Mort

“Of course I didn’t. But it looks as though what people want doesn’t come into it, does it? I’m trying to be sensible about this.”

Mort stared at his knees. Then he stood up.

“I think I’d better be going,” he said coldly.

He folded up the scythe and stuck it into its sheath behind the saddle. Then he looked at the window.

“You came through that,” said Keli, helpfully. “Look, when I said—”

“Does it open?”

“No. There’s a balcony along the passage. But people will see you!”

Mort ignored her, pulled open the door and led Binky out into the corridor. Keli ran after them. A maid stopped, curtsied, and frowned slightly as her brain wisely dismissed the sight of a very large horse walking along the carpet.

The balcony overlooked one of the inner courtyards. Mort glanced over the parapet, and then mounted.

“Watch out for the duke,” he said. “He’s behind all this.”

“My father always warned me about him,” said the princess. “I’ve got a foodtaster.”

“You should get a bodyguard as well,” said Mort. “I must go. I have important things to do. Farewell,” he added, in what he hoped was the right tone of injured pride.

“Shall I see you again?” said Keli. “There’s lots I want to—”

“That might not be a good idea, if you think about it,” said Mort haughtily. He clicked his tongue, and Binky leapt into the air, cleared the parapet and cantered up into the blue morning sky.

“I wanted to say thank you!” Keli yelled after him.

The maid, who couldn’t get over the feeling that something was wrong and had followed her, said, “Are you all right, ma’am?”

Keli looked at her distractedly.

“What?” she demanded.

“I just wondered if—everything was all right?”

Keli’s shoulders sagged.

“No,” she said. “Everything’s all wrong. There’s a dead assassin in my bedroom. Could you please have something done about it?

“And—” she held up a hand—“I don’t want you to say ‘Dead, ma’am?’ or ‘Assassin, ma’am?’ or scream or anything, I just want you to get something done about it. Quietly. I think I’ve got a headache. So just nod.”

The maid nodded, bobbed uncertainly, and backed away.

———

Mort wasn’t sure how he got back. The sky simply changed from ice blue to sullen grey as Binky eased himself into the gap between dimensions. He didn’t land on the dark soil of Death’s estate, it was simply there, underfoot, as though an aircraft carrier had gently manoeuvred itself under a jump jet to save the pilot all the trouble of touching down.

The great horse trotted into the stableyard and halted outside the double door, swishing his tail. Mort slid off and ran for the house.

And stopped, and ran back, and filled the hayrack, and ran for the house, and stopped and muttered to himself and ran back and rubbed the horse down and checked the water bucket, and ran for the house, and ran back and fetched the horseblanket down from its hook on the wall and buckled it on. Binky gave him a dignified nuzzle.

No-one seemed to be about as Mort slipped in by the back door and made his way to the library, where even at this time of night the air seemed to be made of hot dry dust. It seemed to take years to locate Princess Keli’s biography, but he found it eventually. It was a depressingly slim volume on a shelf only reachable by the library ladder, a wheeled rickety structure that strongly resembled an early siege engine.

With trembling fingers he opened it at the last page, and groaned.

“The princess’s assassination at the age of fifteen,” he read, “was followed by the union of Sto Lat with Sto Helit and, indirectly, the collapse of the city states of the central plain and the rise of—”

He read on, unable to stop. Occasionally he groaned again.

Finally he put the book back, hesitated, and then shoved it behind a few other volumes. He could still feel it there as he climbed down the ladder, shrieking its incriminating existence to the world.

There were few ocean-going ships on the Disc. No captain liked to venture out of sight of a coastline. It was a sorry fact that ships which looked from a distance as though they were going over the edge of the world weren’t in fact disappearing over the horizon, they were in fact dropping over the edge of the world.

Every generation or so a few enthusiastic explorers doubted this and set out to prove it wrong. Strangely enough, none of them had ever come back to announce the result of their researches.

The following analogy would, therefore, have been meaningless to Mort.

He felt as if he’d been shipwrecked on the Titanic but in the nick of time had been rescued. By the Lusitania.

He felt as though he’d thrown a snowball on the spur of the moment and watched the ensuing avalanche engulf three ski resorts.

He felt history unravelling all around him.

He felt he needed someone to talk to, quickly.