Piers Anthony - On a Pale Horse

Now her glance was piercing; She did not recognize him. "I believe you have the wrong address, stranger. How did you get past the griffins?"

"It's the right address, but perhaps the wrong uniform. You have met me before in the guise of Death. The griffins gave me wide clearance when they recognized me by smell. We have a date."

She was quick to reappraise him. "Then come in." She opened the door.

Zane stepped inside — and something like a heavy talon fell on his left shoulder. He craned his neck to look at his attacker, but there was nothing. Yet his nose was wrinkling with the heavy, musky odor of something animalistic or insectoid or worse.

"My invisible guardian," Luna explained. "A trained moon moth. If you had some notion of robbing this house — "

Zane smiled with a certain difficulty. "I should have known you would not be defenseless. But I am who I say I am. I can summon the Death steed and don my cloak if necessary; then I think your invisible monster would not find me as easy to handle. But words should suffice; I came last week to take your father, the Magician Kaftan, and he told me I should, er, make your acquaintance if I would talk with him a while. I saw you nude, and then dressed up, and after I took his soul, you offered to — "

"Let him go," Luna murmured, and the claw at Zane's shoulder relaxed. Just as well, for the grip had been increasingly painful.

"Thank you," Zane said. "It doesn't have to be today. I just came when it was convenient for me; I'm afraid I didn't think of your own convenience. I forgot about your grief."

"Today will do," she said, somewhat curtly. "I find I don't enjoy being alone at this time. Let me change and pick up the grief-nullifying stone — "

"No, please!" he cut in. "I prefer to know you exactly as you are. It is right to experience grief; I'm sure your father warrants it. Artificial abatement of a natural feeling — I don't want that."

She considered him, head held slightly askew. "You don't want to be impressed?"

"You impress me as you are. Human."

She smiled quickly, and her beauty flashed into being with the expression. "I think you mean it, and that flatters me. That's almost as good as a spell. What is your pleasure, Zane?"

"Just to honor your father's wish. To talk with you, get to know you. He was most insistent, in Purgatory, when — "

"Purgatory?"

"He is figuring out the balance of his soul there. It will be a tedious task."

She shrugged. "He is good at tedious tasks. He is not in pain?"

"None."

"Then I can let him rest for a while. What were you saying?"

"Just that I came to talk with you. It — I don't see it going any farther than that."

"Why not?" she asked, frowning.

"Oh, it's not that you're not attractive. You showed me before! It's — I don't — "

"Attractive," she muttered darkly, apparently not flattered this time. "You refer to my body, of course, not to my mind or soul."

"Yes," he said, feeling awkward. "I don't know your mind, though I do know a good portion of the evil on your soul is not truly yours. But I said it wasn't that. I know you can make yourself as beautiful as you want to be. But even if you were ugly, you're — you're someone, and I'm no one, so — "

She laughed. "Death tells me this?"

"Death is merely the office. I'm just the man who happened to blunder into that office. I don't think I deserve it, but I'm trying to do it properly. Maybe in time I'll become a good Death, instead of making mistakes."

"Mistakes?" she inquired. "Sit down, Zane." She took his arm, guided him to the couch, and sat down beside him at an angle, so that her right knee touched his left. "How is it going?"

"You don't want to hear about that sort of thing," he demurred, though he did want to talk about it.

"Listen, Zane," she said earnestly. "My father picked you for that office. To you it may have been a blunder, but — "

"Oh, I didn't mean to criticize your father! I meant — "

"He believed you were the proper person for it. I don't know exactly why, but I have faith in his judgment. There must be some quality in you that makes you best for the position. So don't question your fitness for the office."

"Your father picked me for Death — and for you," Zane said. "I don't see the wisdom of either choice."

She removed her net and began adjusting her rich brown hair. "I don't see it either," she admitted with a smile. "Which simply means I have more to discover. My father always, always makes sense, and he never mistreated me in any way. He's a great man! So I'll try to ascertain the meaning of his will. You show me some of your mind, and I'll show you some of mine. Then perhaps we'll both understand why my father wanted us to interact."

"I suppose he did have some reason," Zane agreed. He hardly objected to improving his acquaintance with this increasingly lovely young woman — for she was growing prettier by the moment as she fixed herself up — but didn't like the feeling of being accepted by her only because she had been ordered to do it, "He was a Magician, after all."

"Yes." She did not belabor the obvious, and now he felt foolish for having done so himself. This was an odd sort of date, and he was hardly easy with it.

"I can see why a man like me would be interested in a woman like you, but not why a man like him would want — I mean, surely you are destined for better things, and he would want those things for you."

"Surely," she agreed, shaking out her glistening locks.

That did not help. Luna was not only turning beautiful again, she was becoming more poised, her gaze level.

"Well," he began. "I was just going to tell you about mistakes. Like one of my last cases, in the office of Death — a boy, a teenager — only no one had told him he was going to die. But he knew it when he recognized me. I don't know whether it was right to lie to him, as they did, or tell the truth, as I finally did. Either way, I think I mishandled it, so it's a mistake."

"You regard an indecision as a mistake?"

"I don't know. I guess so. How can you do what's right if you don't know what's right?"

She made a move. "Score a point for you! I suppose you just have to learn from experience, hoping you don't do too much harm in the process."

"I never really appreciated the significance of death before," he said, troubled. "Now that I'm directly involved in it, the force of it becomes much greater, almost overwhelming. Death is no minor thing."

"How do you mean?" Luna asked gently. Her eyes were nacreous.

"I know every living creature must eventually die; otherwise the world would be intolerably crowded. Even on an individual basis, death is necessary. Who would really want to live forever on Earth? Life would be like a game grown over familiar and stale, and what pleasures it offered would be overwhelmed by the intolerable burden of minutiae. Only a fool would carry on regardless. But here I'm not necessarily dealing with the normal course of full lives and the terminations of old age. I'm talking to people who aren't ready to die and taking their souls out of turn. Their full lives have not been lived, their roles have not been played out. Their threads have been cut short through no fault of their own."

"No fault?" She was leading him, in effect interrogating him, but he didn't mind.

"Consider my recent clients. One was a seven-year old boy. He was having lunch at a school cafeteria, and a valve malfunctioned and caused a water heater to explode. It brought down the ceiling, and five children and a teacher died. My client had a difficult home environment, which was why his soul was balanced between good and evil — but he should have had a full life ahead to put his soul in better order. Through sheer random chance, he was denied that life. And the five others who died, not needing my personal attention — maybe they all went directly to Heaven. I hope so. But this was still grossly unfair to them, for they might have gone to Heaven sixty years later, after having their full chances on Earth. The world might have benefited by their lives; certainly they deserved their chances. What possible meaning can there by in such catastrophe?"