Teppic regarded the flat brother.
'It's some sort of wall poster, is it?' he said eventually.
IIb looked down. Teppic saw the movement, and looked down also; he was ankle-deep in green sprouts.
'Sorry,' he said. 'I can't seem to shake it off.'
'It can be dreadful,' said IIb frantically. 'I know how it is, I had this verruca once, nothing would shift it.'
Teppic hunkered down by the cracked stone.
'This thing,' he said. 'What's the significance? I mean, it's coated with metal. Why?'
'There's got to be a sharp point for the flare,' said IIb.
'Is that all? This is gold, isn't it?'
'It's electrum. Gold and silver alloy. The capstone has got to be made of electrum.'
Teppic peeled back the foil.
'This isn't all metal,' he said mildly.
'Yes. Well,' said Ptaclusp. 'We found, er, that foil works just as well.'
'Couldn't you use something cheaper? Like steel?' Ptaclusp sneered. It hadn't been a good day, sanity was a distant memory, but there were certain facts he knew for a fact.
'Wouldn't last for more than a year or two,' he said. 'What with the dew and so forth. You'd lose the point. Wouldn't last more than two or three hundred times.'
Teppic leaned his head against the pyramid. It was cold, and it hummed. He thought he could hear, under the throbbing, a faint rising tone.
The pyramid towered over him. (IIb could have told him that this was because the walls sloped in at precisely 56 degrees, and an effect known as battering made the pyramid loom even higher than it really was. He probably would have used words like perspective and virtual height as well.
The black marble was glassy smooth. The masons had done well. The cracks between each silky panel were hardly wide enough to insert a knife. But wide enough, all the same.
'How about once?' he said.
Koomi chewed his fingernails distractedly.
'Fire,' he said. 'That'd stop them. They're very inflammable. Or water. They'd probably dissolve.'
'Some of them were destroying pyramids,' said the high priest of Juf, the Cobra-Headed God of Papyrus.
'People always come back from the dead in such a bad temper,' said another priest.
Koomi watched the approaching army in mounting bewilderment.
'Where's Dios?' he said.
The old high priest was pushed to the front of the crowd.
'What shall I say to them?' Koomi demanded.
It would be wrong to say that Dios smiled. It wasn't an action he often felt called upon to perform. But his mouth creased at the edges and his eyes went half-hooded.
'You could tell them,' he said, 'that new times demand new men. You could tell them that it is time to make way for younger people with fresh ideas. You could tell them that they are outmoded. You could tell them all that.'
'They'll kill me!'