I could watch her talk the soul down to the Underworld, listen to the calming rhythm of her voice, but I leave her there, walking deep into the guts of the hospital. Some places my birds can’t follow. Besides, the Avian chooses that moment to snatch a bug out of the air.
I get out of there as it starts cracking the struggling insect open on the concrete footpath. Not nearly fast enough; I get a bitter mashed-beetle taste in my mouth.
Back in my own skull as much as I am able, I enjoy a moment or two of calm. No phone ringing. The door to my office closed.
I drop into the throne of Death and power surges through me, a sense of absolute interconnectedness with my employees. I feel Pomps struggling with Stirrers. I feel Pomps pomping souls. My face twists with a savage grin that is more HD than me. I feel the heartbeats of the world amplified tenfold. Some are ending, some beginning. All that life and death stuff. And there I am at its center.
For a moment the bit that’s me isn’t. I become a flood of sensation, death and hunger. It’s the tragicomic sputtering of a multitude of final moments grown suddenly vivid and intense. A series of lightning bursts, none that linger, each crowded out by the next. Death after death after death.
I drown in it and break free. And it’s like I’m gasping for air, only the air is me. Steven de Selby pushing back, taking shape.
Floods, famines, disease. All these deaths have me salivating, and I know HD yearns for more.
I ram HD and that endless stream of information down, down, down, packing it away until it becomes a kind of psychic tinnitus that I can, almost, ignore.
It’s never easy, but I’ve been getting better at it. If I wasn’t, I think I would have gone mad by now.
I pour myself some Black Label Bundy Rum, just to wash the taste of bug out of my mouth, and consider “The Triumph of Death.” Skeletons rushing around having all sorts of fun with Hell on earth. I’m so used to it now that I find it comforting.
Finally I get out of my throne, my hands shaking a little, finish the rum in a couple of gulps (I’ve earned it, haven’t I?) and swing open my door.
Number Four is busy as usual. I catch the familiar odors of aftershave, perfume and slightly burnt coffee, the consequence of staff that have no idea how to operate an espresso machine. Pomps sit at desks, before computers, sorting through the increasingly problematic Schedule of Deaths, trying to calculate which bodies might stir, and which will only require a pomp—it’s getting harder and harder to tell.
Everyone’s tired. These last few days, souls have not wanted to go. Pomps have been rough. It always hurts a little, but the raw pain of sending the dead to Hell has been even rawer of late.
Here is the heartland of our campaign. Number Four may look like any other office, but we’re not only interested in good returns for our shareholders—most of that’s done in the floors below through everyday brokerage and investments, enhanced by a little Deathly foresight. On this floor there are battles being planned. We’re here to open and close the way to Hell. My Pomps and I are the doors and the locks. Souls are pomped. Stirrers are stalled.
There are around 140,000 deaths a year in Australia. Fifty-seven million or so deaths per year in the world. At Mortmax we’re responsible for ensuring all souls go one way, and that nothing comes back. We’re very good at it. We’ve had a lot of practice. Mortmax has existed in one form or another for over seventy thousand years. Death followed humanity out of Africa. Its Pomps have spread around the world. Unfortunately, the Stirrers spread with us, an inescapable and angry echo of the past.
But mixed with that sense of purpose, that industry, is something else I’ve been noticing lately. Fear, a quiet dread. The Stirrer god is coming, and every Stirrer seems intent on reminding us of that. I’ve come across people whispering in the kitchen, stopping the instant they see me. I’ve heard crying coming from the toilets. The End of Days is almost upon us, and we’re not quite sure what we can do about it.
Tim’s door opens at the opposite side of Number Four, like he’s been waiting for me to exit my office. He waves at me—the kind of “we need to talk now” gesture I’m all too familiar with.
You could slash his throat. Make an example of him.
I try not to smile at that, as Tim stalks toward my room. He’s grimacing, and my Pomps keep a wide berth. Watching his passage through the office is fascinating; I think my staff just might be more scared of Tim than of me. Brooding about our morning meeting, I guess. I step back from the door, let him through, shutting it quickly behind him.
He winces as he catches my breath. “You know if you’re going to drink on the job—”
I wave him away. “Oh, the day I’ve had.”
“Just saying.”
“You give up cigarettes. I’ll give up drinking.”
He almost looks hurt. Can I hurt my cousin that easily? Surely not after all we’ve been through. If he’s that sensitive—
“Why is there a tire mark on the shoulder of your jacket?” He squints, walking around me.
“What?” I shrug myself out of my jacket and groan at the filthy pattern scarring what was once pristine wool. The material’s torn around the sleeve. I give it a shake and we both cough at the dust it throws up. I’m also missing a cufflink, a little Death’s Head one Lissa had bought me as a present. Bugger.
“I knew you were attacked today, but I didn’t know that the car drove over you,” Tim says offering me a cigarette, which is really only his excuse to light one up himself.
I shake my head. “Only the tire, the rest of the car was in pieces.”
“And did you ask her?”
I fiddle with my French cuffs, holding them neat with a paperclip.
“I—um, I was going to, and then…look at that tire mark, eh.” I frown. “And thank you very much for sharing my problems with Alex.”
“A man’s gotta vent,” Tim says. “And how is it a problem? You love her, she loves you, just get on with it.”
“You can’t tell me it was easy with you and Sally.”
He clears a space on my desk, and sits down. “Easy? No, but I didn’t have the end of the world to contend with, that puts a slight urgency on the matter. I was only just out of uni. I thought I knew everything.”
I bite my tongue, hold back asking him what’s changed, and why he can’t use a bloody chair once in a while.
“Cerbo’s rather anxious to see you.”
Faber Cerbo was the Ankou to Suzanne Whitman—North America’s RM. He and Tim are my two most senior members of staff.
Cerbo is also my authority on the Stirrer god. He’s pored over almost every ancient volume we can get our hands on. Problem is, last time something like this approached the earth humans weren’t even a glimmer in the eye of an early mammalian ancestor. To say that there are slim historical pickings is like saying the pyramids were a bit of an effort to construct.
What we had was based on guesswork and fossil evidence. And it’s flimsy—wind whistling through the holes in it—evidence at that. Far better minds than mine were debating about it in the Pomp community. But we were running out of time.
“You did explain to him why I cancelled?”
“I did, but he’d like to see you as soon as possible. He says something else has turned up.”
“That’s all he said? What ‘something else’?”
Tim smiles thinly, “I don’t think he trusts me.”
I don’t think he does either. It’s the government connection. Tim was a major player in the department of Pomp/government relations before he became Ankou. And there’s evidence to suggest that that department, manipulated by Rillman disguised as one Magritte Solstice (yes, he was a “fingers in all sorts of pies” kind of guy), allowed a fraudulent and Anti-Pomp arm of the Federal Police to exist unnoticed until it became a major threat.
Tim says he knew nothing about it, and neither did his replacement Doug Anderson, but I can understand why Cerbo doesn’t believe him. We don’t exactly have a healthy, trusting wo
rkplace. And Cerbo is steeped in that corporate culture, but enough is enough.
“It doesn’t matter whether he trusts you. We’re all Pomps. And our enemy is coming. We need to stick together.”
“I tried that on, and all it did was make him even more evasive.” Cerbo doesn’t worry easily. I’ve got a feeling I better visit him now. “Anything else more pressing?”
“What isn’t pressing these days?”
HD gives him a look, and I let it. The knives shudder in their hilts. I have to strain to stop it going any further. I’m not even sure Tim notices.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” Tim continues, and he says it so confidently, that I stop him before he opens the door.
“One more thing,” I say. “Just between you and me.”
“Yes?”
“Do you ever get the feeling that we’re all playing at this…work. That we’re blithely ignoring the elephant in the room.”
“Elephant?”
“The Stirrer god, idiot! All this bullshit, this distrust, trying to carry on as though nothing is going on.”
“Oh, it’s going on.” Tim glares at me, maybe I’ve overstepped the boundaries, but, hey, he was the one who sent me those texts this morning. “You look at that ‘elephant’ too long and it’ll drive you insane.” I’d taken Tim to observe the approaching Stirrer god a few months back. He hadn’t liked it, neither had I. It had grown bigger in the sky of the Deepest Dark since I’d last seen it. Its devouring flesh swallowing souls at an alarming rate. “Hang on,” Tim says, “isn’t that what Cerbo does?”
“Never you mind about that, Cerbo’s the most dangerously sane person I know,” I say. “But aren’t you worried?”
Tim shakes his head. “Nah, not while we have Steven de Selby on our side, the luckiest fucking bastard on the planet.”
I just wish the rest of the office felt that way. I shift to the Boston offices.
An eye blink and I’m there, beats the shit out of transpacific flights, and waiting in line at customs.
Doesn’t mean there isn’t the occasional problem. Cerbo’s knife is out, and it’s pointed at my chest.
5
Oh, it’s you,” he says.
It’s extremely provocative, and not a little dangerous to shift directly into an Ankou’s office. But you could say much the same for pointing a knife at your boss. And while I don’t want to be an arsehole about it, every office of Mortmax Industries is my office. They’re all my Number Fours.
If Cerbo can’t quite hide a flicker of annoyance at my sudden appearance, he’s very good at pushing it down almost at once. Almost as good as he is at slipping the knife from his hand back into its sheath. Even sitting in his office in Boston he’s appropriately paranoid. He makes a show of straightening his cap: a finger brushes his narrow mustache. Neat, lean, serious, Cerbo is always on, always focused on the job. But today there are bags under his eyes, and it looks like he’s wearing yesterday’s suit.
There are leather-bound volumes piled precisely on one corner of his desk, an e-reader next to them. Most of what he needs to read is electronic, but there are a few volumes from the older regions that have yet to be scanned. Including what looks like a scroll. His office smells a little like a second-hand bookstore—rotting paper, coffee and just a hint of sweat.
He’s sitting in the plain leather, but no doubt excessively expensive, chair that replaced Suzanne’s throne of Death after it faded away with her soul, all the throne’s power passing into mine. His other hand, the one that hadn’t just been holding a knife, lowers a thick book onto a notepad. There’s something scribbled there, but I can’t quite make it out.
“I know I cancelled a meeting but you’re not planning a Schism are you?” I ask, framing it with as unthreatening a smile as possible.
Cerbo’s boss Suzanne Whitman was one of the eleven RMs who sacrificed their lives so I could become Orcus. The logic being that a single Death, rather than Death diffused through thirteen souls, would have a better chance at defeating the Stirrer god. I don’t know whether or not I agree with that logic. And I’m positive most of the Ankous the RMs left behind don’t, they’ve certainly proven themselves resistant to my admittedly limited charms. But what’s done is done, and the RMs are gone beyond even the root tips of the One Tree. I’m the Orcus now. And we all have to deal with that.
But dealing can mean a multitude of interesting unfriendly-to-Steve things in a business founded in bloody coups. Actually, as far as Mortmax is concerned, the term “bloody coup” is an exercise in clinical understatement.
“Mr. de Selby, I wouldn’t want your position even if they paid me your salary.”
Yeah, but once the Stirrer god is dealt with I reckon things might change. Cerbo strikes me as a man who makes plans—careful long-term plans—and why sit on a plain leather chair when you can sit on the throne of Death?
He pushes the notepad toward me. Even though the writing is neatly laid out I can’t make much sense of it—one of the symbols that mark it may be a Feynman diagram if I remember my old physics lessons properly, or it could just be a squiggle.
“I’m not making much progress.”
“What’s it say?”
“A god is coming. And I don’t think it’s going to be late,” he says pointedly.
“I tried to get here earlier, but had a few distractions.”
“Have you asked her yet?”
What? Does everybody know? I clench my teeth a little. “Not that sort of distraction,” I say. “More of a car trying to squash me into the footpath.”
“I don’t know why they bother, it’s not as if they can kill you.”
“Maybe they don’t want to kill me, but it might hurt me enough to keep me off the job for a couple of days. They’re trying to get me out of the way,” I say. “You’ve been following things. Stirrers are building again around Brisbane. I’ve needed to pull people in from all over the place to keep on top of it. Even I’ve had to start hunting them when I have a spare moment.”
“It’s good to keep your hand in.”
“Yes, but I’d prefer to have more of a say in it.”
“Draw in even more staff if you need to. As your number of stirs has increased, ours have declined. And that’s been happening across the board. You’re Orcus, your decisions drive and define our company, and this war. It is OK for you to direct Pomps where you want.”
“Yes, but what if that’s exactly what the Stirrer god wants?”
“I don’t think so,” Cerbo says. “What I think is happening is that, for whatever reason, perhaps only because you have chosen to base yourself there, the Stirrer god has in turn chosen Australia as some sort of focal point.”
“You think I’m in some way responsible for the End of Days?”
“I’ve considered it. Not responsible as such, merely a target for the god to aim at. Suzanne certainly believed it. Though in my darkest moments I wonder. What if it’s your very presence as Orcus that ignites the final flame, so to speak? Or perhaps it sees a weakness, a flaw in you that it can use. Both disturbing propositions wouldn’t you say?”
“Or maybe it just knows that it can’t lose and wants a big old fight before it devours all life from the world.” HD lets out an anticipatory growl, and tugs at my face. Cerbo must see a little of it, because he pales.
“It could be any one of those things,” Cerbo says. “Which is why I just wish you’d let me send spies back into the Stirrer city.”
Suzanne had sent spies transformed into Stirrers deep into the city of Devour. They never lasted long, and while their information had at times proven invaluable, or so Cerbo told me, the mortality rate had been almost total. To say that the few who had come back were damaged is something of an understatement.
“No,” I say. “I refuse to send people to die.”
“Sometimes that’s what running the business requires.”
“Maybe before me, but not now.” We hold each other’s gaze, Cerbo is the first to look away.
“I would prefer it if you visited me a bit more often.”
I try and soothe him with a smile. “I think it’s only fair that I visit my other offices. Ari likes visits too. So do Mill, David and Ishi, they all do.”
“I wouldn’t trust Ariana. She lacks subtlety.”
Like I would trust any Ankou other than Tim. “Wouldn’t that be a reason to trust her? Besides she’s an Ankou—you’re all about subtlety.” And knives, and dreaming of the top job, because they all think they could do it so much better. Personally I trust Ari more than I ever will Cerbo, she’s ballsy and proud, and she reminds me of Lissa. “And people start to panic if they see me with you too much.”
Cerbo tilts his head, I’m sure he’d like it known that I visit him more frequently. I can see the cogs of his mind working overtime on this one. At last he smiles. “They think the god’s here, or nearly here.”
“Yeah, the End of Days is easier to deal with in the abstract, or at least with the thought that there are days in front of the ‘end of’ bit.”
“Yes, and I’d like to know just when, but…there’s not enough to tell me one way or another,” he says significantly. And we’re back to those damn spies, or lack thereof.
“What do you think?”
We’ve both seen the vast thing staining the heavens of the Deepest Dark, devouring souls like they were sweetmeats.
Cerbo gets out of his chair. “Come with me.”
There’s a door in one side of the office, an old wooden thing. He pulls a key from his pocket, inserts it in the lock, and with some effort, as though the lock is stuck, or rusted, turns the key. He smiles at the click, and pushes the door open.
I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t this.
The room beyond is tiny: more a chamber, ascetic in the extreme. A single bed and a small table on which an old book sits—its cover cracked, its pages well thumbed. In one corner of the room is a small dressing table, topped with a tiny mirror and two lipsticks. Next to the table is a narrow wardrobe, the sort you’d have to really squeeze into to find Narnia, and at the risk of getting stuck halfway.
The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy Page 55