Mort

better.”
    There was an open-fronted stable at one side of the main building, and he led Binky into the warm, horse-smelling darkness that already accommodated three other horses. As Mort unfastened the nosebag he wondered if Death’s horse felt the same way about other horses which had rather less supernatural lifestyles. He certainly looked impressive compared to the others, which regarded him watchfully. Binky was a real horse—the blisters of the shovel handle on Mort’s hands were a testimony to that—and compared to the others he looked more real than ever. More solid. More horsey. Slightly larger than life.
    In fact, Mort was on the verge of making an important deduction, and it is unfortunate that he was distracted, as he walked across the yard to the inn’s low door, by the sight of the inn sign. Its artist hadn’t been particularly gifted, but there was no mistaking the line of Keli’s jaw or her mass of fiery hair in the portrait of The Quene’s Hed.
    He sighed, and pushed open the door.
    As one man, the assembled company stopped talking and stared at him with the honest rural stare that suggests that for two pins they’ll hit you around the head with a shovel and bury your body under a compost heap at full moon.
    It might be worth taking another look at Mort, because he’s changed a lot in the last few chapters. For example, while he still has plenty of knees and elbows about his person, they seem to have migrated to their normal places and he no longer moves as though his joints were loosely fastened together with elastic bands. He used to look as if he knew nothing at all; now he looks as though he knew too much. Something about his eyes suggests that he has seen things that ordinary people never see, or at least never see more than once.
    Something about all the rest of him suggests to the watchers that causing an inconvenience for this boy might just be as wise as kicking a wasp nest. In short, Mort no longer looks like something the cat brought in and then brought up.
    The landlord relaxed his grip on the stout blackthorn peacemaker he kept under the bar and composed his features into something resembling a cheerful welcoming grin, although not very much.
    “Evening, your lordship,” he said. “What’s your pleasure this cold and frosty night?”
    “What?” said Mort, blinking in the light.
    “What he means is, what d’you want to drink?” said a small ferret-faced man sitting by the fire, who was giving Mort the kind of look a butcher gives a field full of lambs.
    “Um. I don’t know,” said Mort. “Do you sell stardrip?”
    “Never heard of it, lordship.”
    Mort looked around at the faces watching him, illuminated by the firelight. They were the sort of people generally called the salt of the earth. In other words, they were hard, square and bad for your health, but Mort was too preoccupied to notice.
    “What do people like to drink here, then?”
    The landlord looked sideways at his customers, a clever trick given that they were directly in front of him.
    “Why, lordship, we drink scumble, for preference.”
    “Scumble?” said Mort, failing to notice the muffled sniggers.
    “Aye, lordship. Made from apples. Well, mainly apples.”
    This seemed healthy enough to Mort. “Oh, right,” he said. “A pint of scumble, then.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew the bag of gold that Death had given him. It was still quite full. In the sudden hush of the inn the faint clink of the coins sounded like the legendary Brass Gongs of Leshp, which can be heard far out to sea on stormy nights as the currents stir them in their drowned towers three hundred fathoms below.
    “And please serve these gentlemen with whatever they want,” he added.
    He was so overwhelmed by the chorus of thanks that he didn’t take much notice of the fact that his new friends were served their drinks in tiny, thimble-sized glasses, while his alone turned up in a large wooden mug.
    A lot of stories are told about scumble, and how it is made out on the damp marshes according to ancient recipes handed down rather unsteadily from father to son. It’s not true about the rats, or the snake heads, or the lead shot. The one about the dead sheep is a complete fabrication. We can lay to rest all the variations of the one about the trouser button. But the one about not letting it come into contact with metal is absolutely true, because when the landlord flagrantly shortchanged Mort and plonked the small