Discworld 13 - Small Gods

Urn selected a short crowbar from his belt and inserted it between the grille and the stonework. Give me a foot of good steel and a wall to brace … my … foot … against — the grille ground forward and then popped out with a leaden sound — and I can change the world …

He stepped inside the long, dark, damp room, and gave a whistle of admiration.

No one had done any maintenance for — well, for as long as it took iron hinges to become a mass of crumbling rust — but all this still worked?

He looked up at lead and iron buckets bigger than he was, and a tangle of man-sized pipes.

This was the breath of God.

Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent-protection.

Brutha had heard of anchorites, who were a kind of one-way prophet. They went out into the desert but did not come back, preferring a hermit’s life of dirt and hardship and dirt and holy contemplation and dirt. Many of them liked to make life even more uncomfortable for themselves by being walled up in cells or living, quite appropriately, at the top of a pole. The Omnian Church encouraged them, on the basis that it was best to get madmen as far away as possible where they couldn’t cause any trouble and could be cared for by the community, insofar as the community consisted of lions and buzzards and dirt.

And, half an hour later, a black shadowy line on the silver moonlit desert, there were the tracks.

‘The soldiers came this way. We just have to follow the tracks back. If we head where they’ve come from, we’ll get where we’re going.’

‘We’ll never do it!’

‘We’re travelling light.’

‘Oh, yeah. They were burdened by all the food and water they had to carry,’ said Om bitterly. ‘How lucky for us we haven’t got any.’

‘Have you ever heard of a country called Istanzia?’ said Simony. ‘It wasn’t very big. It had nothing anyone wanted. It was just a place for people to live.’

‘Omnia conquered it fifteen years ago,’ said Didactylos.

‘That’s right. My country,’ said Simony. ‘I was just a kid then. But I won’t forget. Nor will others. There’s lots of people with a reason to hate the Church.’

‘I saw you standing close to Vorbis,’ said Urn. ‘I thought you were protecting him.’

‘Oh, I was, I was,’ said Simony. ‘I don’t want anyone to kill him before I do,’

‘This is intolerable!’ snapped Vorbis. ‘We have been treated—’
‘Much better than you would have treated us,’ said the Tyrant mildly. ‘You sit or you stand, my lord, because this is Ephebe and indeed you may stand on your head for all I care, but don’t expect me to believe that if it was I, seeking peace in your Citadel, I would be encouraged to do anything but grovel on what was left of my stomach. Be seated or be upstanding, my lord, but be quiet. I have nearly finished.’
‘Finished what?’ said Vorbis.
‘The peace treaty,’ said the Tyrant.
‘But that is what we are here to discuss,’ said Vorbis.
‘No,’ said the Tyrant. The lizard scuttled again. ‘That is what you are here to sign.’

Om, bumping along in Brutha’s pack, began to feel the acute depression that steals over every realist in the presence of an optimist.

what gods need is belief, and what humans want is gods.

Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.

Things just happen, one after another. They don’t care who knows. But history . . . ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it’s not history. It’s just . . . well, things happening one after another.

Things just happen, one after another. They don’t care who knows. But history . . . ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it’s not history. It’s just . . . well, things happening one after another