Read Discworld 26 - The Thief of Time for Free Online

Schüschein', on the other hand, did have a clock. Of a sort. And it
was... odd. A wicked man - readers could see he was wicked because it said he was wicked,
right there on the page - built a clock of glass in which he captured Time herself, but things
went wrong because there was one part of the clock, a spring, that he couldn't make out of
glass, and it broke under the strain. Time was set free and the man aged ten thousand years in
a second and crumbled to dust and - not surprisingly, in Jeremy's opinion - was never seen
again. The story ended with a moral: Large Enterprises Depend upon Small Details. Jeremy
couldn't see why it couldn't just as well have been It's Wrong to Trap Non-Existent Women in
Clocks, or, It Would Have Worked with a Glass Spring.
But even to Jeremy's inexperienced eye, there was something wrong with the whole story. It
read as though the writer was trying to make sense of something he'd seen, or been told, and
had misunderstood. And - hah! - although it was set hundreds of years ago when even in
Uberwald there were only natural cuckoo clocks, the artist had drawn a long-case clock of the
sort that wasn't around even fifteen years ago. The stupidity of some people! You'd laugh if it
wasn't so tragic!
He put the book aside and spent the rest of the evening doing a little design work for the
Guild. They paid him handsomely for this, provided he promised never to turn up in person.
Then he put the work on the bedside table by the clocks. He blew out the candle. He went to
sleep. He dreamed.
The glass clock ticked. It stood in the middle of the workshop's wooden floor, giving off a
silvery light. Jeremy walked around it, or perhaps it spun gently around him.
It was taller than a man. Within the transparent case red and blue lights twinkled like stars.
The air smelled of acid.
Now his point of view dived into the thing, the crystalline thing, plunging down through the
layers of glass and quartz. They rose past him, their smoothness becoming walls hundreds of
miles high, and still he fell between slabs that were becoming rough, grainy...
... full of holes. The blue and red light was here too, pouring past him.
     
 
  
And only now was there sound. It came from the darkness ahead, a slow beat that was
ridiculously familiar, a heartbeat magnified a million times...
...tchum...tchum...
... each beat slower than mountains and bigger than worlds, dark and blood red. He heard a
few more and then his fall slowed, stopped, and he began to soar back up through the
sleeting light until a brightness ahead became a room.
He had to remember all this! It was all so clear, once you saw it! So simple! So easy! He
could see every part, how they interlocked, how they were made.
And now it began to fade .
Of course it was only a dream. He told himself that and was comforted by it. But he had gone
to some lengths with this one, he had to admit. For example, there was a mug of tea steaming
on the nearby workbench, and the sound of voices on the other side of the door...
There was a knocking at the door. Jeremy wondered if the dream would end when the door
was opened, and then the door disappeared and the knocking went on. It was coming from
downstairs.
The time was 6.47. Jeremy glanced at the alarm clocks to make sure they were right, then
pulled his dressing gown around him and hurried downstairs. He opened the front door a
crack. There was no one there.
'Nah, dahn 'ere, mister.'
Someone lower down was a dwarf.
'Name of Clockson?' it said.
'Yes?'
A clipboard was thrust through the gap.
'Sign 'ere, where it says “Sign 'Ere”. Thank you. Okay, lads...'
Behind him, a couple of trolls tipped up a handcart. A large wooden crate crashed onto the
cobbles.
'What is this?' said Jeremy.
'Express package,' said the dwarf, taking the clipboard. 'Come all the way from Uberwald.
Must've cost someone a packet. Look at all them seals and stickers on it.'
'Can't you bring it in-?'