On a Pale Horse

Chapter 3 EWES AND DOES

Zane jumped. A man sat in the adjacent seat. He was perhaps fifty, with a mustache and goatee and piercing blue eyes. He held a small double cone in his hand.

"You must be immortal," Zane said, after a moment of fevered thought.

"In a sense," the man agreed. "I am another Incarnation, like Fate and Death."

Zane studied him, suspecting that he should recognize the man, but he did not. "Who — ?"

"I am Chronos, colloquially known as Time." He tilted the cones, and fine sand sifted from one to the other. It was an hourglass.

"Time!" Zane exclaimed. "But you're young!" Only that was inaccurate. "At least, not old — "I am ageless," Chronos corrected him. "I realize I have been depicted by ignorant artisans as ancient, but I prefer to operate in my prime."

"Did I — the watch — ?"

"Yes, Death, you summoned me. I am, of course, attuned to all manner of chronometry, especially that practiced by key figures. You signaled me by locking the countdown on ten minutes. Ordinarily Death either freezes the timer where it is or resets it to gain necessary travel time; to do both is a code. Naturally I came to see what you wished, as we Incarnations do try to accommodate one another. It is, after all, one firmament."

"I didn't realize I was signaling you," Zane said sheepishly. "I'm new at this. In fact, I hardly realized you existed as a person."

"As a personification," Chronos corrected him. "An Incarnation of an essential function of existence. Persons differ, but the role continues."

"That's another thing it's hard to get used to — the notion that things like Death and Time are offices, not physical laws or whatever."

"We are roles and offices and laws and more," Chronos assured him. "We are also human beings, and that human quality is important."

"I was just trying to find out how the watch worked. There doesn't seem to be any function for the hours dial."

"It records your schedule backlog," Chronos said easily. "You have recycled your next client by seven minutes and thirty-seven seconds; you have also placed the entire program on hold. This is, of course, your prerogative; you are Death. You can even halt the passage of all time by pulling out the center button. But if you maintain the hold more than half an hour, it will register on the hours dial as a tardy schedule that needs to be made up. If you run more than twelve hours late, overflowing the capacity of the watch, there will be an investigation by the authorities at Purgatory that could damage your performance rating."

"Oh? What happens to me if my rating is bad?"

"That counts as evil on your soul, shifting your balance toward Hell. Of course, you are in perfect balance during your initiation period; every officeholder needs time for trial and error. But when that passes, and at such time as you give up the office, for whatever reason, a negative rating could make your soul most uncomfortable."

Zane was getting it straight. He held the office of Death, but he remained alive, and the account of his soul was yet to be settled. "My predecessor — where did his soul go?"

"He had done an adequate job, generally; I'm sure he found his way to Heaven, which is the last refuge of adequacy."

That made Zane feel easier. "And if I do a good job, I will go to Heaven, too — when the time comes?"

"If it comes. You should. Since you commence the office balanced, and performance is fairly straightforward, it should not be difficult for you to improve your position."

"How do you know my soul is balanced?"

"If it were not, Death would not have had to come for you individually — "

Zane laughed. "You know, I never thought of that! My good and evil were even, so when I tried to suicide, I had to be collected by Death himself. And if I hadn't seen Death arriving, I would be dead now!"

"It is an unusual situation," Chronos agreed. "But at the same time normal. Each Death assassinates his predecessor, thereby burdening his own soul with more evil, but postponing his own reckoning indefinitely. I hardly envy your system."

"Your system differs?"

"Certainly. Each office has its own mechanism of transmittal, some gentler than others. But all of us work together as required, treating one another's offices with due respect. I feel indebted to the prior Death, who did me a favor on occasion, and regret that it was necessary for him to leave the office. Now I will facilitate things for his successor, as he would have wished."

"He doesn't hate me?" Zane asked, bemused.

"There is no hate in Heaven."

"But I murdered him!"

"And you will be murdered by your successor. Do you hate him?"

"Hate my successor? I don't even know him!"

"Your predecessor did not know you. Otherwise he would have been more careful."

Zane changed the subject. "I have just taken a baby. It is perfectly balanced, a uniform shade of gray. I don't know how it can have so much evil on its soul, so well integrated, or what I should do with the soul. Can you advise me?"

"I can clarify the matter. The baby is probably the child of incest or rape, so carries the burden of intensified Original Sin. Such children, conceived in evil, do not commence life with a clean slate."

"Original Sin!" Zane exclaimed. "I thought that was a discredited doctrine!"

"Hardly. It may not be valid in non-Christian parts of the world, but it is certainly operative here. Belief is fundamental to existence, and guilt is very important to religion; so guilt does carry across the generations."

"I don't like that!" Zane protested. "A baby has no free will, especially before it's born. It can't choose the circumstances of its conception. It can't sin."

"Unfortunately, you do not determine the system; you only implement it. All of us have objections to aspects of it, but our powers are limited."

"And I don't know where to take the baby soul. I don't know how to get to Purgatory, assuming that is the proper place."

Chronos laughed. "It is the proper place, and it is simple enough for you to reach. You reside there."

"I do?"

"When not actively pursuing souls. You have a fine Death house, a mansion in the sky."

"Well, I've never seen it," Zane said, nettled. "How do I —?"

"You ride your fine pale horse there."

"My pale horse?"

"Death rides a pale horse. Surely you were aware of that. Mortis is always with you."

"Of course I know about Death's traditional steed! But I don't know where any such horse is!"

Chronos smiled indulgently. "You know where; you don't know what." He patted the dash panel. "This is Mortis."

"The car?" Zane was baffled. "I know its plate says MORTIS. But it's a machine!"

"Press this button." Chronos indicated one on the dash that Zane hadn't noticed before. It had an embossed motif of a chess piece — the knight, the image of the head of a horse.

Zane pressed the button — and found himself astride a magnificent stallion. The hide of the horse was as pale as bleached bone, his mane was like flexible silver, and his hooves were like stainless steel. He lifted his great equine head, perked his ears forward, and snorted a snort of pale vapor.

Zane had daydreamed of owning a flying horse. Now he knew his dream had been amply fulfilled. This horse had no wings, but he could go anywhere!

"Anything else you need to know?" Chronos inquired wryly. He was seated behind Zane now.

"There must be volumes of information I need to acquire," Zane said, awed by the transformation of car to animal. He had known magic and science were allied, but had never seen anything like this before. He felt the warm, powerful muscles of the horse beneath him and was as thrilled as any child. "Somehow it doesn't seem important at the moment."

"The moment is frozen, in a certain respect," Chronos reminded him. He dismounted. "I will leave you now." The hourglass in his hand flashed, and he vanished.

"Time flies," Zane muttered. He shook off the mood and patted the horse. "You and I will get along just fine, I know. But I haven't had much experience riding, so I suppose I had better use your car form for routine city calls. Unless we should go to Purgatory now — "

The stallion issued a snort of negation. Zane decided the horse knew best, so he did not argue the case.

He looked at the saddle and discovered a button on it. "Is this what turns you back into the pale sedan?" he inquired, touching it.

Abruptly he was back in the car. Good enough! He would have more to say to Mortis the horse, much more, in due course. But now duty called. He punched the START button on the Deathwatch, noting that half an hour how registered on the hours dial; he would have to make up that time. At least he was getting to understand the system.

He oriented the Death mobile and put it in hyper drive. Animal to machine — amazing but convenient! Was the horse a robot, or was the car alive? He would have to inquire later. At least this clarified why driving was so easy; there was an animal mind assisting it. Absent-minded people sometimes drove into trees, but that never happened to an absent-minded horseback rider, for the horse knew better. But it seemed strange to be riding inside a horse!

This time he arrived in the parking lot of a big stadium. It was night, but floodlights illuminated the area, so that it almost seemed like day. Zane looked closely at the gems of the bracelet to see if there were a mistake, but the cat's eye was large, the two dots juxtaposed on the grid, and the arrow pointed firmly to the stadium.

"So be it," Zane said. He got out and walked to the structure. The man behind the ticket window did not challenge him, taking him to be a functionary of the premises. He walked right on inside, following the arrow.

The game was in session. It was professional pigskin, with banners proclaiming the teams: the Does vs. the Ewes. The ball was on the ninety-foot line of the Ewes, and the girls were mixing it up in a good old-fashioned hair-pull.

The arrow pointed to the playing field. But there was no one in that section. The action was in the other half.

Zane walked around the edge of the field with a certain difficulty, for the stadium thronged with people. The arrow on the gem shifted, orienting on a spot on the Does' fifty-foot line. An empty spot.

Had his gems malfunctioned? No — he realized immediately that his recycling of the time had caused him to arrive early; three minutes remained before the death was due. He would simply have to wait for it.

Zane took a seat on the convenient bench near the hundred-and-fifty foot line. Several Ewes sat on it — big, husky, well-padded young women, attractive in a violent way, with generous endowments wherever he looked. The nearest one glanced at him, did a double take, then realized she had suffered a delusion and turned away. After all, no one saw Death sitting on the players' bench at a pigskin game!

The Does were pressing hard. They wore bright blue suits whose protective padding accented their female qualities enormously. To Zane it was really too much; even prize-winning milking goats lacked udders as massive as these appeared to be. Maybe he was too close; in times past, watching television, before his set was repossessed by the finance company, he had admired the pig proportions.

The Doe quarterback snatched the skin and faded back for a throw. She heaved it forward just as two Ewes stampeded toward her. There was a flash as the spell on the ball fought off the blocking-spells and freed it to fly to its target. The receiver levitated at an angle, surprising the defender, who had evidently anticipated a bringdown spell. The Doe caught the missile with a cry of glee, clutched it to her massive bosom, and cannonballed to the turf, plowing up a divot. It was a beautiful play, and the audience squealed.

But there was a black flag. The referees, striped like skunks, consulted and concluded that an illegal spell had been cast, momentarily blinding the defending Ewe. The play was disallowed and a penalty assessed. Because the Does were in field-goal range, the Ewe captain chose magic rather than footage — the generation of an adverse wind. That would last two minutes and should be enough to foil the drive.

The Does pressed on determinedly. Their fans in the crowd encouraged them. "Dose! Dose! Dose!" they bawled. Zane thought they were yelling for the team, until he saw the name of the quarterback on the marquee and realized that her initials were O.D. Naturally she was called the Dose. Now he remembered seeing her play, when he was alive and had his TV.

O.D. took the skin and made an end run, skillfully fending off tacklers with a series of legal straight-arm spells. But as she crossed the scrimmage line at the near side of the field, someone caught her with a disable spell. Suddenly she was naked, or at least visible. Zane realized that her uniform had been rendered invisible, so that she was physically protected, though visually exposed. She really was a fine, healthy woman under all the padding. The cheers of the crowd redoubled.

O.D, looked down and discovered what all the shouting was about. She blushed to the waist, not with embarrassment, but with fury. When the next Ewe tackier came, the Dose grabbed her by the hair and whirled her halfway around.

The Ewe reciprocated, grabbing O.D.'s hair and spinning about, trying to use the hank of hair to haul the woman over her shoulder in a judo throw. But the Dose turned around herself, hauling back. The two spun in a circle, back to back. "Dos-a-dos!" the crowd screamed, deliriously delighted by the extracurricular action and its own wit, and the band struck up a dancing tune. Indeed, it was very much like a dance, and soon others were emulating it, until the spoilsport officials broke it up with a riot-control enchantment and wrestled the girls apart.

Naturally there was a penalty flag when the dust settled. Hair-pulling was not nice. The Does lost more ground.

The quarterback retired from the field to get a counter spell for her uniform to restore its visibility. The kicking team came in, chuckling. Apparently the nudity-spell was not illegal since it had not hurt Dose physically and probably not socially; a number of fans were slavering. "That quarter-B sure ain't no half-A!" someone shouted.

The magic wind caused the field-goal attempt to fall short. The Ewes were given the skin on the fifty-foot line. They wasted no time; their first play was a run through the center that gained thirty-five feet. There was no magic about it; they had sneaked through a mundane play, and it had worked, causing the opposition to waste its counter spells.

Then the Doe defense grew tougher. Antimagic blocked magic, and the stout pursuit stiffed the Ewe offense. It looked as if the Ewes would have to punt — and their two minute penalty wind had died, so the ball would have no extra carry. Their fans in the audience were silent.

Suddenly there was a break. The Ewe quarterback launched a desperation toss, buttressed by a levitation spell, that hurtled a hundred and twenty feet. The receiver closed on it — and the defending Doe, Number 69, shoved her out of the way and intercepted the ball.

There was an exclamation of admiration from the Doe fans, and the Doe cheerleaders went crazy, for an enchantment of obscuration had concealed the foul from the officials. But there was a bleat of purest wrath from the Ewes. They turned, galloped down the field, and tackled Number 69 so hard she flipped endwise in the air and landed in a heap.

Now there was a hush — for 69 did not rise. The team doctor rushed over to examine her.

Abruptly Zane remembered his job. His watch had zeroed, and the arrow pointed at the fallen Doe.

He hurried out, knowing she was done for. He did not even pause: he squeezed between oblivious players, squatted beside the body, and hooked out the soul.

No one seemed to notice. Number 69, who had been quivering as if in terrible pain, relaxed. Now she was dead, and it was a relief, for her neck was broken.

Zane walked away, folding the soul as he went. He knew he should not have allowed himself to be distracted by the game; that was unprofessional. Because of his neglect, the woman had suffered as much as a minute longer than she should have.

Unprofessional? Who was he to fancy himself a professional in this grim business! Still, he did have a job to do, and he might as well do it properly. At the very least, he could do it in a manner that relieved distress, rather than promoted it.

His watch was counting down again. He had five minutes. He hurried to the Death mobile, climbed in, started it, oriented it, and hit the hyper drive button so hard he bruised his finger. Yes, he was angry with himself! He resolved never again to allow extraneous events to divert him from proper attention to his client.

He brought out the two analysis gems to review the new soul, but in his unsettlement he dropped one. By the time he picked it up from the floor, he knew the reading had been invalidated, and he didn't want to start over; there would not be time for a proper job now. He folded the soul away for future handling.

Then, idly, he passed the brown gem down his own body. It glimmered. It was reading his living soul!

Well, why not? The stone was concerned only with the evil in a given soul, not with its state of life or afterlife.

Actually, the soul was eternal; it was only the body that died. With these stones, he could assess the balance of good and evil in any person, living or dead.

How did his own tally stand? Zane knocked his forehead with his hand. He was an idiot to cheek his own soul, since he knew it was fifty-fifty and would remain so until his trial period in this office was done. Like the illegitimate baby, circumstance had locked him in.

Yes, he had reason to do his job well, however unqualified he might be for the office. His soul remained in peril of damnation. He hadn't really worried about that during his normal life, but now that he was sure that Hell was really literal, he cared. He didn't want to go there when he died! All he had to do was a good enough job so that his soul would be slated for Heaven. Then he would not have to fear Eternity, at such time as he got careless and was sent there forcefully.

The car stopped in another parking lot. This appeared to be a school. Zane got out and followed his arrow through the comblike serrations of the building complex. It was class-changing time, and children in the range of ten to twelve were scurrying every which way, generally ignoring both Zane and the posted WALK signs. One boy, however, plunged directly into him, naturally paying no attention to the obstacles in the way of his headlong rush.

The contact was emphatic. Zane suffered a mild lapse of breath. The boy righted himself and looked up. "Gee — Halloween!" he exclaimed. "A skull-face!" Then he zoomed away.

Halloween? Close enough. The lad had seen more accurately than he knew. Perhaps this was a talent of the young.

He passed near a classroom where computers were being described to bored students. The virtues of competing brands were highlighted on posters posted alphabetically around the room. It was good to be part of the computer age; Zane wouldn't mind owning any one of those fine data processors. He understood they could also be used to summon quite powerful demons safely, for a computer never erred in setting up the tricky protective spells required to prevent the supernatural from getting out of hand. But alas, he was now beyond that.

The next classroom dealt with modem technical applications of magic. Its students were equally inattentive; they had little interest in required basics of any type. Here the posters described competitively marketed brands of amulets, love potions, curses, magic mirrors, communication conches, cornucopias, voodoo dolls, mail-order ghosts, sophisticated spell books, and sundry gems of enchantment. Zane knew about those last from personal experience!

He arrived at the cubby that served as the school infirmary. There was another boy the size of the one who had bumped Zane. This boy was deathly ill. Beside him, the school's part-time nurse was on the phone, exasperated. "…can't wait for parental permission," she was saying. "I can never reach them during the day anyway. We need an ambulance-carpet immediately! He's got to get to the hospital before he — "

She paused as her eyes fell on Zane. "Oh, no!" she breathed, setting down the phone. "It's too late, isn't it?"

Zane glanced at the Deathwatch. It was time. "Yes," he said. He reached into the boy and drew out his soul.

The nurse covered her eyes with one hand. "I must be hallucinating," she said brokenly. "It's terrible when they are taken so young."

Zane stood there, the small soul dangling from his hand. He felt guilty. Why should such an innocent child have to die? "I must do my job," he said to the nurse. "But if you would be so kind — please tell me the nature of this boy."

"I must be crazy," she said, looking directly at Zane. "Talking to a delusion. But I will answer. He was the youngest drug addict I've dealt with — well, not the youngest, if you count the potheads, but the worst for this age bracket. He was hooked on anything he could get — coke, heroin, acid, magic dust — anything at all that zonked him out of dull existence. He lied, he stole, he — you know, lured clients to illicit activities — anything to get money for a fix. This time he got something too strong — must have been uncut helldust, and he didn't believe it — and Satan took him in."

"Not necessarily Satan," Zane said. "His soul is in near balance between good and evil; it may yet be saved."

"I hope so. He was a decent kind, underneath. Sometimes we talked, while he was recovering from a siege. He wanted to quit; he just couldn't control his habit. I think it was genetic, some chemical imbalance in him that threw him into an irrational depression, so he had to escape by any means available. I know he didn't want to be that way. I turned him in a dozen times, for his own good, and he never held it against me. But they tend to go easy on juveniles, and — oh, I should have taken stronger measures! But I kept hoping, each time, that he'd straighten out — "

Others were coming, and Zane felt it prudent to withdraw. But he had food for thought. First, he knew now that some people could see him and recognize him for his office, even if they weren't dying themselves, and even if they didn't quite believe it. Maybe it was a matter of circumstance; the nurse was in a distraught condition, ready to perceive Death; and, of course, she really did care about the client. Second, the young could indeed have much evil on their souls. This boy had evidently committed heinous acts to support his drug habit. So it made sense; had the boy not OD'd now, when the good still matched the evil in him, the balance would have shifted irrevocably, putting him in Hell for certain when he died later. Maybe he was lucky he had gone today.

Yet that comment about the genetic origin of the lad's compulsion bothered Zane. Depression was an insidious thing, as he knew from his own experience in life; it manifested in obscure ways; indeed, it could be biologic rather than psychologic. Was it fair to charge sin against a person's soul when he couldn't really help what he did? Zane did not have the answer, but he wasn't easy about it.

The watch was running again, swinging backward into the next countdown. Zane knew he'd be crowded until he caught up to his original schedule, but he felt the need to pause again. He pressed the STOP button.

What was bothering him was this: death was a serious business; he could not blithely collect souls without developing some rationale for himself. Was this really what he wanted to do for all eternity?

He sat in the car, in the parking lot, thinking. He needed an answer, but somehow couldn't get a grasp on the nature of his wish. He didn't know what he wanted to do, only that something about his present course was wrong.

His reverie was jarringly interrupted by noise from the radio of a slowly passing car. It was a Hellfire commercial, sung to the tune of a popular hymn:

Satan never quit campaigning! Zane knew himself to be no angel, but this open mockery of Heavenly things disturbed him. Could it really lure wavering souls to Hell? Surely he himself, in life, had been considered a candidate for such infernal blandishments. Even if his soul had not proved to be entirely balanced between good and evil, he would have known he was of questionable virtue. There were blots on his conscience that could never be erased. He was, in secret fact, a murderer — now he had to admit it to himself! — and he had believed for some time that he was destined for Hell, though he had not quite allowed himself to believe Hell existed. Who was he to judge the souls of others? So the schoolboy had the sins of drug addiction on his soul; was Zane himself any better?

Yet what choice did he have now? It always came back to that. If he didn't do his job, how would that improve anyone's situation? Someone else would replace him in the office of Death, and the grim game would continue.

"It might as well be me," Zane said, pressing the button to resume the countdown. But he remained unsatisfied. He had not really answered his question. He was doing this job because he didn't know what else to do and wasn't ready to quit what form of life remained to him. His own suicide attempt had been a passing thing, a wild impulse of the moment; he really did want to live. Since he had to perform or face some sort of Divine accounting, he performed. That really was not much credit to him.

In fact, Zane realized, he was not much of a person. If he had never lived, the world would not have been a worse place. He was just one of the blah mediocrities that cluttered the cosmos. It was ironic that he should have backed into the significant office he now held.

He had started and oriented the car. He was zooming across the surface of the world, hardly paying attention. This was, if he remembered correctly, his sixth case coming up; he was getting the hang of it. Of course there was still much to learn — assuming he really wanted to learn it.

Ocean gave way to land. There was a fleeting beach, and a green shore region; then they plowed through mountains and across a desert whose sands were wrinkled into dunes like the waves of the sea, frozen in place. On south, still in hyper drive; this was a huge island — in fact, a continent!

The Death mobile stopped at last at the dead end of a dirt road in mountainous country. Four minutes remained on the timer. Where was the client?

The arrow stone for once seemed uncertain. He turned it about, and the arrow was inconsistent. In any event, there was no human habitation in sight in this wild land.

A blinking light on the dash caught his attention. It was the one with the horse head silhouette. Zane pushed it.

He was astride the great stallion, his cloak swirling in the breeze. "What next, friend steed?" he inquired.

The Death horse moved forward, galloping up the steep slope to the side. No ordinary horse could have moved this way — but of course this was a unique animal. Mortis leaped to the top of the mountain ridge, where a primitive cottage perched.

This was the place. The arrow stone had not guided him before, because he had been holding it level instead of angled. It had not been able to point upward to the cottage. The car had not driven here because no ordinary car could, and the approach of Death was always circumspect. As they traversed the somewhat harrowing slope of the mountain, Zane thought again about himself and his office. There was something about the appearance of danger, such as a possible fall, that caused him to review his most morbid thoughts. If he felt unfit for the office of Death and did not want to judge others when he knew he was no better than they were, why should he do it? If his abdication meant he would die the death he had aborted before, maybe that was proper. If he went to Hell, maybe that, too, was proper. After all, he had killed his mother; he could hardly go to join her in Heaven! The fact that he now clung to a kind of life had no relevance; it was fitting that he pay his penalty.

Yes — that was what he had to do! "I resign the office!" he cried impulsively. "Take me directly to Hell!"

Nothing happened. The horse trotted toward the cottage, ignoring Zane's outburst.

Of course. He could not blithely resign. He had to be killed by his successor, who would probably be a client like himself and who would turn on him.

Very well — he had a client coming up. He would pass the office on to that person and be done with it.

Two minutes remained as he rode up to the cottage. A woman came out to meet him. "I am ready, Death," she said. "Lift me to your fine horse and bear me to Heaven."

A woman! He had thought it would be a man, maybe with a gun. Would a woman as readily turn on him? She might need some convincing.

"I can not promise you Heaven," he said. "Your soul is in virtual balance; it could go either way."

"But I took poison so I could go at a time of my choosing!" she protested. "I've got to go to Heaven!"

"Take an antidote or an emetic quickly," Zane urged, wondering whether this was feasible. Would he have been summoned, had demise not been certain? And how could she turn the poison she had already taken against him? This was not working out at all! "Extend your life, and we shall talk."

The woman hesitated. "I don't know — "

"Hurry!" Zane cried, seeing his chance slip away. If she had to die, he would not leave his office this time, and might not have the courage to make the next client turn against him.

"I do have a healing potion that should neutralize it, but — "

"Take it!" he pleaded.

Dominated by his urgency, she complied, drinking the potion.

"Now find a gun or a knife," he told her.

"What? Why should I neutralize the poison, only to use something much more messy?"

"Not for you. For me. I want you to kill me."

She gaped at him. "I'll do no such thing! What do you think I am?"

Zane saw that this wasn't remotely feasible. Of course she was not a murderess! He dismounted, took her hand, and led her to a patio where there were chairs and a table. "Why did you want to die?" he asked.

"What do you care, Death?" she asked, wary of him but curious, too. She spoke with the strong Down under accent of this region.

"Not long ago, I sought to die," he said. "I changed my mind when — well, that's hard to explain. Now I want to die again."

"How can Death die even once?"

"Believe me, Death can die. It is only an office I hold, and that office can be yours if — "This is completely appalling!" she cried. "I'll not listen to this!"

Zane sighed. "Tell me your problem." He knew himself to be no psychologist, but he needed to extricate himself from this awkwardness he had put himself into.

"My husband left me," she said grimly. "After fifteen years — a younger woman — I'll show him!"

"Isn't it a sin to commit suicide, according to your religion?" he asked.

She paused, frowning. "I suppose it is, but — "

"I am a woman," she said with a wry smile. "I owe more to emotion than to logic."

Zane returned her smile, showing that he appreciated her humor. No woman really thought herself illogical, however strongly she might feel, but it was fashionable to seem otherwise. "But your soul is so close to balance, the evil matching the good, that these wrongs could tip you into Hell. Do what you know is right, and your balance should favor Heaven."

"Oh, I hadn't thought of that! I don't want to go to Hell!"

"Believe me, you stand at the very brink of it now. You have done evil before, and this — She sighed. "It is true. I have much evil to account for. I drove him away. I suppose you know how bitchy a woman can be when she tries."

"Not really. I always thought of women as pristine and pure," Zane admitted. "Most of the evil resides in men. Women should go to Heaven when they die."

She laughed bitterly. "You idiot! There is more sin concealed in women than in men! My husband errs because it is his male nature; I, at least, should have known better. I was fooling myself when I dreamed of Heaven."

"Not at all," Zane said. "I didn't say you were doomed to Hell; I said you stood at the verge. Heaven is within your potential. I am sure of this. You can redeem yourself. I am in a position to know, for I collect the borderline souls. Go and do good with what remains of your life, and you will go to Heaven. This promise is surely worth some sacrifice."

"Yes, surely it is," she agreed. "But how is it you, the Grim Reaper, urge this course on me? If I live, doesn't that cost you points or something?"

"I don't know," Zane admitted. "I have not held this office long. I just don't like to see a life wasted or a person damned who could be saved."

"Yet you were asking me to kill you!"

"I see now that was wrong of me. I will make you a deal: you live, and I will live."

She smiled more openly, looking rather pretty. "I'll do it! I don't need my husband anyway.

Zane stood. "I regret I have other appointments. May we never meet again." He extended his hand.

She took it, though it seemed skeletal. "This I will remember — shaking hands with Death." Zane laughed. "That's better than what you contemplated."

"Also better than what you contemplated!" He nodded agreement, then returned to the horse and mounted. He waved to her as he departed.