Pyramids

news.”
    “I think I had better be going, father. Otherwise I shall miss the tide.”
    His majesty nodded, and patted his pockets.
    “There was something…” he muttered, and then tracked it down, and slipped a small leather bag into Teppic’s pocket. He tried the shoulder routine again.
    “A little something,” he murmured. “Don’t tell your aunt. Oh, you can’t, anyway. She’s gone for a lie-down. It’s all been rather too much for her.”
    All that remained then was for Teppic to go and sacrifice a chicken at the statue of Khuft, the founder of Djelibeybi, so that his ancestor’s guiding hand would steer his footsteps in the world. It was only a small chicken, though, and when Khuft had finished with it the king had it for lunch.
    Djelibeybi really was a small, self-centered kingdom. Even its plagues were half-hearted. All self-respecting river kingdoms have vast supernatural plagues, but the best the Old Kingdom had been able to achieve in the last hundred years was the Plague of Frog. *

    That evening, when they were well outside the delta of the Djel and heading across the Circle Sea to Ankh-Morpork, Teppic remembered the bag and examined its contents. With love, but also with his normal approach to things, his father had presented him with a cork, half a tin of saddle-soap, a small bronze coin of uncertain denomination, and an extremely elderly sardine.

    It is a well-known fact that when one is about to die the senses immediately become excruciatingly sharp and it has always been believed that this is to enable their owner to detect any possible exit from his predicament other than the obvious one.
    This is not true. The phenomenon is a classical example of displacement activity. The senses are desperately concentrating on anything apart from the immediate problem—which in Teppic’s case consisted of a broad expanse of cobblestones some eighty feet away and closing—in the hope that it will go away.
    The trouble is that it soon will.
    Whatever the reason, Teppic was suddenly acutely aware of things around him. The way the moonlight glowed on the rooftops. The smell of fresh bread wafting from a nearby bakery. The whirring of a cockchafer as it barrelled past his ear, upward. The sound of a baby crying, in the distance, and the bark of a dog. The gentle rush of the air, with particular reference to its thinness and lack of handholds…

    There had been more than seventy of them enrolling that year. The Assassins didn’t have a very strenuous entrance examination; the school was easy to get into, easy to get out of (the trick was to get out upright ). The courtyard in the center of the Guild buildings was thronged with boys who all had two things in common—overlarge trunks, which they were sitting on, and clothes that had been selected for them to grow into, and which they were more or less sitting in . Some optimists had brought weapons with them, which were confiscated and sent home over the next few weeks.
    Teppic watched them carefully. There were distinct advantages to being the only child of parents too preoccupied with their own affairs to worry much about him, or indeed register his existence for days at a time.
    His mother, as far as he could remember, had been a pleasant woman and as self-centered as a gyroscope. She’d liked cats. She didn’t just venerate them—everyone in the kingdom did that —but she actually liked them, too. Teppic knew that it was traditional in river kingdoms to approve of cats, but he suspected that usually the animals in question were graceful, stately creatures; his mother’s cats were small, spitting, flat-headed, yellow-eyed maniacs.
    His father spent a lot of time worrying about the kingdom and occasionally declaring that he was a seagull, although this was probably from general forgetfulness. Teppic had occasionally speculated about his own conception, since his parents were rarely in the same frame of reference, let alone the same state of mind.
    But it had apparently happened and he was left to bring himself up on a trial and error basis, mildly hindered and occasionally enlivened by a succession of tutors. The ones hired by his father were best, especially on those days when he was flying as high as he could, and for one glorious winter Teppic had as his tutor an elderly ibis poacher who had in fact wandered into the royal gardens in search of a stray arrow.
    That had been a time of wild chases with soldiers, moonlight rambles in the dead