Mort

'You're a wizard,' he hissed. 'You don't have to do what he says!'

'How old are you, lad?' said Albert, kindly.

'Twenty.'

'When you're my age you'll see your choices differently.' He turned to Mort. 'Sorry.'

Mort drew his sword, its blade almost invisible in the light from the candles. Death turned and stood facing him, a thin silhouette against a towering rack of hourglasses.

He held out his arms. The scythe appeared in them with a tiny thunderclap.

Albert came back down one of the glass-lined alleys with two hourglasses, and set them down wordlessly on a ledge on one of the pillars.

One was several times the size of the ordinary glasses — black, thin and decorated with a complicated skull-and-bones motif.

That wasn't the most unpleasant thing about it.

Mort groaned inwardly. He couldn't see any sand in there.

The smaller glass beside it was quite plain and unadorned. Mort reached for it.

'May I?' he said.

BE MY GUEST.

The name Mort was engraved on the top bulb. He held it up to the light, noting without any real surprise that there was hardly any sand left. When he held it to his ear he thought he could hear, even above the ever-present roar of the millions of lifetimers around him, the sound of his own life pouring away.

He put it down very carefully.

Death turned to Cutwell.

MR WIZARD, SIR, YOU WILL BE GOOD ENOUGH TO GIVE US A COUNT OF THREE.

Cutwell nodded glumly.

'Are you sure this couldn't all be sorted out by getting around a table —' he began.

NO.

'No.'

Mort and Death circled one another warily, their reflections flickering across the banks of hourglasses.

'One,'said Cutwell.

Death spun his scythe menacingly.

'Two.'

The blades met in mid-air with a noise like a cat sliding down a pane of glass.

'They both cheated!' said Keli. Ysabell nodded. 'Of course,' she said.

Mort jumped back, bringing the sword round in a too-slow arc that Death easily deflected, turning the parry into a wicked low sweep that Mort avoided only by a clumsy standing jump.

Although the scythe isn't preeminent among weapons of war, anyone who has been on the wrong end of, say, a peasants' revolt will know that in skilled hands it is fearsome. Once its owner gets it weaving and spinning no one — including the wielder — is quite certain where the blade is now and where it will be next.

Death advanced, grinning. Mort ducked a cut at head height and dived sideways, hearing a tinkle behind him as the tip of the scythe caught a glass on the nearest shelf. . . .