Soul Music

“He says you’re a mean keyboard player.” He stared at the hands, busy in their pipe bending. They were big . And of course there were four of them. “He was certainly partly right,” he added.
    The ape picked up a length of driftwood and tasted it.
    “We thought you might like to play pianoforte with us at the Drum tonight,” said Glod. “Me and Cliff and Buddy, that is.”
    The Librarian rolled a brown eye toward him, then picked up a piece of wood, gripped one end, and began to strum.
    “Ook?”
    “That’s right,” said Glod. “The boy with the guitar.”
    “Eeek.”
    The Librarian did a back somersault.
    “Oook oook -ooka-ooka-OOOka-OOK!”
    “I can see you’re in the swing of it already,” said Glod.

    Susan saddled the horse and mounted up.
    Beyond Death’s garden were fields of corn, their golden sheen the only color in the landscape. Death might not have been any good at grass (black) and apple trees (gloss black on black), but all the depth of color he hadn’t put elsewhere he’d put in the fields. They rippled as if in the wind, except that there wasn’t any wind.
    Susan couldn’t imagine why he’d done it.
    There was a path, though. It led across the fields for half a mile or so, then disappeared abruptly. It looked as though somebody walked out here occasionally and just stood, looking around.
    Binky followed the path and stopped at the end. Then he turned, managing not to disturb a single ear.
    “I don’t know how you do this,” Susan whispered. “But you must be able to do it, and you know where I want to go.”
    The horse appeared to nod. Albert had said that Binky was a genuine flesh-and-blood horse, but maybe you could be ridden by Death for hundreds of years without learning something. He looked as though he’d been pretty bright to start with.
    Binky began to trot, and then canter, and then gallop. And then the sky flickered, just once.
    Susan had expected more than that. Flashing stars, some sort of explosion of rainbow colors…not just a flicker. It seemed a rather dismissive way of traveling nearly seventeen years.
    The cornfields had gone, but the garden was pretty much the same. There was the strange topiary and the pond with the skeletal fish. There were, pushing jolly wheelbarrows and carrying tiny scythes, what might have been garden gnomes in a mortal garden but here were cheery little skeletons in black robes. Things tended not to change.
    The stables were a little different, though. Binky was in them, for a start.
    He whinnied quietly as Susan led him into an empty stall next to himself.
    “I’m sure you two know each other,” she said. She’d never expected it to work, but it had to, didn’t it? Time was something that happened to other people, wasn’t it?
    She slipped into the house.

    NO. I CANNOT BE BIDDEN. I CANNOT BE FORCED. I WILL ONLY DO THAT WHICH I KNOW TO BE RIGHT…
    Susan crept along behind the shelves of lifetimers. No one noticed her. When you are watching Death fight, you don’t notice shadows in the background.
    They’d never told her about this. Parents never do. Your father could be Death’s apprentice and your mother Death’s adopted daughter, but that’s just fine detail when they become Parents. Parents were never young. They were merely waiting to become Parents.
    Susan reached the end of the shelves.
    Death was standing over her father…she corrected herself, the boy who would be her father.
    Three red marks burn on his cheek where Death has struck him. Susan raised a hand to the pale marks on her own face.
    But that’s not how heredity works .
    At least…the normal kind…
    Her mother…the girl who would become her mother…was pressed against a pillar. She had actually improved with age, Susan thought. Her dress sense certainly had. And she mentally shook herself. Fashion comments? Now?
    Death stood over Mort, sword in one hand and Mort’s own lifetimer in the other.
    YOU DON’T KNOW HOW SORRY THIS MAKES ME, he said.
    “ I might,” said Mort.
    Death looked up, and looked straight at Susan. His eye sockets flared blue for a moment. Susan tried to press herself into the shadows.
    He looked back down at Mort for a moment, and then at Ysabell, and then back at Susan, and then back down at Mort. And laughed.
    And turned the hourglass over.
    And snapped his fingers.
    Mort vanished, with a small “pop” of imploding air. So did Ysabell and the others.
    It was, suddenly, very quiet.
    Death put the hourglass down, very