The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy (75 page)

“Mr. de Selby, I wouldn’t want your position even if they paid me your salary.”

Yeah, but once the Stirrer god is dealt with I reckon things might change.
Cerbo strikes me as a man who makes plans—careful long-term plans—and why sit on a plain leather chair when you can sit on the throne of Death?

He pushes the notepad toward me. Even though the writing is neatly laid out I can’t make much sense of it—one of the symbols that mark it may be a Feynman diagram if I remember my old physics lessons properly, or it could just be a squiggle.

“I’m not making much progress.”

“What’s it say?”

“A god is coming. And I don’t think it’s going to be late,” he says pointedly.

“I tried to get here earlier, but had a few distractions.”

“Have you asked her yet?”

What? Does everybody know?
I clench my teeth a little. “Not that sort of distraction,” I say. “More of a car trying to squash me into the footpath.”

“I don’t know why they bother, it’s not as if they can kill you.”

“Maybe they don’t want to kill me, but it might hurt me enough to keep me off the job for a couple of days. They’re trying to get me out of the way,” I say. “You’ve been following things. Stirrers are building again around Brisbane. I’ve needed to pull people in from all over the place to keep on top of it. Even I’ve had to start hunting them when I have a spare moment.”

“It’s good to keep your hand in.”

“Yes, but I’d prefer to have more of a say in it.”

“Draw in even more staff if you need to. As your number of stirs has increased, ours have declined. And that’s been happening across the board. You’re Orcus, your decisions drive and define our company, and this war. It is OK for you to direct Pomps where you want.”

“Yes, but what if that’s exactly what the Stirrer god wants?”

“I don’t think so,” Cerbo says. “What I think is happening is that, for whatever reason, perhaps only because you have chosen to base yourself there, the Stirrer god has in turn chosen Australia as some sort of focal point.”

“You think I’m in some way responsible for the End of Days?”

“I’ve considered it. Not responsible as such, merely a target for the god to aim at. Suzanne certainly believed it. Though in my darkest moments I wonder. What if it’s your very presence as Orcus that ignites the final flame, so to speak? Or perhaps it sees a weakness, a flaw in you that it can use. Both disturbing propositions wouldn’t you say?”

“Or maybe it just knows that it can’t lose and wants a big old fight before it devours all life from the world.” HD lets out an anticipatory growl, and tugs at my face. Cerbo must see a little of it, because he pales.

“It could be any one of those things,” Cerbo says. “Which is why I just wish you’d let me send spies back into the Stirrer city.”

Suzanne had sent spies transformed into Stirrers deep into the
city of Devour. They never lasted long, and while their information had at times proven invaluable, or so Cerbo told me, the mortality rate had been almost total. To say that the few who had come back were damaged is something of an understatement.

“No,” I say. “I refuse to send people to die.”

“Sometimes that’s what running the business requires.”

“Maybe before me, but not now.” We hold each other’s gaze, Cerbo is the first to look away.

“I would prefer it if you visited me a bit more often.”

I try and soothe him with a smile. “I think it’s only fair that I visit my other offices. Ari likes visits too. So do Mill, David and Ishi, they all do.”

“I wouldn’t trust Ariana. She lacks subtlety.”

Like I would trust any Ankou other than Tim. “Wouldn’t that be a reason to trust her? Besides she’s an Ankou—you’re all about subtlety.” And knives, and dreaming of the top job, because they all think they could do it so much better. Personally I trust Ari more than I ever will Cerbo, she’s ballsy and proud, and she reminds me of Lissa. “And people start to panic if they see me with you too much.”

Cerbo tilts his head, I’m sure he’d like it known that I visit him more frequently. I can see the cogs of his mind working overtime on this one. At last he smiles. “They think the god’s here, or nearly here.”

“Yeah, the End of Days is easier to deal with in the abstract, or at least with the thought that there are days in front of the ‘end of’ bit.”

“Yes, and I’d like to know just when, but…there’s not enough to tell me one way or another,” he says significantly. And we’re back to those damn spies, or lack thereof.

“What do you think?”

We’ve both seen the vast thing staining the heavens of the Deepest Dark, devouring souls like they were sweetmeats.

Cerbo gets out of his chair. “Come with me.”

There’s a door in one side of the office, an old wooden thing. He
pulls a key from his pocket, inserts it in the lock, and with some effort, as though the lock is stuck, or rusted, turns the key. He smiles at the click, and pushes the door open.

I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t this.

The room beyond is tiny: more a chamber, ascetic in the extreme. A single bed and a small table on which an old book sits—its cover cracked, its pages well thumbed. In one corner of the room is a small dressing table, topped with a tiny mirror and two lipsticks. Next to the table is a narrow wardrobe, the sort you’d have to really squeeze into to find Narnia, and at the risk of getting stuck halfway.

“This is her room,” Cerbo says. “And all she owned.”

“Suzanne lived here?” Even more surprising, I could almost have imagined Suzanne Whitman using this as a quiet room, but …

“Yes. I believe you would find the same situation with the other RMs, a few centuries and the gathering of possessions seems to lose its appeal. The job itself is its own reward.”

Mr. D obviously hadn’t reached that kind of corporate Zen state, what with his boat and his houses along the coast. I’d always expected Suzanne to live in a Brownstone in some exclusive neighbourhood in Boston, with a library taking up several rooms. The smell of dust and books. Not this tiny room, smelling just so faintly of must and time passing slowly, inching into eons.

The bed is made up, a single pillow, a single thin blanket. For a moment I feel a twinge of sadness. A made bed and this tiny room. All that’s left of her.

“It was here that she would stay, if she needed rest, in those few times that she needed rest. Suzanne gave the End of Days far more thought and time than any mortal could. And she believed that it would start in your region.”

“Another reason why she manipulated me into becoming Orcus?” I hadn’t heard this one before, though it makes sense. Why else would the Stirrers have been so anxious to deal with the last two Australian
Ankous? I wonder if the threat had been expected to start in another region if I’d still be alive or if someone else would be Orcus. I open my mouth to speak, but Cerbo seems to have anticipated the thought.

“The least of reasons, believe me, Steven, but no doubt a factor.”

I look down at the book,
Huckleberry Finn
. Who’d have thought! Each to their own. I want to pick it up, have a look (see if it’s signed) but to do so seems somehow disrespectful.

“I don’t like coming into this room,” Cerbo says. “But here, under the book…” He pushes it gently to one side.

There, carved in the table is a date and the letter M. The wound is relatively fresh. I run my hands over it, cut so smooth you’d have thought she used a really tiny router. This meant something, it was important.

May 24. M

It’s only a week away. So close. Surely not, and yet, it feels…right. Shit. I don’t know whether or not to feel frightened or relieved. My skin prickles. HD slides around inside me with a new urgency. There’s something else, too. Something familiar about that date. I can’t quite put my finger on it. The only M-word I can think of right now is “marriage.” No, this is much more ominous. But then again…marriage. Did they know something that I didn’t?

I look over at Cerbo. “What does it mean?”

Cerbo shrugs. “I was hoping Suzanne would have told you. She didn’t tell me. If I hadn’t been cleaning up in here, dusting, I wouldn’t have found it.”

“You do your own dusting?”

Cerbo puffs up to full height: it’s almost threatening. “Of course I do, as if I would trust the job to anyone else. Dust holds too many secrets.”

I smile at him. “But, hang on, Suzanne died over four months ago…”

Cerbo blushes, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him blush before.
“I—I haven’t been able to bring myself to come in here. Today was the first day I’ve managed to walk through that door.”

“It’s all right,” I say, wishing that he had, and that we had more than a handful of days to work out the significance of the date, if there is any significance at all. “She must have wanted you to find it.”

“Yes. One doesn’t carve into a fifteenth-century side table for no reason.”

But that doesn’t make complete sense. Suzanne was a woman who planned everything. To leave such a clue and not to provide any context seems very unlike her.

Perhaps she really hadn’t expected to die.

“Did Suzanne ever write a diary?”

Cerbo laughs. “Not that I am aware.”

“Have you ever looked?” He blushes again. OK, so he has. “And you never found anything?”

“Not a thing,” he says. I leave it at that. I can imagine why this may not have come up in conversation at the Death Moot, the last day Suzanne was alive. Things had been crazy then, all she had planned was coming to fruition, including her own death. There’s no way she couldn’t have been anything but distracted. And in my experience, nothing ever goes as smoothly as planned. And yet she left this final mark.

May 24. Why is that date niggling me? “See if you can find anything. Any reference at all to do with the twenty-fourth. Get in touch with the other Ankous, just be subtle about it.” I say.

“I am the very definition of subtlety.”

Unlike, Ari, apparently, I want to say, but I hold my tongue.

I look back to his office door. “How are things here?”

“Running smoothly,” Cerbo says guardedly.

“Yeah, but what’s the mood?”

Cerbo’s silence is answer enough.

“We can all feel it coming now,” I say.

“Yes. It’s not far away. The twenty-fourth or not.”

“Are we ready?”

“Do you want me to lie to you? It’d help if we knew what we needed to be ready for. But we don’t.”

“We can bleed. We can stall. Maybe that will be enough.”

Cerbo smiles as bright and false a smile as I have ever seen, and I shift from Suzanne’s chamber back to my office.

May 24. That doesn’t leave much time, this could be nothing more than a coincidence, but that cold hard certainty is growing inside me. My hands are shaking. I peer at the calendar under the mess on my desk. Seven days, an interminable length of time, and not nearly enough. Not if it’s true, and truth is what I require. I need more than a sense of anxiety inside me to believe that this is actually going to happen. Much more.

I’ve been tossed around by other people’s truths these past few months, just taken them as
fait accompli,
including this job. It’s time I made a few of my own. Or at least found them myself.

I’ve a hunch that if this date is important it might show up somewhere else.

A place I’ve been avoiding because of the memory it evokes, and the brutal mess that I last saw there. A bloody, almost offhand scattering of limbs and flesh, and that was only the beginning.

Aunt Neti had kept meticulous records of the goings-in and goings-out of the Underworld. If anyone is likely to have left information corresponding with Suzanne’s date, it would be Neti. A second reference to that date will certainly suggest that my worry is well founded.

But that means going to her rooms.

I wasn’t fond of them when she was alive. Sometimes things get worse after people die, and not just because of the hole they leave. I don’t think Neti’s rooms are going to have gotten any better.

W
hen you decide to do something. You’re better off just doing it.

That was my mum’s philosophy.

Mine was, and still is: think about it, procrastinate, check email, post a couple of witty tweets, check email, check hair in the mirror by my filing cabinet, consider filing, consider employing someone to do my filing, see if anyone’s relationship status has changed on Facebook. Normally I was a star at the whole thing, but not today. I only got as far as opening the Twitter app on my phone.

I need to sort this out, see if there is anything connecting Suzanne’s scribbling with Aunt Neti. Maybe their nearness to death had made them both somewhat prescient. Not that I’ve ever come across anything like that before, other than the insane or extremely senile All-Death, but there is always a first time. What worries me more is if they both had, if all the RMs had seen this date as a probable starting point, all the RMs except me. I mean, why hadn’t I?

Ah, fuck it!