The Innocence of Death

by E G Stone

  “I’d rather not,” Yolanda said. She clapped a hand over her mouth and looked at me, pained. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s alright,” I put a hand on her knee in comfort, though I’m not sure it worked. “You just tell me where to go and what to do and I’ll take care of it.”

  “It’s just…my cousin went to ask him a question once,” Yolanda said, looking at her hands in her lap. “The price he asked was the use of my cousin’s right hand. Three days later, his right hand strangled his wife.”

  I was pretty sure my mouth fell open. “Okay then. I understand why you don’t want to go.”

  “But you’re going to do it anyways.” It wasn’t a question and I didn’t give an answer. Just shrugged. Yolanda nodded and we left the drunk satyrs and dancing faeries in peace.

  It wasn’t hard to get on the wyvern again, knowing that what was coming was far worse than flying. True, it was still pretty horrible. But the ride felt like it was over too quickly. We were maybe a few hundred metres from Death’s realm when the wyvern landed. I could see the silvery trees and a part of me wanted to go and shelter under them. I could tell Death what I had learned and he could make the bargain with whatever sage this was. I could go focus on my marketing.

  And fail in the first real task I had been set. I would ruin Death’s chance at maintaining his image before I even started. I didn’t think I was really that cowardly. And I was probably more curious about this sage than was healthy.

  Call it a condition, curiosity.

  Yolanda hiked with me to the base of the mountain. It wasn’t an enormous mountain, more like a slag of rock that had been driven from the ground during a volcanic eruption. There were enough plants in a mixture of the over-saturated variety from Life’s lands with the silvery-grey types from Death’s lands. Everything was perfectly still, like the world was holding its breath and waiting for some idiot—that would be me—to climb to their doom. My troll assistant, tall and massive and terrified, pointed to the path that would take me up and took two definitive steps back. I started forwards.

  “Good luck, Cal,” Yolanda said.

  “Thanks,” I smiled over my shoulder and went to go face this mysterious sage.

  Over My Dead Body

  Now, I have been walking around cities my entire life. I have done many miles at a time, especially when missing the late bus from work meant either spending money on a taxi or sloughing it home. More often than not, I sloughed it. I wasn’t a runner. I didn’t do cross-fit. But I considered myself in reasonable shape. Certainly I could do a three hour session of yoga without falling over completely.

  All that being said, climbing up that mountain left me gasping and wheezing and all around exhausted. My legs burned and I think I had pulled a muscle in my back that definitely didn’t exist yesterday. I staggered to the top of the mountain—a plateau of some sort with a great view—and fell to the ground in agony. My muscles were both burning and twitching. It took me a full two minutes to catch my breath and my head was still spinning when I did. When someone handed me a glass of water, I guzzled it without thinking.

  “Thanks,” I said. Then froze. I turned slowly to look at the person standing next to me.

  He was innocuous as far as things went. Compared to Yolanda, Thaddeus the vampire, and the wyvern, he was almost cuddly. He was almost human-looking, with fair skin and bright red hair, a pleasant expression and no obvious horns or tails or wings. I half expected him to be wearing a kilt or some such, he looked like he belonged in a movie about the highlands, but he wore an embroidered robe over fairly ordinary trousers and a shirt, instead. The edges were a bit frayed, but the embroidery was still gleaming and in one piece.

  The weird thing was that the pattern was of a fish. Over and over and over again, a fish. Big, small, swimming, dying, it was the same fish.

  “It’s a salmon,” the man said.

  “Sorry, what?” I handed him back the glass of water and wondered if I was going to pay for it later. I knew from my time in a creative writing class that there were all sorts of rules about eating and drinking at various supernatural tables. I hoped this wasn’t one of those situations. Then again, we were talking about salmon, so maybe it was just my imagination.

  “It’s a salmon,” the man repeated. “The Salmon of Knowledge.”

  I tried to keep a straight face, I really did, but the laugh just sort of slipped out. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  The man made an annoyed sound in the back of his throat. “No. I am not kidding.”

  “What in the world is a Salmon of Knowledge?” I asked, my laughs still slipping through.

  “In Irish mythology, there was a salmon who swam his way into the Well of Wisdom. Into this well fell nine hazelnuts, which the salmon ate. The salmon then gained all the knowledge of the world. But the salmon was still a fish and it was caught by a poet. He knew of the salmon’s knowledge and gave it to his servant to cook, so that he might gain the fish’s knowledge. The servant was accidentally burned by some of the fat from the salmon and stuck his finger in his mouth. The salmon’s knowledge passed instead to the servant, for the first person to eat of the fish’s flesh would gain all the knowledge of the world.”

  “So you are…” I said.

  “The servant. Fionn,” he introduced himself with a flourish. I raised my eyebrows and shrugged.

  “Sorry, not familiar with the tale,” I said. Fionn’s face grew flushed and he scowled.

  “Have you never heard of the tales of Fianna? The legendary warriors?”

  “No, sorry,” I said. I probably shouldn’t have sounded so cheerful about the fact, but the story was a bit ridiculous. I mean, really. The Salmon of Knowledge?

  “What of Taliesin? Or Sigurd?” Fionn asked. Now them I had heard of. I mean, in passing, but still.

  “You’re them?” I sat up straighter, eager.

  “No, but the principle is similar,” Fionn grumbled. I deflated again. Well, there was nothing for it, I supposed. I didn’t need to know who this Fionn character was to get my knowledge from him.

  “Well, that’s alright, I suppose. I’ve come to ask you a question,” I said. Fionn sniffed and straightened his shoulders.

  “All who find themselves on my mountain have questions,” he said, adjusting his robes.

  “Okay, great! So how does this work? I ask my question and we see what happens?” I said, then winced. “Those don’t count as my question, by the way.”

  “Most of the people who come up here at least know the lore,” Fionn grumbled. I got the impression that he didn’t much care for me.

  “Yeah, well, I’m new to this,” I said. “All I got was you borrowed a troll’s right hand and strangled his wife as payment.”

  “Interesting,” Fionn murmured. “You don’t look the sort to be consorting with trolls.”

  “You don’t look the sort to strangle by proxy,” I retorted. Coming to Elsewhere must have messed with my mind, because I wasn’t usually this combative. Maybe it was the fact that this guy had terrified Yolanda. She was bigger than me, stronger than me and had a whole lot more knowledge about the world. But she was my assistant and I had to stick up for her. I also had to get answers to my questions or face, you know, the end of the world or some such. At the very least, my boss would be severely unimpressed with me.

  Fionn wrinkled his nose as he appraised me. He stretched out his legs and leaned against an outcropping of rock that I was pretty certain hadn’t been there moments ago. He looked comfortable, like he had all the time in the world. Thank goodness I hadn’t upset him too badly.

  “What do you wish to know?” he asked.

  I considered, “You have all the knowledge of the world.”

  “I do. I am also bound by certain restrictions. I can only know the answer to the question you ask,” Fionn said, looking at his hands absently. “I cannot answer any question that would ruin the journey for you. I cannot give you the meaning of life, because each person must figure that ou
t for themselves.”

  “But if I were to ask you who killed Magnus, you could tell me?” I said.

  “Is that your question? You only get one,” Fionn brushed a hand over one of the salmon embroideries on his robe and fixed me with a very piercing stare. My heart started beating faster.

  “Yes, alright. My question is, who killed Magnus? Life’s Magnus, you know. The warrior-slash-jewel-thief that she was so fond of. Not some random Magnus.” The words came out in a rush and I hoped I had made it sufficiently clear who I meant. I also really hoped I hadn’t bungled the actual question. Maybe I should have come up with something more specific, like “who wants to cause an imbalance of power between Life and Death?”

  Fionn glanced at me, then nodded. He opened his mouth and, before I could exclaim in surprise, bit down on his thumb. He didn’t bite hard enough to sever the digit, but there was definitely blood drawn. He hissed and tossed his head back, eyes widening and pupils contracting. There weren’t any bells ringing or wind blowing. It was just Fionn looking a little stunned. A moment later and he was fine, blinking off whatever had happened.

  His thumb was also healed.

  He turned to me, a cunning grin on his face. “Well, I have the knowledge. Now we come to matter of price.”

  “Shouldn’t we have figured out price before the question?” I asked. I had sort of hoped that he forgot about the whole price thing. Silly human, I sighed to myself. These magical beings didn’t forget that sort of thing.

  “What point would there be to setting a price before I knew what the answer meant?” Fionn asked.

  “Alright, how much is it going to cost me?” I winced. “I only have a few thousand in the bank and I’d have to get permission to access it and—”

  “I want your life,” Fionn interrupted. I choked on my words.

  “Uh, what? You can’t…that’s not…”

  “I now know how valuable this information is.” Fionn examined his robes carefully. “So my price must be made accordingly. I cannot let this get out into the world. Therefore, my price is your life.”

  “No!” I said. “You can’t kill me!”

  “Very well, if you refuse my price, then I must kill you,” Fionn said evenly. I felt my eyes bugging out in astonishment.

  “So you were going to kill me either way?” I spluttered. “That’s just not fair!”

  “Life isn’t fair,” Fionn said with a grin.

  “No,” I agreed, “she isn’t.”

  Before I could blink, the Irish sage had drawn a knife from the inside of his robes. He lunged for me. I scrabbled backwards, but I was still tired and stiff from climbing a mountain. He was fresh as a daisy and probably had some immortal powers lending him strength. He got me once on the cheek and I flinched away. I held up my arm to block Fionn’s next blow, but the sage was a whole lot faster than me. He slipped past my guard and drew the blade across my throat in a death-blow.

  Things went black.

  Then, they weren’t black.

  I found myself exactly where I had been. My neck was tingling and I was very much not dead. “Holy crap!” I said.

  “This is not possible!” Fionn said, driving his knife towards me again. This time, I had the good sense to roll away. While I was running from a madman with a knife, my mind was working.

  I wasn’t dead. I should really have been dead. My throat had been cut—I definitely felt the knife go in all the way—and now it wasn’t. I could still feel blood trickling down my cheek, so I knew I wasn’t a ghost or impervious to injury. I certainly wasn’t impervious to pain. So what the hell was going on?

  Things clicked. Death had removed me from my life-force. That meant that I wasn’t actually alive to be killed. Life had said I was immortal. I just figured that Death had kept me from ageing or disease. And, after Yolanda explained things, I figured I was just like the other immortals. Alive, but just extended, not actually immune from death. Apparently, I was wrong. I wasn’t actually alive at all. Did that mean I would never die? Was I even human anymore? The thought was profoundly disturbing.

  All the while my brain was puzzling this out, Fionn was still racing after me with his knife. I flopped onto my back and squealed as he bore down on me with the knife. I yelped and raised my hands in a desperate attempt to stave him off. Maybe I had just gotten lucky and he had only scratched my throat.

  But on the off-chance that I wasn’t lucky, “I’ll pay your price!”

  Fionn halted. His eyes were blazing and his skin was flushed with anger. His robes were stained red where my blood had splattered on them. “What?” he hissed.

  “I’ll pay your price. You can kill me and I get your answer,” I said. My voice wavered. I really hoped I was making the right decision, here.

  “You…but…no,” Fionn said.

  “You set the price. I’m willing to pay it. We have a bargain,” I said. Oh, please, let me be doing this right. Fionn snarled in wordless rage and raised his knife. I screamed again, the sound high pitched and absolutely terrified. Fionn plunged his knife directly into my heart. This time, the scream was from pain.

  Again, things went black. And again, they became normal. I was exactly where I was, assuredly not dead. Fionn was looking at me in disgust from a few feet away, wiping his knife on his robes. Disturbingly, the robes were dissolving my blood as though it had never been there. I think I even saw one of the salmons eat a droplet.

  “You tricked me,” he said.

  “Honestly, I didn’t,” I said, sitting up.

  “The price is honestly paid,” Fionn spat. “But know this: if you ever set foot on my mountain again, I will use all my knowledge to find a way to tear you from this world.”

  Somehow, I managed to get myself standing. I felt wobbly and probably wouldn’t be doing a whole lot of moving for the rest of the day, but I was in one piece. I think. “So, can I have my answer, please?”

  “Very well,” Fionn snapped. “Magnus was killed by an Ennedi Tiger.”

  My mouth dropped open, “That was what you had to kill me to protect? Are you insane?”

  “Get off my mountain,” Fionn raised his knife again. “I may not be able to kill you, but I can cause you great pain.”

  “Right. Got it. Thanks so much. Good luck with all this,” I said, backing away. As soon as my feet hit the path, I was running down it as best I could. I managed to get down the mountain in some sort of running slide that didn’t tear too many of my muscles and only left me with half my skin scraped off. I felt this was a good thing compared to the alternative

  I hit the end of the trail and sprinted towards Yolanda like a rabbit. She had been pacing, apparently. A small trench was worn in the soft ground where she had walked. The troll took one look at me and rushed forwards.

  “Cal! Are you okay? Where are you hurt? What happened?” Yolanda asked. She patted my limbs, looking for the wound that had spouted so much blood. I pushed her away with a trembling arm.

  Panting, I asked, “Yolanda, what in the world is an Ennedi Tiger?”

  Yolanda took one more look at me and opened her mouth to speak. Before she got there, the day’s activities and lack of oxygen rushed up to me and I fell to the ground. Yes, the great Cal Thorpe, the impossible to kill, marketing genius, the mighty human, fainted.

  Sheesh.

  Knock ‘Em Dead

  I woke up in an annoyingly familiar setting. The walls were glaring white, everything hurt and I tried really hard not to scream when Graveltoes appeared too close to my face. Again. The creature blinked its enormous eyes and grinned, showing off pointed teeth.

  “You are awake again!” Graveltoes exclaimed. I groaned and sat up, forcing the creature to clamber backwards. It handed me my glasses, which I cleaned thoroughly on my hospital pyjamas before slipping back on my nose.

  “Why am I here?” I complained. At least this time I could talk. Sure, every bone in my body felt like it had been pulverised, but at least I could talk.

  “Because you fell over
,” Graveltoes said as though it were obvious. I sighed.

  “No, I mean why am I here and not in my house in Death’s lands?” I was fairly certain that being in my really comfortable bed in a place that, while still unfamiliar, was my own, would be better than this. Almost anything would be better than waking up to Graveltoes in my face.

  “Ah. Because the troll did not know what was wrong with you. She brought you here. And I did not know what was wrong with you, but you are better now, so it worked! Humans are such strange creatures to fall over like that.” Graveltoes nodded sagely. I looked around and found the room empty but for the good doctor and myself.

  “Where’s Yolanda?” I asked, perhaps a bit pointedly. Graveltoes may have been a doctor and doing his best to heal me and make me feel better, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t resent him for it. And I had questions for Yolanda.

  “I will go send her in,” Graveltoes clambered off my bed and gave me a disapproving shake of his head. “You humans, always so impatient. Pah.”

  Human. Was that what I was? After being not-killed by Fionn—twice—I didn’t even know if I could be considered human. Could I be killed? Was I even alive, or just stuck somewhere between Life and Death? Was I an immortal? If not, then was I something else? More? Less? Maybe most people would have been grinning widely and jumping out of airplanes at the discovery that they couldn’t die. I felt more like curling up into a ball and never coming out again.

  The whole point of my taking the agreement with Death was that I didn’t want to die. I still had life to live and I wanted to live it. That didn’t mean I wanted to be turned into some super-powerful being that would never die, even if I did still feel pain. A lot. I just wanted to live. I wanted to get my promotion and do well at my job. Heck, I even wanted to fall in love. Have a family. A life.

  Death’s offer had made it seem like I could at least have part of that.

  But what had I lost?

  “You are well.” Yolanda slipped into the room and greeted me with a big smile. I nodded. The troll put my bloodied clothes on a chair. She looked at me then started fiddling with her thumbs. “I am glad you are alive.”