Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement. One of the statuelike workers bent over her tray of Praline Dreams was shifting almost imperceptibly.

  Time was flowing into the room. Pale blue light glinted in the air.

  She turned and saw a vaguely human figure hovering beside her. It was featureless and as transparent as mist, but in her head it said, I’m stronger. You are my anchor, my link to this world, can you guess how hard it is to find it again in so many? . . .Get me to the clock . . .

  Susan turned and thrust the icing syringe into the arms of the groaning Myria. “Grab that. And make some kind of . . .of sling or something. I want you to be carrying as many of those chocolate eggs as possible. And the cremes. And the liqueurs. Understand? You can do it!”

  Oh, gods, there was no alternative. The poor thing needed some kind of morale boost. “Please, Myria? And that’s a stupid name! You’re not many, you’re one. Okay? Just be . . .yourself. Unity . . .that’d be a good name.”

  The new Unity raised a mascara-streaked face.

  “Yes . . .it is . . .it’s a good name . . .”

  Susan snatched as much merchandise as she could carry, aware of some rustling behind her, and turned to find Unity standing to attention holding, by the look of it, a benchworth of assorted confectionery in . . .

  . . .a sort of a big cerise sack.

  “Oh. Good. Intelligent use of the materials at hand,” said Susan weakly. Then the teacher within her cut in and added, “I hope you brought enough for everybody.”

  * * *

  “You were the first,” said Lu-Tze. “You basically created the whole business. Innovative, you were.”

  “That was then,” said Ronnie Soak. “It’s all changed now.”

  “Not like it used to be,” agreed Lu-Tze.

  “Take Death,” said Ronnie Soak. “Impressive, I’ll grant you, and who doesn’t look good in black? But, after all, Death . . .what’s death?”

  “Just a big sleep,” said Lu-Tze.

  “Just a big sleep,” said Ronnie Soak. “As for the others . . .War? If war’s so bad, why do people keep doing it?”

  “Practically a hobby,” said Lu-Tze. He began to roll himself a cigarette.

  “Practically a hobby,” repeated Ronnie Soak. “As for Famine and Pestilence, well . . .”

  “Enough said,” said Lu-Tze, sympathetically.

  “Exactly. I mean, Famine’s a fearful thing, obviously—”

  “—in an agricultural community, but you’ve got to move with the times,” said Lu-Tze, putting the roll-up in his mouth.

  “You’ve put your finger right on it. You’ve got to move with the times. I mean, does your average city person fear famine?”

  “No, he thinks food grows in shops,” said Lu-Tze. He was beginning to enjoy this. He had eight hundred years’ worth of experience in steering the thoughts of his superiors, and most of them had been intelligent. He decided to strike out a little.

  “Fire, now, city folk really fear fire,” he said. “That’s new. Your primitive villager, he reckoned fire was a good thing, didn’t he? Kept the wolves away. If it burned down his hut, well, logs and turf are cheap enough. But now he lives in a street of crowded wooden houses and everyone’s cooking in their rooms, well—”

  Ronnie glared.

  “Fire? Fire? Just a demigod! Some little runt of a thief pinches the flame from the gods and suddenly he’s immortal? You call that training and experience?” A spark leaped from his fingers and ignited the end of Lu-Tze’s cigarette. “And as for gods—”

  “Johnny-come-latelys, the pack of ’em,” said Lu-Tze quickly.

  “Right! People started worshiping them because they were afraid of me,” said Ronnie. “Did you know that?”

  “No, really?” said Lu-Tze innocently.

  But now Ronnie sagged.

  “That was then, of course,” he said. “It’s different now. I’m not what I used to be.”

  “No, no, obviously not, no,” said Lu-Tze soothingly. “But it’s all a matter of how you look at it, am I correct? Now, supposing a man—that is to say, a—”

  “Anthropomorphic personification,” said Ronnie Soak. “But I’ve always preferred the term ‘avatar.’”

  Lu-Tze’s brow wrinkled.

  “You fly around a lot?” he said.

  “That would be aviator.”

  “Sorry. Well, supposing an avatar, thank you, who was perhaps a bit ahead of his time thousands of years ago, well, supposing he took a good look around now, he might just find the world is ready for him again.”

  Lu-Tze waited.

  “My abbot, now, he reckons you are the bee’s knees,” he said for a little reinforcement.

  “Does he?” said Ronnie Soak suspiciously.

  “Bee’s knees, cat’s pajamas, and dog’s . . .elbows,” Lu-Tze finished. “He’s written scrolls and scrolls about you. Says you are hugely important in understanding how the universe works.”

  “Yeah, but . . .he’s just one man,” said Ronnie Soak, with all the sullenness and reluctance of someone cuddling a lifetime’s huge snit like a favorite soft toy.

  “Technically, yes,” said Lu-Tze. “But he’s an abbot. And brainy? He thinks such big thoughts he needs a second lifetime just to finish them off! Let a lot of peasants fear famine, I say, but someone like you should aim for quality. And you look at the cities, now. Back in the old days there were just heaps of mud bricks with names like Ur and Uh and Ugg. These days there’s millions of people living in cities. Very, very complicated cities. Just you think about what they really, really fear. And fear . . .well, fear is belief. Hmm?”

  There was another long pause.

  “Well, alright, but . . .” Ronnie began.

  “Of course, they won’t be living in ’em very long, because by the time the gray people have finished taking them to pieces to see how they work there won’t be any belief left.”

  “My customers do depend on me . . .” Ronnie Soak mumbled.

  “What customers? That’s Soak speaking,” said Lu-Tze. “That’s not the voice of Kaos.”

  “Hah!” said Kaos bitterly. “You haven’t told me yet how you worked that one out.”

  Because I’ve got more than three brain cells, and you’re vain, and you painted your actual name back to front on your cart whether you knew it or not, and a dark window is a mirror, and K and S are still recognizable in a reflection even when they’re back to front, thought Lu-Tze. But that wasn’t a good way forward.

  “It was just obvious,” he said. “You sort of shine through. It’s like putting a sheet over an elephant. You might not be able to see it, but you’re sure the elephant’s still there.”

  Kaos looked wretched.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “it’s been a long time—”

  “Oh? And I thought you said you were Number One?” said Lu-Tze, deciding on a new approach. “Sorry! Still, I suppose it’s not your fault you’ve lost a few skills over the centuries, what with one thing and—”

  “Lost skills?” snapped Kaos, waving a finger under the sweeper’s nose. “I could certainly take you to the cleaners, you little maggot!”

  “What with, a dangerous yogurt?” said Lu-Tze, climbing off the cart. Kaos leaped down after him.

  “Where do you get off, talking to me like that?” he demanded.

  Lu-Tze glanced up.

  “Corner of Merchant and Broad Way,” he said. “So what?”

  Kaos roared. He tore off his striped apron and his white cap. He seemed to grow in size. Darkness evaporated off him like smoke.

  Lu-Tze folded his hands and grinned.

  “Remember Rule One,” he said.

  “Rules? Rules?! I’m Kaos!”

  “Who was the first?” said Lu-Tze.

  “Yes!”

  “Creator and Destroyer?”

  “Right!”

  “Apparently complicated, apparently patternless behavior that nevertheless has a simple, deterministic explanation and is a key to new levels of understanding of the multidimensional universe?”

  “You’d better believe it—what?”

  “Got to move with the times, mister, got to keep up!” shouted Lu-Tze excitedly, hopping from foot to foot. “You’re what people think you are! And they’ve changed you! I hope you’re good at sums!”

  “You can’t tell me what to be!” Kaos roared. “I’m Kaos!”

  “You don’t think so? Well, your big comeback ain’t gonna happen now that the Auditors have taken over! The rules, mister! That’s what they are! They’re the cold, dead rules!”

  Silver lightning flickered in the walking cloud that had once been Ronnie. Then cloud, cart, and horse vanished.

  “Well, could have been worse, I suppose,” said Lu-Tze to himself. “Not a very bright lad, really. Possibly a bit too old-fashioned.”

  He turned around and found a crowd of Auditors watching him. There were dozens of them.

  He sighed and grinned his sheepish little grin. He’d had just about enough for one day.

  “Well, I expect you have heard of Rule One, right?” he said.

  That seemed to give them pause. One said: “We know millions of rules, human.”

  “Billions. Trillions,” said another.

  “Well, you can’t attack me,” said Lu-Tze, “’cos of Rule One.”

  The nearest Auditors went into a huddle.

  “It must involve gravitation.”

  “No, quantum effects. Obviously.”

  “Logically, there cannot be a Rule One because at that point there would be no concept of plurality.”

  “But if there is not a Rule One, can there be any other rules? If there is no Rule One, where is Rule Two?”

  “There are millions of rules! They cannot fail to be numbered!”

  Wonderful, thought Lu-Tze. All I have to do is wait until their heads explode.

  But an Auditor stepped forward. It looked more wild-eyed than the others, and was much more unkempt. It was also carrying an ax.

  “We do not have to discuss this,” it snapped. “We must think: this is nonsense, we will not discuss it!”

  “But what is Rule—” an Auditor began.

  “You will call me Mr. White!”

  “Mr. White, what is Rule One?”

  “I am not glad you asked that question!” screamed Mr. White and swung the ax. The body of the other Auditor crumbled in around the blade, dissolving into floating motes that dispersed in a fine cloud.

  “Anyone else got any questions?” said Mr. White, raising the ax again.

  One or two Auditors, not yet entirely in tune with current developments, opened their mouths to speak. And shut them again.

  Lu-Tze took a few steps back. He prided himself on an incredibly well-honed ability to talk his way in or out of anything, but that rather depended on a passably sane entity being involved at the other end of the dialogue.

  Mr. White turned to Lu-Tze.

  “What are you doing out of your place, organic?”

  But Lu-Tze was overhearing another, whispered conversation. It was coming from the other side of a nearby wall, and it went like this:

  “Who cares about the damn wording!”

  “Accuracy is important, Susan. There is a precise description on the little map inside the lid. Look.”

  “And you think that will impress anyone?”

  “Please. Things should be done properly.”

  “Oh, give it to me, then!”

  Mr. White advanced on Lu-Tze, ax raised.

  “It is forbidden to—” he began.

  “Eat . . .oh, good grief . . .Eat . . .‘a delicious fondant sugar creme infused with delightfully rich and creamy raspberry filling wrapped in mysterious dark chocolate’ . . .you gray bastards!”

  A shower of small objects pattered down on the street. Several of them broke open.

  Lu-Tze heard a whine or, rather, the silence caused by the absence of a whine he’d grown used to.

  “Oh no, I’m winding dow . . .”

  * * *

  Trailing smoke, but looking more like a milkman again, albeit one that’d just delivered to a blazing house, Ronnie Soak stormed into his dairy.

  “Who does he think he is?” he muttered, gripping the spotless edge of a counter so hard that the metal bent. “Hah, oh yes, they just toss you aside, but when they want you to make a comeback—”

  Under his fingers, the metal went white-hot and then dripped.

  “I’ve got customers. I’ve got customers. People depend on me. It might not be a glamorous job, but people will always need milk—”

  He clapped a hand to his forehead. Where the molten metal touched his skin, the metal evaporated.

  The headache was really bad.

  He could remember the time when there was only him. It was hard to remember, because . . .there was nothing, no color, no sound, no pressure, no time, no spin, no light, no life . . .

  Just Kaos.

  And the thought arose: do I want that again? The perfect order that goes with changelessness?

  More thoughts were following that one, like little silvery eels in his mind. He was, after all, a horseman, and had been ever since the time the people in mud cities on baking plains put together some hazy idea of Something that had existed before anyone else. And a horseman picks up the noises of the world. The mud-city people and the skin-tent people, they’d known instinctively that the world swirled perilously through a complex and uncaring multiverse, that life was lived a mirror’s thickness from the cold of space and the gulfs of night. They knew that everything they called reality, the web of rules that made life happen, was a bubble on the tide. They feared old Kaos. But now—

  He opened his eyes and looked down at his dark, smoking hands.

  To the world in general, he said: “Who am I now?”

  * * *

  Lu-Tze heard his voice speed up from nothing: “—wn . . .”

  “No, you’re wound up again,” said a young woman in front of him. She stood back, giving him a critical look. Lu-Tze, for the first time in eight hundred years, felt that he’d been caught doing something wrong. It was that kind of expression—searching, rummaging around inside his head.

  “You’ll be Lu-Tze, then,” said Susan. “I’m Susan Sto Helit. No time for explanations. You’ve been out for . . .well, not for long. We have to get Lobsang to the glass clock. Are you any good? Lobsang thinks you’re a bit of a fraud.”

  “Only a bit? I’m surprised.” Lu-Tze looked around. “What happened here?”

  The street was empty, except for the ever-present statues. But scraps of silver paper and colored wrappers littered the ground, and across the wall behind him was a long splash of what looked very much like chocolate icing.

  “Some of them got away,” said Susan, picking up what Lu-Tze could only hope was a giant icing syringe. “Mostly they fought with one another. Would you try to tear someone apart just for a coffee creme?”

  Lu-Tze looked into those eyes. After eight hundred years you learn how to read people. And Susan was a story that went back a very long way. She probably even knew about Rule One, and didn’t care. This was someone to treat with respect. But you couldn’t let even someone like her have it all their own way.

  “The kind with a coffee bean on the top, or the ordinary kind?” he said.

  “The kind without the coffee bean, I think,” said Susan, holding his gaze.

  “Nnn—o. No. No, I don’t think I would,” said Lu-Tze.

  “But they are learning,” said a woman’s voice behind the sweeper. “Some resisted. We can learn. That’s how humans became humans.”

  Lu-Tze regarded the speaker. She looked like a society lady who had just had a really bad day in a threshing machine.

  “Can I just be clear here?” he said, staring from one woman to the other. “You’ve been fighting the gray people with chocolate?”

  “Yes,” said Susan, peering around the corner. “It’s the sensory explosion. They lose control of their morphic field. Can you throw at all? Good. Unity, give him as many chocolate eggs as he can carry. The secret is to get them to land hard so that there’s lots of shrapnel—”

  “And where is Lobsang?” said Lu-Tze.

  “Him? You could say he’s with us in spirit.”

  There were blue sparkles in the air.

  “Growing pains, I think,” Susan added.

  Centuries of experience once again came to Lu-Tze’s aid.

  “He always looked like a lad who needed to find himself,” he said.

  “Yes. And it came as a bit of a shock. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Death looked down at the world. Timelessness had reached the rim now and was expanding into the universe at the speed of light. The Discworld was a sculpture in crystal.

  Not an apocalypse. There had always been plenty of those—small apocalypses, not the full shilling at all, fake apocalypses: apocryphal apocalypses. Most of them had been back in the old days, when the world as in “end of the world” was often objectively no wider than a few villages and a clearing in the forest.

  And those little worlds had ended. But there had always been somewhere else. There had been the horizon, to start with. The fleeing refugees would find that the world was bigger than they’d thought. A few villages in a clearing? Hah, how could they have been so stupid! Now they knew it was a whole island! Of course, there was that horizon again . . .

  The world had run out of horizons.

  As Death watched, the sun stopped in its orbit, and its light became duller, redder.

  He sighed and nudged Binky. The horse stepped forward, in a direction that could not be found on any map.

  And the sky was full of gray shapes. There was a ripple in the ranks of Auditors as the pale horse trotted forward.

  One drifted toward Death and hung in the air a few feet away.

  It said, Should you not be riding out?

  DO YOU SPEAK FOR ALL?

  You know the custom, said the voice in Death’s mind. Among us, one speaks for all.

  WHAT IS BEING DONE IS WRONG.

  It is not your business.