Reaper Man (Discworld #11)

Reaper Man (Discworld #11) Page 4

"My nose tends to peel if I'm out in the sun too long," said Windle. "I don't know if that's any help. " He tried to smile.

The wizards looked at one another and shrugged.

"Get out," said the Archchancellor. They trooped out.

Ridcully followed them. He paused at the door and waved a finger at Windle.

"This uncooperative attitude, Windle, is not doing you any good," he said, and slammed the door behind him.

After a few seconds the four screws holding the door handle very slowly unscrewed themselves. They rose up and orbited near the ceiling for a while, and then fell.

Windle thought about this for a while.

Memories. He had lots of them. One hundred and thirty years of memories. When he was alive he hadn't been able to remember one-hundredth of the things he knew but now he was dead, his mind uncluttered with everything except the single silver thread of his thoughts, he could feel them all there. Everything he'd ever read, everything he'd ever seen, everything he'd ever heard. All there, ranged in ranks. Nothing forgotten. Everything in its place.

Three inexplicable phenomena in one day. Four, if you included the fact of his continued existence. That was really inexplicable.

It needed explicating.

Well, that was someone else's problem. Everything was someone else's problem now.

The wizards crouched outside the door of Windle's room.

"Got everything?" said Ridcully.

"Why can't we get some of the servants to do it?" muttered the Senior Wrangler. "It's undignified."

"Because I want it done properly and with dignity," snapped the Archchancellor. "If anyone's going to bury a wizard at a crossroads with a stake hammered through him, then wizards ought to do it. After all, we're his friends."

"What is this thing, anyway?" said the Dean, inspecting the implement in his hands.

"It's called a shovel, " said the Senior Wrangler. "I've seen the gardeners use them. You stick the sharp end in the ground. Then it gets a bit technical."

Ridcully squinted through the keyhole.

"He's lying down again," he said. He got up, brushing the dust off his knees, and grasped the door handle. "Right," he said. "Take your time from me. One...two..."

Modo the gardener was trundling a barrow load of hedge trimmings to a bonfire behind the new High Energy Magic research building when about half a dozen wizards went past at, for wizards, high speed.

Windle Poons was being borne aloft between them.

Modo heard him to say, "Really, Archchancellor, are you quite sure this one will work -?"

"We've got your best interests at heart," said Ridcully.

"I'm sure, but -"

"We'll soon have you feeling your old self again," said the Bursar.

"No, we won't," hissed the Dean. "That's the whole point!"

"We'll soon have you not feeling your old self again, that's the whole point," stuttered the Bursar, as they rounded the corner.

Modo picked up the handles of the barrow again and pushed it thoughtfully towards the secluded area where he kept his bonfire, his compost heaps, his leaf-mould pile, and the little shed he sat in when it rained.

He used to be assistant gardener at the palace, but this job was a lot more interesting. You really got to see life.

Ankh-Morpork society is street society. There is always something interesting going on. At the moment, the driver of a two-horse fruit wagon was holding the Dean six inches in the air by the scruff of the Dean's robe and was threatening to push the Dean's face through the back of the Dean's head.

"It's peaches, right?" he kept bellowing. "You know what happens to peaches what lies around too long? They get bruised. Lots of things round here are going to get bruised."

"I am a wizard, you know, " said the Dean, his pointy shoes dangling. "If it wasn't for the fact that it would be against the rules for me to use magic in anything except a purely defensive manner, you would definitely be in a lot of trouble."

"What you doing, anyway?" said the driver, lowering the Dean so he could look suspiciously over his shoulder.

"Yeah," said a man trying to control the team pulling a lumber wagon, "what's going on? There's people here being paid by the hour, you know!"

"Move along at the front there!"

The lumber driver turned in his seat and addressed the queue of carts behind him. "I'm trying to, " he said.

"It's not my fault, is it? There's a load of wizards digging up the godsdamn street!"

The Archchancellor's muddy face peered over the edge of the hole.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Dean, " he said, "I told you to sort things out!"

"Yes, I was just asking this gentleman to back up and go another way," said the Dean, who was afraid he was beginning to choke.

The fruiterer turned him around 90 that he could see along the crowded streets. "Ever tried to back up sixty carts all at once?" he demanded. "It's not easy. Especially when everyone can't move because you guys have got it so's the carts are backed up all round the block and no-one can move because everyone's in someone else's way, right?"

The Dean tried to nod. He had wondered himself about the wisdom of digging the hole at the junction of the Street of Small Gods and Broad Way, two of the busiest streets in Ankh-Morpork. It had seemed logical at the time. Even the most persistent undead ought to stay decently buried under that amount of traffic. The only problem was that no-one had thought seriously about the difficulty of digging up a couple of main streets during the busy time of day.

"All right, all right, what's going on here?"

The crowd of spectators opened to admit the bulky figure of Sergeant Colon of the Watch. He moved through the people unstoppably, his stomach leading the way. When he saw the wizards, waist deep in a hole in the middle of the road, his huge red face brightened up.

"What's this, then?" he said. "A gang of international crossroads thieves?"

He was overjoyed. His long-term policing strategy was paying off!

The Archchancellor tipped a shovelful of Ankh-Morpork loam over his boots.

"Don't be stupid, man," he snapped. "This is vitally important."

"Oh, yes. That's what they all say," said Sergeant Colon, not a man to be easily steered from a particular course of thought once he'd got up to mental speed. "'I bet there's hundreds of villages in heathen places like Klatch that'd pay good money for a nice prestigious crossroads like this, eh?"

Ridcully looked up at him with his mouth open.

"What are you gabbling about, officer?" he said. He pointed irritably to his pointy hat. "Didn't you hear me? We're wizards. This is wizard business. So if you could just sort of direct the traffic around us, there's a good chance -"

"- these peaches bruise as soon as you even look at 'em ¨C" said a voice behind Sergeant Colon.

"The old idiots have been holding us up for half an hour," said a cattle drover who had long ago lost control of forty steers now wandering aimlessly around the nearby streets. "I wants 'em arrested."

It dawned on the sergeant that he had inadvertently placed himself centre stage in a drama involving hundreds of people, some of them wizards and all of them angry.

"What are you doing, then?" he said weakly.

"We're burying our colleague. What does it look like?" said Ridcully.

Colon's eyes swivelled to an open coffin by the side of the road. Windle Poons gave him a little wave.

"But... he's not dead... is he?" he said, his forehead wrinkling as he tried to get ahead of the situation.

"Appearances can be deceptive," said the Archchancellor.

"But he just waved to me," said the sergeant, desperately.

"So?"

"Well, it's not normal for -"

"It's all right, sergeant, " said Windle.

Sergeant Colon sidled closer to the coffin.

"Didn't I see you throw yourself into the river last night?" he said, out of the corner of his mouth.

"Yes. You were very helpful," said Windle.

"And then you threw yourself sort of out again," said the sergeant.

"I'm afraid so."

"But you were down there for ages."

"Well, it was very dark, you see. I couldn't find the steps."

Sergeant Colon had to concede the logic of this.

"Well, I suppose you must be dead, then," he said. 'No-one could stay down there who wasn't dead."

"This is it," Windle agreed.

"Only why are you waving and talking?" said Colon.

The Senior Wrangler poked his head out of the hole.

"It's not unknown for a dead body to move and make noises after death, Sergeant," he volunteered. "It's all down to involuntary muscular spasms."

"Actually, Senior Wrangler is right," said Windle Poons. "I read that somewhere."

"Oh. " Sergeant Colon looked around. "Right, " he said, uncertainly. "Well... fair enough, I suppose..."

"OK, we're done," said the Archchancellor, scrambling out of the hole, "it's deep enough. Come on, Windle, down you go."

"I really am very touched, you know," said Windle, lying back in the coffin. It was quite a good one, from the mortuary in Elm Street. The Archchancellor had let him choose it himself.

Ridcully picked up a mallet.

Windle sat up again.

"Everyone's going to so much trouble -"

"Yes, right," said Ridcully, looking around.

"Now - who's got the stake?"

Everyone looked at the Bursar.

The Bursar looked unhappy.

He fumbled in a bag.

"I couldn't get any, " he said.

The Archchancellor put his hand over his eyes.

"All right," he said quietly. "You know, I'm not surprised? Not surprised at all. What did you get? Lamb chops? A nice piece of pork?"

"Celery, " said the Bursar.

"It's his nerves, " said the Dean, quickly.

"Celery," said the Archchancellor, his self-control rigid enough to bend horseshoes around. "Right."

The Bursar handed him a soggy green bundle.

Ridcully took it.

"Now, Windle, " he said, "I'd like you to imagine that what I have in my hand -"

"It's quite all right, " said Windle.

"I'm not actually sure I can hammer -"

"I don't mind, I assure you, " said Windle.

"You don't?"

"The principle is sound," said Windle. "If you just hand me the celery but think hammering a stake, that's probably sufficient."

"That's very decent of you," said Ridcully. "That shows a very proper spirit."

"Esprit de corpse," said the Senior Wrangler.

Ridcully glared at him, and thrust the celery dramatically towards Windle.

"Take that!" he said.

"Thank you," said Windle.

"And now let's put the lid on and go and have some lunch," said Ridcully. "Don't worry, Windle. It's bound to work. Today is the last day of the rest of your life."

Windle lay in the darkness, listening to the hammering. There was a thump and a muffled imprecation against the Dean for not holding the end properly.

And then the patter of soil on the lid, getting fainter and more distant.

After a while a distant rumbling suggested that the commerce of the city was being resumed. He could even hear muffled voices.

He banged on the coffin lid.

"Can you beep it down?" he demanded. "There's people down here trying to be dead!"

He heard the voices stop. There was the sound of feet hurrying away.

Windle lay there for some time. He didn't know how long. He tried stopping all functions, but that just made things uncomfortable. Why was dying so difficult? Other people seemed to manage it, even without practice.

Also, his leg itched.

He tried to reach down to scratch it, and his hand touched something small and irregularly shaped. He managed to get his fingers around it.

It felt like a bundle of matches.

In a coffin? Did anyone think he'd smoke a quiet cigar to pass the time?

After a certain amount of effort he managed to push one boot off with the other boot and ease it up until he could just grasp it. This gave him a rough surface to strike the match on.

Sulphurous light filled his tiny oblong world.

There was a tiny scrap of cardboard pinned to the inside of the lid.

He read it.

He read it again.

The match went out.

He lit another one, just to check that what he had read really did exist.

The message was still as strange, even third time round:

Dead? Depressed?

Feel like starting it all again?

Then why not come along to the

FRESH START CLUB

Thursdays, 12 pm. 668 Elm Street

EVERY BODY WELCOME

The second match went out, taking the last of the oxygen with it.

Windle lay in the dark for a while, considering his next move and finishing off the celery.

Who'd have thought it?

And it suddenly dawned on the late Windle Poons that there was no such thing as somebody else's problem, and that just when you thought the world had pushed you aside it turned out to be full of strangeness. He knew from experience that the living never found out half of what was really happening, because they were too busy being the living. The onlooker sees most of the game, he told himself.

It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane. But it was strange. It had things in it like screws that unscrewed themselves, and little written messages to the dead.

He resolved to find out what was going on. And then... if Death wasn't going to come to him, he'd go to Death. He had his rights, after all. Yeah. He'd lead the biggest missing-person hunt of all time.

Windle grinned in the darkness.

Missing - believed Death.

Today was the first day of the rest of his life.

And Ankh-Morpork lay at his feet. Well, metaphorically. The only way was up.

He reached up, felt for the card in the dark, and pulled it free. He stuck it between his teeth.

Windle Poons braced his feet against the end of the box, pushed his hands past his head, and heaved.

The soggy loam of Ankh-Morpork moved slightly.

Windle paused out of habit to take a breath, and realised that there was no point. He pushed again. The end of the coffin splintered.

Windle pulled it towards him and tore the solid pine like paper. He was left with a piece of plank which would have been a totally useless spade for anyone with un-zombie-like strength.

Turning on to his stomach, tucking the earth around him with his impromptu spade and ramming it back with his feet, Windle Poons dug his way towards a fresh start.

Picture a landscape, a plain with rolling curves.

It's late summer in the octarine grass country below the towering peaks of the high Ramtops, and the predominant colours are umber and gold. Heat sears the landscape. Grasshoppers sizzle, as in a frying pan. Even the air is too hot to move. It's the hottest summer in living memory and, - in these parts, that's a long, long time.

Picture a figure on horseback, moving slowly along a road that's an inch deep in dust between fields of corn that already promise an unusually rich harvest.

Picture a fence of baked, dead wood. There's a notice pinned to it. The sun has faded the letters, but they are still readable.

Picture a shadow, falling across the notice. You can almost hear it reading both the words.

There's a track leading off the road, towards a small group of bleached buildings.

Picture dragging footsteps.

Picture a door, open.

Picture a cool, dark room, glimpsed through the open doorway. This isn't a room that people live in a lot. It's a room for people who live outdoors but have to come inside sometimes, when it gets dark. It's a room for harnesses and dogs, a room where oilskins are hung up to dry. There's a beer barrel by the door. There are flagstones on the floor and, along the ceiling beams, hooks for bacon. There's a scrubbed table that thirty hungry men could sit down at.

There are no men. There are no dogs. There is no beer.

There is no bacon.

There was silence after the knocking, and then the flap flap of slippers on flagstones. Eventually a skinny old woman with a face the colour and texture of a walnut peered around the door.

"Yes?" she said.

THE NOTICE SAID 'MAN WANTED'.

"Did it? Did it? That's been up there since before last winter!"

I AM SORRY? YOU NEED NO HELP?

The wrinkled face looked at him thoughtfully.

"I can't pay more'n sixpence a week, mind," it said.

The tall figure looming against the sunlight appeared to consider this.

YES. it said, eventually.

"I wouldn't even know where to start you workin', either. We haven't had any proper help here for three years. I just hire the lazy goodfornothin's from the village when I want 'em."

YES?

"You don't mind, then?"

I HAVE A HORSE.

The old woman peered around the stranger. In the yard was the most impressive horse she'd ever seen. Her eyes narrowed.

"And that's your horse, is it?"

YES.

"With all that silver on the harness and everything?"

YES.

"And you want to work for sixpence a week?"

YES.

The old woman pursed her lips. She looked from the stranger to the horse to the dilapidation around the farm.

She appeared to reach a decision, possibly on the lines that someone who owned no horses probably didn't have much to fear from a horse thief.

"You're to sleep in the barn, understand?" she said.

SLEEP? YES. OF COURSE. YES, I WILL HAVE TO SLEEP.

"Couldn't have you in the house anyway. It wouldn't be right."

THE BARN WILL BE QUITE ADEQUATE, I ASSURE YOU.

"But you can come into the house for your meals."

THANK YOU.

"My name's Miss Flitworth."

YES.

She waited.

"I expect you have a name, too," she prompted.

YES. THAT'S RIGHT.

She waited again.

I'M SORRY?

"What is your name?"

The stranger stared at her for a moment, and then looked around wildly.

"Come on," said Miss Flitworth. "l ain't employing no-one without no name. Mr... . ?"

The figure stared upwards.

MR. SKY?

"No-one's called Mr. Sky."

MR... . DOOR?

She nodded.

"Could be. Could be Mr. Door. There was a chap called Doors I knew once. Yeah. Mr. Door. And your first name? Don't tell me you haven't got one of those, too. You've got to be a Bill or a Tom or a Bruce or one of those names."

YES.

"What?"

ONE OF THOSE.

"Which one?"

ER. THE FIRST ONE?

"You're a Bill?"

YES?

Miss Flitworth rolled her eyes.

"All right, Bill Sky... " she said.

DOOR.

"Yeah. Sorry. All right, Bill Door..."

CALL ME BILL.

"And you can call me Miss Flitworth. I expect you want some dinner?"

I WOULD? AH. YES. THE MEAL OF THE EVENING. YES.

"You look half starved, to tell the truth. More than half, really. " She squinted at the figure. Somehow it was very hard to be certain what Bill Door looked like, or even remember the exact sound of his voice. Clearly he was there, and clearly he had spoken - otherwise why did you remember anything at all?

"There's a lot of people in these parts as don't use the name they were born with," she said. 'l always say there's nothing to be gained by going around asking pers'nal questions. I suppose you can work, Mr. Bill Door? I'm still getting the hay in off the high meadows and there'll be a lot of work come harvest. Can you use a scythe?"

Bill Door seemed to meditate on the question for some time. Then he said, I THINK THE ANSWER TO THAT IS A DEFINITE 'YES', MISS FLITWORTH.

Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler also never saw the sense in asking personal questions, at least insofar as they applied to him and were on the lines of 'Are these things yours to sell?" But no-one appeared to be coming forward to berate him for selling off their property, and that was good enough for him. He'd sold more than a thousand of the little globes this morning, and he'd had to employ a troll to keep up a flow from the mysterious source of supply in the cellar.

People loved them.

The principle of operation was laughably simple and easily graspable by the average Ankh-Morpork citizen after a few false starts.

If you gave the globe a shake, a cloud of little white snowflakes swirled up in the liquid inside and settled, delicately, on a tiny model of a famous Ankh-Morpork landmark. In some globes it was the University, or the Tower of Art, or the Brass Bridge, or the Patrician's Palace. The detail was amazing.

And then there were no more left. Well, thought Throat, that's a shame. Since they hadn't technically belonged to him - although morally, of course, morally they were his - he couldn't actually complain.

Well, he could complain, of course, but only under his breath and not to anybody specific. Maybe it was all for the best, come to think of it. Stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap. Get 'em off your hands - it made it much easier to spread them in a gesture of injured innocence when you said 'Who, me?"

They were really pretty, though. Except, strangely enough, for the writing. It was on the bottom of each globe, in shaky, amateurish letters, as if done by someone who had never seen writing before and was trying to copy some down. On the bottom of every globe, below the intricate little snowflake-covered building, were the words:

~fo r~3

4h~ MorPor"

Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of Unseen University, was a shameless autocondimentor. He had his own special cruet put in front of him at every meal. It consisted of salt, three types of pepper, four types of mustard, four types of vinegar, fifteen different kinds of chutney and his special favourite: Wow-Wow Sauce, a mixture of mature scumble, pickled cucumbers, capers, mustard, mangoes, figs, grated wahooni, anchovy essence, asafetida and, significantly, sulphur and saltpetre for added potency.

Ridcully inherited the formula from his uncle who, after half a pint of sauce on a big meal one evening, had a charcoal biscuit to settle his stomach, lit his pipe and disappeared in mysterious circumstances, although his shoes were found on the roof the following summer.

There was cold mutton for lunch. Mutton went well with Wow-Wow Sauce; on the night of Ridcully senior's death, for example, it had gone at least three miles.

Mustrum tied his napkin behind his neck, rubbed his hands together, and reached out.

The cruet moved.

He reached out again. It slid away.

Ridcully sighed.

"All right, you fellows," he said. "No magic at Table, you know the rules. Who's playing silly buggers?"

The other senior wizards stared at him.

"I, I, I don't think we can play it any more, " said the Bursar, who at the moment was only occasionally bouncing off the sides of sanity, "I, I, I think we lost some of the pieces..."

He looked around, giggled, and went back to trying to cut his mutton with a spoon. The other wizards were keeping knives out of his way at present.

The entire cruet floated up into the air and started to spin slowly. Then it exploded.

The wizards, dripping vinegar and expensive spices, watched it owlishly.

"It was probably the sauce," the Dean ventured. "It was definitely going a bit critical last night."

Something dropped on his head and landed in his lunch. It was a black iron screw, several inches long.

Another one mildly contused the Bursar.

After a second or two, a third landed point down on the table by the Archchancellor's hand and stuck there.

The wizards turned their eyes upwards.

The Great Hall was lit in the evenings by one massive chandelier, although the word so often associated with glittering prismatic glassware seemed inappropriate for the huge, heavy, black, tallow-encrusted thing that hung from the ceiling like a threatening overdraft. It could hold a thousand candles. It was directly over the senior wizards' table.