The Toll

by Neal Shusterman

  Then he saw a lone scythe looking in his direction from the field. The one in the crimson robe. One of the few scythes who was not going after the crowd. They locked eyes for a moment. Then, just as the flames caught on the doomed man’s pant legs, Scythe Constantine raised a pistol and performed the only gleaning he would do today. A single shot through the heart that spared the tech from a more painful end.

  And the last thought the tech had before his life left him was a wave of immense gratitude for the crimson scythe’s mercy.

  * * *

  “I will forgive you for trying to stop me,” Goddard said to Scythe Rand as their limousine pulled away from the stadium. “But it surprises me, Ayn, that you of all people would flinch when it came to gleaning.”

  Ayn could have said a million things to him, but she held her tongue. Rowan was already forgotten—trampled beneath this larger affair. Rumor was that he had been seen leaving the stadium with Scythe Travis and several other Texan scythes. She could blame all this on them, but who was she kidding? She was the one who’d suggested Goddard find a way to make Rowan’s absence appear like part of a larger plan. But she never imagined where Goddard would take it.

  “This was not the event that I asked for, but rarely do things come the way we expect,” Goddard said in the calm, collected way someone might discuss a stage play. “Even so, this day has worked to our advantage.”

  Rand looked at him in disbelief. “How? How can you say that?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” And when she didn’t respond, he elucidated with the smooth eloquence he was famous for. “Fear, Ayn. Fear is the beloved father of respect. The common citizens must know their place. They must be aware of the lines they may not cross. Without the Thunderhead in their lives, they need a firm hand to give them stability. To set clear boundaries. They will revere me, and all my scythes, and will not run afoul of us again.” He thought about his own self-serving rationalizations and nodded in approval of himself. “All is well, Ayn. All is well.”

  But Scythe Rand knew that from this moment on, nothing would be well again.

  Part Four THE ONLY TOOL WE CAN WIELD

  A Testament of the Toll

  The sanctimonious Sibilants who would wage unwarranted war were an abomination to the Toll. He would descend on them as the furious beating of a million wings, and the skies would rage with Thunder. The unrepentant would be struck down, but those who fell to their knees would be spared. Then he would leave them, dissolving once more into a storm of feathers and disappearing to the calming sky.  All rejoice!

  Commentary of Curate Symphonius

  The Toll was not only a man of flesh, but a master of it. He possessed the ability to transform into any creature, or multitude of creatures. This verse illustrates his ability to become a great flock of birds, most likely eagles, falcons, or owls. Graceful. Noble. Wise. But also to be feared and respected. Creatures that were the epitome of all the Toll was.

  Coda’s Analysis of Symphonius

  The ever-present problem with Symphonius is his inconsistency. He sees things as symbolic or literal whenever it suits him, thus his interpretations are more whim than wisdom. While it’s possible that the Toll could have taken form as a flock, is it not more likely that he simply possessed the mystical ability to fly, like the caped heroes of archival graphics?

  32 A Grim Fulcrum

  The cathedral bells that rang out the hours for nearly a thousand years in EuroScandia had been silenced. Ripped out, torn apart, melted in a makeshift furnace. A great concert hall in the same region had been raided in the middle of a performance, and, amid the panic of the crowd, Tonists flooded the stage, breaking the smaller instruments by hand and taking axes to the larger ones.

  Your voices are music to my ears, the Toll had once said. Which clearly meant that all other music had to be destroyed.

  These extreme sibilant sects found, in their devotion, a need to impose their beliefs on the world. No two sects of Sibilants were alike. Each one was its own unique aberration, with its own frightening interpretations of Tonist doctrine and twistings of the Toll’s words. The only thing they all had in common was a propensity for violence and intolerance—including the intolerance of other Tonists, for any sect that did not believe precisely as they did was clearly lesser.

  There were no Sibilants before the Thunderhead fell silent. Yes, there were sects that had extreme beliefs, but the Thunderhead and the Nimbus agents of the Authority Interface reined them in. Violence would not be tolerated.

  But once the world was unsavory, and the Thunderhead spoke no more, many things in many places began to fester.

  In the oldest cities of EuroScandia, groups of roaming Sibilants would leave bonfires in public squares full of pianos, cellos, and guitars, and although they would be caught and detained by peace officers every time, they would not stop. People hoped that the Thunderhead, even in its silence, would supplant them, replacing their minds and their entire identities with ones that would be content and not prone to violence. But that would be a violation of religious freedom. So the Sibilants were detained, forced to pay for the replacement of the things they had destroyed, and then released, only to destroy these things again.

  The Thunderhead, if it could speak, might say that they were providing a service—and that by destroying musical instruments, it provided work for those whose job it was to create such instruments. But even for the Thunderhead, enough was enough.

  The Toll appeared to the EuroScandian Sibilants as they prepared to lay waste to another concert hall.

  The EuroScandian Sibilants knew it must be an imposter, for the Toll had been martyred at the hands of a scythe. Resurrection was not a tenet of their belief, so the zealots were skeptical.

  “Drop your weapons and fall to your knees,” the imposter said.

  They did no such thing.

  “The Tone and the Thunder are offended by your actions. And so am I. DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND FALL TO YOUR KNEES!”

  Still they did not obey. One of them ran forward, speaking in an old language native to the region that few people spoke anymore.

  Then from the imposter’s small entourage, a denim-robed scythe came forward, caught the attacker, and threw him to the ground. The attacker, bruised and bloody, scampered away.

  “It is not too late to repent,” the Toll imposter said. “The Tone, the Thunder, and I will forgive you if you renounce your destructive ways and serve us in peace.”

  The Sibilants looked past him to the doors of the concert hall. Their goal was so close, but there was something commanding about this young man before them. Something… divine.

  “I give you a sign,” he said, “from the Thunderhead, to whom I alone can speak, and to whom I alone can intercede on your behalf.”

  Then he spread out his arms… and out of the sky they came. Mourning doves. A hundred of them swooping in from all directions, as if they had been waiting all this time in the eaves of every building in the city! They landed on him, perching on his arms, his body, his head, until he could not be seen anymore. They covered him from head to toe, their light-brown bodies and wings like a shell, like an armor around him—and the color of it. The pattern of the feathers enveloping him, the way they moved. The sibilant Tonists realized what he now resembled.

  He looked like a storm cloud. A Thunderhead billowing with wrath.

  Suddenly the birds took off in all directions, leaving him and disappearing back to the hidden corners of the city from whence they came.

  All was silent but for the last flapping of departing wings. And in that silence the Toll spoke in nearly a whisper.

  “Now drop your weapons and fall to your knees.”

  And they did.

  * * *

  Being a dead prophet was much better than being a live one.

  When you were dead, you weren’t obliged to fill your days with a mind-numbing parade of supplicants. You were free to go where you wanted, when you wanted—and more importantly, where you were needed.
But the best part about it was that nobody tried to kill you.

  Being dead, Greyson Tolliver concluded, was much better for his peace of mind than being alive.

  Since his public demise, Greyson had spent over two years traveling the world in an attempt to wrangle in the sibilant Tonists that were popping up everywhere. He and everyone with him traveled as modestly as possible. Public trains, commercial airlines. Greyson never wore his embroidered scapular and violet tunic when they traveled. They were all incognito in simple, drab Tonist attire. No one asked questions of Tonists for fear that they’d start espousing their beliefs. Most people would look the other way, avoiding eye contact.

  Of course, if Curate Mendoza had his way, they would travel the world in a private jet with vertical landing capability, so the Toll could plop out of the sky like an actual god-machine. But Greyson forbade it, feeling there was already too much hypocrisy in the world.

  “Tonists are not supposed to be materialistic,” he told Mendoza.

  “Neither are scythes,” Mendoza pointed out, “and how did that work out?”

  Nevertheless, this wasn’t a democracy. What the Toll said was law among them, no matter who disagreed with it.

  Sister Astrid was on Greyson’s side.

  “I think your resistance to extravagance is a good thing,” she said. “And I imagine the Thunderhead agrees.”

  “As long as we get where we’re going by the time we need to get there, the Thunderhead has no opinion,” Greyson told her. Although he suspected that the Thunderhead was rerouting trains and flights to speed their way to their destinations. Greyson supposed that if the Toll proclaimed they must travel by mule, the Thunderhead would somehow supply them with racing mules.

  Even with modest travel, Mendoza always managed to find a way to make their arrival dramatic and impressive enough to shake sibilant Tonists to their corroded foundations. Whatever strange and disturbing things they were doing, Greyson would reveal himself to them as the Toll and denounce them, renounce them, and basically shut them down, leaving them begging for his forgiveness.

  The trick with the birds had been Greyson’s idea. It was easy enough. All Earth’s creatures had nanites so that the Thunderhead could monitor their populations—which meant that the Thunderhead had a back door into each species’s behavior.

  The scythedom had done something similar with the sea life around Endura, turning them into a free-range aquarium. But unlike that ill-fated technology, the Thunderhead did not manipulate the animals for human pleasure—or, as it turned out in the end—human pain. It only controlled a creature if that creature was in danger of becoming roadkill, or engaging in any other behavior that would end its life. As there were no revival centers for wild animals, it was the most effective way to allow them to live the full length of their natural lives.

  “If I’m supposed to stop Sibilants,” Greyson had said to the Thunderhead, “then I need to show them something impressive. Something that will prove to them that you are on my side, and not theirs.” He proposed the gathering of storm-cloud colored birds, lighting all over him, and the Thunderhead obliged.

  There were other tricks that Greyson used, of course. The Thunderhead could cause publicars to encircle the Tonists, herding them like sheep. It could generate a magnetic field strong enough to levitate Greyson with no visible means of doing so, and when weather conditions were right, the Thunderhead could induce a lightning storm at Greyson’s command. But the birds were the best. It never failed to dazzle and always brought Sibilants around. If not back into line, then at least it started them moving in the right direction. Of course, being covered in doves and pigeons was not a pleasant thing. Their talons left scratches and gouges in his skin. They often tried to peck at his ears and eyes. And they were not the most hygienic of animals.

  He would stay with the sect in question just long enough to make sure they were changing their ways. “Coming back into the fold,” Mendoza called it. Then the Toll would disappear with his entourage and move on to another sect of Sibilants in another part of the world. Surgical strikes and guerilla diplomacy, that was his strategy for two years, and it was working. It helped that there were more ridiculous rumors about him than legitimate ones. “The Toll made a mountain crumble with his voice.” “The Toll was seen dining in the desert with mortal-age gods, and was at the head of the table.” It was easy to hide his actual appearances in the folds of the absurd ones.

  “It’s good that we do this,” Curate Mendoza would say, “but it’s nothing compared to what we could be doing.”

  “It’s what the Thunderhead wants,” Greyson would tell him, but Mendoza was always dubious. And, truth be told, Greyson was just as frustrated.

  “You have me on a treadmill,” Greyson had told the Thunderhead. “What am I accomplishing if sibilant sects are popping up faster than I can turn them? Is this your big plan? And isn’t it wrong for me to pretend to be a god?”

  “Define ‘wrong,’ ” the Thunderhead had said.

  The Thunderhead was particularly annoying when Greyson put forth ethical questions. It could not lie—but Greyson could, and did. He lied to the Sibilants at every encounter, telling them he was beyond human. Even so, the Thunderhead would not stop him from doing it, so he had no idea if it approved or disapproved. A simple “don’t do that” would have sufficed if the Thunderhead felt his actions were an abuse of his power. In fact, being chastised by the Thunderhead would be comforting, because then he’d know if his own moral compass was off the mark. On the other hand, if the end did justify Greyson’s means, why couldn’t the Thunderhead just tell him so, and ease his mind?

  “If you do anything that is too damaging, I will inform you,” the Thunderhead had told him. Which left Greyson constantly waiting for a slap that never came.

  “I’ve done some terrible things in your name,” he told the Thunderhead.

  To which the Thunderhead replied, “Define ‘terrible.’ ”

  * * *

  The Toll’s entourage, which had contracted to his inner circle—Scythe Morrison, Sister Astrid, and Curate Mendoza—had become an effective team.

  Morrison had proven himself valuable right from the beginning. He never really had much of a work ethic before showing up to glean the Toll, but these years had changed him considerably—or at least carved him a new rut that was a little more enlightened. He had his reasons for staying. After all, where would he go? The North Merican scythedom thought he was dead. But that was only part of it. The thing is, if the North Merican scythedom were to check their own statistics, they’d know that he’d gleaned and granted immunity more than once. Well, he told himself, with so much gleaning going on these days, they couldn’t be expected to notice the actions of one rogue scythe.

  Of course, he knew that wasn’t the truth, but the truth hurt a little too much to admit.

  They didn’t notice, because they didn’t care.

  He had always been a nonentity to the other scythes. An embarrassment to his mentor, who chose him because he was strong and good-looking, and then disowned him the moment it became clear that he’d never win anyone’s respect. To them he was a joke. But at least here, in the service of the Toll, his existence was acknowledged. He had a place and a purpose. He was the protector, and he liked it.

  Sister Astrid was the only one who had issues with Morrison. “You, Jim, embody everything about the world I can’t stand,” she once told him.

  Which made him grin. “Why can’t you just admit that you like me?”

  “I tolerate you. There’s a big difference.”

  As for Astrid, she had her work cut out for her keeping them all on the proper spiritual path. She stayed with the Toll because deep down, she believed that Greyson Tolliver was the real thing. That he was divinely moved by the Tone, and that his humility about it was understandable. A humble nature was, after all, the hallmark of a true holy man. It made perfect sense that he would refuse to believe he was part of the Holy Triad, but just because he did
n’t believe it himself, didn’t make it any less true.

  She would secretly smirk each time he faced sibilant Tonists as the Toll, because she knew he didn’t believe a single thing he said. To him it was just a role. But to Astrid, his denial made it all the more true.

  And then there was Curate Mendoza: the magician, the showman, the producer of their traveling show. He knew he was the linchpin holding it all together, and although there were times that he actually believed his own faith, that always got trampled by the practicality of getting the job done.

  Mendoza not only organized the Toll’s appearances, but kept in close communication with his network of curates around the globe, in a constant attempt to wrangle more and more sects under one accepted doctrine, and to help them protect themselves against scythes. Mendoza also worked in the shadows, spreading many of the false rumors about the Toll. They were amazingly helpful in keeping the flock engaged—and in keeping scythes disengaged—because how could scythes give any credence to Toll sightings when most of them were flights of fancy? Yet when Greyson found out what Mendoza was doing, he was horrified. How could Greyson not see the value?

  “You’re telling people that I’ve risen from my own ashes?”

  “There is precedent,” Mendoza tried to explain. “The history of faith is full of falling/rising gods. I’m laying the groundwork for your legend.”

  “If people want to believe that, fine,” Greyson said, “but I don’t want to encourage it by spreading more lies.”

  “If you want me to help you, why do you keep tying my hands?” Mendoza said, increasingly frustrated.

  “Maybe because I want you to use your hands for something more than pleasuring yourself.”