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.’