On a Pale Horse (10 page)

The magic wind caused the field-goal attempt to fall short. The Ewes were given the skin on the fifty-foot line. They wasted no time; their first play was a run through the center that gained thirty-five feet. There was no magic about it; they had sneaked through a mundane play, and it had worked, causing the opposition to waste its counterspells.

Then the Doe defense grew tougher. Antimagic blocked magic, and the stout pursuit stiffed the Ewe offense. It looked as if the Ewes would have to punt—and their two-minute penalty wind had died, so the ball would have no extra carry. Their fans in the audience were silent.

Suddenly there was a break. The Ewe quarterback launched a desperation toss, buttressed by a levitation-spell, that hurtled a hundred and twenty feet. The receiver closed on it—and the defending Doe, Number 69, shoved her out of the way and intercepted the ball.

There was an exclamation of admiration from the Doe fans, and the Doe cheerleaders went crazy, for an enchantment
of obscuration had concealed the foul from the officials. But there was a bleat of purest wrath from the Ewes. They turned, galloped down the field, and tackled Number 69 so hard she flipped endwise in the air and landed in a heap.

Now there was a hush—for 69 did not rise. The team doctor rushed over to examine her.

Abruptly Zane remembered his job. His watch had zeroed, and the arrow pointed at the fallen Doe.

He hurried out, knowing she was done for. He did not even pause: he squeezed between oblivious players, squatted beside the body, and hooked out the soul.

No one seemed to notice. Number 69, who had been quivering as if in terrible pain, relaxed. Now she was dead, and it was a relief, for her neck was broken.

Zane walked away, folding the soul as he went. He knew he should not have allowed himself to be distracted by the game; that was unprofessional. Because of his neglect, the woman had suffered as much as a minute longer than she should have.

Unprofessional? Who was he to fancy himself a professional in this grim business! Still, he did have a job to do, and he might as well do it properly. At the very least, he could do it in a manner that relieved distress, rather than promoted it.

His watch was counting down again. He had five minutes. He hurried to the Deathmobile, climbed in, started it, oriented it, and hit the hyperdrive button so hard he bruised his finger. Yes, he was angry with himself! He resolved never again to allow extraneous events to divert him from proper attention to his client.

He brought out the two analysis gems to review the new soul, but in his unsettlement he dropped one. By the time he picked it up from the floor, he knew the reading had been invalidated, and he didn’t want to start over; there would not be time for a proper job now. He folded the soul away for future handling.

Then, idly, he passed the brown gem down his own body. It glimmered. It was reading his living soul!

Well, why not? The stone was concerned only with the evil in a given soul, not with its state of life or afterlife.
Actually, the soul was eternal; it was only the body that died. With these stones, he could assess the balance of good and evil in any person, living or dead.

How did his own tally stand? Zane knocked his forehead with his hand. He was an idiot to check his own soul, since he knew it was fifty-fifty and would remain so until his trial period in this office was done. Like the illegitimate baby, circumstance had locked him in.

Yes, he had reason to do his job well, however unqualified he might be for the office. His soul remained in peril of damnation. He hadn’t really worried about that during his normal life, but now that he was sure that Hell was really literal, he cared. He didn’t want to go there when he died! All he had to do was a good enough job so that his soul would be slated for Heaven. Then he would not have to fear Eternity, at such time as he got careless and was sent there forcefully.

The car stopped in another parking lot. This appeared to be a school. Zane got out and followed his arrow through the comblike serrations of the building complex. It was class-changing time, and children in the range of ten to twelve were scurrying every which way, generally ignoring both Zane and the posted WALK signs. One boy, however, plunged directly into him, naturally paying no attention to the obstacles in the way of his headlong rush.

The contact was emphatic. Zane suffered a mild lapse of breath. The boy righted himself and looked up. “Gee—Halloween!” he exclaimed. “A skull-face!” Then he zoomed away.

Halloween? Close enough. The lad had seen more accurately than he knew. Perhaps this was a talent of the young.

He passed near a classroom where computers were being described to bored students. The virtues of competing brands were highlighted on posters posted alphabetically around the room. It was good to be part of the computer age; Zane wouldn’t mind owning any one of those fine data processors. He understood they could also be used to summon quite powerful demons safely, for a computer never erred in setting up the tricky protective
spells required to prevent the supernatural from getting out of hand. But alas, he was now beyond that.

The next classroom dealt with modern technical applications of magic. Its students were equally inattentive; they had little interest in required basics of any type. Here the posters described competitively marketed brands of amulets, love potions, curses, magic mirrors, communication conches, cornucopias, voodoo dolls, mail-order ghosts, sophisticated spellbooks, and sundry gems of enchantment. Zane knew about those last from personal experience!

He arrived at the cubby that served as the school infirmary. There was another boy the size of the one who had bumped Zane. This boy was deathly ill. Beside him, the school’s part-time nurse was on the phone, exasperated. “… can’t wait for parental permission,” she was saying. “I can never reach them during the day anyway. We need an ambulance-carpet immediately! He’s got to get to the hospital before he—”

She paused as her eyes fell on Zane. “Oh, no!” she breathed, setting down the phone. “It’s too late, isn’t it?”

Zane glanced at the Deathwatch. It was time. “Yes,” he said. He reached into the boy and drew out his soul.

The nurse covered her eyes with one hand. “I must be hallucinating,” she said brokenly. “It’s terrible when they are taken so young.”

Zane stood there, the small soul dangling from his hand. He felt guilty. Why should such an innocent child have to die? “I must do my job,” he said to the nurse. “But if you would be so kind—please tell me the nature of this boy.”

“I must be crazy,” she said, looking directly at Zane. “Talking to a delusion. But I will answer. He was the youngest drug addict I’ve dealt with—well, not the youngest, if you count the potheads, but the worst for this age bracket. He was hooked on anything he could get—coke, heroin, acid, magic dust—anything at all that zonked him out of dull existence. He lied, he stole, he—you know, lured clients to illicit activities—anything to get money for a fix. This time he got something too strong—must
have been uncut helldust, and he didn’t believe it—and Satan took him in.”

“Not necessarily Satan,” Zane said. “His soul is in near balance between good and evil; it may yet be saved.”

“I hope so. He was a decent kind, underneath. Sometimes we talked, while he was recovering from a siege. He wanted to quit; he just couldn’t control his habit. I think it was genetic, some chemical imbalance in him that threw him into an irrational depression, so he had to escape by any means available. I know he didn’t want to be that way. I turned him in a dozen times, for his own good, and he never held it against me. But they tend to go easy on juveniles, and—oh, I should have taken stronger measures! But I kept hoping, each time, that he’d straighten out—”

Others were coming, and Zane felt it prudent to withdraw. But he had food for thought. First, he knew now that some people could see him and recognize him for his office, even if they weren’t dying themselves, and even if they didn’t quite believe it. Maybe it was a matter of circumstance; the nurse was in a distraught condition, ready to perceive Death; and, of course, she really did care about the client. Second, the young could indeed have much evil on their souls. This boy had evidently committed heinous acts to support his drug habit. So it made sense; had the boy not OD’d now, when the good still matched the evil in him, the balance would have shifted irrevocably, putting him in Hell for certain when he died later. Maybe he was lucky he had gone today.

Yet that comment about the genetic origin of the lad’s compulsion bothered Zane. Depression was an insidious thing, as he knew from his own experience in life; it manifested in obscure ways; indeed, it could be biologic rather than psychologic. Was it fair to charge sin against a person’s soul when he couldn’t really help what he did? Zane did not have the answer, but he wasn’t easy about it.

The watch was running again, swinging backward into the next countdown. Zane knew he’d be crowded until he caught up to his original schedule, but he felt the need to pause again. He pressed the STOP button.

What was bothering him was this: death was a serious
business; he could not blithely collect souls without developing some rationale for himself. Was this really what he wanted to do for all eternity?

He sat in the car, in the parking lot, thinking. He needed an answer, but somehow couldn’t get a grasp on the nature of his wish. He didn’t know what he wanted to do, only that something about his present course was wrong.

His reverie was jarringly interrupted by noise from the radio of a slowly passing car. It was a Hellfire commercial, sung to the tune of a popular hymn:
Hark, the herald angels shout. Ten more years till you get out! Ten more years till you are free, from life’s penitentiary!

Satan never quit campaigning! Zane knew himself to be no angel, but this open mockery of Heavenly things disturbed him. Could it really lure wavering souls to Hell? Surely he himself, in life, had been considered a candidate for such infernal blandishments. Even if his soul had not proved to be entirely balanced between good and evil, he would have known he was of questionable virtue. There were blots on his conscience that could never be erased. He was, in secret fact, a murderer—now he had to admit it to himself!—and he had believed for some time that he was destined for Hell, though he had not quite allowed himself to believe Hell existed. Who was he to judge the souls of others? So the schoolboy had the sins of drug addiction on his soul; was Zane himself any better?

Yet what choice did he have now? It always came back to that. If he didn’t do his job, how would that improve anyone’s situation? Someone else would replace him in the office of Death, and the grim game would continue.

“It might as well be me,” Zane said, pressing the button to resume the countdown. But he remained unsatisfied. He had not really answered his question. He was doing this job because he didn’t know what else to do and wasn’t ready to quit what form of life remained to him. His own suicide attempt had been a passing thing, a wild impulse of the moment; he really did want to live. Since he had to perform or face some sort of Divine accounting, he performed. That really was not much credit to him.

In fact, Zane realized, he was not much of a person. If he had never lived, the world would not have been a
worse place. He was just one of the blah mediocrities that cluttered the cosmos. It was ironic that he should have backed into the significant office he now held.

He had started and oriented the car. He was zooming across the surface of the world, hardly paying attention. This was, if he remembered correctly, his sixth case coming up; he was getting the hang of it. Of course there was still much to learn—assuming he really wanted to learn it.

Ocean gave way to land. There was a fleeting beach, and a green shore region; then they plowed through mountains and across a desert whose sands were wrinkled into dunes like the waves of the sea, frozen in place. On south, still in hyperdrive; this was a huge island—in fact, a continent!

The Deathmobile stopped at last at the dead end of a dirt road in mountainous country. Four minutes remained on the timer. Where was the client?

The arrowstone for once seemed uncertain. He turned it about, and the arrow was inconsistent. In any event, there was no human habitation in sight in this wild land.

A blinking light on the dash caught his attention. It was the one with the horsehead silhouette. Zane pushed it.

He was astride the great stallion, his cloak swirling in the breeze. “What next, friend steed?” he inquired.

The Deathhorse moved forward, galloping up the steep slope to the side. No ordinary horse could have moved this way—but of course this was a unique animal. Mortis leaped to the top of the mountain ridge, where a primitive cottage perched.

This was the place. The arrowstone had not guided him before, because he had been holding it level instead of angled. It had not been able to point upward to the cottage. The car had not driven here because no ordinary car could, and the approach of Death was always circumspect.

As they traversed the somewhat harrowing slope of the mountain, Zane thought again about himself and his office. There was something about the appearance of danger, such as a possible fall, that caused him to review his
most morbid thoughts. If he felt unfit for the office of Death and did not want to judge others when he knew he was no better than they were, why should he do it? If his abdication meant he would die the death he had aborted before, maybe that was proper. If he went to Hell, maybe that, too, was proper. After all, he had killed his mother; he could hardly go to join her in Heaven! The fact that he now clung to a kind of life had no relevance; it was fitting that he pay his penalty.

Yes—that was what he had to do! “I resign the office!” he cried impulsively. “Take me directly to Hell!”

Nothing happened. The horse trotted toward the cottage, ignoring Zane’s outburst.

Of course. He could not blithely resign. He had to be killed by his successor, who would probably be a client like himself and who would turn on him.