The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy (63 page)

The Hungry Death laughs, and dances around the corpses of Lissa and my family. This new family. The one I haven’t lost yet.

But you will.
The shadow that is the Hungry Death dips into a bow
. Merry Christmas, Mr. de Selby.

In one swift movement it wrenches Lissa’s head from her shoulders, and hurls it at my face. Her dead eyes open, unseeing, never to behold me again.

I wake with a jolt. Only a moment’s passed since my eyes closed, scarcely more than an eye blink. Lissa’s still next to me, her heartbeat is strong. She’s a thousand times more alive than when I first saw her, and I will not see her dead again. Never. I refuse to.

And it’s so lovely to know that
that
is inside me, and is part of me in such a fundamental way. So very lovely indeed.

“You know,” I whisper to it. “All I really wanted for Christmas was a pair of socks.”

I slide away from Lissa. There’s an ibis on a nearby roof, looking like a weathervane. It turns its long beaked face toward me.

“Lissa’s sleeping,” I say. “Keep an eye on her.”

It dips its head, and scrambles across the roof for a better view. A crow shoots above me, landing on our roof with a scrape of claws. I get a confusion of perspectives looking in toward Lissa and away. The suburb is quiet, but for kids riding their new bikes, or people getting ready for a late Christmas dinner. Aircons are sighing, beetles are whirring. There’s a clatter and a snap from up on the roof, and for a moment I can taste the crow’s gecko dinner.
Ugh
.

I walk back to Lissa, kiss her on the brow. She startles me by actually opening her eyes.

“Where are you going?”

“Somewhere you can’t come. Don’t worry, I’ll be safe—well, safeish. I’ve got work to do.”

“It doesn’t stop for you, does it?”

I smile. “You know, there was a while there when I thought it did. That I deserved a break. But when I stop, people die, people who I care about. And when they die, I die a bit, too.”

Lissa touches my face, with a hand so perfect, so clear in my mind that I could hold it forever. “Merry Christmas,” she says.

And I think about HD, and its last words to me. I can’t let it spoil this. I’ll be damned if I’m going to give it even a minor victory.

“Yeah, merry Christmas.”

Then I shift, leaving her and my Avian Pomps behind.

E
ven this early in the morning Suzanne’s Boston offices are a picture of efficiency. People work behind terminals, tapping away furiously, calculating the best routes to a pomp or a stir. A stocking taped beside a noticeboard is the only concession I can see to Christmas here.

Suzanne used to base herself in New York, but found it too noisy; “too clamorous,” as she put it. I can understand that—such a big city, so many beating hearts hard up against each other. Washington, she’d never cared for, just as I could never imagine basing myself in Canberra. Capital cities are modern constructs. Our regions were built on different models.

The blinds are up, and it’s snowing outside. Suzanne and Cerbo are both waiting for me.

“Merry Christmas, Mr. de Selby,” Suzanne says, and pecks me on the cheek before I even realize what she’s doing.

“You, too, Ms. Whitman.”

Suzanne leads Cerbo and me into her office. “I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to spending a few days in Australia,” she says, once she’s shut her door and sat in her throne. “I’ve actually booked a room at the Marriott, a couple of blocks away from the bridge. Beautiful view.”

I’m not here for small talk. “Things are getting worse,” I say. “Stirrers are growing in numbers and I can’t detect them.”

“We’ve had problems here, too,” Suzanne says. “The god’s presence is making them almost reckless. You’ve seen it, you can understand why.”

“Rillman isn’t helping, either.” I describe the symbol Rillman designed, and its powers. I’d emailed the details out to every RM, but it doesn’t hurt to go over it again.

“No, he is proving to be something of a trial,” Suzanne says.

“That may be the biggest understatement I have heard in my life. Are you practicing for a political career? A trial? Christ! And I need to know as much as I can about this god. Is there even any hope of stopping it?”

Suzanne nods at Cerbo.

“All I can tell you is this, and it goes back a ways,” Cerbo says, pouring me a coffee, which I didn’t ask for but accept nonetheless. “Six hundred million years ago something happened. Call it Snowball Earth, call it whatever you want, but after that, life grew more complicated, and the Stirrers’ grip on this world ended.” His voice speeds up: words tumble into each other with his excitement. I’ve never seen Cerbo so wound up. He’s a nerd of the apocalypse. “You can see it more clearly in the Underworld. Look at the base of the One Tree; you’ll see stromatolites crowding in like slimy green warts. We even have intelligence—” Cerbo looks at Suzanne, and she nods. “—we’ve even had intelligence that the Stirrers keep some in the heart of their city. Get out on the Tethys, go more than a few miles out, and what do you find? Nothing, no echoes of anything. Life hugs the shore. There’s probably patches or places that correspond roughly to life and death on the earth but the sea of Hell is vast and I haven’t found them. Believe me, I’ve looked.”

“So what are you telling me?”

“What you probably already know, and what you will know as time goes by, ever quicker for you—that life is precarious. I think the Stirrer god existed before the Stirrers; a long time before. Maybe it’s as old as the birth of the universe and Underverse itself.”

“Old doesn’t mean smart,” I say.

“But it does mean tenacious and robust. That Stirrer god may be the most ancient consciousness in existence.”

“So that’s what we’re up against?”

Cerbo nods.

I think about it for a moment. Try and find the most positive outcome. “Well, life won before, obviously. We’re all still here. Things are alive. Life can win again.”

Cerbo shakes his head. “But you see, I think that was an accidental victory, a consequence of forces that just slipped in life’s favor. That is, if you can even call it a victory. Life exploded after those events, but the desolation beforehand…And this time…”

“And if the world shifted that way again?”

“It may well be worse than the Stirrer god itself. You don’t know how bad the earth would be if we returned to those minus-fifty-degree Celsius temperatures.”

I shrug. “I’ve seen
The Empire Strikes Back
.”

Cerbo’s smile is thinner than his mustache. “Humor is an inadequate defense. And it would be nothing like that. The planet Hoth would be a walk in the park on a summer’s day compared to that.”

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know if there’s anything we can do.”

Suzanne grabs my hand. “See? See how difficult this is? This is what we are up against. I ask that you not judge any of us for the choices we may have to make in the days ahead. You, least of all.”

I open my mouth to speak. Suzanne’s phone rings, and mine follows a few moments later. We look at each other. When an RM’s phone rings it’s never a good thing.

It’s Tim on mine. I answer it, trying to work out just who is calling Suzanne.

“Steve?” Tim asks. He sounds a little frightened. He’d been laughing at my table only a few hours ago. I immediately think the worst.

“Yeah.”
Just give me the bad news.

“Neill’s dead.”

I look at Suzanne and Cerbo. They’re both pale as sheets, both getting the same message.

“Dead?”

“Yeah, it seems that Rillman has had better luck in South Africa.”

An RM? Someone has managed to do what I thought impossible. “Is it a Schism?”

“No. David, Neill’s Ankou, called me. Let me tell you, the guy was in a state. Someone came at Neill with knives, cut him up badly. Cut him into little pieces, is how David put it.”

Then Tim’s voice falls away. He’s still talking, but I can’t hear him. Something is clawing its way into my chest. A force, a strength that’s part dark chuckle, part dread fear, part chest imploder. I recognize it at once. With Neill dead, a twelfth of his share of the Hungry Death is drawn into me.

I drop to the floor, maybe black out, because the next thing I see is Cerbo hesitating between Suzanne and me. We’re
both
on the carpet.

“Well, can you help me get up?” Suzanne says, the first to recover. Her eyes are bright.

And yet, Cerbo hesitates. “That hasn’t happened yet,” Suzanne growls. “Here, now. Focus on me.”

Cerbo runs to Suzanne’s side, pulling her to her feet.

What the hell was that about?
I wonder. I’m shaky, but standing now. Suzanne glances at me.

“This is not good,” she says.

“But Neill has been dead for a while.”

“The transfer isn’t instantaneous. The Hungry Death has to find us. It’s drawn to our flesh, but it takes time.” Suzanne shakes her head. “Poor Neill.”

“I thought you said the transition needed blood,” I say.

“Well, there was plenty of it—Neill’s blood,” Suzanne says grimly.

“This changes things,” Cerbo says. “Surely you can—”

“It changes nothing.” Suzanne smiles so viciously at Cerbo that he quails.

She looks at me. “Tend to your region, Steven. I must tend to mine.”

“What about Neill’s region? Who’s tending to it?”

“Charlie Top. At least, until we can organize some sort of transition. A Schism and Negotiation is messy, but this is far worse. It will have to do. We’ve two days until the Moot. We can organize something then.”

I try and imagine something messier than a Schism. I can’t, but then I’m not really the most knowledgeable RM. What I really don’t like is the stronger HD inside me. The mere thought of all that carnage pulls at my lips.
He
pulls at my lips, from the inside. It’s an effort not to smile, but I won’t give HD that satisfaction. This is my body.

Suzanne waves me away with one hand. And I go.

I shift to my office, my head pounding with this new fragment of the Hungry Death. I tumble into my throne and the comfort it provides. The throne is slightly bigger, its edges harder, and yet I find it more comfortable to sit in. I decide I don’t like that and I get to my feet, walk about my office, pull open the door.

The office is busy, but that’s what you expect at this time of year, and in this trade. Holidays mean nothing—other than a serious inflation of the payroll, according to Tim.

Word has spread fast about Neill. Lissa’s left a message on my phone, she’s coming in straightaway. I look at my watch. It’s getting late. People glance hurriedly away as I catch their eye. This is an office that is spooked. I don’t blame them.

I make a show of going to the photocopier, try to look like everything is normal. It seems to have the opposite effect, particularly
when I jam the bloody machine. Right, then, a more direct approach is needed. These people haven’t deserted me, and I damn well won’t desert them. I walk to the center of the office, and clear my throat. I’ve heard my share of inspirational speeches.

“As you have probably heard, the South African RM has died.” The office is silent, listening. “Well, we have a Death Moot to run. In just three days, the remaining RMs will be here. Things are going to get hectic, but I am not going anywhere. Rillman has tried to kill me numerous times, and failed. I will not desert you.”

I don’t notice Tim until he’s standing beside me. Lissa’s here, too, now. She smiles hesitantly at me.

“We’ll see this out,” Tim says.

“We’ve faced worse.” Lissa’s voice is hard and strong. She holds my hand. “But it won’t mean anything if we don’t keep pomping or if we stop stalling Stirrers. We can’t let Neill’s death distract us. Everything dies, we all know that.”

“And we have to make sure that that keeps happening. We have to be strong. I won’t let you down.” I don’t know if that’s enough, but it’s all I have.

“Where were you?” Lissa asks me, once everyone returns to work—inspired, or terrified, or hunting for the job pages.

“Checking out the bridge,” I lie.

Tim looks like he’s about to say something, and then seems to think the better of it.

I guide them both into my office, and then the black phone, Mr. D’s phone, rings.

T
here’s a first time for everything.

I snatch it up.

“Neti’s rooms,” Mr. D says in a tone I’ve never heard before. “Now.”

Mr. D can be direct when he needs to be.

“What the hell is going on?” Lissa demands.

“I need you to stay here,” I say. “Both of you. It’s something to do with Neti. Mr. D sounds frightened.”

I head out the door, then across the office floor. I’m running by the time I hit the hall. Wal shudders on my arm and begins to slide free, his ink turning to muscle and bone. He tears from my flesh with the hummingbird whirr of a cherub’s flight.

“Where are we going in such a hurry?”