On A Pale Horse (7 page)

The novelty of the language and the stone had distracted him from the business at hand; the client was looking at him expectantly. Zane was taken aback. “You were expecting me? You're not afraid?”

“Expecting you? I've been seeking you for six months! Afraid? I thought I'd never get out of this prison!”

“This hospital? It seems nice enough.”

“This body.”

Oh. And it seemed the translation worked both ways, for the man understood Zane's words, though there was no noise in his ear. “You want to—?”

The client squinted at him. “You're new at this job, aren't you?”

Zane choked. “How did you know?”

The man smiled. “I had a close encounter with Death once before. He was older than you. More wrinkles in his skull. The sight of him so fazed me that I surged right back into life. I had been dying on the operating table, but the operation became a success. That time.”

“I know how that is,” Zane agreed, thinking once more of his mother.

“Then I had a reserve will to live that manifested when challenged. But my condition is farther gone now. Neither science nor magic can abate the pain any more. Not without dulling my intellect, and I don't want that. In any event, I suspect that death is merely a translation to a similar existence without the burden of the body. Some people don't even realize when they're dead. I don't mind if I realize, just as long as the pain abates. So my will has eased, and I'm ready to lay life down. I hope you are competent.”

Zane looked at the Deathwatch. He was a minute overdue! “I hope so, too,” he said. “I talked with you too long.”

The man smiled again. “It was a pleasure, Death. It provided me a brief respite. If you ever discover a person truly being kept alive beyond his will, you must use force if necessary to ease him. I think you will do that.”

Again Zane thought of his mother. “I have done that,” he agreed in a whisper. “A person has a right to die in his turn. I believe that. But some would call it murder.”

“Some would,” the client agreed. “But some are fools.” Then his face tightened with a spasm of intense pain. “Ah, it is time!” he gasped. “Do it now, Death!”

Zane reached for the man's soul. His fingers passed through the client's body and caught the web of the soul. He drew it carefully out, not tearing it. The man's eyes glazed; he was dead and satisfied to be so.

The three other patients in the room paid no attention. They did not realize the nature of the visitor, or know that their companion had died.

Zane folded the soul and put it in his bag with the other. He was getting better at this, fortunately. He felt better about it, too, for he knew he had done right by this particular client, sparing him further futile pain. Perhaps this office was not as dreadful as he had thought.

He looked at his watch. The countdown was running again, but showed almost half an hour. The cat's eye was large; the location was close. For once he wouldn't have to hurry.

He drove to a park area beyond Phoenix and pulled off the street. He opened his bag of souls, put in his hand, and drew one out. He unfolded it carefully, spreading it out as well as he could against the inside of the windshield. It was a whole soul, untorn, so he knew it was the most recent one he had collected.

The soul, silhouetted against the glare of oncoming headlights, showed patterns of translucency and opacity, like a convoluted Rorschach blob. It was fascinating in its intricate detail, but he had no way to judge its overall nature. Should this one be relegated to Heaven or Hell?

Something glimmered in his mind, almost like a memory from a prior existence. Zane reached around the soul, his arm crumpling it slightly in passing, and punched open the dashboard compartment. Sure enough, inside it were several more gemstones. He had gone from paucity to plethora when he assumed this office!

Two stones were gently flashing. Zane drew them out. They were more cabochons, half-rounded polished hemispheres. One was a dull brown, the other a dull yellow. He set their flat faces together, and the two formed a sphere, a little like the dark and light faces of the moon. Perhaps they were moonstones. They were a matched set—but what was their purpose?

He let the stones separate and brought the brown one near the spread soul. The stone flickered as if hungry. He slid it across the surface of the soul, and it flickered whenever it crossed a dark patch.

Aha! Zane brought the yellow stone near. It flickered as it passed the light portions.

If dark equated with evil and light with good, he had here his analytic mechanism. One stone responded to each aspect of the soul. He could perform the magic analysis scientifically. But how was the final balance to be ascertained?

Maybe the stones gained weight as they absorbed the readings from the soul. Was there a set of scales?

He checked in the compartment, but found no scales. Well, maybe the mechanism would become apparent at the right moment. He really did not have time to ponder at length.

Zane passed the brown gem across the length of the edge of the soul, then down a swath just in from the edge. The dark items flashed into the stone. Where he ran over a portion already covered, there was no response; the gem only picked up any given sin once. As it did so, it gradually darkened, but did not seem heavier in Zane's hand. Of course, the change might be too small for him to detect.

By the time he had covered the whole soul, the stone was almost black. There was certainly a lot of guilt and sin on this ledger. Zane wondered what the details were, but had no way to learn them. The client had had a mixed life before cancer brought him down; perhaps that was all Death needed to know.

He passed the yellow stone across the soul in the same fashion. As it picked up the good aspects, it brightened, until at the end it shone like the brightest moon.

Now what? Certainly the stones had changed, taking the measure of this soul—but which one had changed more? The dark one certainly seemed heavier than the light one; did that mean that evil predominated in this soul? Yet the light stone had seemed to become lighter as it proceeded, as if the good in it were buoyant. Maybe the trick was to ascertain which gem had changed more. Was there more sink to the dark stone, or more lift to the not so bright one? Where was the balance, when the two were averaged?

Then he had it. He put the two stones together. They clung to each other, as if magnetically attached, and the line of their cleavage writhed into the configuration of the Oriental Yin-Yang or the Occidental baseball. They were merged.

He let go of the ball. It hovered in mid-air, in almost perfect balance. What was this soul's destiny?

Then, slowly, it rose. The balance was marginally in favor of Heaven. Zane let his breath out; he had been more nervous about this than he had realized. He had been in doubt about both the technique of analysis and the destination of the nice gentleman he had talked with.

Nice? The man couldn't have been too nice, or he would not have had so much evil on his soul!

The gem ball nudged gently against the ceiling of the car. Zane did not let it go outside; with the car windows closed, the ball was not going anywhere. He needed to send the soul itself to Heaven. But how?

He fished in the compartment again. He found a roll of transparent tape and two packages of balls. The balls were of distinctly differing densities. Some were pith and threatened to float away; others were lead, quite heavy.

Now it came clear. Zane refolded the soul into a compact mass, bound it together by a loop of tape, and affixed a buoyant pithball. Then he opened the car window and released it. It floated up into the starry sky and in a moment was lost to view.

He hoped the package arrived safely in Heaven. This seemed an unconscionably primitive way to transport a commodity as precious as a soul. Surely it should be possible, in a world possessing magic carpets and luxury airplanes, to transport a soul more safely and efficiently than by such means. But, of course, this was his predecessor's method; maybe Zane would be able to update it when he learned more about the office.

The merged stones fell apart, their original dull colors returning. That job was finished. He returned them to the dashboard compartment.

The Deathwatch was counting down past ten minutes. He had used up his spare time and had to move.

Zane oriented the car and touched the hyper drive button. This time the wrenching was longer. He looked out the window. He was passing across water. He was proceeding east across the ocean, according to the compass he now spotted on the dash. He left the night and reentered day, realizing that it had been evening when he started this business, and late afternoon when he had taken his first client in Anchorage, and evening again in Firebird for his second. The world continued its turning regardless of his business, and he was zipping in and out of day.

In a moment, land loomed. The car swooped up to it, slowing, then rolled across a brief beach, through a development of twenty-story modernistic condominiums, through—not around—a ragged brown mountain range, past a village that filled in a valley with white, plastersided houses, through an olive orchard, past grazing horses, and to an open field.

He was now near his client. He wasn't sure why the hyper drive never delivered him precisely to the target; perhaps long-distance accuracy was not great. More likely it was to preserve the anonymity of Death's approach; it would be hard for people to ignore a car that abruptly materialized on the site of an accident. Magic did have its limitations, so it was best not to push it too far.

He used the eye and arrow to close in on the target and arrived with a good minute to spare. He was at a decrepit farmhouse amidst languishing fields. This was a poverty-stricken family.

He opened the door and walked in. He wondered whether he should have knocked, but concluded that no one would care to answer Death at the door. It was dawn here; he could hear the members of the family screaming at each other as they blundered sleepily about, getting organized in the chill house. His left ear picked up the translated words, for, of course, this was not Zane's own language. The people were grumbling about the cold morning, the inadequacy of food for breakfast, and a rat that skittered across the floor.

Zane's gems guided him to the bedroom. The woman was there, sitting on the bed, an expression of discomfort on her face as she struggled to don heavy, opaque stockings. One leg was raised, the knee bent, so that he had an intimate view of her thighs. He was shocked to see that they were almost covered by a flaming rash. Indeed, the woman looked sick; her face was flushed, her hair straggly and tangled. Her teeth, as she grimaced, were discolored, perhaps rotting. This was a young, fairly shapely woman, but her bad health made her unappealing. Her eyes were so deeply shadowed, it was as if they had been blacked by violence. Then Zane realized that there had been violence; she had bruises and scrapes all over her body where flesh showed.

Perhaps death would, in fact, be a boon to her. She was obviously living in misery.

But the arrow did not point to the woman. It pointed to the crib on the far side of the room where a small baby lay huddled.

A baby? How could he take a baby?

Zane walked past the woman, who paid him no attention, and stood over the crib. The baby had scuffled off its inadequate blanket during the night and lay, exposed and damp, face down, its skin bluish. It was, he realized, about to suffer a crib death.

But what of the fifty-fifty rule that governed his clients? Most people died and were separated from their souls without his direct help. Only those who so cluttered their souls with evil as to be in doubt of salvation required the personal service of Death. Almost by definition, a baby was innocent; therefore its freed soul should float blithely to Heaven. A baby was not yet, as Fate had quoted, the captain of its soul, and Heaven still lay about it.

Yet there was no question this was his client. The baby was fading fast. It was time. Zane reached down and hooked out the small soul.

The baby's mother, intent on her laborious dressing, never noticed. Zane walked past her, carrying the soul, and left the house. He felt ill.

In the Death mobile, he used the stones to analyze the little soul. The pattern was strange, because it was not a pattern at all; the soul was uniformly gray. Experience had not yet caused it to be variegated.

The verdict of the combined stones was neutral; the gem ball hovered in place like the moon it resembled, neither rising nor falling.

How could this be? What evil had this little boy done? What evil could he have done, confined to his crib, completely dependent on his sick mother?

Zane had no answer. He folded the soul neatly and put it in the bag.

The Deathwatch was counting down yet again. Was there no end to this? When did he get some rest, some time to think things out?

He knew the answer. Deaths occurred all the time, and the small percentage that required special attention continued, too. At some point he would have two difficult cases happen at the same moment, on opposite sides of the globe. What would he do then?

Zane was beginning to understand how a person performing the office of Death could grow careless, as his predecessor had done. When things got rushed, comers had to be cut, or the job would not get done. What happened to a Death who got too far behind?

He looked at the watch more carefully. It had three buttons on the side. This was a stopwatch, a chronograph, of course, though its timer did run backward. He had seen the type before. One button would be used to start and stop timing; another to zero the total; and the shorter middle one to set the regular time and calendar features when necessary.

But this watch ran itself, magically, responding to input he did not know about. Maybe it had a direct line to Heaven or Hell or wherever the allocation of souls was determined. Fate probably had a hand in it, as she measured her threads. He didn't time events; events timed him. Why, then, were the extra buttons necessary? What did they control?

He thought of punching a button. Then he hesitated; it could be dangerous to play with something he did not understand. Yet how else was he to learn? He had lived his life and almost died his death in an impetuous manner; he might as well be consistent.