the lowlands?”
The yeti had to bend double to bring its long face close to Lu-Tze.
“Yaas,” it said.
“What do you want to do with these people?”
The yeti looked round at the cowering hunters.
“It bein' daark soon,” he said. “No guides noaw.”
“They've got torches,” said Lu-Tze.
“Ha. Ha,” said the yeti, and it said it, rather than laughed. “Dat's good. Torches show up aat night.”
“Hah! Yes. Can you give us a lift? It's really important.”
“You and daat whizzin' kid I seein' there?”
A patch of grey air at the edge of the clearing became Lobsang, out of breath. He dropped the broken branch he'd been holding.
“The lad is called Lobsang. I'm training him up,” said Lu-Tze.
“Looks like you gotta hurry before you runnin' out of things he don't knoow,” said the yeti. “Ha. Ha.”
“Sweeper, what were you—” Lobsang began, hurrying forward.
Lu-Tze put his finger to his lips. “Not in front of our fallen friends,” he said. “I'm looking for Rule One to become a lot better respected in these parts as a result of this day's work.”
“But I had to do all the—”
“We must be going,” said Lu-Tze, waving him into silence. “I reckon we can snooze quite happily while our friend here carries us.”
Lobsang glanced up at the yeti, and then back at Lu-Tze. And then back to the yeti. It was tall. In some ways it was like the trolls he'd met in the city, but rolled out thin. It was more than twice as high as he was, and most of the extra height was skinny legs and arms. The body was a ball of fur, and the feet were indeed huge.
“If he could've got out of the trap at any—” he began.
“You are the apprentice, right?” said Lu-Tze. “Me, I'm the master? I'm sure I wrote that down somewhere…”
“But you said you weren't going to say any of those know-it-all—”
“Remember Rule One! Oh, and pick up one of those swords. We'll need it in a minute. Okay, yer honour…”
The yeti picked them up gently and firmly, cradled them in the crook of each arm, and strode away through the snow and trees.
“Snug, eh?” said Lu-Tze after a while. “Their wool is spun out of rock in some way, but it's pretty comfy.”
There was no answer fro
m the other arm.
“I spent some time with the yetis,” said Lu-Tze. “Amazing people. They taught me a thing or two. Valuable stuff. For is it not written, ‘We live and learn’?”
Silence, a kind of sullen, deliberate silence, reigned.
“I'd think myself lucky if I was a boy your age actually being carried by an actual yeti. A lot of people back in the valley have never even seen one. Mind you, they don't come that close to settlements any more. Not since that rumour about their feet got around.”
Lu-Tze got the feeling that he was taking part in a dialogue of one.
“Something you want to say, is there?” he said.
“Well, as a matter of fact, yes, there is, actually,” said Lobsang. “You let me do all the work back there! You weren't going to do anything!”
“I was making sure I had their full attention,” said Lu-Tze smoothly.
“Why?”
“So that you didn't have their full attention. I had every confidence in you, of course. A good master gives the pupil an opportunity to demonstrate his skills.”
“And what would you have done if I hadn't been here, pray?”
“Yes, probably,” said Lu-Tze.
“What?”
“But I expect I would have found some way to use their stupidity against them,” said Lu-Tze. “There generally is one. Is there a problem here?”
“Well, I just… I thought… well, I just thought you'd be teaching me more, that's all.”
“I'm teaching you things all the time,” said Lu-Tze. “You might not be learning them, of course.”
“Oh, I see,” said Lobsang. “Very smug. Are you going to try to teach me about this yeti, then, and why you made me bring a sword?”
“You'll need the sword to learn about yetis,” said Lu-Tze.
“How?”
“In a few minutes we'll find a nice place to stop and you can cut his head off. Is that all right by you, sir?”
“Yaas. Sure,” said the yeti.
In the Second Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised a story is written concerning one day when the apprentice Clodpool, in a rebellious mood, approached Wen and spake thusly:
“Master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment?”
Wen considered this for some time, and at last said: “A fish!”
And Clodpool went away, satisfied.
Tick
The Code of the Igors was very strict.
Never Contradict: it was no part of an Igor's job to say things like “No, thur, that'th an artery.” The marthter was always right.
Never Complain: an Igor would never say “But that'th a thouthand mileth away!”
Never Make Personal Remarks: no Igor would dream of saying anything like “I thould have thomething done about that laugh, if I wath you.”
And never, ever Ask Questions. Admittedly, Igor knew, that meant never ask BIG questions. “Would thur like a cup of tea around now?” was fine, but “What do you need a hundred virginth for?” or “Where do you ecthpect me to find a brain at thith time of night?” was not. An Igor stood for loyal, dependable, discreet service with a smile, or at least a sort of lopsided grin, or possibly just a curved scar in the right place.12
And, therefore, Igor was getting worried. Things were wrong, and when an Igor thinks that, they are really wrong. Great difficulty lay in getting this across to Jeremy without breaking the Code, though. Igor was increasingly ill at ease with someone so clearly stark, staring sane. Nevertheless, he tried.
“Her ladythip will be along again thith morning,” he said, as they watched yet another crystal grow in its solution. And I know you know that, he thought, because you've smoothed your hair down with soap and put on a clean shirt.
“Yes,” said Jeremy. “I wish we had better progress to report. However, I'm sure we're nearly there now.”
“Yeth, that'th very thtrange, ithn't it,” said Igor, seizing the opening.
“Strange, you say?”
“Call me Mithter Thilly, thur, but it theemth to me that we're alwayth on the point of thuctheth when her ladythip payth uth a vithit, but when thee'th gone we ecthperienth new difficultieth.”
“What are you suggesting, Igor?”
“Me, thur? I'm not a thuggethtive perthon, thur. But latht time part of the divider array had cracked.”
“You know I think that was because of dimensional instability!”
“Yeth, thur.”
“Why are you giving me that funny look, Igor?”
Igor shrugged. That is, one shoulder was momentarily as high as the other one. “Goeth with the fathe, thur.”
“She'd hardly pay us so handsomely and then sabotage the project, would she? Why would she do that?”
Igor hesitated. He had his back right up against the Code now.
“I am thtill wondering if thee ith all thee theemth, thur.”
“Sorry? I didn't catch that.”
“I wonder if we can trutht her, thur,” said Igor patiently.
“Oh, go and calibrate the complexity resonator, will you?”
Grumbling, Igor obeyed.
The second time Igor'd followed their benefactor she'd gone to a hotel. Next day she'd headed for a large house in Kings Way, where she'd been met by an oily man who'd made a great play of presenting her with a key. Igor had followed the oleaginous man back to his office in a nearby street where—because there are few things that are kept from a man with a face full of stitches—he'd learned that she'd just bought the lease for a very large bar of gold.
After that, Igor had resorted to an ancient Ankh-Morpork tradition and paid someone to follow her ladyship. There was enough gold in the workshop, heavens knew, and the master took no interest in it.
Lady LeJean went to the opera. Lady LeJean went to art galleries. Lady LeJean was living life to the fullest. Except that Lady LeJean, as far as Igor could determine, never visited restaurants and had no food delivered to the house.
Lady LeJean was up to something. Igor could spot this easily. Lady LeJean also did not appear in Twurp's Peerage or the Almanack de Gothic or any of the other reference books Igor had checked as a matter of course, which meant that she had something to hide. Of course, he had worked for masters who occasionally had a great deal to hide, sometimes in deep holes at midnight. But this situation was morally different for two reasons. Her ladyship wasn't his master, Jeremy was, and that was where his loyalty lay. And Igor had decided it was morally different.
Now he reached the glass clock.
It looked almost complete. Jeremy had designed a mechanism to go behind the face and Igor had got it made up, all in glass. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the other mechanism, which flickered away down behind the pendulum and took up a disconcertingly small amount of room now that it was assembled; quite a few of its parts were no longer sharing the same set of dimensions as the rest of it. But the clock had a face, and a face needed hands, and so the glass pendulum swung and the glass hands moved and told normal, everyday time. The “tick” had a slightly bell-like quality, as though someone were flicking a wineglass with a fingernail.
Igor looked at his hand-me-down hands. They were beginning to worry him. Now that the glass clock looked like a clock, they began to shake every time Igor came near it.
Tick
No one noticed Susan in the library of the Guild of Historians, leafing her way through a pile of books. Occasionally she made a note.
She didn't know if her other gift was from Death, but she'd always told the children that they had a lazy eye and a business eye. There were two ways of looking at the world. The lazy eye just saw the surface. The business eye saw through into the reality beneath.
She turned a page.
Seen through her business eye, history was very strange indeed. The scars stood out. The history of the country of Eph
ebe was puzzling, for example. Either its famous philosophers lived for a very long time, or they inherited their names, or extra bits had been stitched into history there. The history of Omnia was a mess. Two centuries had been folded into one, by the look of it, and it was only because of the mind-set of the Omnians, whose religion in any case mixed the past and future with the present, that it could possibly have passed unnoticed.
And what about Koom Valley? Everyone knew that there had been a famous battle there, between dwarfs and trolls and mercenaries on both sides, but how many battles had there actually been? Historians talked about the valley being in just the right place in disputed territory to become more or less the preferred local pitch for all confrontations, but you could just as easily believe—at least you could if you had a grandfather called Death—that a patch that just happened to fit had been welded into history several times, so that different generations went round through the whole stupid disaster again and again, shouting “Remember Koom Valley!” as they did so.13
There were anomalies everywhere.
And no one had noticed.
You had to hand it to human beings. They had one of the strangest powers in the universe. Even her grandfather had remarked upon it. No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom. Perhaps it was boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled them up the evolutionary ladder. Trolls and dwarfs had it, too, that strange ability to look at the universe and think “oh, the same as yesterday, how dull. I wonder what happens if I bang this rock on that head?”
And along with this had come an associated power, to make things normal. The world changed mightily, and within a few days humans considered it was normal. They had the most amazing ability to shut out and forget what didn't fit. They told themselves little stories to explain away the inexplicable, to make things normal.
Historians were especially good at it. If it suddenly looked as though hardly anything had happened in the fourteenth century, they'd weigh in with twenty different theories. Not one of these would be that maybe most of the time had been cut out and pasted into the nineteenth century, where the Crash had not left enough coherent time for everything that needed to happen, because it only takes a week to invent the horse collar.
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