The Book of Storms (12 page)

“Nothing!” spat Sammael, although he had his suspicions as to how Abel Korsakof might have died. “But whatever's gone wrong, his sand is still mine. He got his bargain.”

“He
almost
got it,” said Death. “Except for that final month.” But she was getting ready to put the corpse down and concede defeat. She had too much to do, and she wasn't altogether sympathetic toward humans who chose to sell their souls to Sammael. If they wanted to, that was their own affair. It was hard enough these days finding time to gather up all the ones who'd lived natural lives, and then returning them back to the earth, without having to fight Sammael for the odd one who'd died in an ambiguous way.

But Abel Korsakof's eyelids lifelessly lolled open again, and she caught sight of his gentle blue eyes and couldn't give him over.

“Give!” Sammael reached out an arm.

“Don't touch him!” Death swung the corpse away and closed her eyes. When they opened again, they'd changed from red to the exact blue of Korsakof's.

Around them, ghostly shadows began to creep from the shed walls and slide into the air. They didn't form shapes that could be seen and traced, but they began to eat the air with whispers. It was a language even Sammael didn't understand: the most ancient tongue of all, formed at the first moment a single cell had slipped from existence into death. To Death herself, who indeed knew everything, the sound of the whispers was as clear as a tune played on a single violin.

She listened. Sammael watched her. They rarely met, but he was always struck by her ugliness: her shapeless, plain face and drooping mouth. Her red eyes were usually as dull as ancient garnets, dragged from the earth covered in dust. Sammael hated creatures that tried to stand in his way, but he hated dull things even more. Death was both. All work and no play, he'd taunted her once, and she hadn't argued.

“I see what went on,” said Death quietly as the shadows began to disperse.

“I couldn't care less what went on,” said Sammael. “He's mine and I want him.”

He had plans for Korsakof's sand.

“He isn't, though,” said Death. “He laid down his life for that boy, the one you're after. Who, I'd like to remind you before you get any ideas, you
cannot kill
.”

“He shouldn't have laid down his life for anyone!” roared Sammael. “His life was
mine
! Either bring him back to life and let him live for another month, or give him to me now! It's the law of the universe and
you
can't change it!”

His ears appeared to be steaming, but Death knew that it was smoke. Whatever made up Sammael sometimes combusted when he got very angry. But he couldn't harm Death.

She supported Abel Korsakof's corpse on her knee and reached up to push her silver hair back from her face.

“It is the law of the universe,” she said. “There's no way I could bring him back—he touched some kind of storm fire. It burned his life away, protecting its owner. But he knew it would, and he still wanted to let it. I guess he knew that you'd try again to make him kill that boy and he didn't want to. So he sacrificed himself rather than become a tool for killing innocent children.”

Death fixed her stare on Sammael. Not that it would make any difference at all whether she approved of him or not, but sometimes she had to let him know.

“
We
both know he was wrong, don't we?” she went on, grimly. “We both know that you can't
make
anybody kill, you can only suggest it and wait to see if they do. We both know that if you killed anyone,
I
wouldn't take them anywhere.”

Sammael glared back at her and then smiled. It was a smile that curled the corners of his thin lips up into a tight arc and stopped just below his eyes.

“You forget,” he said, “that I'm a lot cleverer than you.”

“And
you
forget,” said Death, letting her eyes relax back to their usual red, “that I'm stubborn and consistent and I know what you're up to.”

“But you don't,” said Sammael. “For every way that I've ever tried to do anything, I've got at least a thousand more up my sleeve. I could list a million ways in which I've managed to cheat you over the ages.”

“You leave that boy alone,” said Death. “And you leave storms alone, whatever you're trying to do with them. You're playing with fire.”

“That's exactly what I'm doing,” said Sammael. “And with storm fire, actually. Except I'm not playing. I mean it. And soon those wretched, ungrateful humans will know how
much
I mean it.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out an acorn.

“Do you want to see what
I
can do with taros?” he asked.

Without waiting for an answer, he threw the acorn onto the floor, then cast a few grains of sand on top of it and clicked his fingers.

“Kalia,” he said. “Get out. A long way.”

The lurcher shot from the shed. Sammael gave her a few seconds, then raised his eyebrows to Death and looked up at the shed roof.

“‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough.…'” he said.

It wasn't a single bolt of lightning, or even a few. A torrent of electricity spewed from the sky, pouring down in a blinding river. What had once been Abel Korsakof's shed erupted into a castle of flames.

“Lightning?” said Death as they faced each other through the fire, which neither could feel. “Very impressive.”

“Ha!” said Sammael.

And the castle of Korsakof's shed roared up into the tumbling lightning, seeming to feed on it like a bird swallowing a dangled worm. Blazing into a golden fireball, it gulped and spat and chewed, reaching out to the trees, to the little cottage, to the hedges, and to the sign that hung in the old oak, devouring them in a single bright flare. Within seconds, Puddleton Lane End had become a great black scar, and Storm Cottage a smoking skeleton.

Sammael shrugged and the fire stopped. Death was watching him closely, trying to work out what he'd done.

“Only an acorn,” said Sammael. “Plenty more where that came from.”

“It's just fire,” said Death. “I've seen worse.”

Sammael smiled again. This time it reached his eyes, and even Death wanted to shiver.

“And another corpse for you in the cottage,” he said. “Old lady. And even if you say I killed her, you'll find it a lot easier to take her away than to try and piece her back together. She was killed by storm fire, don't you know.”

He turned on his heel and went to fetch Kalia. It was infuriating that the boy had gotten hold of that taro; storm fire couldn't kill a creature protected by such a thing. But there were still plenty of other ways. He had a good idea for the next attempt, which would hopefully be the last one. And then he could get on with collecting more taros. Shame to have wasted one flattening a shed and a single old woman, but it had been worth it to see the surprise on Death's smug face.

*   *   *

Sammael reached the farm in seconds, unlocked the door, and found his way upstairs. He crouched down by the woman's bedside. Another ugly one. She had a wide, flat face and toffee-colored hair, and she looked like she'd spent her life in a cowshed too close to the back ends of the cattle.

He got a few grains of sand out of his pocket. He always kept a handful in there, but his supplies were getting low—it would soon be time to go back to his room and get some more. Dropping the sand onto the woman's face, he watched it dissolve into her skin.

“There are logs in the bed,” he said. “Logs in the yellow bedroom bed. Logs that need chopping in two. And when you've spent a lifetime chopping logs, you know exactly how to do it, don't you? You could pretty much do it
in your sleep
.”

He stood back and watched her rise. Her eyes were open but sightless. She walked as calmly as if she'd been awake, knowing exactly how many steps to take to reach the doorway. Then she headed off down the stairs.

Down the stairs and toward the barn, where the axes were kept.

CHAPTER 8

MIDNIGHT

Death was dancing with Abel Korsakof, her tears falling freely to the ground in great streams. They formed puddles so deep that the dancers were soon splashing, except, whereas Death seemed to dance with greater relish as she kicked up spray, Abel Korsakof was dragging his feet, weak against the depth of water.

Soon Death was holding Abel's body entirely in her arms, holding him upright to stop him from sinking. But the old man was a deadweight. His legs splayed out, catching on the waves and causing Death to trip. She gathered him up under the knees and cradled him. His head lolled back, and his arms swung out into the high-flung water as if reaching for something so tiny that the only hope he had of catching it was to sweep through every inch of air. But whatever it was, he wasn't finding it—all the swinging and swiping was only pushing Death further off balance, causing her to stagger hopelessly about in her lake of tears.

*   *   *

And then Death dropped Abel Korsakof. With a great splash he fell into the pool, and Danny woke up, sure that the sound in his ears must be more than part of a dream, waiting for his brain to clear and reassure him that it wasn't.

Clarity came but brought with it a terrible silence that crawled across every inch of his skin until it had prickled into a carpet of goose bumps.

There was something in his room, he was sure of it.

His own breath, normally so silent, began to catch at the hairs in his nostrils and whistle softly like the wind down a chimney. The more he listened to it, the louder it became, so that he was sure he wouldn't hear any tiny sounds of danger unless he held his breath.

After he'd stopped breathing, the pounding of his heart filled his ears, blood rushing round his eardrums in a pulsing rhythm. It set off a high-pitched, electronic whine that made him clench his fists under the duvet and screw his eyes shut, trying to will the sound away.

When he opened them again, the room seemed even blacker.

He saw a silver glint in a shaft of moonlight, and some vital instinct possessed his body for just long enough to make him throw himself to one side as it flickered. There was a whisper, a rush, a silent swing, and the shrieking, screaming, spine-piercing howl of every nerve under Danny's skin as for an endless moment everything in the room flashed myriads of color and the air turned to molten gold.

The axe thudded into the mattress beside him, pinning down the yellow covers under which he lay.

*   *   *

Danny couldn't move. For a second he feared that he, too, had been pinioned to the mattress, but through the darkness he saw that the lumpy shape of the axe head was next to his shoulder. Cold air was emanating from the metal. He wasn't bleeding, nothing hurt. But his heart was beating as though it were the size of a bucket.

The bedroom door swung shut. And something hung in the air: a trace of flowery scent. A scent so impossible that Danny knew he must be imagining it: there was no way his aunt would ever have played such a trick on him. His eyes must be inventing that whisk of white nightgown disappearing into the shadows.

Slowly he pulled himself away from the axe, inch by inch, until he had crept so far over the edge of the bed that there wasn't enough of him left on it to balance and he fell onto the floor.

From whichever place he looked at it, the axe was still there.

With an enormous effort he overcame the paralysis in his limbs and posted them, one by one, underneath his body. For a moment it seemed the safest way to be, curled up as tight as a hedgehog, but without an armor of spines on his own back he knew it wouldn't be safe for long. He scrambled to his feet.

The axe had not moved.

Danny switched on the light. The axe was Aunt Kathleen's wood-cutting axe, the two-handed monstrosity that Danny couldn't even lift. He had watched Jake, the hired hand with muscles like bricks, felling a tree with it the summer before. It was an old warrior, and it had fallen blade-down right where Danny's chest should have been.

He must have bitten his tongue in the fall: the sharp lemon taste of blood filled his mouth. His legs still wouldn't hold him—either he must move now or he would fall like Abel Korsakof onto the hard, cold floor and Death would gather him up in her arms.

Danny's hands scrabbled frantically over the door until he found the handle and yanked it open. He ran into the passage outside and stood for another few seconds in the moonlight. The air seemed five degrees warmer than it had been in his room; it was a living air, a breathing air, soft and gentle. And he thought, The air in my room was cold. It was full of … of … full of …

But the only word he could think of to describe the difference was a single name that stayed mute on his lips and threatened him with terror if he dared speak it out loud.