The Death of Me: A Tor.Com Original (2 page)

As it happened, this was self-evidently true. But Cabal did not care to jump into the carriages of strangers. That way lay a sack over the head, a cosh to the skull, and, if he was lucky, a shallow grave in scrubland. “I’ll walk,” he said, turned, took a step, and found himself sitting down opposite the woman. The door swung shut and the carriage rattled on. Cabal looked about in consternation. At no point had he decided to place his foot upon the step, hoist himself into the carriage, and take the seat. No matter. He would just leave. It would not be the first time he’d jumped from a moving carriage.

He reached for the handle and discovered that there wasn’t one. He paused for a furious moment. He could search for one, but this was all looking very much like a fait accompli. Scrabbling around at the door would probably just make him appear an idiot, even more than an idiot who enters a carriage without meaning to. Instead, he sat back and looked at the woman steadily. There was an element of glaring in the look, but he couldn’t help that.

“Thank you for your offer. If you’d be so kind as to drop me off at the railway station, I should be most obliged.”

They travelled in silence for all of two minutes before the women spoke, her voice quiet and musical. “This is a lonely road you travel, Mr Cabal.”

Ah
, thought Cabal.
So begins the double talk. I shall have none of it
.

“You clearly know who I am. I don’t believe that you simply happened to be passing, and I do not believe that I could have made such a mess of the simple act of avoiding joining you in here without assistance. I am a busy man”—he saw no evidence of a wedding ring beneath the black lace of her gloves and ventured a— “fräulein. I would ask of you that you dispense with your attempts at tact, disingenuity, and abstruse conversation. If you have something to say, say it.”

To his great and rising irritation, she was not at all put out but only smiled sweetly, as at a small child who has made an imperfect attempt upon a three-syllable word.

They travelled in silence for a further two minutes.

Finally the women spoke again, her voice quiet and musical. “This is a lonely road you travel, Mr Cabal.”

Cabal was assailed by a strong sense of déjà vu, not simply from the repetition of the words but also from the small hillock, topped by an old elm, that he could see out the window. He was sure he had been looking at that exact tree when she had spoken the last time. He began to understand the rules of this game and, having no desire to spend the rest of the day seeing the same elm on the same hillock, he decided that he would play, albeit not in the most sporting frame of mind.

“I prefer to travel alone.”

Infuriatingly, her smile deepened. “But was that always the way? In your dreams, is that the way still? Or do you wish to go back a ways? To twist a thread whole that cruel Atropos…”

Cabal’s lips grew thin, his colour pallid. “You, madam, are on dangerous ground…” he said, so quietly that it was lost in the hoofbeats and creaking of wood.

Yet, she seemed to hear him, and yet, she didn’t care.

“… that cruel Atropos cut
so
short.” Her eyes shined as she spoke, harsh icy crystals of something like cruelty in every syllable.

“Shut up!” Cabal was suddenly furious, his tightly reined anger breaking loose. “Shut your
verdammt
mouth! You think you can just kidnap me in this fashion and I don’t know who you are?” He fumbled in his pocket and took out a small piece of pitted metal that he placed with venomous swiftness on her pale flesh between cuff and glove. She watched him with amused eyes as he, face white with fury, breath shuddering, pressed the metal harder onto her skin.

“What do you expect to happen?” she asked, politely interested.

Cabal’s fury left him as quickly as it had materialised. He looked at the piece of metal, her wrist, the metal again, and finally dropped it into his pocket. He swept back his short blond hair as he regained his composure. “I’m sorry, fräulein. Your questions were too impertinent to tolerate but, still…” His loss of control had frightened him far more than it had her.

“What was that?” she murmured calmly, pointing vaguely at his pocket.

“Meteoric cold iron. I … forgive me … I assumed that you were of the Fay. It would have burned you if you were. I was obviously mistaken.” He coughed, embarrassed. “My current line of experimentation, I almost expect reprisals.”

The elm tree on its hillock went by again.

“You are right in one respect, Mr Cabal. Time is short. Perhaps shorter than you realise. We have touched, briefly if not briefly enough, upon your past, and you speak of your present endeavours. But I…” She reached to the side of the carriage and drew down a folding tabletop until it lay across her lap. Then, nonchalantly and without affectation, she produced a deck of cards from thin air and spread them facedown. Taking the last card, she slid it beneath the end of the spread and flipped it over. The cards obediently flowed onto their backs in a wave, showing their faces. Cabal winced slightly. Tarot cards. “I deal with people’s futures. Or”—she held up the card she was holding so Cabal could see its face—“the lack of same.”

It was the thirteenth card. Death. Unusually, Death was not represented by a skeleton with a scythe. Instead, the card showed a carriage upon a lonely road. From its window, a woman in black and red and white looked out.

“Ah,” said Cabal.

She did him the courtesy of looking down as she gathered up the cards, affecting to ignore his confusion and dismay. “You and I are not enemies, Johannes.” She looked up and smiled brightly at him. “You don’t mind if I call you ‘Johannes,’ do you?” Cabal, finding diplomacy and self-preservation might well be the same thing at that moment, did not. “We are not enemies, no matter how much you might believe that. Your enemy is time.” She gestured out of the window, where the elm was just going by again.

“A nicety.” Cabal was recovering his composure.

“Not at all. A fundamental point.” She held out the cards to him. Lips pursed, he cut the deck. She smiled pleasantly and started to lay them out. “Nobody knows when your time is up.”

“You do.”

“I don’t.” She finished laying out the cards into a fortune-teller’s spread. She saw his raised eyebrow. “No. I don’t. But when the time comes, it’s clear enough. There are always indicators. Of past” —she tapped the cards as she spoke—“present, and, my abiding interest, the future.” She flipped the card over.

Cabal craned his neck to look. “Card X. The Wheel. That’s good, I believe.”

“For most people who don’t do what you do, it is. Do you believe in karma?”

“No.”

“That’s a shame, because this card does.” She started to gather up the cards again. “I think we need to exercise some alternative technique.”

He stopped her. “Please. Humour my curiosity.” He turned the card marking his past.

“The Lovers, Johannes. My, my, my,” she remarked mildly.

He sniffed and turned the card marking his present. “Card I. The Conjuror. Ha!”

She took the card and looked at it for a moment before turning its face towards him. “Are you sure?” Cabal looked again. Card 0. The Fool.

She slid the card back into the deck and shuffled it. “I always get them mixed up myself.”

Cabal watched her for a moment before asking, “Why this concern? There are many within my profession, such as it is. Well, a few, at any rate. Do they all receive visitations such as this?”

“No, Johannes. They do not. You are a special case.”

“Special?” That sounded dangerous. “In what way?”

But the woman wasn’t listening. Before returning the card marking Cabal’s past to the deck, she had flipped it in her hand and was looking intently at it. “Just special,” she said distractedly. She returned it to the deck and gave Cabal a look he couldn’t decipher at all. “Give me your hand,” she said tonelessly, unsmiling.

With mild trepidation, Cabal held out his right hand. She took off her gloves before taking his hand in hers. Her skin was smooth and cool; Cabal found himself thinking of the statue of a medieval lady, buried by her husband in a church crypt that he had once visited, lady-size in marble. If the woman noticed the faint shudder that ran through him, she didn’t show it.

“A long middle finger. Strong thumb.”

Cabal was interested despite himself. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning that you’re probably very good at flicking things.” Her smile returned, more mischievous than before. “Oh, and some other things, but they’re not relevant.” She turned his hand palm upwards and the smile vanished. She looked at him very seriously. “All of which brings us to my interest in you, Johannes Cabal.”

“Yes, your interest in me,” replied Cabal evenly, while wondering how far he would get if he flung himself out of the carriage window. He had a depressing sense that the glass wouldn’t shatter.

She turned his hand so he could see the palm and indicated an area from the web between the thumb and forefinger down in an arc to the middle of the wrist. “Do you know what’s missing from here?”

“You know, the Gypsy Petulengro neglected to mention any…”

She stopped him. “I’ve heard about your brand of wit. Keep it to yourself.” She indicated his palm again. “You’re walking around without a life line, Johannes. That simply isn’t done.”

“Life line?” Baffled, he took his hand back and studied his palm. Now that she mentioned it, it didn’t look nearly as cluttered as perhaps it should. He had memories of a line running just as she had shown him, running around the base of the thenar eminence. Now, there was nothing but the expected fine geography of minute peaks and troughs. He looked up at her suspiciously. “A freakish happenstance, nothing more. Why
your
interest?”

“Not just a freakish happenstance, Johannes. It’s against the rules.”

“Whose rules?”

“Mine. And I tend to have the last word in disputes. Now, how did you happen to lose your life line? Think carefully now.” The smile was back. Cabal had a sense of a cat trifling with a mouse, or vole, or some other small rodent, and he didn’t care for it at all, no matter who she was.

“I dislike being toyed with,” he said sharply.

“I
know
you do,” she replied, as if speaking to a four-year-old. She dropped the demeanour like a mask, but kept a colder incarnation of the smile. “I know a great deal about you. I know you think you can cheat me.”

“I
have
cheated you. I died. I got over it.”

“You managed it once. Don’t get all cocky and think you can manage it again. You haven’t cheated anything at all. Only postponed the inevitable. Which brings us back”—she took his hand again and levered it over so she could see his palm. She did it with such unexpected strength that Cabal gasped involuntarily—“to this.” She smiled, without a shred of humour. “What shall we do to make things right again, Johannes?”

She wasn’t releasing her grip and Cabal found the pain was escalating. It was hard to accept that the young—if only in appearance—lady sitting opposite him was applying the sort of pressure more usually associated with bull gorillas with something to prove. He was past pain now, tending into the foothills of agony.

“Are you open to suggestions?” he managed without sobbing.

“No. On this occasion, I think I already have the solution.”

She placed the tip of her free thumb gently on the skin between the bases of his thumb and forefinger. Then, with a sudden vicious push, she drove her nail into the flesh.

Cabal’s agony rocketed from the merely very unpleasant to the incandescent in a heartbeat. He couldn’t draw breath to scream, his feet scrabbled helplessly on the carriage floor, his free hand grabbed the edge of the seat, and his fingers dug into the upholstery. He could feel the bones crushing together within her grip, could feel them breaking and breaking again. He wanted to collapse, but she held his hand as effortlessly immobile as if she really were that marble statue, held his hand free from the slightest quiver as she drew her nail across his palm, skirting the thenar eminence, slowly and deliberately cutting his hand open. The flesh peeled back beneath her nail, sharper than any scalpel, peeled back the subcutaneous layer, the flesh beneath, musculature, blood vessels parting, down to the white bone in its red setting. Blood sluiced down his wrist, soaking his shirtsleeve.

Suddenly he was in the road, rolling facedown in the dust. His bag landed with a thump beside his head. As he blinked away tears of pain, as he hugged and cosseted his maimed hand to his chest, he heard her say, “Remember, Cabal. You haven’t cheated anything at all. Only postponed the inevitable. Those are the rules.”

He rolled over, spitting foul invectives in three dead languages. And found he was cursing a milestone. Of the carriage, the horses, the coachman, and the passenger, there was no sign at all.

He was past being surprised. It didn’t surprise him that the milestone showed that his lengthy ride in the carriage had carried him less than half a mile. It didn’t surprise him that, on turning, he found himself facing a small hillock topped with an old elm. It didn’t surprise him when he risked a glance at his crushed and slashed hand that…

He blinked. No, he concluded, actually this
was
quite surprising. His hand seemed unmarked, undamaged. No mangled fingers, no bloody rivulet trailing from his grip, no red-soaked sleeve, nothing at all. Except … He angled his hand to examine the palm more closely in the sunlight. Except that now he had a life line. It looked like it had always been there; it looked as if it belonged. Apart from the slight itching tingle that travelled through the skin, there was nothing to tell it apart from any other line upon his hand.

He frowned. All this trouble for a crease in the skin? The attention of a higher power for
this
? He rubbed experimentally at it, but it remained.

Cabal took out his pocket watch. His capacity to accept the inexplicable that morning had been raised to such a high mark that he hardly registered more surprise than warranted a slight sniff when he discovered that a little less than two minutes had passed since he last checked it, moments before the carriage had appeared. He still had time to get to the station. But, he would still have to walk. Picking up his bag, Johannes Cabal started along the road once more.