Always remarkable to me that, among all the Tom Clancy knockoffs, books about paranormal detectives and their werewolf/vampire/changeling boyfriends, and books about cats solving memories, the Dollar Generals will have Discworld books for 3 bucks.
Teppic has just passed his test to become an assassin, despite realizing he doesn't want to actually kill people. Before he can come up with a creative bit of thinking to excuse the taking of lives, he's visited by a seagull. because his father, who is the pharaoh of a once prosperous, now increasingly broke kingdom on the banks of a river. It's broke because they keep making increasingly elaborate pyramids for their dead rulers.
The pyramids also collect time energy, somehow, and when you make too large a pyramid, bad things happen. I didn't really understand that part, when Time becomes width and whatnot. End result, they end up where all their many contradictory gods exist and it turns out once you're dead, being stuffed in a giant rock tomb isn't all that great, either.
The plot's not really that interesting to me, and Pratchett keeps jumping around between characters I don't particularly care about. The architect and his two sons, the embalmer, the whole thing about camels being Discworld's greatest mathematicians. I was mostly wanting to follow Teppic and the high priest Dios. The way things have become so set in stone in the kingdom that the ruler really can't change anything, even when he desperately needs to.
"There's something really weird going on over there," he said. "They're shooting tortoises."
"Why?"
"Search me. They seem to think the tortoise ought to be able to run away."
"What, from an arrow?"
"Like I said. Really weird. You stay here. I'll whistle if it's safe to follow me."
"What will you do if it isn't safe?"
"Scream."
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