Reaper Man

said. He considered it some more and then brightened up. “On account of it all being part of bushido. Like…small trees. Bush-i-do. Yeah. Makes sense, when you think about it.”
    “But you can’t shout ‘bonsai!’ here ,” said the Lecturer of Recent Runes. “We’ve got a totally different cultural background. It’d be useless. No one will know what you mean.”
    “I’ll work on it,” said the Dean.
    He noticed Ludmilla standing with her mouth open.
    “This is wizard talk,” he said.
    “It is, isn’t it,” said Ludmilla. “I never would have guessed.”
    The Archchancellor had got out of the trolley and was wheeling it experimentally back and forth. It usually took quite a long time for a fresh idea to fully lodge in Ridcully’s mind, but he felt instinctively that there were all sorts of uses for a wire basket on four wheels.
    “Are we going or are we standin’ around all night bandagin’ our heads?” he said.
    “Yo!” snapped the Dean.
    “Yo?” said Reg Shoe.
    “Oook!”
    “Was that a yo?” said the Dean, suspiciously.
    “Oook.”
    “Well…all right, then.”

    Death sat on a mountaintop. It wasn’t particularly high, or bare, or sinister. No witches held naked sabbats on it; Discworld witches, on the whole, didn’t hold with taking off anymore clothes than was absolutely necessary for the business in hand. No specters haunted it. No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops gives you not only hemorrhoids but frostbitten hemorrhoids.
    Occasionally people would climb the mountain and add a stone or two to the cairn at the top, if only to prove that there is nothing really damn stupid that humans won’t do.
    Death sat on the cairn and ran a stone down the blade of his scythe in long, deliberate strokes.
    There was a movement of air. Three gray servants popped into existence.
    One said, You think you have won?
    One said, You think you have triumphed?
    Death turned the stone in his hand, to get a fresh surface, and brought it slowly down the length of the blade.
    One said, We will inform Azrael.
    One said, You are only, after all, a little Death.
    Death held the blade up to the moonlight, twisting it this way and that, noting the play of light on the tiny flecks of metal on its edge.
    Then he stood up, in one quick movement. The servants backed away hurriedly.
    He reached out with the speed of a snake and grasped a robe, pulling its empty hood level with his eye sockets.
    D O YOU KNOW WHY THE PRISONER IN THE TOWER WATCHES THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS ? he said.
    It said, Take your hands off me…oops…
    Blue flame flared for a moment.
    Death lowered his hand and looked around at the other two.
    One said, You haven’t heard the last of this.
    They vanished.
    Death brushed a speck of ash off his robe, and then planted his feet squarely on the mountaintop. He raised the scythe over his head in both hands, and summoned up all the lesser Deaths that had arisen in his absence.
    After a while they streamed up the mountain in a faint black wave.
    They flowed together like dark mercury.
    It went on for a long time and then stopped.
    Death lowered the scythe, and examined himself. Yes, all there. Once again, he was the Death, containing all the deaths of the world. Except for—
    For a moment he hesitated. There was one tiny area of emptiness somewhere, some fragment of his soul, something unaccounted for…
    He couldn’t be quite certain what it was.
    He shrugged. Doubtless he’d find out. In the meantime, there was a lot of work to be done…
    He rode away.
    Far off, in his den under the barn, the Death of Rats relaxed his determined grip on a beam.

    Windle Poons brought both feet down heavily on a tentacle snaking out from under the tiles, and lurched off through the steam. A slab of marble smashed down, showering him with fragments. Then he kicked the wall, savagely.
    There was very probably no way out now, he realized, and even if there was he couldn’t find it. Anyway, he was already inside the thing. It was shaking its own walls down in an effort to get at him. At least he could give it a really bad case of indigestion.
    He headed toward an orifice that had once been the entrance to a wide passage, and dived awkwardly through it just before it snapped shut. Silver fire crackled over the walls. There was so much life here it couldn’t be contained.
    There were a few trolleys still