The Toll

by Neal Shusterman

  It was a humble offering of mercy. Of course, they would most likely be killed out in the gardens and thrown on the pyre, but the ambudrones were making off with quite a few of the deadish, so they’d have a fighting chance.

  But just then the housekeeper rose to her feet. The anger in her eyes was beyond anger—beyond fury. And it was focused. Like the eyes of a scythe.

  She leaped at the nearest Tonist, took her down with a skilled martial arts kick, grabbed the machete she was holding, and swung at the curate, disarming him. Literally.

  He watched, stunned, as his hand flew spinning into the air. Then she grabbed the gun from his severed hand, and swung its aim toward the curate. She didn’t speak, because her actions spoke much louder than words.

  ix. Lux Aeterna

  Jerico had not trusted Anastasia’s instincts—had not believed this was as serious as she made it out to be. It was a dreadful failure of judgment on Jeri’s part. They could have escaped long before the outer wall was breached, had Jeri only trusted Anastasia. The captain vowed to never doubt her again. If they survived, that is—and survival now would be a tall order, indeed.

  As the Tonists broke into the palace, Jeri had convinced Anastasia to switch clothes. “It is my job to protect you,” Jeri begged. “Please, Anastasia, let me do this for you. Do me that honor!”

  As much as she didn’t want to put Jeri in peril, when it was put to her that way, she couldn’t refuse.

  Once wearing Anastasia’s robe, Jeri took off up the grand staircase, drawing away half of the Tonists. Jeri did not know all the rooms and suites of the palace’s upper levels, but knew them better than the attackers. Jeri led them into Scythe Anastasia’s suite, then doubled back through a side door, to an outer salon. The palace was enough of a maze to keep Jeri from being cornered too quickly, but that would only work for so long. Then came the sound of a gunshot from downstairs—then another. No thinking about that now—the focus had to be keeping these Tonists out of that battle.

  Endless fires were being set throughout the palace by the invading Tonists. They lit the colonnade and upper suites in the angry, shifting light of frenetic flames. The flames turned every shadow into a figure lurching from the darkness—but those shadows also provided Jeri with enough cover to dupe the pursuers and double back.

  Jeri ducked into another suite but, not being used to the robe, snagged it on a doorjamb. Before Jeri could get it free, the Tonists were there, brandishing weapons that they clearly were not trained to use. Jeri was no scythe, but had experience with fighting weapons. There had been a time, in fact, when Jeri would go to fighting clubs. People loved to see Madagascans fight—somehow the ambiguity made the battle more intriguing.

  And today, these Tonists picked the wrong Madagascan.

  Anastasia had left a blade in one of the pockets of the robe. Jeri pulled it out and fought like never before.

  x. Libera Me

  Anastasia missed. Blast it! She missed the curate!

  A young Tonist, seeing that her curate was about to be gleaned, pushed him out of the way and took the bullet herself. And the curate, gripping the stub of his arm in pain, ran. He ran like a coward, into the mob of Tonists still flooding the grand foyer.

  Tenkamenin was dead. So were Makeda and Baba. The Tonists who had seen her attack the curate were still stunned and unsure what to do. She was about to glean them all in fury but stopped herself, because gleaning in anger was not the scythe way. And there was a more pressing matter: Jeri.

  She turned and ran up the stairs. No one pursued her. They were too busy setting fire to anything that would burn.

  She followed the sound of fighting to one of the unused guest suites. There were a few deadish Sibilants and a trail of blood on the floor. She followed the trail to a bedroom, where three more Tonists were attacking Jeri. Jeri was on the floor, fending them off, but was outnumbered and was losing the battle.

  Anastasia gleaned the three Tonists with their own weapons and dropped to the floor, quickly trying to assess Jeri’s wounds. The turquoise robe was soaked with blood. She pulled it off and ripped it, trying to use pieces as a tourniquet.

  “I… I heard gunshots,” Jeri said.

  Jeri’s wounds were too severe for healing nanites to handle. They would not mend without help. “Tenkamenin is dead,” Anastasia said. “He died protecting me.”

  “Perhaps,” Jeri said weakly, “perhaps he was not as bad as I thought.”

  “If he were alive, I think he’d say the same about you.”

  Thick smoke was already billowing through every open door. She helped Jeri out into the colonnade overlooking the atrium. Everything below them was burning. There was no way to get down the stairs. Then something occurred to her. A way out—perhaps the only chance they had.

  “Can you climb?” she asked Jeri.

  “I can try.”

  Anastasia helped Jeri up to the next level, then through another suite to a balcony. Beside the balcony were ladder rungs embedded in the stone, which she had seen workers use to access the bronze dome that covered the palace. One rung at a time, Anastasia got Jeri all the way up to the edge of the dome. It was designed with a gentle slope and patterned with textured divots and nubs that would give them footholds—but to Jeri, already exhausted from blood loss, it must have looked like Mount Everest.

  “H-how will climbing up there—”

  “Just shut up and move,” demanded Anastasia, not having time to explain.

  The dome was hot from the fire in the atrium below. Its glass skylights were already beginning to explode from the heat and belch forth black smoke.

  When they reached the pinnacle, there was a weather vane in the shape of the symbol of the scythedom—the curved blade and the unblinking eye—that pivoted left and right, not sure which way the winds were blowing, because the heat was making the wind blow directly up.

  And now, finally, the scythedom helicopter arrived. It headed straight for the heliport, the pilots not yet knowing that it had been overrun by Tonists.

  “It won’t see us,” said Jeri.

  “That’s not why we’re up here.”

  Then an ambudrone buzzed past them, and another, and another. They dropped toward the rose garden, which was littered with deadish guards and Tonists. “That’s why we’re here,” Anastasia said. She tried to grab a drone, but it was moving too quickly and wasn’t close enough to grasp.

  Then below, the helicopter made a grievous error. Seeing the ambudrones buzzing around it, the pilot made a sudden evasive maneuver. It was unnecessary—the drones would stay far from the chopper’s path—but they couldn’t avoid a sudden flinch of human error that pulled the helicopter directly into their flight paths. The helicopter’s blade sliced an ambudrone in two, the blade broke, and the helicopter came careening toward the palace.

  Anastasia grabbed Jeri and turned away. The explosion seemed to rock the entire world. It blew a hole in the palace, taking down several of the marble columns holding up the monstrously heavy bronze dome.

  And the dome began to list to one side.

  Then from below came the most awful vibration. It’s the remaining columns, thought Anastasia. They can’t hold the weight. They’re crumbling….

  And still the ambudrones buzzed past them on their way to claim the deadish from the gardens and lawns.

  “My wounds are bad, but they’re not lethal,” Jeri said. “If we’re going to attract an ambudrone, one of us must die.”

  Flames now licked through the ruptured skylights. The sound of crashing columns echoed from below, and the dome listed farther.

  Jeri was right—there was no way around it—so Anastasia pulled out a blade and aimed the tip toward her own chest, ready to render herself deadish so an ambudrone would come.

  But no! What was she thinking? How unbelievably stupid! It wasn’t like hurling herself off Xenocrates’s roof when she was just an apprentice. She was a scythe now; if she took her own life, it would be considered a self-gleaning. The
ambudrones wouldn’t come for her. And as she pondered the idiocy of what she had almost just done, Jeri gently took the blade from her.

  “For you, Honorable Scythe Anastasia, I would die a thousand deaths at my own hand. But one will be sufficient.” Then Jeri thrust the blade inward.

  A gasp. A cough. A grimace. And Jeri was deadish.

  An ambudrone sped by… then stopped in midflight, doubled back, and came for Jeri. It seized the salvage captain in its pincers, and as it did, the dome began to give way.

  Anastasia grabbed for the ambudrone, but there was nothing to grip on to—so instead she grasped Jeri’s arm with both hands as tightly as she could.

  Beneath her, the dome fell away, plunging into the flames, imploding into the atrium. It struck the ground, destroying what was left of the palace, and let off a powerful metallic resonance like the toll of a funeral bell. Like the final, mournful note of a requiem.

  While up above, the ambudrone carried away the deadish sea captain and the scythe dangling from the captain’s arm, delivering them to a place that promised life to everyone who crossed through its doors.

  We are bitterly opposed. Eight of us firmly believe that an association of humans should be responsible for the thinning of the burgeoning population. But the four against it are adamant in their resistance. Confucius, Elizabeth, Sappho, and King insist that we are simply not ready for such a responsibility any more than we were ready for immortality—but the alternative they propose terrifies me, for if we implement their plan, it will be a genie out of the bottle. Out of our control forever. I therefore stand with Prometheus and the others. We must establish an honorable worldwide society of death mongers. We shall call ourselves scythes and will create a global scythedom.

  The sentient cloud, which will have nothing to do with issues of life or death, supports it, and people will come to see the wisdom of it in time. As for the four dissenters among us, they will have to accept the voice of the majority, so that we present a unified front to the world.

  Still, I wonder which is worse: to mimic nature in its cruel brutality, or to take it upon ourselves, imperfect as we are, to insert into death the kindness and compassion that nature lacks.

  The four in opposition argue for nature as a model, but I cannot advocate for it. Not while I still have a conscience.

  —From the “lost pages” of founding scythe Da Vinci

  36 Who Do You Serve?

  Although the Thunderhead had predicted it, Greyson didn’t need the Thunderhead to tell him that the first repercussions from the Mile High gleaning would be from sibilant Tonists. The only question was where would it happen? Would it be against Goddard directly, or would it be somewhere less prepared for an onslaught of violent zealots?

  He had his answer when he saw the first images of the burned ruins of the SubSaharan palace.

  “Violence begets violence,” Curate Mendoza commented. “This clearly calls for a change in our approach, don’t you agree?”

  Greyson couldn’t help but feel that he had failed. For over two years, he had been wrestling Sibilants into line, getting them to shed their extreme ways, but he had never made it to SubSahara. This might not have happened if he had done a better job.

  “Well,” said Mendoza, “if we had our own personal mode of transportation, we could have moved more quickly—tackled more problems in more regions.”

  “Fine,” Greyson said. “You win. Get us a jet and fly us to SubSahara. I want to find these Tonists before they make things even worse.”

  As it turned out, that was the only way for them to get into the region. After the attack, the SubSaharan scythedom clamped down, extending way beyond its authority, and turned the region into something of a mortal-age police state.

  “If the Thunderhead will not do its job and apprehend these criminals, then it falls upon the scythes of SubSahara to take control,” they proclaimed, and since scythes, by law, could do anything they wanted, they couldn’t be stopped from taking control, enforcing curfews, and gleaning anyone who resisted.

  Tonists were officially forbidden from traveling to SubSahara, and all commercial flights were monitored by the scythedom in a way they hadn’t been monitored since mortal days. The tragedy of all this was that the SubSaharan scythedom had been a gentle and tolerant region—but now, thanks to the Sibilants, it was aligning with Goddard, who promised worldwide retribution against Tonists. There was no question the new SubSaharan High Blade, whoever it might be, would have a robe that sparkled with jewels.

  The SubSaharan scythedom had dispatched dozens of regiments of the BladeGuard to patrol the streets of Port Remembrance, and every other city in the region, as well as beating paths through the wilderness in search of the Tonists who had murdered their High Blade, but they had no luck. No one knew where the Sibilants were hiding.

  But the Thunderhead did.

  And contrary to popular opinion, the Thunderhead was not shirking its responsibility to bring justice. It was merely going about it a different way. By means of a luxury jet with vertical landing capability.

  “I could get used to this,” Morrison commented as he luxuriated in a plush seat.

  “Don’t,” said Greyson. Although he suspected that once you began traveling in such a craft, you wouldn’t easily part with it. There were four passengers, and not a pilot among them. That was fine. The Thunderhead knew exactly where to take them.

  “You could say we’re being moved by the Holy Triad,” Sister Astrid said.

  “Actually no,” said Morrison, “because I only count two of the three: The Toll”—he gestured to Greyson—“and the Thunder”—he indicated the automated cockpit—“but there’s no Tone.”

  “Ha! You’re wrong,” said Astrid, with a grin. “Don’t you hear it singing in the hum of the engines?”

  There was, at the very least, a sense that they were soaring toward not just a destination, but a destiny.

  * * *

  “I am Curate Mendoza, humble servant to His Sonority, the Toll, who you now see before you, the Tone made flesh. All rejoice!”

  “All rejoice!” echoed Astrid and Morrison. Greyson knew it would have been a more impressive chorus if the Toll’s entourage had been larger.

  Their jet had dropped down from the sky and landed with impressive gravity in front of the Ogbunike Caves, in what was once eastern Nigeria but was now just a part of the SubSaharan region. The caves and the surrounding forest were maintained by the Thunderhead as a curated wilderness, everything within it protected. Everything, that is, except for the Sibilants hiding in the twisting passageways of the mysterious caves. It was once said that the stones in the Ogbunike Caves talked. An odd choice for a sect of Tonists who were mute.

  When Greyson and his team arrived, the Sibilants were nowhere to be seen; they were hiding deep in the caves—and probably went deeper the moment they heard the roar of the aircraft. But the Thunderhead smoked them out, so to speak, by emitting a sonar tone that disoriented the many thousands of bats also living in the cave, making them go… well… batshit. Attacked by the peeved bats, the Tonists were chased out, where they were faced, not by a phalanx of BladeGuards, as they had expected, but by four figures, one of whom was dressed in rich violet under a flowing scapular down which sound waves spilled like a waterfall. Between the jet on their doorstep and the somber figure in holy attire, it was hard not to pay attention.

  “Where is your curate?” Mendoza asked.

  The Tonists stood there in defiance. The Toll was dead. The Toll was a martyr. How dare this imposter taint the Toll’s memory. It was always this way with Sibilants.

  “It will be better for you if you honor the Toll, and bring your leader forth,” Mendoza said.

  Still nothing. So Greyson quietly asked the Thunderhead for just a little more assistance, and the Thunderhead was happy to oblige, speaking gently in Greyson’s ear.

  Greyson moved toward one of the Tonists. She was a small woman who seemed half-starved, and he wondered if starvation
was part of this sibilant sect’s behavior. Her defiance wavered as he approached. She was afraid of him. Good, he thought. After what these people had done, she should be.

  He leaned close to her, and she stiffened. Then he whispered into her ear, “Your brother did it. Everyone thinks it was you, but it was your brother.”

  Greyson had no idea what it was that her brother had done. But the Thunderhead did and told Greyson just enough to bring about the desired reaction. The woman’s eyes widened. Her lips began to quiver. She let off the slightest squeak of surprise. She was now speechless in more ways than one.

  “Now go bring me your curate.”

  She did not resist in the slightest now. She turned and pointed to one of the others in the crowd. Greyson already knew, of course. The Thunderhead had identified him the moment they all came out of the cave—but it was important that the man be betrayed by one of his own.

  Exposed, the man stepped forward. He was the epitome of a sibilant curate. Scraggly gray beard, wild eyes, scars on his arms from some sort of self-inflicted misery. Greyson would have been able to pick him out even if he hadn’t been told.

  “Are you the Tonists who burned High Blade Tenkamenin, and Scythes Makeda and Baba?”

  There were silent sects that used sign language to communicate, but this group had nothing but the simplest of gestures. As if communication itself was their enemy.

  A single nod from the curate.

  “Do you believe that I am the Toll?”

  Nothing from their curate. Greyson tried again, a bit louder, speaking from deep in his diaphragm.

  “I asked you a question. Do you believe I am the Toll?”

  The Sibilants all turned to their curate to see what he would do.

  The curate narrowed his eyes and shook his head slowly. And so Greyson got to work. He turned his eyes to various members of the curate’s flock, singling them out.