Mirrorworld (14 page)

“How are things, Marcus?” Death asked in a companionable manner.

Marcus glanced down the length of the bar, attempting to catch Ron’s attention. The man was busily serving at the far end of the bar, seemingly unfazed by the sudden arrival of a new barman.

“I must say, you’re looking very good for a dead person. I especially like the party hat.”

“Erm.. drink?” Marcus ventured.

“Why thank you, yes. What have you got there?” Death picked up the glass and inspected it. Marcus flinched slightly at the sound of bone on glass as the skeleton’s grip tightened around it until he was sure it would break. “It looks interesting,” Death added. “Would you get me one? I’d ask myself, but unfortunately, the only people who can usually see me are those who are about to die. Which brings me neatly to the reason I’m here.”

“You can have mine,” Marcus offered graciously.

“Thanks.” Marcus relaxed slightly as Death finally broke eye contact, raising the glass to his grinning face and knocking it back. Marcus noted, with a slight hint of hope, that it didn’t instantly drop out of the bottom of the Reaper’s jaw. What would human alcohol do to a talking skeleton?

“So, Marcus,” Death said, setting the empty glass, which was steaming, down onto the bar. “Do you remember the last time we met?”

“Yes. There was an explosion.”

“Indeed there was. And unfortunately, we were separated in the aftermath. Leaving us with, as you may guessed, some unfinished business.” The skull turned slightly, focusing now on the staff.

“You want the staff back?” Marcus felt the little bubble of hope inflate slightly.

The skull nodded.

“And if I give it you back, we’re cool?”

“Absolutely,” Death agreed. “Hundred percent cool.
Once I’ve collected your soul, of course.”

“Sorry, what?” Pssssh went the hope bubble as someone stabbed it with a pin.

The skull’s grin widened, an action even more unnerving for how it shouldn’t have been physically possible. A skeletal finger extended to point directly between Marcus’s eyes. “Look at you, Marcus, running around,
living
like that. Who would guess that you died two nights ago in a bar on a different planet? You’re living on borrowed time, quite literally. Your life should have come to its natural end that night in that bar, which was actually quite a bit like this one, wasn’t it? Funny, that.” Death paused for Marcus to appreciate the irony. “You see, I am unique amongst my brethren. Unlike War, Famine or Pestilence
, I
only visit once. You die of alcohol poisoning, I collect your soul, all is well in both worlds. If you
don’t
die, well that just plays hell with my schedule. Check this out.”

From somewhere about his person Death produced a very big, heavy-looking book. He dropped it on the bar in front of Marcus with a slam that shook the building, and with a flick of his finger, the pages flipped past. Marcus saw lists of names, with dates and causes of death, all punctuated by a big tick. The pages settled where there was one name, amidst the list, which did not have a tick. It was the entry for a Marcus Lathir Chiallion, twenty-nine years and three days old, who had died of alcohol poisoning on the floor of a seedy bar on Earth.

Marcus looked up.

“I
know
, right?” Death said. “Also, this
happened.” A few more pages flew past. On the page where the book settled, the cramped, neat hand in which the majority of the entries were written was interrupted by a different one, a scribbled slur not unlike Marcus’s own.
Peter John Lambert,
it read,
Forty-three years two hundred and four days of age. Cause of death: attempting to rob the wrong person, Rice Street, Portruss, the Mirrorworld.
There was no tick. And, underneath, the next entry had a thick line drawn through it, rendering it illegible.

“Your book was smaller before,” Marcus said, buying time.

“That was my schedule. This is my.. history. Also, that was obviously not the point.”

Death’s gaze had shifted to the scythe. Marcus took the opportunity to glance around, desperately looking for help that was not forthcoming; he seemed to be in a bubble, alone but for Death, ignored by the entire bar. He kicked Helm on the off-chance, but didn’t even merit a snort. He found himself wondering whether he might have recently added another name to Death’s book, and was beset by a blossoming sensation of guilt that mixed well the strong sensation of fear that was dancing through his mind and left him feeling quite, quite wretched.

“Now listen, Marcus,” Death said, and Marcus swung his focus back to the reaper, who seemed to have grown even taller and more menacing. He was also now holding a gleaming sword, although the effect of it was lessened somewhat by how he was using it to saw his book free of the bar surface. “I am a symbol,” the skeleton continued, his baritone deepening and increasing in volume, “and symbols are
very
powerful. I am the incarnation of Death. That’s kind of a big deal. My scythe, the symbol of my endless, dutiful harvest, has power far beyond mortal imagining. You didn’t just kill Mister Lambert, you know. You harvested him. Half-assed it, but there you go – point is, he was
not supposed to die
there
. Oh he was immoral, yes. You might even make the argument that he deserved it, and trust me,” Death said, a dark gleam shining in his eye sockets, “I hear a
lot
of arguments along those lines. But no, our Mister Lambert should not be dead. The situation in which he died should not even have happened, because the person who killed him – that’s you, hello – shouldn’t have been there. Yet there you were, thanks to the bloody Viaggiatori, and now Lambert is dead in place of some other poor bastard who now has to go on
living
until they get written into my book again. It wasn’t so bad when you were just a rogue staining my perfect record, but now you’re actively co-authoring death, and that simply
will not do
.”

Death paused, and it was like suddenly entering the eye of the storm after the tornado has been spinning you around like a demented fairground ride for five minutes. “Y’see Marcus,” he continued, “I’m a personification of simple tastes and pleasures, and I like to think I take an interest in what I do.. but this is just ridiculous. Given time, I can account for the mess you’ve made, but only if you stop making it. With that in mind...
GIVE ME THE SCYTHE!
”

Back on the waltzers without warning, Marcus had half-raised the scythe up in offering to the voice of command before his mind caught up, admonished him for thinking that could possibly be a good idea, and forced him to pull it back down quickly. “Look,” he began, “I didn’t
mean
to steal it..”

“I really don’t care. Come on, hand it over.”

Marcus looked once again into the skeleton’s eyes, where there now lay supernovas. A nasty little suspicion was growing in his mind, reflating his hope. “You can’t take it from me, can you?”

The supernovas flickered. There was a silent moment.

“You are astute, Marcus,” Death answered, in a quieter tone. “No, I cannot. Through direct action, I cannot take my scythe from you. You have held it, and used it, and it had moulded itself to you. As I said, it is no simple weapon. If it were, you wouldn’t have started doing my job for me. Be aware that though I use the phrase ‘doing my job’, I actually mean ‘ruining the fragile balance of life and death and generally making a quite terrible mess for me to deal with’.”

Marcus raised the scythe, somewhat awkwardly one-handed, putting it between himself and Death. “So my choices are, give it to you and be killed, or keep it and cause you a
bit more work
?”

“You’re already dead, Marcus. This just makes it official.”

“Am I? I don’t feel dead.” He took a deep breath, realising as he did so that such an act was probably a grave insult in Death’s eyes. Nonetheless, he had to try; “how about this; I give you the scythe back, and as a gesture of thanks, you don’t.. officialise.. me?”

“That’s
not
how it works,” Death growled, and it was a true growl, low and guttural and terrifying. “The book must be filled. There are
no
exceptions. No-one gets to pick and choose who dies and who lives, not even me. Those are the rules, and they must be respected. I had rather hoped you might see the logic in this, and respond to reasoned argument.. but no.” He sighed. “You living creatures, so attached to your feeble, flimsy mortality.. I should have known better than to try. Well,” he added, and his voice took on a grim tone that Marcus was pretty sure he didn’t like, “I can still take it from you by force, if I must.” Death raised his sword, almost laying it across the scythe. Small sparks jumped across from one weapon to the other, and Marcus’s sense of dread kicked into overdrive. “Kill the owner,” Death concluded, “and the weapon resets. Think you could take me in a fight, Marcus?”

“Hang on,” Marcus said, mind desperately whirring again as the skull leered at him. “Won’t killing me yourself make an even bigger mess?”

Death did his unnerving grin +1 again. “Nothing I can’t clear up. Certainly it’ll be less of a mess than allowing you to continue running around with my scythe. There are three options, here, Marcus. You play nice, and you die. You fight me, and you die. You attempt to escape, maybe you succeed, but not for long. I’ll find you. Tracking down dead people is my
job.
My work commitments take me all over many worlds, so it might take a while – I’m already late for my appointment with the Archbishop of Lithe, and I’m blaming any unscheduled mischief that his ghost gets up to in this time on you, by the way – but I
will
find you. Death, my friend, is inevitable.”

“I feel pretty good about my chances,” Marcus said blithely, his mind still working furiously.
If it’s really that easy for him to just kill me and take the scythe back, then why not just do that and be done with it? Why even try diplomacy?
The treacherous, hopeful thought shot through his mind like a lightning bolt; the scythe had power. Maybe a fight between them wouldn’t be as one-sided as Death wanted him to think. Still, it wasn’t a fight to get into if there was any way to avoid it..

And just like that, fate offered up a way out. As Death’s jaw creaked open, framing a response, a hiccough came out instead. The skeletal figure did a double take as steam began to flow from his mouth and eye sockets. Marcus blinked; against all the odds, the number 42
did
work on skeletal personifications, just with a significant delay. Offering a small prayer to Ron’s arcane mixology skills, Marcus took this opportunity to raise Helm’s water pistol and squirt it randomly around the bar, causing well-chosen targets to jump to their feet angrily. There was a general kerfuffle – no-one had spotted the perpetrator. Wild accusations filled the air, and before Ron could vault the bar and pull everyone apart, the unruly mob that formed his customer base had evolved to its next natural state: the brawl.

Death wafted himself down and refocused on Marcus just as the fists began to fly. Before the Reaper could react, Marcus dived backwards off his stool, almost tripped over Helm, and staggered into the fray. With a guttural roar, Death dived over the bar as well, snaking his way into the fight. As he reached out his unnaturally long arm to drag Marcus back to him, raising his sword for a deadly strike, someone barrelled into him from the side and sent him crashing through a poker table in a shower of bones.

A few minutes passed. A cat, strolling down the alley outside Ron’s Bar, stopped curiously to listen to the sounds of muffled brawling coming from inside. As it paused, the bar’s door was slammed open with such force that it ripped free of its hinges and carried on going, crashing into the wall on the far side of the alley. The cat dived in terror for the nearest bin, and therefore did not see the black-clad skeleton storm out into the street and glare around, apparently searching for something. Neither did Marcus, who was by this time several streets away, scythe in hand, not looking back.

Sunrise was a time of day that Eira had mixed feelings about. It was, on the one hand, a beautiful thing to watch: as the sun dragged itself up from below the horizon, tendrils of light snuck across the floor of her office, gradually creeping over to her book-strewn second desk and bathing her in fresh, unused sunlight. On the other hand, it was also a reminder of the fact that, once again, she’d been up all night. Okay, there might have been an hour or so of dozing in her chair somewhere around the midnight hours, but then a tremor had registered out on the plains to the south, which may or may not have been the Mirrorline juddering open of its own accord and dumping some potentially undesirable debris into the Mirrorworld. Everyone had been running around screaming until she’d downed a coffee, wandered out and got a hold of the situation. Now, a small team had been sent off to locate the site of the tremor and deal with it, Tec had finally gone home after repeatedly hinting about how much more efficient his sensor system could be if he could get a bit of extra funding, and Eira had returned to her desk, only to find that her stack of paperwork had doubled in her absence.

And now here she was, with the sun creeping up and no end in sight. Right in front of her on the desk lay the note she’d been trying to avoid looking at for several hours, which was still stubbornly refusing to cease existing. It was a request from the council for an update as to ‘the immigrant situation’, which was the damning title they had instantly dreamt up when she’d revealed to them her proposal for dragging someone from Earth over to the Mirrorworld, justified with ‘the Mirrorline said it was a good idea’. They’d explicitly forbidden her to do it, but since she was the Master she’d gone and organised it anyway, and now they were demonstrating a keen interest in how that was working out, probably so they could steal the credit for the idea if it had turned out to be a good one.

Luckily – although that hardly seemed like the word – it was turning out to not be. She had been expecting Helm to check in with his initial report on Marcus hours ago. Admittedly, she’d been content to not ask the man to come back by a specific time, but 7am the following morning was pushing it a bit. Even so, that probably wouldn’t have worried her, were it not for the fact that the second Viaggiatori she’d sent out to follow Marcus and Helm and make sure nothing happened to them hadn’t reported in either. She’d been beginning to suspect that people were deliberately avoiding talking to her, so had sent her secretary to wake up Eustace and send
him
to find out what was happening. It was a slightly roundabout way of dealing with the issue, but worth it to mess with Eustace; hopefully if she could annoy him for long enough he’d give up on the dream-walking stuff.