Mort (3 page)

What he actually said was, “Yes. Thank you. I’d better be going. I’ll try and write you a letter.”

“There’s bound to be someone passing who can read it to us,” said Lezek. “Goodbye, Mort.” He blew his nose.

“Goodbye, Dad. I’ll come back to visit,” said Mort. Death coughed tactfully, although it sounded like the pistol-crack of an ancient beam full of death-watch beetle.

W
E HAD BETTER BE GOING
, he said. H
OP UP, MORT
.

As Mort scrambled behind the ornate silver saddle Death leaned down and shook Lezek’s hand.

T
HANK YOU
, he said.

“He’s a good lad at heart,” said Lezek. “A bit dreamy, that’s all. I suppose we were all young once.”

Death considered this.

No, he said, I
DON’T THINK SO
.

He gathered up the reins and turned the horse towards the Rim road. From his perch behind the black-robed figure Mort waved desperately.

Lezek waved back. Then, as the horse and its two riders disappeared from view, he lowered his hand and looked at it. The handshake…it had felt strange. But, somehow, he couldn’t remember exactly why.

Mort listened to the clatter of stone under the horse’s hooves. Then there was the soft thud of packed earth as they reached the road, and then there was nothing at all.

He looked down and saw the landscape spread out below him, the night etched with moonlight silver. If he fell off, the only thing he’d hit was air.

He redoubled his grip on the saddle.

Then Death said, A
RE YOU HUNGRY, BOY
?

“Yes, sir.” The words came straight from his stomach without the intervention of his brain.

Death nodded, and reined in the horse. It stood on the air, the great circular panorama of the Disc glittering below it. Here and there a city was an orange glow; in the warm seas nearer the Rim thee was a hint of phosphorescence. In some of the deep valleys the trapped daylight of the Disc, which is slow and slightly heavy
*
, was evaporating like silver steam.

But it was outshone by the glow that rose towards the stars from the Rim itself. Vast streamers of light shimmered and glittered across the night. Great golden walls surrounded the world.

“It’s beautiful,” said Mort softly. “What is it?”

T
HE SUN IS UNDER THE
D
ISC
, said Death.

“Is it like this every night?”

E
VERY NIGHT
, said Death. N
ATURE’S LIKE THAT
.

“Doesn’t anyone know?”

M
E
. Y
OU
. T
HE GODS
. G
OOD, IS IT
?

“Gosh!”

Death leaned over the saddle and looked down at the kingdoms of the world.

I
DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU
, he said, B
UT
I
COULD MURDER A CURRY
.

Although it was well after midnight the twin city of Ankh-Morpork was roaring with life. Mort had thought Sheepridge looked busy, but compared to the turmoil of the street around him the town was, well, a morgue.

Poets have tried to describe Ankh-Morpork. They have failed. Perhaps it’s the sheer zestful vitality of the place, or maybe it’s just that a city with a million inhabitants and no sewers is rather robust for poets, who prefer daffodils and no wonder. So let’s just say that Ankh-Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colorful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound.

There were temples, their doors wide open, filling the streets with the sounds of gongs, cymbals and, in the case of some of the more conservative fundamentalist religions, the brief screams of the victims. There were shops whose strange wares spilled out on to the pavement. There seemed to be rather a lot of friendly young ladies who couldn’t afford many clothes. There were flares, and jugglers, and assorted sellers of instant transcendence.

And Death stalked through it all. Mort had half expected him to pass through the crowds like smoke, but it wasn’t like that at all. The simple truth was that wherever Death walked, people just drifted out of the way.

It didn’t work like that for Mort. The crowds that gently parted for his new master closed again just in time to get in his way. His toes got trodden on, his ribs were bruised, people kept trying to sell him unpleasant spices and suggestively-shaped vegetables, and a rather elderly lady said, against all the evidence, that he looked a well set-up young lad who would like a nice time.

He thanked her very much, and said that he hoped he was having a nice time already.

Death reached the street corner, the light from the flares raising brilliant highlights on the polished dome of his skull, and sniffed the air. A drunk staggered up, and without quite realizing why made a slight detour in his erratic passage for no visible reason.

T
HIS IS THE CITY, BOY
, said Death. W
HAT DO YOU THINK
?

“It’s very big,” said Mort, uncertainly. “I mean, why does everyone want to live all squeezed together like this?”

Death shrugged.

I
LIKE IT
, he said. I
T’S FULL OF LIFE
.

“Sir?”

Y
ES
?

“What’s a curry?”

The blue fires flared deep in the eyes of Death.

H
AVE YOU EVER BITTEN A RED-HOT ICE CUBE
?

“No, sir,” said Mort.

C
URRY’S LIKE THAT
.

“Sir?”

Y
ES
?

Mort swallowed hard. “Excuse me, sir, but my dad said, if I don’t understand, I was to ask questions, sir?”

V
ERY COMMENDABLE
, said Death. He set off down a side street, the crowds parting in front of him like random molecules.

“Well, sir, I can’t help noticing, the point is, well, the plain fact of it, sir, is—”

O
UT 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.

T
HERE ARE TIMES, YOU KNOW
, he said, half to himself, W
HEN
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 gray 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 gray eyes. When he tried to touch one his hand went straight through it, and tingled.

Y
OU 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?”

P
EOPLE SHAPED
, said Death. I
T’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.

C
URRY 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.

W
HAT DO YOU THINK
? said Death. A
M
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.

T
HEY DO IT ALL THEMSELVES
, he said. T
HERE’S NO MAGIC
. P
EOPLE CAN’T SEE ME, THEY SIMPLY WON’T ALLOW THEMSELVES TO DO IT
. U
NTIL IT’S TIME, OF COURSE
. W
IZARDS CAN SEE ME, AND CATS
. B
UT YOUR AVERAGE HUMAN…NO, NEVER
. He blew a smoke ring at the sky, and added, S
TRANGE BUT TRUE
.

Mort watched the smoke ring wobble into the sky and drift away towards the river.

“I can see you,” he said.

T
HAT’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.

C
OME
, he said, standing up. W
E 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?”

B
UY YOU SOME NEW CLOTHES
.

“These were new today—yesterday, I mean.”

R
EALLY
?

“Father said the shop was famous for its budget clothing,” said Mort, running to keep up.

I
T 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.

T
HIS 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.

I
N PAIRS
.

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 humor.

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, hypnotized way that Mort was coming to recognize, 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 somber, 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 crystallized 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.

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.

He looked down at his own body, which was wearing a long white nightshirt. His clothes had been neatly folded on a chair by the bed; the chair, he couldn’t help noticing, was delicately carved with a skull-and-bones motif.

Mort sat down on the edge of the bed and began to dress, his mind racing.

He eased open the heavy oak door, and felt oddly disappointed when it failed to creak ominously.

There was a bare wooden corridor outside, with big yellow candles set in holders on the far wall. Mort crept out and sidled along the boards until he reached a staircase. He negotiated that successfully without anything ghastly happening, arriving in what looked like an entrance hall full of doors. There were a lot of funereal drapes here, and a grandfather clock with a tick like the heartbeat of a mountain. There was an umbrella stand beside it.

It had a scythe in it.

Mort looked around at the doors. They looked important. Their arches were carved in the now-familiar bones motif. He went to try the nearest one, and a voice behind him said:

“You mustn’t go in there, boy.”

It took him a moment to realize that this wasn’t a voice in his head, but real human words that had been formed by a mouth and transferred to his ears by a convenient system of air compression, as nature intended. Nature had gone to a lot of trouble for six words with a slightly petulant tone to them.

He turned around. There was a girl there, about his own height and perhaps a few years older than him. She had silver hair, and eyes with a pearly sheen to them, and the kind of interesting but impractical long, dress that tends to be worn by tragic heroines who clasp single roses to their bosom while gazing soulfully at the moon. Mort had never heard the phrase “Pre-Raphaelite,” which was a pity because it would have been almost the right description. However, such girls tend to be on the translucent, consumptive side, whereas this one had a slight suggestion of too many chocolates.

She stared at him with her head on one side, and one foot tapping irritably on the floor. Then she reached out quickly and pinched him sharply on the arm.

“Ow!”

“Hmm. So you’re really real,” she said. “What’s your name, boy?”

“Mortimer. They call me Mort,” he said, rubbing his elbow. “What did you do that for?”

“I shall call you Boy,” she said. “And I don’t really have to explain myself, you understand, but if you must know I thought you were dead. You
look
dead.”

Mort said nothing.

“Lost your tongue?”

Mort was, in fact, counting to ten.

“I’m not dead,” he said eventually. “At least, I don’t think so. It’s a little hard to tell. Who are you?”

“You may call me Miss Ysabell,” she said haughtily. “Father told me you must have something to eat. Follow me.”

She swept away towards one of the other doors. Mort trailed behind her at just the right distance to have it swing back and hit his other elbow.

There was a kitchen on the other side of the door—long, low and warm, with copper pans hanging from the ceiling and a vast black iron stove occupying the whole of one long wall. An old man was standing in front of it, frying eggs and bacon and whistling between his teeth.

The smell attracted Mort’s taste buds from across the room, hinting that if they got together they could really enjoy themselves. He found himself moving forward without even consulting his legs.

“Albert,” snapped Ysabell, “another one for breakfast.”

The man turned his head slowly, and nodded at her without saying a word. She turned back to Mort.

“I must say,” she said, “that with the whole Disc to choose from, I should think Father could have done rather better than you. I suppose you’ll just have to do.”

She swept out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

“Have to do what?” said Mort, to no one in particular.

The room was silent, except for the sizzle of the frying pan and the crumbling of coals in the molten heart of the stove. Mort saw that it had the words “The Little Moloch (Ptntd)” embossed on its oven door.

The cook didn’t seem to notice him, so Mort pulled up a chair and sat down at the white scrubbed table.

“Mushrooms?” said the old man, without looking around.

“Hmm? What?”

“I said, do you want mushrooms?”

“Oh. Sorry. No, thank you,” said Mort.

“Right you are, young sir.”

He turned around and set out for the table.

Even after he got used to it, Mort always held his breath when he watched Albert walking. Death’s manservant was one of those stick-thin, raw-nosed old men who always look as though they are wearing gloves with the fingers cut out—even when they’re not—and his walking involved a complicated sequence of movements. Albert leaned forward and his left arm started to swing, slowly at first but soon evolving into a wild jerking movement that finally and suddenly, at about the time when a watcher would have expected the arm to fly off at the elbow, transferred itself down the length of his body to his legs and propelled him forward like a high-speed stilt walker. The frying pan followed a series of intricate curves in the air and was brought to a halt just over Mort’s plate.

Albert did indeed have exactly the right type of half-moon spectacles to peer over the top of.

“There could be some porridge to follow,” he said, and winked, apparently to include Mort in the world porridge conspiracy.

“Excuse me,” said Mort, “but where am I, exactly?”

“Don’t you know? This is the house of Death, lad. He brought you here last night.”

“I—sort of remember. Only”….

“Hmm?”

“Well. The bacon and eggs,” said Mort, vaguely. “It doesn’t seem, well, appropriate.”

“I’ve got some black pudding somewhere,” said Albert.

“No, I mean…” Mort hesitated. “It’s just that I can’t see
him
sitting down to a couple of rashers and a fried slice.”

Albert grinned. “Oh, he doesn’t, lad. Not as a regular thing, no. Very easy to cater for, the master. I just cook for me and—” he paused—“the young lady, of course.”

Mort nodded. “Your daughter,” he said.

“Mine? Ha,” said Albert. “You’re wrong there. She’s his.”

Mort stared down at his fried eggs. They stared back from their lake of fat. Albert had heard of nutritional values, and didn’t hold with them.

“Are we talking about the same person?” he said at last. “Tall, wears black, he’s a bit…skinny….”

“Adopted,” said Albert, kindly. “It’s rather a long story—”

A bell jangled by his head.

“—which will have to wait. He wants to see you in his study. I should run along if I were you. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Understandable, really. Up the steps and first door on the left. You can’t miss it—”

“It’s got skulls and bones around the door?” said Mort, pushing back his chair.

“They all have, most of them,” sighed Albert. “It’s only his fancy. He doesn’t mean anything by it.”

Leaving his breakfast to congeal, Mort hurried up the steps, along the corridor and paused in front of the first door. He raised his hand to knock.

E
NTER
.

The handle turned of its own accord. The door swung inward.

Death was seated behind a desk, peering intently into a vast leather book almost bigger than the desk itself. He looked up as Mort came in, keeping one calcareous finger marking his place, and grinned. There wasn’t much of an alternative.

A
H
, he said, and then paused. Then he scratched his chin, with a noise like a fingernail being pulled across a comb.

W
HO ARE YOU, BOY
?

“Mort, sir,” said Mort. “Your apprentice. You remember?”

Death stared at him for some time. Then the pinpoint blue eyes turned back to the book.

O
H YES
, he said, M
ORT
. W
ELL, BOY, DO YOU SINCERELY WISH TO LEARN THE UTTERMOST SECRETS OF TIME AND SPACE
?

“Yes, sir. I think so, sir.”

G
OOD
. T
HE STABLES ARE AROUND THE BACK
. T
HE SHOVEL HANGS JUST INSIDE THE DOOR
.

He looked down. He looked up. Mort hadn’t moved.

I
S IT BY ANY CHANCE POSSIBLE THAT YOU FAIL TO UNDERSTAND ME
?

“Not fully, sir,” said Mort.

D
UNG, BOY
. D
UNG
. A
LBERT HAS A COMPOST HEAP IN THE GARDEN
. I
IMAGINE THERE’S A WHEELBARROW SOMEWHERE ON THE PREMISES
. G
ET ON WITH IT
.

Mort nodded mournfully. “Yes, sir. I see, sir. Sir?”

Y
ES
?

“Sir, I don’t see what this has to do with the secrets of time and space.”

Death did not look up from his book.

T
HAT
, he said,
IS BECAUSE YOU ARE HERE TO LEARN
.