Reaper Man (3 page)

The Bursar riffled desperately through his limited repertoire of small talk relating to women. He leaned down to Windle’s gnarled ear.

“Isn’t there rather a lot of,” he struck out aimlessly, “washing things? And making beds and cookery and all that sort of thing?”

“Not in the kind of, mm, life
I
have in mind,” said Windle firmly.

The Bursar shut his mouth. The Archchancellor banged on a table with a spoon.

“Brothers—” he began, when there was something approaching silence. This prompted a loud and ragged chorus of cheering.

“—As you all know we are here tonight to mark the, ah,
retirement
”—nervous laughter—“of our old friend and colleague Windle Poons. You know, seeing old Windle sitting here tonight puts me in mind, as luck would have it, of the story of the cow with three wooden legs. It appears that there was this cow, and—”

The Bursar let his mind wander. He knew the story. The Archchancellor always mucked up the punch line, and in any case he had other things on his mind.

He kept looking back at the little table.

The Bursar was a kindly if nervous soul, and quite enjoyed his job. Apart from anything else, no other wizard wanted it. Lots of wizards wanted to be Archchancellor, for example, or the head of one of the eight orders of magic, but practically no wizards wanted to spend lots of time in an office shuffling bits of paper and doing sums. All the paperwork of the University tended to accumulate in the Bursar’s office, which meant that he went to bed tired at nights but at least slept soundly and didn’t have to check very hard for unexpected scorpions in his nightshirt.

Killing off a wizard of a higher grade was a recognized way of getting advancement in the orders. However, the only person likely to want to kill the Bursar was someone else who derived a quiet pleasure from columns of numbers, all neatly arranged, and people like that don’t often go in for murder.
*

He recalled his childhood, long ago, in the Ramtop Mountains. He and his sister used to leave a glass of wine and a cake out every Hogswatch-night for the Hogfather. Things had been different, then. He’d been a lot younger and hadn’t known much and had probably been a lot happier.

For example, he hadn’t known that he might one day be a wizard and join other wizards in leaving a glass of wine and a cake and a rather suspect chicken vol-au-vent and a paper party hat for…

…someone else.

There’d been Hogswatch parties, too, when he was a little boy. They’d always follow a certain pattern. Just when all the children were nearly sick with excitement, one of the grown-ups would say, archly, “I think we’re going to have a special visitor!” and, amazingly on cue, there’d be a suspicious ringing of hog bells outside the window and in would come…

…in would come…

The Bursar shook his head. Someone’s grandad in false whiskers, of course. Some jolly old boy with a sack of toys, stamping the snow off his boots. Someone who
gave
you something.

Whereas
tonight
…

Of course, old Windle probably felt different about it. After one hundred and thirty years, death probably had a certain attraction. You probably became quite interested in finding out what happened next.

The Archchancellor’s convoluted anecdote wound jerkily to its close. The assembled wizards laughed dutifully, and then tried to work out the joke.

The Bursar looked surreptitiously at his watch. It was now twenty minutes past nine.

Windle Poons made a speech. It was long and rambling and disjointed and went on about the good old days and he seemed to think that most of the people around him were people who had been, in fact, dead for about fifty years, but that didn’t matter because you got into the habit of not listening to old Windle.

The Bursar couldn’t tear his eyes away from his watch. From inside came the squeak of the treadle as the demon patiently pedalled his way toward infinity.

Twenty-five minutes past the hour.

The Bursar wondered how it was supposed to happen. Did you hear—
I think we’re going to have a very special visitor
—hoofbeats outside?

Did the door actually open or did He come through it? Silly question. He was renowned for His ability to get into sealed places—
especially
into sealed places, if you thought about it logically. Seal yourself in anywhere and it was only a matter of time.

The Bursar hoped He’d use the door properly. His nerves were twanging as it was.

The conversational level was dropping. Quite a few other wizards, the Bursar noticed, were glancing at the door.

Windle was at the center of a very tactfully widening circle. No one was actually avoiding him, it was just that an apparent random Brownian motion was gently moving everyone away.

Wizards can see Death. And when a wizard dies, Death arrives in person to usher him into the Beyond. The Bursar wondered why this was considered a plus—

“Don’t know what you’re all looking at,” said Windle, cheerfully.

The Bursar opened his watch.

The hatch under the 12 snapped up.

“Can you knock it off with all this shaking around?” squeaked the demon. “I keeps on losing count.”

“Sorry,” the Bursar hissed. It was nine twenty-nine.

The Archchancellor stepped forward.

“’Bye, then, Windle,” he said, shaking the old man’s parchment-like hand. “The old place won’t seem the same without you.”

“Don’t know how we’ll manage,” said the Bursar, thankfully.

“Good luck in the next life,” said the Dean. “Drop in if you’re ever passing and happen to, you know, remember who you’ve been.”

“Don’t be a stranger, you hear?” said the Archchancellor.

Windle Poons nodded amiably. He hadn’t heard what they were saying. He nodded on general principles.

The wizards, as one man, faced the door.

The hatch under the 12 snapped up again.

“Bing bing bong bing,” said the demon. “Bingely-bingely bong bing bing.”

“What?” said the Bursar, jolted.

“Half past nine,” said the demon.

The wizards turned to Windle Poons. They looked faintly accusing.

“What’re you all looking at?” he said.

The seconds hand on the watch squeaked onward.

“How are you feeling?” said the Dean loudly.

“Never felt better,” said Windle. “Is there anymore of that, mm, rum left?”

The assembled wizards watched him pour a generous measure into his beaker.

“You want to go easy on that stuff,” said the Dean nervously.

“Good health!” said Windle Poons.

The Archchancellor drummed his fingers on the table.

“Mr. Poons,” he said, “are you quite
sure?
”

Windle had gone off at a tangent. “Any more of these toturerillas? Not that I call it proper food,” he said, “dippin’ bits of hard bikky in sludge, what’s so special about that? What I could do with right now is one of Mr. Dibbler’s famous meat pies—”

And then he died.

The Archchancellor glanced at his fellow wizards, and then tiptoed across to the wheelchair and lifted a blue-veined wrist to check the pulse. He shook his head.

“That’s the way I want to go,” said the Dean.

“What, muttering about meat pies?” said the Bursar.

“No. Late.”

“Hold on. Hold on,” said the Archchancellor. “This isn’t right, you know. According to tradition, Death
himself
turns up for the death of a wiz—”

“Perhaps He was busy,” said the Bursar hurriedly.

“That’s right,” said the Dean. “Bit of a serious flu epidemic over Quirm way, I’m told.”

“Quite a storm last night, too. Lots of shipwrecks, I daresay,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

“And of course it’s springtime, when you get a great many avalanches in the mountains.”

“And plagues.”

The Archchancellor stroked his beard thoughtfully.

“Hmmm,” he said.

Alone of all the creatures in the world, trolls believe that all living things go through Time backward. If the past is visible and the future is hidden, they say, then it means you must be facing the wrong way. Everything alive is going through life back to front. And this is a very interesting idea, considering it was invented by a race who spend most of their time hitting one another on the head with rocks.

Whichever way around it is, Time is something that living creatures possess.

Death galloped down through towering black clouds.

And now he had Time, too.

The time of his life.

Windle Poons peered into the darkness.

“Hallo?” he said. “Hallo. Anyone there? What ho?”

There was a distant, forlorn soughing, as of wind at the end of a tunnel.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” said Windle, his voice trembling with mad cheerfulness. “Don’t worry. I’m quite looking forward to it, to tell the truth.”

He clapped his hands, spiritual hands, and rubbed them together with forced enthusiasm.

“Get a move on. Some of us have got new lives to go to,” he said.

The darkness remained inert. There was no shape, no sound. It was void, without form. The spirit of Windle Poons moved on the face of the darkness.

It shook its head. “Blow this for a lark,” it muttered. “This isn’t right at all.”

It hung around for a while and then, because there didn’t seem anything else for it, headed for the only home it had ever known.

It was a home he’d occupied for one hundred and thirty years. It wasn’t expecting him back and put up a lot of resistance. You either had to be very determined or very powerful to overcome that sort of thing, but Windle Poons had been a wizard for more than a century. Besides, it was like breaking into your own house, the old familiar property that you’d lived in for years. You knew where the metaphorical window was that didn’t shut properly.

In short, Windle Poons went back to Windle Poons.

Wizards don’t believe in gods in the same way that most people don’t find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they’re there, they know they’re there for a purpose, they’d probably agree that they have a place in a well-organized universe, but they wouldn’t see the point of
believing
, of going around saying, “O great table, without whom we are as naught.” Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.

Nevertheless, there is a small chapel off the University’s Great Hall, because while the wizards stand right behind the philosophy as outlined above, you don’t become a successful wizard by getting up gods’ noses even if those noses only exist in an ethereal or metaphorical sense. Because while wizards don’t believe in gods they know for a fact that
gods
believe in gods.

And in this chapel lay the body of Windle Poons. The University had instituted twenty-four hours’ lying-in-state ever since the embarrassing affair thirty years previously with the late Prissal “Merry Prankster” Teatar.

The body of Windle Poons opened its eyes. Two coins jingled onto the stone floor.

The hands, crossed over the chest, unclenched.

Windle raised his head. Some idiot had stuck a lily on his stomach.

His eyes swiveled sideways. There was a candle on either side of his head.

He raised his head some more.

There were two more candles down there, too.

Thank goodness for old Teatar, he thought. Otherwise I’d already be looking at the underside of a rather cheap pine lid.

Funny thing, he thought. I’m thinking. Clearly.

Wow.

Windle lay back, feeling his spirit refilling his body like gleaming molten metal running through a mold. White-hot thoughts seared across the darkness of his brain, fired sluggish neurones into action.

It was never like this when I was alive.

But I’m not dead.

Not alive and not dead.

Sort of non-alive.

Or un-dead.

Oh
dear
…

He swung himself upright. Muscles that hadn’t worked properly for seventy or eighty years jerked into overdrive. For the first time in his entire life, he corrected himself, better make that “period of existence,” Windle Poons’ body was entirely under Windle Poons’ control. And Windle Poons’ spirit wasn’t about to take any lip from a bunch of muscles.

Now the body stood up. The knee joints resisted for a while, but they were no more able to withstand the onslaught of will-power than a sick mosquito can withstand a blowtorch.

The door to the chapel was locked. However, Windle found that the merest pressure was enough to pull the lock out of the woodwork and leave fingerprints in the metal of the doorhandle.

“Oh, goodness,” he said.

He piloted himself out into the corridor. The distant clatter of cutlery and the buzz of voices suggested that one of the University’s four daily meals was in progress.

He wondered whether you were allowed to eat when you were dead. Probably not, he thought.

And could he eat, anyway? It wasn’t that he wasn’t hungry. It was just that…well, he knew how to think, and walking and moving were just a matter of twitching some fairly obvious nerves, but how exactly did your stomach work?

It began to dawn on Windle that the human body is not run by the brain, despite the brain’s opinion on the matter. In fact it’s run by dozens of complex automatic systems, all whirring and clicking away with the kind of precision that isn’t noticed until it breaks down.

He surveyed himself from the control room of his skull. He looked at the silent chemical factory of his liver with the same sinking feeling as a canoe builder might survey the controls of a computerized supertanker. The mysteries of his kidneys awaited Windle’s mastery of renal control. What, when you got right down to it,
was
a spleen? And how did you make it go?

His heart sank.

Or, rather, it didn’t.

“Oh,
gods
,” muttered Windle, and leaned against the wall. How did it work, now? He prodded a few likely-looking nerves. Was it
systolic…diastolic…systolic…diastolic…?
And then there were the lungs, too…