# Water Thieves

*The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 14 Jun 1998*

<https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/787>

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### Charles Dye
*14 Jun 1998, 21:07*

Quoth Mantis:

> You remembered two of the water clock passages I'd forgotten--the one
> I'm vaguely thinking of is the one used to explain how the master of
> the house's clock manages to stop "precisely" at the moment that the
> master dies . . . mainly that with all the deathbed activity, none of
> the slaves fills the water pan for the clock, then when the doctor
> wants to jot down the time of death he looks at the clock, which
> stopped at some arbitrary time, and the doctor uses that time as
> being as good as any, and everybody else goes "whoo" (and the master's
> dog begins to howl since they've forgotten to feed him as well as
> water the clock <g>).

A bit of spooky magic explained in flat commonsense terms.

> Can't remember where this one comes from.

Spoken by Thecla.  Which makes the magician conducting Severian's
anacrisis say "whoo" as Sev's in solitary and Thecla's dead.  There's
a simple explanation, of course.  (And Severian continues to come up
with simple explanations for the jungle magicks until it's almost too
late.)

raster at highfiber.com

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