But Lissa doesn’t come with me. I’m standing in my office. Alone. HD screams.
I shift back. Back to her.
This shift is not resisted. I see now that this is where I am meant to be, what I am meant to witness.
The plane crumbles and tumbles around me. People scream, and die. Their souls lash through me: bullet-quick and burning. It hurts, but I ignore it. I reach out for Lissa.
“No!” she says. I can’t hear her, of course. The roar of a plane breaking, tumbling, dying, drowns her out. But I can read her lips.
I clutch at her. Wrap my arms around her, and shift again. Pain. A nest of needles jutting through every cell of me, and twisting. I’m shrieking in my office, blood running from my lips, my eyes, my ears, my arse. Every orifice bleeds.
No Lissa. She is not here.
I shift again.
The plane. The plummeting cage. Outside I see the One Tree looming and then a wing clips a branch. Metal grinds, windows crack and blow out.
“Sorry,” she says, and squeezes my hand.
She shouldn’t say that. This is my fault. All of it.
She touches my face. “It’s all right.”
“I’ll follow you. I’ll follow you to the end of fucking time if I have to.” And then there is an explosion. The whole sky seems on fire.
I wrap my arms around her, shield her from the worst of it. I’m hit, but heal almost as fast as the wounds make their mark. There is so much strength in me. But not enough for her.
And there isn’t a plane anymore. Just fragments dropping toward a black and perilous sea. The air roars and all around us, people fall. All around us is the death that I made.
She falls. And falls.
And I can’t lift her up, so I hold her close. I whisper my love. I press my lips against her, and I fall with her.
We plummet toward water dark as slate in the storm. She holds my gaze with a strength that amazes me. An implacable acceptance. I can feel her heartbeat, like I can feel all their heartbeats, and it is racing. But she doesn’t look away.
I am going to lose her.
Let me, the Hungry Death whispers, Let me.
And I do. I let it fill me. I make a void for it within my soul, and for the first time in my life I have an inkling of what real power is. I shift.
And this time she comes with me. We’re here, in my office.
She belts her hands against my chest. “No! You shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t have!”
“Stay here. I’ll be back. I promise.”
“Where are you going?” Lissa asks, weeping.
“To bear witness. To pomp the souls of those lost.”
There are bodies in the water, lifeless. Only their souls know motion among the flotsam, bits of plane, and pieces of people’s lives. I hover cross-legged, shifting above them, and it is effortless. But the wonder has been sucked from it, by these dead: one hundred and fifty in total. Their souls thrash in the water, bound there, unable to do more than keep their essences afloat. Out here, if I don’t do anything…
Long gray limbs slither from the sea. Water spills from narrow bald heads, beneath which beam mouths long and beakish. The ocean wants these souls for itself. It wants them restless and heaving in the depths. The gray shapes flash toward the souls of the dead. I glare at them. HD howls. And they hesitate.
“These are mine,” the Water whispers. “Not yours. You have no dominion in my seas.”
“This time I do.”
“You would challenge me, Orcus?”
Orcus. I blink at the title, at the stupid formality of it. But it is true. It is what I am. I am Orcus, my region is the earth. I am the only one capable of pomping these souls to Hell away from the shore. Children! There are children here. Dozens of them. And, God help me, HD guffaws with pleasure.
“Yes,” I say, “and you cannot stop me.”
I close my eyes, and draw the souls within me. It’s hard work pulling them from the suck and cold of the sea. I’m sweating and shaking by the end, with the effort of it. The Water was right. I have no dominion here, but I do have my power. Finally they are gone, sent to the Underworld, which is their right, no matter that it has come too soon for all of them.
The gray forms drop beneath the water. “Orcus, you do yourself no good in making an enemy of me.”
“One more enemy. What does it matter?”
Then the Water beneath me is just water again, and the dead are soulless and drifting among the wreckage. I’ve done what I can here.
It’s time to find Rillman. The bastard has to pay.
33
I can sense his heartbeat. It can’t hide its secrets from me. I close my eyes and shift.
The Deepest Dark. Why here? Which is precisely the question Wal asks when he crawls out from under my shirt. I can sense Rillman circling around, shifting from space to space. I catch glimpses of him. A leg. A foot. A hand tight around a knife hilt. His feet send up clouds of dust. Closer and closer. I wait.
And then, through the dark to my left, two stony blades jab out at me.
I jerk to the right, though one of the blade points cuts through my suit, bites shallowly into my stomach. It burns. I resist the urge to crouch over it, as though to stop my guts spilling. But the wound is already healed.
“Out you come,” I snarl.
A body takes form in the dark, arms and shoulders, then head, torso and legs knitted from all that cold shadow.
Solstice smiles. Who else would it be?
“So what do I call you? Rillman or Solstice?”
His limbs move with a jerky energy that Solstice never had. I wonder at the strength of will it must have taken Rillman to contain all that madness. He doesn’t need to now, and it bursts from him as wild as any storm.
“I never really liked the name Solstice, but you take what the mask gives you. And he was such a good mask.” Then he changes, becomes the Rillman I know. The Rillman in the tunnel. The dull, smiling bloke in Lissa’s photo album. He shrugs. “You know, after I failed, I killed myself. Not once, but twice. And every time I came back. She helped me come back.”
“Aunt Neti?”
“Yes, even when I didn’t want to. And then RMs noticed. They tried to kill me, too, and each time I died, I came back, different, stronger.”
Around him swings the tiny dragon, Smauget, its red eyes aflame. It darts toward my face. There’s a blur of movement, a shrill yowl, and Wal has snatched it from the air. The dragon hisses and snaps, its tiny mouth going for Wal’s jugular, but the little fella is ready for it. He catches it by the throat, and they tumble to the ground.
“Leave this to me,” he says, from between clenched teeth. “You deal with him.”
Rillman holds the knives at a distance from his chest, as though even he’s afraid of what they are. I don’t blame him. I understand their will intimately. The knives blur the air like light sticks waving in the depths of a cave.
They whisper and snort, Hello, hello.
“I am better armed now. These things kill RMs like you wouldn’t believe. They’re simplicity itself. And here, you don’t have any Avian Pomps to protect you,” Rillman says.
“Why did you kill them?” I ask.
“Who? The RMs, well, you know that they deserved it.”
“Not them. This isn’t about them.”
I lift my hand. Dust shapes itself into a plane. Dust people tumble from it.
Rillman almost drops the knives. They shudder in his hands. “What?” The emotions that play across his face shock me. It’s almost as variable as Mr. D’s. Joy, sadness and a mad hunger mix and meld across his features, and it would almost be comedic if he wasn’t waving knives in my face. Then I realize that Rillman isn’t well at all.
I could almost pity him.
“Your Stirrer drones,” I spit. “The ones with Lissa. I took them out, and then the Hungry Death came. I wouldn’t have been there but for you. Its presence within me wouldn’t have destroyed that plane.”
Rill
man snorts. “You RMs, always ready to blame anyone but yourselves. Lissa was meant to die. To make you understand. To teach you the mechanics of pain. And my attacks on you? That was their purpose, too. To hurt, to blind, to scare. I take it that you managed to save her. Too bad about the others, eh? They were your doing.”
“I understand pain.” HD snickers. It’s intimate with pain as well.
“Ah, you only think you do. Maddie, I killed her. But I could have brought her back. And there he was, your Mr. D. Smug and useless. There he waited, in the dark that slides along the borders of the Underworld. And with a fucking grin on his face, he hurled her back. I was done, then. I was spent; no chance of another Schism. He had nothing to fear from me, but he hurled her back. And even now, dead, he is not dead. And you have made it so. The favored one, the fucking coddled one. The man who didn’t want to be Death. How can you expect to do anything? How can you expect to hold back anything?”
“That’s it,” I say. “It starts and ends here. And the rest? The rest we will have to see.”
A little calm returns to Rillman, a crooked smile. “That’s what the Orcus said, and there’s very little left of any of them.”
“I’m something altogether different now,” I say.
The knives flash toward me, but I’m ducking and weaving. It’s motion absent of thought, fed on instinct. I’ve fought with these knives before. My movement is fast and sinuous. Something is hardening within me. A dreadful resolve, a chuckling vastness. The knives slice the air millimeters above my face, then to my left and right, never quite touching.
Rillman growls.
I gesture at the dust around my boots. It flashes up in a tight spiral between us—Suzanne would have been pleased—and into his eyes. My fist follows it. Rillman stumbles back. Wipes at his nose with his wrist. A knot of blood and snot stretches from his nostrils to his arm, then breaks.
His heart beats loud in my ears, and it’s no longer that familiar steady rhythm. It’s pounding, racing—160 bpms at least. His pupils are dilated. I know he’s on something and it’s raging through his body like fire. He comes back at me, fast. But something is burning through my body, too.
The knives dance figure eights before him. It would almost be beautiful, but I’ve no eye for beauty now. HD argues the point, but I ignore it.
More dust, a blinding burst. He staggers, his eyes stung. I kick him in the chest. He crashes backward, lands hard.
“Dust? Is that all you have?” he pants, getting to his feet, wiping at his eyes with his wrists. He’s half blind, but it doesn’t stop him. I’d almost respect that, but I am hatred now. I am blazing anger.
“It’s all I need.” I launch more dust at him. Rillman slices through it with the knives, but it’s only dust, it doesn’t bleed. Not like him. He doesn’t even know that he’s beaten.
He charges at me. And this time I don’t care to obscure his run. No dust. Just him and me.
“I want you to know that you made this,” I say. The blades whirr around me, jabbing toward me and away, and I weave in time with them in perfect synchrony. The poor bastard doesn’t understand that they are dancing for me. “Your desire for revenge. To cause me pain. To bring down the Orcus. To hurt me and mine. All of it. The whole fucking concatenation of hate and fear. You made it all, and now …” I snatch the blades from his hands, one, two … “These are mine.”
I kick him to the ground, easily. Rillman lies there, bleeding. “What are you?”
“You don’t get it at all, do you? I’m Steven de Selby,” I say, picking him up with one hand, as though he weighs nothing. And he doesn’t. No one does now. “I am Death.”
I backhand him casually in the face. Bone cracks. He drops to the ground, and I stand over him. I grit my teeth, and feel my face shift. It’s agony and it’s glorious. For a moment all I am is pain. All I am is Death.
The knives in my hand slide toward each other, bind each other in their stony gravity, and then I am holding a scythe. It shivers with the deepest of hungers in my grip.
Mayhem. Murder. Death, it breathes.
And God help me, I swing the scythe above my head.
Wal rushes in between us. “Whoa, whoa!” He hovers there, his wings beating so fast that they lift up dust. His eyes are wide with a kind of terror that I’m unacquainted with, and they’re directed at me.
“Go away,” I say.
“If you kill him, you won’t get answers.”
I jab my finger at his face. “But that’s just it. I am the answer, am I not?”
All I want is death. His death. The world’s death. HD cackles, like a drunk crashing toward damnation.
Then a squeak of brakes alerts me to his presence. My old boss.
“Stop this now,” Mr. D says, sliding off his bike. His face is pale; he’s out of breath. Must have been riding since I entered the Underworld.
“You,” I growl. “This is as much your fault as his. Letting them—letting all of them—do this to me.”
But it is glorious!
Mr. D holds my gaze. “Yes… They were convincing, Steven.”
“Convincing!” I swing the scythe above his head. It would be nothing to lop it off. Mr. D doesn’t move. “Is that all you can say?”
“You didn’t prepare him for any of this,” Rillman says.
Mr. D glances over at him. “Good evening, Francis.”
Rillman spits toward him. “Hell must be so hungry for you.”
“It’s hungry for all of us,” Mr. D says. “It will have me in its own good time, believe me.”
“I’d kill you if I could,” Rillman breathes.
“You’re not the only one.” Mr. D places a hand on my shoulder. “Steven, I am so sorry.”
I brush his hand away. “You should go now. You have no power here.”
“None of us do, Steven. The rules that bind us do so tightly. You have choices, but what horrible, horrible choices. Leave this idiot. The other RMs are still on the tree; they won’t be for much longer. Go to them, find out anything more you can.”
“I don’t need them anymore. I want you gone.” My voice is barely a whisper, but there is a dreadful force behind it. Mr. D diminishes, nods.
“As you wish.” He throws a glance askew at Wal, as if to say sorry. Then he picks up his bike and rides away into the dark. I watch him until the gloom swallows the flickering red of his tail-light.
Rillman coughs. Wal flits in front of him again.
“You want me to go, too? I swear I won’t go so easily,” Wal says. Nonetheless I tap my arm and he is nothing more than a tattoo, his face twisted with a bunched zippering of cherubic teeth.
I fashion a chair out of dust, and drop Rillman in it.
He coughs, spits blood. He’s not bound. I don’t need to do that.
“You can run,” I say. “But I will find you. Have no doubt of that.”
He eyes the knives I’ve left resting on a nearby root tip of the One Tree. They’re no longer the scythe. I raise one hand and that’s what they become. I’m intuiting a lot, but I know I can call that scythe to me in a second, just as I know its name is Mog. In a breath, a single breath of that name, it will find me.
He looks shiftily from the scythe to me, and back again. I dare him with my eyes. But Rillman has had enough.
“Why did you do this?” I ask. “Tell me and I might be gentle with you.”
“I hate you,” Rillman growls. “You got what I wanted. While Mr. D was alive he locked me out. But you, you were so interesting. So naive. You were the only RM not like them. You were the one who I wanted to suffer, not just kill, because you didn’t deserve what you had been given. I’ve been a long time in planning this, and when you won your Negotiation and changed the rules … Well, you have to realize that I had to make you pay.” He sneers at me. “Is it any wonder that governments agreed to my requests, when I showed them what I was capable of, with but the merest sliver of an RM’s powers? They’ve been frightened of Mortmax for a long time, the conseque
nces of it. And they’re terrified of you.”
Yeah, they have a bloody good reason to be now. HD’s pleasure radiates through me.
“I knew it would only be a matter of time until it fell apart, and the world’s governments would be left picking up the pieces anyway. The Thirteen have lurched along for an age. But everything ends.” He fiddles with his tie with his restless jerky fingers.
“Yeah, when you murder them.”
Rillman’s face darkens. “All of them were murderers. Every single one, and I know you’re not stupid enough to believe otherwise. You want to become a murderer, Steven?”
“I’m Death. It’s what I do.” Mog quivers in its resting place. And the new and ancient part of me remembers its endless predation, its racing hunger. It would be easy to give in to that. After all, it’s what nature intended. It’s so like humanity to shape things into much more convoluted patterns. I’ve a chance to break them all, starting with the death of Rillman. One enemy removed. “And maybe it’s your time,” I say.
Rillman shakes his head. “I’ve read your files, Steven, it’s not in you.” He’s waiting. There’s a pulsing vein in his forehead and a slight smile breaks the line of his lips. Then he scowls and maybe, for the first time, I have the real measure of the man, and what I see is shocking. There is too much of my rage in there. “You’re just not that kind of guy.”
I grab him by his lapels and lift. “I am now.”
This close, I can feel what it is that gives him power: the thing that Neti gave him that allows him to slip from the land of the living to the land of the dead, and back again. It shivers inside him like a second beating heart. This is a free pass between the gates of the two worlds, and it belongs to me! I don’t know how Aunt Neti stole it, but I want it back. I yank him to his feet, touch his face with my hands, grip his skull hard, and draw that power from him.
It hurts. Because what he has is fed by pain and anger. I drag it into me; more power, more of the essence that is now so much of what I am. I understand the truth that is the Hungry Death, its persuasive presence, and the tiny thing that is the man before me. I close one hand around his neck, curious how that might feel, and then the other hand.
The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy Page 51