“Well, sir, I can’t help noticing, the point is, well, the plain fact of it, sir, is—”
OUT WITH IT, BOY.
“How can you eat things, sir?”
Death pulled up short, so that Mort walked into him. When the boy started to speak he waved him into silence. He appeared to be listening to something.
THERE ARE TIMES, YOU KNOW, he said, half to himself, WHEN I GET REALLY UPSET.
He turned on one heel and set off down an alleyway at high speed, his cloak flying out behind him. The alley wound between dark walls and sleeping buildings, not so much a thoroughfare as a meandering gap.
Death stopped by a decrepit water butt and plunged his arm in at full length, bringing out a small sack with a brick tied to it. He drew his sword, a line of flickering blue fire in the darkness, and sliced through the string.
I GET VERY ANGRY INDEED, he said. He upended the sack and Mort watched the pathetic scraps of sodden fur slide out, to lie in their spreading puddle on the cobbles. Death reached out with his white fingers and stroked them gently.
After a while something like grey smoke curled up from the kittens and formed three small cat-shaped clouds in the air. They billowed occasionally, unsure of their shape, and blinked at Mort with puzzled grey eyes. When he tried to touch one his hand went straight through it, and tingled.
YOU DON’T SEE PEOPLE AT THEIR BEST IN THIS JOB, said Death. He blew on a kitten, sending it gently tumbling. Its miaow of complaint sounded as though it had come from a long way away via a tin tube.
“They’re souls, aren’t they?” said Mort. “What do people look like?”
PEOPLE SHAPED, said Death. IT’S BASICALLY ALL DOWN TO THE CHARACTERISTIC MORPHOGENETIC FIELD.
He sighed like the swish of a shroud, picked the kittens out of the air, and carefully stowed them away somewhere in the dark recesses of his robe. He stood up.
CURRY TIME, he said.
It was crowded in the Curry Gardens on the corner of God Street and Blood Alley, but only with the cream of society—at least, with those people who are found floating on the top and who, therefore, it’s wisest to call the cream. Fragrant bushes planted among the tables nearly concealed the basic smell of the city itself, which has been likened to the nasal equivalent of a foghorn.
Mort ate ravenously, but curbed his curiosity and didn’t watch to see how Death could possibly eat anything. The food was there to start with and wasn’t there later, so presumably something must have happened in between. Mort got the feeling that Death wasn’t really used to all this but was doing it to put him at his ease, like an elderly bachelor uncle who has been landed with his nephew for a holiday and is terrified of getting it wrong.
The other diners didn’t take much notice, even when Death leaned back and lit a rather fine pipe. Someone with smoke curling out of their eye sockets takes some ignoring, but everyone managed it.
“Is it magic?” said Mort.
WHAT DO YOU THINK? said Death. AM I REALLY HERE, BOY?
“Yes,” said Mort slowly. “I… I’ve watched people. They look at you but they don’t see you, I think. You do something to their minds.”
Death shook his head.
THEY DO IT ALL THEMSELVES, he said. THERE’S NO MAGIC. PEOPLE CAN’T SEE ME, THEY SIMPLY WON’T ALLOW THEMSELVES TO DO IT. UNTIL IT’S TIME, OF COURSE. WIZARDS CAN SEE ME, AND CATS. BUT YOUR AVERAGE HUMAN… NO, NEVER. He blew a smoke ring at the sky, and added, STRANGE BUT TRUE.
Mort watched the smoke ring wobble into the sky and drift away towards the river.
“I can see you,” he said.
THAT’S DIFFERENT.
The Klatchian waiter arrived with the bill, and placed it in front of Death. The man was squat and brown, with a hairstyle like a coconut gone nova, and his round face creased into a puzzled frown when Death nodded politely to him. He shook his head like someone trying to dislodge soap from his ears, and walked away.
Death reached into the depths of his robe and brought out a large leather bag full of assorted copper coinage, most of it blue and green with age. He inspected the bill carefully. Then he counted out a dozen coins.
COME, he said, standing up. WE MUST GO.
Mort trotted along behind him as he stalked out of the garden and into the street, which was still fairly busy even though there were the first suggestions of dawn on the horizon.
“What are we going to do now?”
BUY YOU SOME NEW CLOTHES.
“These were new today—yesterday, I mean.”
REALLY?
“Father said the shop was famous for its budget clothing,” said Mort, running to keep up.
IT CERTAINLY ADDS A NEW TERROR TO POVERTY.
They turned into a wider street leading into a more affluent part of the city (the torches were closer together and the middens further apart). There were no stalls and alley corner traders here, but proper buildings with signs hanging outside. They weren’t mere shops, they were emporia; they had purveyors in them, and chairs, and spittoons. Most of them were open even at this time of night, because the average Ankhian trader can’t sleep for thinking of the money he’s not making.
“Doesn’t anyone ever go to bed around here?” said Mort.
THIS IS A CITY, said Death, and pushed open the door of a clothing store. When they came out twenty minutes later Mort was wearing a neatly-fitting black robe with faint silver embroidery, and the shopkeeper was looking at a handful of antique copper coins and wondering precisely how he came to have them.
“How do you get all those coins?” asked Mort.
IN PAIRS.{2}
An all-night barber sheared Mort’s hair into the latest fashion among the city’s young bloods while Death relaxed in the next chair, humming to himself. Much to his surprise, he felt in a good humour.
In fact after a while he pushed his hood back and glanced up at the barber’s apprentice, who tied a towel around his neck in that unseeing, hypnotised way that Mort was coming to recognise, and said, A SPLASH OF TOILET WATER AND A POLISH, MY GOOD MAN.
An elderly wizard having a beard-trim on the other side stiffened when he heard those sombre, leaden tones and swung around. He blanched and muttered a few protective incantations after Death turned, very slowly for maximum effect, and treated him to a grin.
A few minutes later, feeling rather self-conscious and chilly around the ears, Mort was heading back towards the stables where Death had lodged his horse. He tried an experimental swagger; he felt his new suit and haircut rather demanded it. It didn’t quite work.
Mort awoke.
He lay looking at the ceiling while his memory did a fast-rewind and the events of the previous day crystallised in his mind like little ice cubes.
He couldn’t have met Death. He couldn’t have eaten a meal with a skeleton with glowing blue eyes. It had to be a weird dream. He couldn’t have ridden pillion on a great white horse that had cantered up into the sky and then went…
… where?
The answer flowed into his mind with all the inevitability of a tax demand.{3}
Here.
His searching hands reached up to his cropped hair, and down to sheets of some smooth slippery material. It was much finer than the wool he was used to at home, which was coarse and always smelled of sheep; it felt like warm, dry ice.
He swung out of the bed hastily and stared around the room.
First of all it was large, larger than the entire house back home, and dry, dry as old tombs under ancient deserts. The air tasted as though it had been cooked for hours and then allowed to cool. The carpet under his feet was deep enough to hide a tribe of pygmies and crackled electrically as he padded through it. And everything had been designed in shades of purple and black.