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'That's a sha, and sighed They stood in gloomy silence

'So perhaps we could ask one of the dead ones?' said Gern

'Er Gern,' said Dil, backing away

The king slapped the apprentice on the back, pitching him forward

'Daet one of the real early ancestors Oh' He sagged 'That's no good No-one will be able to understand the wider

'No, it's all right, king,' said Gern, enjoying the new-found freedo, everyone understands soht lad Bright lad,' said the king

'Gern!'

They both looked at hiht, one all white'

'The t-' stuttered Dil, rigid with terror

'The what, master?'

'The t- look at the t-'

'He ought to have a lie down,' said the king 'I know his sort The artistic type Highly strung'

Dil took a deep breath

'Look at the sodding torch, Gern!' he shouted

They looked

Without any fuss, turning its black ashes into dry straw, the torch was burning backwards

The Old Kingdom lay stretched out before Teppic, and it was unreal

He looked at You Bastard, who had stuck hisa noise like the last drop in the h There's nothing like a ca really solid But the landscape had an uncertain quality, as if it hadn't quite made up its mind to be there or not

Except for the Great Pyramid It squatted in the middle distance as real as the pin that nails a butterfly to a board It was contriving to look extre all the solidity out of the landscape into itself

Well, he was here Wherever here was

How did you kill a pyramid?

And ould happen if you did?

He orking on the hypothesis that everything would snap back into place Into the Old Kingdoods for a while, wondering what the hell they were, and how it didn't seem to matter They looked no more real than the land over which they strode, about incomprehensible errands of their own The world was no more than a dream Teppic felt incapable of surprise If seven fat cows had wandered by, he wouldn't have given thelance

He reently, down the road The fields on either side had a devastated look

The sun was finally sinking; the gods of night and evening were prevailing over the daylight gods, but it had been a long struggle and, when you thought about all the things that would happen to it now - eaten by goddesses, carried on boats under the world, and so on - it was an odds-on chance that it wouldn't be seen again

No-one was visible as he rode into the stable yard You Bastard padded sedately to his stall and pulled delicately at a wisp of hay He'd thought of so about bivariant distributions

Teppic patted hi another cloud, and walked up the wide steps that led to the palace proper Still there were no guards, no servants No living soul

He slipped into his own palace like a thief in the day, and found his way to Dil's workshop It was eh a robber with very peculiar tastes had recently been at work in there The throne room smelled like a kitchen, and by the looks of it the cooks had fled in a hurry

The gold htly buckled out of shape, had rolled into a corner He picked it up and, on a suspicion, scratched it with one of his knives The gold peeled away, exposing a silver-grey gleam

He'd suspected that There siold around The mask felt as heavy as lead because, well, it was lead He wondered if it had ever been all gold, and which ancestor had done it, and how many pyramids it had paid for It was probably very sy or other Perhaps not even sy Just symbolic, all by itself

One of the sacred cats was hiding under the throne It flattened its ears and spat at Teppic as he reached down to pat it That ed, at least

Still no people He padded across to the balcony

And there the people were, a great silent ht As Teppic watched a flotilla of boats and ferries set out fro bridges, he thought But we said that would be shackling the river

He dropped lightly over the balustrade on to the packed earth and walked down to the crowd

And the full force of its belief scythed into hiht have had conflicting ideas about their gods, but their belief in their kings had been unswerving for thousands of years To Teppic it was like walking into a vat of alcohol He felt it pouring into hih his body until it gushed into his brain, bringing not o sensation that while he didn't actually know everything, he would do soon and had done once

It had been like this back in Ankh, when the divinity had hooked him But that had been just a flicker Now it had the solid power of real belief behind it

He looked down at a rustling below hi out of the dry sand around his feet