Reaper Man

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    “Oh, hell!”
    Miss Flitworth ducked under his arm.
    “And where’s the wind come from?”
    T HE SKY ? said Bill Door, surprised at the sudden excitement.
    “Come on!” She whirled back into the kitchen and scrabbled on the dresser for a candle lantern and some matches.
    B UT YOU SAID IT WOULD DRY .
    “In a normal storm, yes. In this lot? It’s going to be ruined! We’ll find it spread all over the hill in the morning!”
    She fumbled the candle alight and ran back again.
    Bill Door looked out into the storm. Straws whirred past, tumbling on the gale.
    R UINED ? M Y HARVEST ? He straightened up. B UGGER THAT .

    The hail rumbled on the roof of the smithy.
    Ned Simnel pumped the furnace bellows until the heart of the coals was white with the merest hint of yellow.
    It had been a good day. The Combination Harvester had worked better than he’d dared to hope; old Peedbury had insisted on keeping it to do another field tomorrow, so it had been left out with a tarpaulin over it, securely tied down. Tomorrow he could teach one of the men to use it, and start work on a new improved model. Success was assured. The future definitely lay ahead.
    Then there was the matter of the scythe. He went to the wall where it had been hung. A bit of a mystery, that. Here was the most superb instrument of its kind he’d ever seen. You couldn’t even blunt it. Its sharpness extended well beyond its actual edge. And yet he was supposed to destroy it. Where was the sense in that? Ned Simnel was a great believer in sense, of a certain specialized kind.
    Maybe Bill Door just wanted to be rid of it, and that was understandable, because even now when it hung innocuously enough from the wall it seemed to radiate sharpness. There was a faint violet corona around the blade, caused by the drafts in the room driving luckless air molecules to their severed death.
    Ned Simnel picked it up with great care.
    Weird fellow, Bill Door. He’d said he wanted to be sure it was absolutely dead. As if you could kill a thing .
    “Anyway, how could anyone destroy it? Oh, the handle would burn and the metal would calcine and, if he worked hard enough, eventually there’d be nothing more than a little heap of dust and ashes. That was what the customer wanted.
    On the other hand, presumably you could destroy it just by taking the blade off the handle…After all, it wouldn’t be a scythe if you did that. It’d just be, well…bits. Certainly, you could make a scythe out of them, but you could probably do that with the dust and ashes if you knew how to do it.
    Ned Simnel was quite pleased with this line of argument. And, after all, Bill Door hadn’t even asked for proof that the thing had been, er, killed.
    He took sight carefully and then used the scythe to chop the end off the anvil. Uncanny.
    Total sharpness.
    He gave in. It was unfair. You couldn’t ask someone like him to destroy something like this. It was a work of art.
    It was better than that. It was a work of craft.
    He walked across the room to a stack of timber and thrust the scythe well out of the way behind the heap. There was a brief, punctured squeak.
    Anyway, it would be all right. He’d give Bill his farthing back in the morning.

    The Death of Rats materialized behind the heap in the forge, and trudged to the sad little heap of fur that had been a rat that got in the way of the scythe.
    Its ghost was standing beside it, looking apprehensive. It didn’t seem very pleased to see him.
    “Squeak? Squeak?”
    S QUEAK , the Death of Rats explained.
    “Squeak?”
    S QUEAK , the Death of Rats confirmed.
    “[Preen whiskers] [twitch nose]?”
    The Death of Rats shook its head.
    S QUEAK .
    The rat was crestfallen. The Death of Rats laid a bony but not entirely unkind paw on its shoulder.
    S QUEAK .
    The rat nodded sadly. It had been a good life in the forge. Ned’s housekeeping was almost nonexistent, and he was probably the world champion absent-minded-leaver of unfinished sandwiches. It shrugged, and trooped after the small robed figure. It wasn’t as if it had any choice.

    People were streaming through the streets. Most of them were chasing trolleys. Most of the trolleys were full of whatever people had found a trolley useful to carry—firewood, children, shopping.
    And they were no longer dodging, but moving blindly, all in the same direction.
    You could stop a trolley by turning it over, when its wheels spun madly and uselessly. The wizards saw a number of enthusiastic