Mirrorworld (16 page)

“Perhaps he lives for the manifestation of a destiny that will save us from Keithus?” Eira felt almost ashamed at the unabashed hope in her voice, but Helm was in no state to notice it.

“I don’t think.. so,” he said sleepily, his eyes beginning to redden again. “To be honest.. I think if the Grim Reaper came for him today, he’d greet him with open arms.”

Consciousness came gunning for Marcus in tandem with the rising sun, the former wedging itself rudely between his eyes and forcing them open so that the latter might burn away the spider webs that alcohol had weaved behind his retinas. Cursing the heady hangover that had found him where he’d left himself atop a pile of bin bags, collapsed from exhaustion following a wild, directionless flight through the city the night before, he rolled away and pulled himself up to a sitting position, where he waited quietly for the pain of waking to slink off and bother somebody else.

The aftermath of a night with Ron’s numbers was a potent one, and Marcus cherished every instant of it. He had not forgotten the encounter that had informed his flight, not forgotten a word of the conversation he had shared with the Grim Reaper. The sense of fear and dread rang yet through his head, lightning bolts riding the recollection of Death’s promises of inevitability. His number was up, his cards were marked, his time borrowed and rapidly accumulating interest. He was a problem to be solved, a boat to be brought in, and all of that didn’t matter a damn against the deep bass thud of a killer headache that was solid, undeniable proof that right now,
he was still alive.
Those pounding drums shattered the image of Death’s leering skull every time it tried to form in his mind, forcing Marcus’s thoughts away from the murky gloom of his lost and found life and over to more immediate, primal concerns like
painkillers, now!

Full of lethargic urgency, he dug Death’s scythe out of the pile of trash and used it to lever himself upright. He’d considered throwing it aside again many times during his wild flight, but as he understood it, the scythe itself wasn’t the problem. He, Marcus Chiallion, was the problem, at least in Death’s eyes. Somehow, whatever wild voodoo the Viaggiatori had worked to bring him to the Mirrorworld had interfered with Death’s business and turned Marcus into a dead man walking, and that was what Death, quite reasonably really, found objectionable. But if that was what Marcus was to be, then damn it if he couldn’t use Death’s staff to support himself. He did so now, leaning heavily on it as he hobbled out of his alley and back to civilisation, or more accurately, Rice Street.

Early as it was – Marcus checked his watch, which he’d kept meaning to adjust and had never got around to, so it only ever lied to him – the street was a hive of activity. Stalls that had serviced the people of Portruss’s night were being closed up and wheeled away, or else outright converted into an entirely different stall that might better serve the day shift. Collected piles of bin bags had been swept to the sides of the road; Marcus presumed that whoever had the unenviable job of collecting the rubbish would be along soon to clear it up, cleaning the slate for another day in the big city.

In spite of the ongoing war between his headache and soul-ache, Marcus had to smile as he wandered the length of Rice Street. The weather was pensive, the sun rising through the clear skies, not quite succeeding at piercing the wintery chill and summoning the spring, but giving it its best shot. All around, jovial traders bade Marcus good morning, lending him instead their warmth along with promises of delicious food from lots of places with odd-sounding names that he didn’t quite recognise. Despite the fear of literal imminent Death, Marcus found himself enjoying the atmosphere. It would be a nice day, he now held in his free hand a steaming cup of coffee, and were those the scents of fresh baking that he smelt in the air?

They were. Since what with one thing and another he’d never gotten around to paying his tab the previous night, he still had plenty of money, so he expunged on a croissant the size of his face and went to sit at a rickety table nearby and decide what he was going to do with his afterlife.

What I need to do,
he thought,
is to get out of this city. That was the plan last night, and it should still be my plan. If I can put some distance between myself and all this madness, maybe it’ll all make a little more sense.
For the most part, it was working out pretty well so far; here he sat, alone and unfettered, enjoying an al fresco breakfast as he soaked up the sounds and sights – the stalls, the passers-by, the ghost, the food, the drink..

Oh, but you can’t run from me,
growled the thought of Death, no longer cowed by the receding beat of headache.
Wherever you go, I told you, I will find you, and I know you believed me.
Marcus shivered. The fact that Death had also admitted to being rather busy and that it might take a while was of little comfort; was he to stare down every shadow as a potential lurking place for his doom, sidestepping every patch of darkness until one of them finally rose up to take his soul? A life of ignobility, capped by a brief glimpse of another way, instantly poisoned by the inevitability of death. Maybe he’d been wrong; maybe the future would be just like the past after all.

I need to know more.
Marcus latched onto this thought as a welcome distraction. Staring unseeingly past the slightly translucent man across the way who kept trying and failing to engage the attention of passers-by, Marcus tried to decide what to do. Who might be able to tell him about Death? The Viaggiatori has caused all this, but it didn’t seem like they’d meant to, and going back to them would be letting them snare him up in their talk of his supposed destiny. Perhaps, then, the wizards were a better option. Helm had suggested that they had a lot of arcane knowledge, and this definitely seemed like an arcane situation. And no wizard knew or cared who Marcus Chiallion was, so he could go to them risk-free.. it was as good a plan as any. Marcus felt better for having made it. Now, if only he could figure out what the deal with that ghost was..

Marcus blinked as his thoughts caught up with eyes, and focused again on what he’d been watching for the last few minutes. The slightly insubstantial figure of the man who couldn’t seem to get anyone to pay attention to him was still there, still failing to acquire any acknowledgement of his presence. Several times, the man seemed to have a thought and attempt to walk off, but he only ever got so far before something seemed to pull him back into Marcus’s line of sight.

Marcus glanced around. Nope, not a single person other than he seemed to find the sight curious, or even to register it at all. The man was now attempting to steal some food from a nearby stall, but his fingers closed only over empty air, passing through a stack of croissants as if they were fog. With a howl, the man turned and ran, struggling against whatever strange force pulled him back until he seemed to snap free of it, only to flicker out of existence, reappear again near the pile of rubbish where Marcus had first spotted him, and start the cycle all over again.

Marcus decided to go and talk to him.

“Hello,” he said, when he was nearby. The ghost was now sitting glumly on a split refuse sack, or at least seemed to think it was, when in reality it was hovering an inch or so above the bag’s surface. It glanced up at Marcus’s greeting, and upon realising that it was being addressed, sprang to its feet.

“You can see me?”

“Yes,” Marcus said, “I can. Who are you?”

“Oh thank goodness! I was starting to think there was something wrong with me.. I’ve been here for hours, bloody hours, ever since that guy..” the ghost trailed off, looking straight into Marcus’s eyes.

Marcus felt the bottom drop out of his world, recognising the ghost in the same instant that it recognised him. It was the would-be mugger from the previous day - Peter John Lambert.

“It’s you!” they both said at the same time.

“But, what are you doing here?” Marcus asked. “This is unreal.”

“Tell me about it,” Lambert agreed. “One minute I’m innocently attempting to rob you, the next I’ve been knocked out. Then they drag me over to the side of the road and dump me with the other rubbish, and
then
everyone starts ignoring me. Hours and hours I’ve been here, and the only person to pay any attention to me.. is
you!
”

Marcus had no idea what to say, although he was sure that there was something about the situation that Lambert hadn’t quite taken in yet. He pointed wordlessly at the unfortunate shape he had just spotted, lying among the rubbish.

Lambert followed his gaze. “Oh, yes, there I am, looking quite wretched. What of me?”

“Well,” Marcus said quietly, after wondering what the best way to word this was and deciding there
was
no best way, “if you’re lying down there... with half of your face smashed in.. who’s looking down at you right now?”

Lambert blinked. He looked down again, then at his hands, seemingly realising for the first time that they weren’t opaque. He looked again at Marcus, and then a terrifyingly oblique hopelessness illuminated his washed-out face. “I’m dead?” he asked.

Marcus stepped back from the sheer force of his enlightenment, then gave the only answer that made sense. “Yes.”

“Doesn’t seem strictly fair,” Lambert mused. “And you! You’re the Grim Reaper?!”

“Well-“

“That
is
unfair. How was I to know? You could have just told me, I’d have left you alone!”

“I kind of did, actually-“

“You
killed
me!”

Marcus reeled. This was not the sort of thing he was used to. He’d never killed anyone before, but even if he had he wouldn’t have expected them to come back and tell him off about it.

“Everyone has their time-“ he began weakly, remembering Death’s book and how he’d changed it and not believing what he was saying in the slightest.

“I have a family, man! My wife! My daughter..” Shimmering tears of faded colour began to stream from the man’s eyes, as Marcus stood there with no idea what to do. Looking down though, he noticed that the shade of the man was still, in some way, connected to his prior self. A thin grey cord snaked out from under the ghost of his right foot, and attached itself to the same point on his body.

Marcus looked at the cord, and then at his staff. And then at the cord again.

People always get that wrong. Death doesn’t kill people. Life kills people. My job is to pick people up after they’ve died, and point them in the right direction. It’s important work.

Boing
went the staff as the blade popped out.
Swoosh
went the blade as it cut through the air.

The ghost of Lambert stopped sobbing incoherently, and looked down at his old body. The two flailing ends of the cord that Marcus had just severed slowly faded away into nothingness as he watched. A moment passed. The sun went behind a cloud.

“So what happens now?” Lambert asked, sounding more peaceable.

“I don’t know,” Marcus admitted. “This is all just an accident.”

“There’s no afterlife? No sun-filled gardens?”

Marcus looked around desperately for assistance. There was, of course, none.

“Is none of it real?” Lambert asked him, worriedly.

What was real? Marcus thought to himself. He knew all about his own world, his own life, dull and drab and wasteful as it had been. Against all that was this new world, which seemed so bright and full of life even with all the ignorance he had of it. Not fifteen minutes ago he’d found himself smiling in spite of himself. But now, here, this man was off to
another
world he knew nothing about, one that might not even exist. Reality was, at this point, a foreign concept.

“I don’t know,” he said again.

“You know what,” Lambert grumbled, “you’re fucking useless.”

And then he vanished.

Tick,
went the Book of Deaths.

It was now approaching midday. There was still no sign of Marcus. Tec had dropped in to find out if he was going to be needed today, and Eira had chased him out. As the hours wore on, she found herself becoming increasingly edgy. In the end, she arranged to meet with the council on the basis that it would pass some time she would otherwise spend fretting, and was almost guaranteed to give her something else to rage about.

The council insisted on meeting her in the Main Chamber. They always did, even for private, trivial meetings. The Main Chamber was a wide hall with tiered seating on both sides, and a set ornamental table in the centre where the most powerful players in the current debate would sit, backed up by a large mirror set into the wall. The walls had once held many more mirrors and sculptures of all sizes, a decorative chronicle of Viaggiatori history, but those were gone, now, replaced with scorch marks that no amount of scrubbing or repainting seemed able to remove. Nonetheless, it was all still very official.

All four of them were already there by the time Eira arrived, sat in their custom-designed chairs that rivalled the table in terms of ornamental overkill, alternating their exchanges of cold stares between each other. When Eira walked up and dropped into the plain chair at the head of the table that was hers by default, all four glares descended on her. There was Delor, thin and haughty, more skeleton than flesh and blood human. Sat next to him but by no means ‘with’ him was Malydwyn, equally tall, but with more muscle to him and a ridiculous floppy moustache. On the other side of the table, balancing the glare, was Oroitz, medium of height and huge of width, drooping sideways out of his chair. Behind him, almost obscured by the rolling waves of fat, was the short and stooped Burley. His glare was less pronounced than the others, mostly because it had the furthest to go, and had to break out of Oroitz’s orbit in order to land safely. Overall, Eira thought they were the most repulsive group of imbeciles she had the misfortune of knowing.

“Yes?” she asked.

They flinched, slightly. Whilst most meetings sooner or later descended into open hostility, usually protocol had everyone dancing around each other for the opening few minutes. Today, however, Eira simply could not be bothered, and made a tired motion for them to get on with it.