There's usually much more ceremony than this, not to mention contracts to be signed-and a bit of gloating, after all he was a Black Sheep-but we don't have time. Now, I have two Pomps. It's hardly an army, a once-dead girl and a Black Sheep, but I feel my strength increase, and the Stirrers are pausing, staring at us with their flat, undead eyes.
I open myself up to the Stirrers in Number Four, and I pull them through me. It is like nothing I have ever felt before. It is terrible and gorgeous at once. It is life, and it is life's ending, and there's so much wonder, so much pain, so much joy. Because death-like life is the contradiction and the certainty. It is the terror and the inescapable truth. And I embrace it.
I blink.
The Stirrers in Number Four are gone. The bodies are gone. Is that it? I think. Surely that can't be it.
And then it tears through me, worse than any pomp I've ever performed, because there are hundreds of souls, not just from here, but from all across the country, carried to me by the force and the will of the crows, the souls of Stirrers and people. Lost souls, angry souls, souls desperate for absolution, souls gripped in terror or madness, and I take them all because I am Australia's Death. I direct that raging torrent to the Underworld. I realize why a Regional Manager needs all his Pomps, and why he is so fragile without them. This is hard and awful, and utterly necessary.
I've stopped a Regional Apocalypse, but at a cost. People all across the country have paid with their lives. The Stirrers worked as fast as they could to turn people. There are hundreds more dead than there should be. Now I'm paying, because this dying business stops with me.
How could anyone want this? How could anyone kill for this?
Tim and Lissa grow paler by the moment, their lips bloody and cracked, but I'm taking most of it. I have to. This could kill them, and it may yet.
The Stirrers come first and each one is rough, a howling soul hurled into the abyss. But they're soon gone, all of them banished from my region. After them are the usual deaths. The misadventures and illnesses, the pointless tragedies as slow as cancer or as abrupt as a gunshot. It's all that dying darkness which the world holds up at the end though, of course, it's not the end. Not by a long shot. There's so much more. Every stage is precious and discrete, I understand that now. But there is continuity, and the responsibility of that begins and ends with me. I infiltrate the worlds of the living and the dead in a way I can hardly believe is possible.
And it's a dreadful agony.
Then I'm in a different space. If still feels like Number Four only it's different, somehow. Darker, colder, the only light a sickly green.
Stirrers surround me in their true form, narrow-faced, saw-toothed. Their vast emptiness is palpable and insulting, and all of a sudden I know them a little. Better than Morrigan ever could, deal or no deal.
I enter the dialog of their existence, see their world and ours through their eyes. They are old, older than death itself. I'm slammed with an epiphany. To them, the living world is the aberration, the new thing. They are not so much invaders but the usurped. Their time passed so long ago, but they refuse to acknowledge it. I could almost respect them for it if they didn't hate so desperately.
They cannot think of anything but our destruction. For two billion years at least they have focused on it. And we are but the latest opponent in what has been such a long campaign for them.
This is just the beginning.
Now I know why they were so eager to deal with Morrigan, why they sought such a disruption to the order of things, and that it wasn't just to cause mayhem.
Something is coming. Something big and dark-rising out of the darkest depths-and it was ancient before life began. I know at once that the Stirrers worship it and fear it in equal measure. It is drawing near, and I know that it has been here before.
In that moment of utter clarity, I look up, and it is not the ceiling of Number Four I see, but a space, an inky desolation through which howls a wind as cold and bleak as any I ever encountered in Hell. My body clenches, reacting against this place. My newly possessed power slides around me, sheathing me from this realm's touch, but even that is not enough to take the cold from it, nor the terror from what I see.
An eye the size of a continent rolls toward me in its orbit.
Its vast bulk strains against the dark and I cower beneath its alien scrutiny. There is a part of my brain that starts to lock down, a part of me that wants to curl up into the smallest ball it can and never look into that dark again.
But I hold its gaze for a fraction of a moment. The god's endless hatred and cruel hungers crash against me, but I do not quail, even as every bit of me chills. This is the creature that the Stirrers serve, the beast that their death and destruction feeds. Why have I not been told about this? It's one more thing to add to the misinformation that is my life.
The Stirrers call to it, and it shrieks back, a long sharp cry that sets reality rippling. Although I can see it clearly, the god is still so far away that my mind cannot fathom it. I am Death, but I am nothing compared to this. And it is coming.
But it isn't here. Not yet, not today.
I snap back into the land of the living.
I'm not sure how long I've been gone but when I wake, Lissa's looking down at me and squeezing my hand.
"Where were you?" Lissa asks.
Tim's not far behind her, looking sick with worry and exhaustion. "You right, Steve?"
Maybe I should be asking him that.
I blink. I feel like I'm newly born or newly dead. Everything is tender. But that's not all of it. The world itself is clicking along at a slightly different pace… or am I? "I went everywhere," I say. "And I saw what's crashing toward us and it's terrible." I realize that I'm on my knees. There's a lot going on in my head, so many thoughts spinning tight orbits around each other, so many terrors. And there's so much to do.
For Christ's sake I'm holding a Death Moot in December. What the hell do you do, or even wear, at a Death Moot? But that is for later. Right now I can stop running. "It's done. For now. We've won, I guess." I touch Lissa's face. I could never get sick of that contact. "You're alive. We did it. We made it."
Tim clears his throat. I glance over at him.
"Mom, Dad. Did you see them?"
I shake my head. "They were gone."
Tim nods his head. "You tried though?"
"I didn't have much time."
"Yeah."
"Morrigan's gone," I say. "He paid for what he did. I made him pay."
Tim seems satisfied with that, and it's all I can give him. Lissa helps me get to my feet. I'm not that steady on them. She lets me hold her, and it feels good. Everything about her feels good.
"You're even cuter alive, you know," I say.
Lissa arches one eyebrow, her lips twitch. "Do you ever take anything seriously?"
"My hair. I take my hair way seriously."
"I hate to say it, but I think you're thinning on top."
Tim snorts. "She's right, you know. I didn't want to say anything but…"
"Really?" Shit, I know that baldness is hereditary, but I'd been doing so well.
Lissa glances over at Tim, then me. "Nah… Maybe."
"You are such a bitch." These two are going to be trouble.
"Aren't I adorable?"
And she is, and I'm staring into those green eyes, and there's still all that je ne sais quoi stuff going on, and I think there always will be, if we get a chance. If this job, and everything else, gives us a chance.
I hold her face in my trembling hands, and then I'm kissing her. There's so much to be done. So much to absorb, to rage against and mourn the passing of. All of that confusion is inside me, churning madly, demanding attention, and I can't pretend it isn't.
But I get that moment, that kiss. And it's a start.
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Document creation date: 08.02.2011
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Death most definite sds-1 Page 25