On A Pale Horse (16 page)

She sighed. “My soul is burdened with evil, and my faith is weak. I don't have the information my father had.”

“You are mortal, like me,” he said. “You are not provided with ready answers.”

“All too true. But I still think we can work out a rationale, if we try. How, exactly, did you get to be Death?”

“I shot my predecessor,” Zane admitted. “I was going to suicide, because I'd been gypped out of a girl—a girl like you, beautiful and wealthy and loyal—but when I saw Death, I killed him instead. Then Fate came and told me I had to be the new Death. So I was.”

“A girl like me,” Luna said. She had continued adjusting herself and now was verging from lovely to ravishing, approaching the physical appeal she had had on their last meeting.

“Yes. Not only pretty, but pure—”

Luna choked on a fit of laughter. “How little you know about women!” Zane shrugged. “I've known ordinary women. But—”

“Death came for you personally,” she cut in with a feminine non sequitur. “That means you were half evil.”

“Yes. I never claimed—”

“If you were to pass your definition gems near me, you would find me much the same. My outer form is as fair as nature and cosmetic magic can make it; my inner personality is suspect. Don't put me on any pedestal, Zane. I can match you evil for evil.”

“Oh, I'm sure—”

“No, you aren't. But you might as well find out. That should settle whatever my father had in mind.” She got up and strode across the room, lithe and purposeful. Her housecoat seemed to have changed along with her attitude and now looked more like a gown. Whatever magic she had wasn't all magic, he realized. “Come to the stone chamber.”

Zane followed her, anticipating some kind of crypt hewn out of bedrock, but the chamber turned out to be a bright wood-paneled room arranged like a museum, with small stones of every type set out on shelves and in cabinets. “These—are magic?” he asked, amazed.

“Certainly. That was my father's business—enchanting stones. Some of the most intricate magic in the world is concentrated here. The stones you use to analyze souls may have been Crafted by my father, as he was one of perhaps only four living people capable of that precision of magic. He surely knew more about you than you knew about yourself. That's why we need to get to the bottom of this. I confess I'm not keen on any relationship with you, and your interests obviously would have preferred to focus elsewhere, but my father selected you and me for reasons we are bound to fathom before we part. We can't afford to take the risk of rejecting what he set up unless we first understand the reason for it. If we discover a continuing relationship is necessary, we can grit our teeth and use the Love stone to facilitate—”

“I doubt I need a Love stone,” Zane said. “All I need is to look at you closely.”

She shrugged that off as if irrelevant. “But first we must separate reality from illusion. My father said that a person is best defined by the nature of his evil. His own evil was in dealing with Satan for the sake of increased magic power. Without demonic help, he would have been merely a world-class Magician instead of a grand master. So he is defined by his lust for complete professionalism, and I know that damned him, but I also respect him for it.”

“Yes,” Zane agreed, impressed. He had heard that a world-class Magician could virtually demolish a city with a single fission-spell. What could a grand master do? Zane didn't know and suspected no one else knew, because of the secretive nature of such Magicians.

“Now you and I will exchange evils in the presence of these stones and see what we shall see.” Luna lifted several gems from their casings.

“I really don't understand—”

“Hold this stone in your right hand; it glows only when you tell a lie.” She handed him a dusky diamond. “And this in your left; it is a Sinstone, like the one you use to evaluate souls.”

Zane held the stones, not at all certain he liked this. Luna took similar stones in her hands. “I will lead the way, so you can see how it's done,” she said.

“Um,” Zane said noncommittally.

“My name is Venus,” she announced. Her Truthstone flashed warningly. “I mean Luna.” The stone remained dark. “I only did that to prove it's working,” she explained, and the stone did not object. “Now test yours.”

“My name is Jehosephat,” Zane said, and saw his own Truthstone flash. “Zane.” The glow faded.

Luna took a deep breath that did things for her torso. She looked pained. “Oh, I don't like this! Why am I doing it?” she asked rhetorically.

“Let's not do it,” Zane said. “I don't want to know your secrets.” But his Truthstone flashed.

“I have fornicated with a demon of Hell,” Luna announced.

Zane's jaw dropped.

She faced him defiantly. “There, I did it. Note that my Truthstone did not glow—but my Sinstone brightened.” She gestured with her left hand, showing how the stone had come to life. “Whose Sinstone gets brightest—that's the most evil one of us.”

Zane swallowed. How had he gotten into this? But Luna's sincere discomfiture made her prettier than ever, and somehow he felt he had to prove she was better than he. “I embezzled funds from my employer,” he said. His Sinstone brightened, but not as much as hers.

“I am worse than you,” Luna said, like a child teasing.

“I never had the opportunity to make it with a lady demon,” he pointed out. But he remained shaken by her revelation. She looked so innocent!

“And I never had an employer from whom to embezzle. Opportunity is only part of it.” She took another breath. “I practiced black magic.”

“I thought that was your father, not you.” But he saw that her right stone was dark, while her left one had brightened another notch. She was guilty, all right, though he, personally, didn't care about black magic. Magic was magic, wasn't it? What did it really matter what color it was?

She was waiting for his second confession. “I gambled away almost everything I had, including friendships.”

“Gambling is not really evil,” she said. But his Sinstone had brightened significantly.

“I need to clarify that,” he said grimly. He understood why Luna had found this so difficult! “There was a girl who loved me—who said she did—but I wouldn't marry her, because she wasn't beautiful and because she was poor. I wanted to marry wealth. She—later I learned she committed suicide. That was the main friendship I gambled away—gambling on a richer one.”

“That's bad,” Luna agreed. “Did you know she was going to kill herself?”

“I never thought of it—until after the fact. Then I realized I should have seen it coming. I should have married her.”

“Though you didn't love her?”

“She was a good girl! It would have been much better to marry her than to kill her!” But his Truthstone flickered, for he knew he had not really killed her.

“We tend to assume more evil than is our due, after the fact,” Luna said, spying that flicker. “You think she died because you didn't marry her—but that's no basis for marriage. Maybe the money you hoped for was just a pretext for you to turn off a relationship that you knew wouldn't have worked anyway.”

“I don't think so.” But his Truthstone fluttered again. “I thought about it a lot, after. I decided I had not considered her feelings enough, only my own. I resolved not to be that way any more. I should have realized she was pregnant. If she had told me—”

Luna smiled briefly. “Some girls don't. You would have done what you deemed to be right, but you didn't know. I wouldn't try to trap a man by telling him I was pregnant.”

“You wouldn't have needed to! But she really was!”

Still, he appreciated the point. The girl had wanted his love, not his baby.

It was her turn again. “I deceived my father. He thought I knew no creative magic myself.”

“You claim to be evil,” Zane chided her. “You've done black magic and hidden it from your father, himself a black Magician. That's not much.”

“Apart from prostituting myself to a demon,” she reminded him sharply.

There was that. Zane found it very hard to accept the notion of her being intimate with a demon, but the Truthstone had confirmed her statement. “Why did you do that?”

“To learn the black magic. My father wouldn't teach me, of course. He wanted to keep me clean. The man I respect most—and I deliberately deceived him! Now what do you have to beat that?”

It was Zane's turn to breathe deeply. “I killed my mother.”

Now she gaped. “You can't mean that!”

Zane held up his Truthstone, which remained dark. “I did it. Then I wasted my inheritance gambling, and tried to replace it by embezzlement.” And now his Sinstone glowed more brightly than hers.

“You have made your case,” Luna said. “But I still have more total evil than you, because—”

“Because you took some of your father's burden of evil,” he said quickly. “He thought you were in balance, including his evil, but you're not. Where does that put you?”

“Destined for Hell,” she admitted. “Of course he didn't know about my other evil. He thought I was pristine, so a twenty-five percent share of evil from him would not imperil my status.”

“And, in fact, you are about seventy-five percent evil—or at least, that's what's charged against your soul,” he said.

“Close enough.”

“I'm surprised he didn't check your balance and catch you at it.”

Her smile was wan. “Men are easy to deceive.”

Zane studied her with new appreciation. “You seem pretty good to me.”

“Your Truthstone is glimmering,” she advised him.

So it was. “I guess that's a half-truth. You do seem good to me, but that business about the demon—” He paused, watching the stone. It was dim. “Wasn't there some other way to learn the magic you wanted? Study a book, or something?”

“A book!” she exclaimed scathingly. “Black-magic texts are illegal!”

“But you can find them on the black market.”

“My father would have known. Only black magic could counter his black magic, even to the limited extent of concealing this information from him.”

It would indeed require special measures to hide something from a magical grand master, Zane realized. So maybe she had required input from Hell. Still—

“Why did you want black magic if your father said no? You always obeyed him in other things, didn't you?”

She winced. This betrayal of her father was evidently an extremely sensitive matter to her. “It always fascinated me. I knew the power my father had, and I wanted—” She broke off, for her Truthstone was glimmering. “Oh, fudge! I should have set that stone down.” She took another breath. “I was afraid for my father. Some of those minions of Hell—they frightened me. I don't mean little child-bugaboo-type frights; these things were truly, fundamentally evil and they had such power, such malign awareness—you really can't appreciate such horror unless you find it near. I knew they regarded my father as a rare prize, and though I also knew he was smarter than they, still he was riding the tiger. I didn't want to see my father damned, and I knew he would be, but there was no way I could help him unless I learned more about his business. So I learned all I could, legitimately—and some of the things in the legitimate, unexpurgated texts gave me screaming nightmares—then finally I had to move on into—you know, and the only coin I had to offer was—you know.” This time her stone was quiescent.

Zane considered. “I think I could get to like you pretty well. I know I'm nothing special, but—well, can we set another date?”

She seemed surprised. “Date?”

“Go out for a walk, or to eat—a pretext for being together, for talking some more.”

“You can have what you want right now,” she said, her voice sharpening. “You don't have to clothe it in romance.”

“I don't think so.”

“It's true! Try me. After the demon, nothing you want will be so bad.”

Zane cringed inside to think of her opinion of the needs of men. She really had not had much experience in this regard, and no doubt thought of the demon as nothing more than an exaggerated man. “I want your respect.”

She tilted her head, peering at him quizzically. “My what?”

“Your respect. You have mine. Your father was right; you are a good person. I don't care how the sin ledger stands. There seem to be a number of artificial standards of good and evil that don't really relate to true merit or demerit. Maybe the official system of classification has failed to keep up with the changing nature of our society. You haven't done anything I consider really wrong, except—well, even the demon, if you only did it to help your father—and you did help your father, because without your help he would have gone directly to Hell without passing Purgatory. So it was more like a sacrifice.”

“A virgin sacrifice,” she agreed, glancing at Zane with a new appraisal. “It's the only type that kind accepts. It was horrible.”

“So I suppose after that, no ordinary man represents a threat to you. Certainly I don't. But a woman who would do that to protect her father—I'd just like to know you better, that's all.”

“Yet you killed your mother,” she pointed out. “What do you care about anyone's parent?”

“I cared about her,” he said, somewhat stiffly. “But she was dying anyway, and in pain, and she knew it was hopeless; when she asked me to—I just had to do it, that's all, even though I knew it was a crime and a sin that would damn me. It wasn't right to let her suffer any longer.”

Luna's eyes narrowed. “Just what happened?”

“Oh, you wouldn't care to hear—”

“Yes, I would.”

Zane closed his eyes, suffering in retrospect. "She was in the hospital, and her hair was falling out and her skin turning rough like that of a lizard, and there were tubes and wires and things going into her and coming out of her in a continuous violation of her body, and different colored fluids bubbling, and gauges pulsing with every breath she took and every beat other heart, so that any stranger passing by could read at a glance the most intimate secrets of her functioning. She would have died long since, from mortification as much as physical failure, but the artificial heart and kidney and stomach wouldn't let her. She had periods of disorientation, and these were getting longer. I think sometimes she hallucinated. But on occasion she was lucid, and that was when the horror of it was clear.