Hogfather - Terry Pratchett [77]
“This isn’t a proper landscape,” she said.
“It doesn’t sound too unreal to me,” said the oh god. “Sky. Trees. Flowers. Dead fish.”
“Brown tree trunks? Really they’re mostly a sort of grayish mossy color. You only ever see brown tree trunks in one place,” said Susan. “And it’s the same place where the sky is only ever overhead. The blue never comes down to the ground.”
She looked up. At the far end of the corridor was one of the very tall, very thin windows. It looked out onto the black gardens. Black bushes, black grass, black trees. Skeletal fish cruising in the black waters of a pool, under black water lilies.
There was color, in a sense, but it was the kind of color you’d get if you could shine a beam of black through a prism. There were hints of tints, here and there a black you might persuade yourself was a very deep purple or a midnight blue. But it was basically black, under a black sky, because this was the world belonging to Death and that was all there was to it.
The shape of Death was the shape people had created for him, over the centuries. Why bony? Because bones were associated with death. He’d got a scythe because agricultural people could spot a decent metaphor. And he lived in a somber land because the human imagination would be rather stretched to let him live somewhere nice with flowers.
People like Death lived in the human imagination, and got their shape there, too. He wasn’t the only one…
…but he didn’t like the script, did he? He’d started to take an interest in people. Was that a thought, or just a memory of something that hadn’t happened yet?
The oh god followed her gaze.
“Can we go after her?” said the oh god. “I say we, I think I’ve just got drafted in because I was in the wrong place.”
“She’s alive. That means she is mortal,” said Susan. “That means I can find her, too.” She turned and started to walk out of the library.
“If she says the sky is just blue overhead, what’s between it and the horizon?” said the oh god, running to keep up.
“You don’t have to come,” said Susan. “It’s not your problem.”
“Yes, but given that my problem is that my whole purpose in life is to feel rotten, anything’s an improvement.”
“It could be dangerous. I don’t think she’s there of her own free will. Would you be any good in a fight?”
“Yes. I could be sick on people.”
It was a shack, somewhere out on the outskirts of the Plains town of Scrote. Scrote had a lot of outskirts, spread so widely—a busted cart here, a dead dog there—that often people went through it without even knowing it was there, and really it only appeared on the maps because cartographers get embarrassed about big empty spaces.
Hogswatch came after the excitement of the cabbage harvest when it was pretty quiet in Scrote and there was nothing much to look forward to until the fun of the sprout festival.
This shack had an iron stove, with a pipe that went up through the thick cabbage-leaf thatch.
Voices echoed faintly within the pipe.
THIS IS REALLY, REALLY STUPID.
“I think the tradition got started when everyone had them big chimneys, master.” This voice sounded as though it was coming from someone standing on the roof and shouting down the pipe.
INDEED? IT’S ONLY A MERCY IT’S UNLIT.
There was some muffled scratching and banging, and then a thump from within the potbelly of the stove.
DAMN.
“What’s up, master?”
THE DOOR HAS NO HANDLE ON THE INSIDE. I CALL THAT INCONSIDERATE.
There were some more bumps, and then a scrape as the stove lid was lifted up and pushed sideways. An arm came out and felt around the front of the stove until it found the handle.
It played with it for a while, but it was obvious that the hand did not belong to a person used to opening things.
In short, Death came out of the stove. Exactly how would be difficult to describe without folding the page. Time and space were, from Death’s point of view, merely things that he’d heard described. When it came to Death, they ticked the box marked Not Applicable. It might help to think of the universe as a rubber sheet, or perhaps