'Where's father?' he said.
'I sent one of us to go and wake him up,' said IIa.
'Who?'
'One of you, actually.'
'Oh.' IIb stared again at the capstone. 'It's not that heavy,' he said. 'Two of us could manhandle it up there.' He gave his brother an enquiring look.
'You must be mad. Send some of the men to do it.'
'They've all run away-'
Down river another pyramid tried to flare, spluttered, and then ejected a screaming, ragged flame that arched across the sky and grounded near the top of the Great Pyramid itself.
'It's interfering with the others now!' shouted IIb. 'Come on. We've got to flare it off, it's the only way!'
About a third of the way up the pyramid's flanks a crackling blue zigzag arced out and struck itself on a stone sphinx. The air above it boiled.
The two brothers slung the stone between them and staggered to the scaffolding, while the dust around them whirled into strange shapes.
'Can you hear something?' said IIb, as they stumbled on to the first platform.
'What, you mean the fabric of time and space being put through the wringer?' said IIa.
The architect gave his brother a look of faint admiration. It was an unusual remark for an accountant. Then his face returned to its previous look of faint terror.
'No, not that,' he said.
'Well, the sound of the very air itself being subjected to horrible tortures?'
'Not that, either,' said IIb, vaguely annoyed. 'I mean the creaking noise.'
Three more pyramids struck their discharges, which fizzled through the roiling clouds overhead and poured into the black marble above them.
'Can't hear anything like that,' said IIa.
'I think it's coming from the pyramid.'
'Well, you can put your ear against it if you like, but I'm not going to.'
The scaffolding swayed in the storm as they eased their way up another ladder, the heavy capstone rocking between them.
'I said we shouldn't do it,' muttered the accountant, as the stone slid gently on to his toes. 'We shouldn't have built this.'
'Just shut up and lift your end, will you?'
And so, one rocking ladder after another, the brothers Ptaclusp eased their bickering way up the flanks of the Great Pyramid, while the lesser tombs along the Djel fired one after another, and the sky streamed with lines of sizzling time.
It was around about this point that the greatest mathematician in the world, lying in cosy flatulence in his stall below the palace, stopped chewing the cud and realised that something very wrong was happening to numbers. All the numbers.
The camel looked along its nose at Teppic. Its expression made it clear that of all the riders in all the world it would least like to ride it, he was right at the top of the list. However, camels look like that at everyone. Camels have a very democratic approach to the human race. They hate every member of it, without making any distinctions for rank or creed.
This one appeared to be chewing soap.
Teppic looked distractedly down the shadowy length of the royal stables, which had once contained a hundred camels. He'd have given the world for a horse, and a moderately-sized continent for a pony. But the stables now held only a handful of rotting war chariots, relics of past glories, an elderly elephant whose presence was a bit of a mystery, and this camel. It looked an extremely inefficient animal. It was going threadbare at the knees.
'Well, this is it,' he said to Ptraci. 'I don't dare try the river during the night. I could try and get you over the border.'