Death Most Definite (Death Works #1)

by Trent Jamieson

  The crows descend in a storm of claws and beaks, and every Stirrer they touch is stalled.

  It’s hard keeping them under control. These aren’t human Pomps, they’re easily distracted, and the way they stall these bodies is different, more violent. It is a steady tearing of flesh from bone. But there are so many that the Stirrers can’t keep up, they can’t fill bodies fast enough. And the crows are taking their toll.

  I can taste the meat, feel it pulling away from dead bones. It should turn my stomach but it doesn’t. These crows are mine. I am so intimately connected to them that this act, this devouring, seems natural. I wonder if this is what Mr. D had referred to as the Hungry Death.

  But it isn’t enough. Number Four is full of Stirrers, and the region itself, from the Cape to the Bight, is far worse than that. There are hundreds of them throughout the country. I look over at Lissa.

  “So, are you open to becoming a Pomp again?”

  “I want a raise,” she says without hesitation. “A big one.”

  “Sounds good to me.” I grab her hand, and transfer my essence into her, my fingers tingling as energy runs down my arm. For a moment I feel like I’m not just touching her flesh, but her soul again. It’s frighteningly intimate. And the transfer is two-way, I feel something of her in me, something that gives me strength.

  “Hey,” Tim says, free now. “I want to help, too.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Are you sure?” I’m not sure I really want to share that experience with anyone else, just yet.

  “Just do it. Now. Do whatever the hell it is you have to do before I change my mind.”

  I glance at Lissa. She nods. We’re going to need all the help we can get.

  I reach over and hold his arm. The ability slides into him. He seems to fight it for a moment—a lifetime of Black Sheepdom I suppose—then gives in to it.

  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.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  You only ever get one first book. And, being the first book, I could fill it with a book’s worth of people to thank. So here’s the stripped-back version.

  Off the bat, I’m in no way the first to play with Death. This book is very much a fusion of my love for Fritz Leiber, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Deaths, and Charon from Clash of the Titans, not to mention Piers Anthony’s On a Pale Horse. All of these have left a wonderful and, no doubt, influential impression.

  Now to the people I know.

  Thanks to Marianne de Pierres for getting the ball rolling. Thanks to Travis Jamieson and Veronica Adams for reading early drafts, and to Deonie Fiford for pushing the book to the next level, and giving support at the right time.

  And of course, there’s my brothers and sisters in writing, ROR. They’re the best writing group you could ever want, really.

  For the last stages, a big thank you goes to my publisher Bernadette Foley, my structural editor Nicola O’Shea and my copy-editor Roberta Ivers. You’ve helped make this book better than I thought it could be.

  And a thank you to every bookstore I’ve ever worked in, and the wonderful people I have worked with. Thanks to everyone at Avid Reader Bookstore (and the cafe) for being amazing, and for putting up with the least available casual staff member in the universe (particularly Fiona Stager and Anna Hood). And a massive thank you to Krissy Kneen, and to Paul Landymore, my SF Sunday compadre.

  Oh, and there’s Philip Neilsen at QUT, my mate Grace Dugan, and Kate Eltham at the QWC, and the SF Writer’s group, Vision. And the city of Brisbane, with which I have taken some liberties… I really better stop—well, not yet.

  Thanks to my family, always supportive. And finally, to the one who puts up with everything, and who has never doubted me, Diana, thank you, my heart.

  extras

  meet the author

  TRENT JAMIESON has had more than sixty short stories published over the last decade, and, in 2005, won an Aurealis award for his story “Slow and Ache.” His most recent stories have appeared in Cosmos Magazine, Zahir, Murky Depths and Jack Dann’s anthology Dreaming Again. His collection Reserved for Travelling Shows was released in 2006. He won the 2008 Aurealis Award for best YA short story with his story “Cracks.”

  Trent was fiction editor of Redsine Magazine, and worked for Prime Books on Kirsten Bishop’s multi-award winning novel The Etched City. He’s a seasonal academic at QUT teaching creative writing, and has taught at Clarion South. He has a fondness for New Zealand beer, and gloomy music. He lives in Brisbane with his wife, Diana.

  Trent’s blog can be found at

  http://trentonomicon.blogspot.com.

  interview

  Have you always known that you wanted to be a writer?

  Pretty much. I’ve wanted to write since I was about five, and it was always fantasy or science fiction. It only took me three decades to sell my first book, but I’ve been writing in all that time. The only thing I ever really thought I might like to do is be a stage magician, but I don’t have the eye–hand co-ordination for that nor the patter.

  When you aren’t busy writing, what are some of your hobbies?

  I like walking—I live next to a fair bit of brush, we have wallabies and koalas in there, and right now the young Kookaburras are learning to laugh, it’s a really really horrible sound, until they get it. I love reading, of course, and, occasionally, I’ll sketch one of my pets. But I don’t really have a hobby, it’s that lack of eye–hand co-ordination, I think. When I stop writing I sit in a corner and power down.

  Who or what inspired you to write about Death?

  Fritz Leiber’s Death in the Lankhmar books for starters. The depiction of Charon in the old Clash of the Titans movie. There’s a bit of Neil Gaiman’s Death in there as well as Pratchett’s. Though in my world there are thirteen deaths, collectively called the Orcus, and none of them get along all that well.

  I’ve always had an interest in death, and the brevity of life. It’s the wall we all end up hitting. It’s fun to imagine various scenarios for what might come after.

  I’ve thrown in a lot of Death folklore as well, though I’ve mixed it up. Terms like Ankou and Orcus hold slightly different meanings in different cultures’ folkstories—an Ankou for instance, is Death’s helper, but is sort of death as well.

  How did you develop the world of DEATH MOST DEFINITE?

  It all started with that first scene. I had no idea what was going on, but it made me want to find out. Pretty quickly in I had the idea of people working for Death, and what might happen if someone starts murdering them.

  Of course, at its heart it’s still a love story. And Steven always fell in love at first sight.

  If death really was run like a corporation, how well do you think it would succeed?

  Like any corporation. Really well when everything’s working, and utterly terribly when it’s not. Oh, and someone would always be stealing the paperclips and pens. And the phones would never work, and we’d all be crashing towards some sort of apocalypse.

  Hmm, kind of like the DEATH MOST DEFINITE, I suppose.

  Do you have a favorite character? If so, why?

  Other than Steven and Lissa, who I see as the heart of the story. I think it’s Wal. I never expected to have a plump Cherub show up at all, until, well, until he did. He’s part conscience part troublemaker, and quite tolerant for a creature stuck on someone’s arm most of the time.

  Oh, but I also love Tim, Don and Sam, Mr D, and Charon. And, in book two there’s Aunt Neti. She guards the stone knives of Negotiation, and the secret back ways into hell, and has many eyes and many arms and likes to cook scones—they’re delicious, just don’t ask what’s in them or the jam. (You can tell that I’m deep in edits for book two can’t you?)

  What can we look forward to in Steven’s next outing, MANAGING DEATH?

  Well, Steven has to learn how to be Death while organizing a meeting of the Regional Managers called a Death Moot.

  You’ll meet Aunt Neti, the mysterious Frances Rillman, and the even more mysterious and disturbing Hungry Death. There’s betrayals, g
reat battles, an approaching evil god, and scones and jam to be had.

  And Steven still has a lot of growing up to do: lucky he’s got Lissa and Tim by his side, and Wal, stuck on his arm. This book is a good deal darker, but I suppose that’s what happens when you move up the ladder at Mortmax Industries.

  Finally, what has been your favorite part of the publication process so far?

  I may sound like a glutton for punishment, but so far it’s been the editing. I’ve loved reworking these stories, making them as tight as I can. I’ve learnt a lot—the publication process is such a team effort—and I think that’s going to really show in book three—but you’ll just have to wait and see.

  I’m dying to see the books in print. I know how hard I’ve worked on them, as have my editors at Orbit, and, after thirty years of waiting and writing, it’ll be great to finally see one of my own novels in a bookstore!

  introducing

  If you enjoyed

  DEATH MOST DEFINITE,

  look out for

  MANAGING DEATH

  Death Works: Book Two

  by Trent Jamieson

  There’s blood behind my eyelids, and in my mouth. A knife, cold and sharp-edged, is pressed beneath my Adam’s apple. The blade digs in, slowly.

  I’m cackling so hard my throat tears, and I really didn’t have that much to drink last night.

  “Gah!” I almost tumble from the wicker chair in the bedroom.

  Dream.

  Another one! And I’d barely closed my eyes.

  Just a dream. Like anything is just a dream in my line of business.

  These days I hardly sleep at all; my body doesn’t need it. Comes with being a Regional Manager, comes with being Australia’s Death.