Mort

that needed to be said a long time ago and were simply content, now, to get on with their jobs with the minimum of inconvenience all round. To Mort it was rather like going for a walk after a really bad thunderstorm—everything was quite fresh, nothing was particularly unpleasant, but there was the sense of vast energies just expended.
    Finding out about Albert tagged itself on to the end of his list of things to do.
    H OLD THIS , said Death, and pushed a scythe into his hand while he swung himself up on to Binky. The scythe looked normal enough, except for the blade: it was so thin that Mort could see through it, a pale blue shimmer in the air that could slice flame and chop sound. He held it very carefully.
    R IGHT, BOY , said Death. C OME ON UP . A LBERT . D ON’T WAIT UP .
    The horse trotted out of the courtyard and into the sky.
    There should have been a flash or rush of stars. The air should have spiralled and turned into speeding sparks such as normally happens in the common, everyday trans-dimensional hyper-jumps. But this was Death, who has mastered the art of going everywhere without ostentation and could slide between dimensions as easily as he could slip through a locked door, and they moved at an easy gallop through cloud canyons, past great billowing mountains of cumulus, until the wisps parted in front of them and the Disc lay below, basking in sunlight.
    T HAT’S BECAUSE TIME IS ADJUSTABLE , said Death, when Mort pointed this out. I T’S NOT REALLY IMPORTANT .
    “I always thought it was.”
    P EOPLE THINK IT’S IMPORTANT ONLY BECAUSE THEY INVENTED IT , said Death somberly. Mort considered this rather trite, but decided not to argue.
    “What are we going to do now?” he said.
    T HERE’S A PROMISING WAR IN K LATCHISTAN , said Death. S EVERAL PLAGUE OUTBREAKS . O NE RATHER IMPORTANT ASSASSINATION, IF YOU’D PREFER .
    “What, a murder?”
    A YE, A KING.
    “Oh, kings,” said Mort dismissively. He knew about kings. Once a year a band of strolling players, or at any rate ambling ones, came to Sheepridge and the plays, they performed were invariably about kings. Kings were always killing one another, or being killed. The plots were quite complicated, involving mistaken identity, poisons, battles, long-lost sons, ghosts, witches and, usually, lots of daggers. Since it was clear that being a king was no picnic it was amazing that half the cast were apparently trying to become one. Mort’s idea of palace life was a little hazy, but he imagined that no one got much sleep.
    “I’d quite like to see a real king,” he said. “They wear crowns all the time, my granny said. Even when they go to the lavatory.”
    Death considered this carefully.
    T HERE’S NO TECHNICAL REASON WHY NOT , he conceded. I N MY EXPERIENCE, HOWEVER, IT IS GENERALLY NOT THE CASE .
    The horse wheeled, and the vast flat checkerboard of the Sto plain sped underneath them at lightning speed. This was rich country, full of silt and rolling cabbage fields and neat little kingdoms whose boundaries wriggled like snakes as small, formal wars, marriage pacts, complex alliances and the occasional bit of sloppy cartography changed the political shape of the land.
    “This king,” said Mort, as a forest zipped beneath them, “is he good or bad?”
    I NEVER CONCERN MYSELF WITH SUCH THINGS , Said Death. H E’S NO WORSE THAN ANY OTHER KING , I IMAGINE .
    “Does he have people put to death?” said Mort, and remembering who he was talking to added, “Saving y’honor’s presence, of course.”
    S OMETIMES . T HERE ARE SOME THINGS YOU HAVE TO DO, WHEN YOU’RE A KING .
    A city slid below them, clustered around a castle built on a rock outcrop that poked up out of the plain like a geological pimple. It was one huge rock from the distant Ramtops, Death said, left there by the retreating ice in the legendary days when the Ice Giants waged war on the gods and rode their glaciers across the land in an attempt to freeze the whole world. They’d given up in the end, however, and driven their great glittering flocks back to their hidden lands among the razor-backed mountains near the Hub. No one on the plains knew why they had done this; it was generally considered by the younger generation in the city of Sto Lat, the city around the rock, that it was because the place was dead boring.
    Binky trotted down over nothingness and touched down on the flagstones of the castle’s topmost tower. Death dismounted and told Mort to sort out the