Mort

'Is he ready to go solo, master?' said Albert doubtfully.

Death thought about it. HE CAN DO IT, he said at last. HE'S KEEN, HE'S QUICK TO LEARN AND, REALLY, he added, PEOPLE CAN'T EXPECT TO HAVE ME RUNNING AROUND AFTER THEM ALL THE TIME.

Mort stared blankly at the velvet wall hangings a few inches from his eyes.

I've walked through a wall, he thought. And that's impossible.

He gingerly moved the hangings aside to see if a door was lurking somewhere, but there was nothing but crumbling plaster which had cracked away in places to reveal some dampish but emphatically solid brickwork.

He prodded it experimentally. It was quite clear that he wasn't going back out that way.

'Well,' he said to the wall. 'What now?'

A voice behind him said, 'Um. Excuse please?'

He turned around slowly.

Grouped around a table in the middle of the room was a Klatchian family of father, mother and half a dozen children of dwindling size. Eight pairs of round eyes were fixed on Mort. A ninth pair belonging to an aged grandparent of indeterminate sex weren't, because their owner had taken advantage of the interruption to get some elbow room at the communal rice bowl, taking the view that a boiled fish in the hand was worth any amount of unexplained manifestations, and the silence was punctuated by the sound of determined mastication.

In one corner of the crowded room was a little shrine to Offler, the six-armed Crocodile God of Klatch. It was grinning just like Death, except of course Death didn't have a flock of holy birds that brought him news of his worshippers and also kept his teeth clean.

Klatchians prize hospitality above all other virtues. As Mort stared the woman took another plate off the shelf behind her and silently began to fill it from the big bowl, snatching a choice cut of catfish from the ancient's hands after a brief struggle. Her kohl-rimmed eyes remained steadily on Mort, however.

It was the father who had spoken. Mort bowed nervously.

'Sorry,' he said. 'Er, I seem to have walked through this wall.' It was rather lame, he had to admit.

'Please?' said the man. The woman, her bangles jangling, carefully arranged a few slices of pepper across the plate and sprinkled it with a dark green sauce that Mort was afraid he recognized. He'd tried it a few weeks before, and although it was a complicated recipe one taste had been enough to know that it was made out of fish entrails marinated for several years in a vat of shark bile. Death had said that it was an acquired taste. Mort had decided not to make the effort.

He tried to sidle around the edge of the room towards the bead-hung doorway, all the heads turning to watch him. He tried a grin.

The woman said: 'Why does the demon show his teeth, husband of my life?'

The man said: 'It could be hunger, moon of my desire. Pile on more fish!'

And the ancestor grumbled: 'I was eating that, wretched child. Woe unto the world when there is no respect for age!'

Now the fact is that while the words entered Mort's ear in their spoken Klatchian, with all the curlicues and subtle diphthongs of a language so ancient and sophisticated that it had fifteen words meaning 'assassination' before the rest of the world had caught on to the idea of bashing one another over the head with rocks, they arrived in his brain as clear and understandable as his mother tongue.

'I'm no demon! I'm a human!' he said, and stopped in shock as his words emerged in perfect Klatch.

'You're a thief?' said the father. 'A murderer? To creep in thus, are you a tax- gatherer?' His hand slipped under the table and came up holding a meat cleaver honed to paper thinness. His wife screamed and dropped the plate and clutched the youngest children to her.

Mort watched the blade weave through the air, and gave in.

'I bring you greetings from the uttermost circles of hell,' he hazarded.