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Mort felt instinctively that some young couples met, say, at a village dance, and hit it off, and went out together for a year or two, had a few rows, made up, got married and didn’t kill themselves at all.

He became aware that the litany of star-crossed love had wound down.

“Oh,” he said, weakly. “Doesn’t anyone just, you know, just get along any more?”

“To love is to suffer,” said Ysabell. “There’s got to be lots of dark passion.”

“Has there?”

“Absolutely. And anguish.”

Ysabell appeared to recall something.

“Did you say something about something flapping around loose?” she said, in the tight voice of someone pulling themselves together.

Mort considered. “No,” he said. “I’m afraid I wasn’t paying much attention.”

“It doesn’t matter at all.”

They strolled back to the house in silence.

When Mort went back to the study he found that Death had gone, leaving four hourglasses on the desk. The big leather book was lying on a lectern, securely locked shut.

There was a note tucked under the glasses.

Mort had imagined that Death’s handwriting would either be gothic or else tombstone angular, but Death had in fact studied a classic work on graphology before selecting a style and had adopted a hand that indicated a balanced, well-adjusted personality.

It said:

———

Mort thought that history was thrashing around like a steel hawser with the tension off, twanging backwards and forwards across reality in great destructive sweeps.

History isn’t like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always—eventually—manages to spring back into its old familiar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It’s been around a long time.

This is what was happening:

The misplaced stroke of Mort’s scythe had cut history into two separate realities. In the city of Sto Lat Princess Keli still ruled, with a certain amount of difficulty and with the full time aid of the Royal Recogniser, who was put on the court payroll and charged with the duty of remembering that she existed. In the lands outside, though—beyond the plain, in the Ramtops, around the Circle Sea and all the way to the Rim—the traditional reality still held sway and she was quite definitely dead, the duke was king and the world was proceeding sedately according to plan, whatever that was.

The point is that both realities were true.

The sort of historical event horizon was currently about twenty miles away from the city, and wasn’t yet very noticeable. That’s because the—well, call it the difference in historical pressures—wasn’t yet very great. But it was growing. Out in the damp cabbage fields there was a shimmer in the air and a faint sizzle, like frying grasshoppers.

People don’t alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it. Inch by inch, implacable as a glacier and far colder, the real reality was grinding back towards Sto Lat.

———

Mort was the first person to notice.

It had been a long afternoon. The mountaineer had held on to his icy handhold until the last moment and the executee had called Mort a lackey of the monarchist state. Only the old lady of 103, who had gone to her reward surrounded by her sorrowing relatives, had smiled at him and said he was looking a little pale.

The Disc sun was close to the horizon by the time Binky cantered wearily through the skies over Sto Lat, and Mort looked down and saw the borderland of reality. It curved away below him, a crescent of faint silver mist. He didn’t know what it was, but he had a nasty foreboding that it had something to do with him.

He reined in the horse and allowed him to trot gently towards the ground, touching down a few yards behind the wall of iridescent air. It was moving at something less than walking pace, hissing gently as it drifted ghost-like across the stark damp cabbage fields and frozen drainage ditches.

It was a cold night, the type of night when frost and fog fight for domination and every sound is muffled. Binky’s breath made fountains of cloud in the still air. He whinnied gently, almost apologetically, and pawed at the ground.

Mort slid out of the saddle and crept up to the interface. It crackled softly. Weird shapes coruscated across it, flowing and shifting and disappearing.

After some searching he found a stick and poked it cautiously into the wall. It made strange ripples that wobbled slowly out of sight.