Read Online Small Gods by Terry Pratchett - Free Book Online

that marked the complex rituals of Great Om demanded long, gentle slopes. Such steps as there were, were low enough to encompass the faltering steps of very old men. And there were so many very old men in the Citadel.
    Sand blew in all the time from the desert. Drifts built up on the steps and in the courtyards, despite everything that an army of brush-wielding novices could do.
    But a tortoise has very inefficient legs.
    “Thou Shall Build Shallower Steps,” he hissed, hauling himself up.
    Feet thundered past him, a few inches away. This was one of the main thoroughfares of the Citadel, leading to the Place of Lamentation, and was trodden by thousands of pilgrims every day.
    Once or twice an errant sandal caught his shell and spun him around.
    “ Your feet to fly from your body and be buried in a termite mound! ” he screamed.
    It made him feel a little better.
    Another foot clipped him and slid him across the stones. He fetched up, with a clang, against a curved metal grille set low in one wall. Only a lightning grab with his jaws stopped him slipping through it. He ended up hanging by his mouth over a cellar.
    A tortoise has incredibly powerful jaw muscles. He swayed a bit, legs wobbling. All right. A tortoise in a crevassed, rocky landscape was used to this sort of thing. He just had to get a leg hooked…
    Faint sounds drew themselves to his attention. There was the clink of metal, and then a very soft whimper.
    Om swiveled his eye around.
    The grille was high in one wall of a very long, low room. It was brightly illuminated by the light-wells that ran everywhere through the Citadel.
    Vorbis had made a point of that. The inquisitors shouldn’t work in the shadows, he said, but in the light.
    Where they could see, very clearly, what they were doing.
    So could Om.
    He hung from the grille for some time, unable to take his eye off the row of benches.
    On the whole, Vorbis discouraged red-hot irons, spiked chains, and things with drills and big screws on, unless it was for a public display on an important Fast day. It was amazing what you could do, he always said, with a simple knife…
    But many of the inquisitors liked the old ways best.
    After a while, Om very slowly hauled himself up to the grille, neck muscles twitching. Like a creature with its mind on something else, the tortoise hooked first one front leg over a bar, then another. His back legs waggled for a while, and then he hooked a claw on to the rough stonework.
    He strained for a moment and then pulled himself back into the light.
    He walked off slowly, keeping close to the wall to avoid the feet. He had no alternative to walking slowly in any case, but now he was walking slowly because he was thinking. Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time.

    Anyone could go to the Place of Lamentation. It was one of the great freedoms of Omnianism.
    There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and exactly how things should be. After all, those who had achieved success in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God, because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His disapproval . In the same way, the Quisition could act without possibility of flaw. Suspicion was proof. How could it be anything else? The Great God would not have seen fit to put the suspicion in the minds of His exquisitors unless it was right that it should be there. Life could be very simple, if you believed in the Great God Om. And sometimes quite short, too.
    But there were always the improvident, the stupid, and those who, because of some flaw or oversight in this life or a past one, were not even able to afford a pinch of incense. And the Great God, in His wisdom and mercy as filtered through His priests, had made provision for them.
    Prayers and entreaties could be offered up in the Place of Lamentation. They would assuredly be heard. They might