On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony Page A

the traffic. The windows and mirrors provided excellent visibility all around, and the wheels seemed almost to steer themselves. Maybe there were crash guards, magnetically distancing the car from other vehicles. Certainly the driving seemed better than Zane’s own, since poverty had kept him out of cars for some years.
    The Deathwatch now indicated four minutes. Where was he going?
    Zane concentrated on the passing geography and realized he was headed west. But this did not necessarily bear any relation to the direction in which he should go to make his appointment. How did Death home in on his victims?
    Victims? He did not like that term! Fate had used the word “client,” as he recalled; that was better.
    By whatever term, there had to be a way. Zane felt about his cloak and found an inner pocket with an object inside. He drew this out and glanced at it while driving.
    It was a bracelet, with the band broken. That explained why the former Death had not been wearing it. Death had grown careless about a number of details, it seemed! But what did this item signify?
    There were three prominent jewels set in the bracelet. One was an orange-yellow cat’s eye, the eye stretching across half the polished surface. It seemed almost alive, looking at him. The middle one was a pink stone with a line across it, the line capped by a kind of arrowhead image at one end. The third was a greenish gridstone, probably rutilated quartz, pretty in its fashion, with two imperfections on its surface. One marking was light, the other dark. There was also a light tracery of curved lines marring the otherwise straight-line pattern.
    Zane couldn’t make much sense of this. The watch now showed only two minutes remaining. He had to figure things out in a hurry!
    He turned a corner—and as he did so, he saw that the pink stone changed. Its arrow swung around to point in a new direction. No—the car had swung about; the arrow pointed the same way it had before, northwest.
    Zane goosed the accelerator and cut into the fast lane. A driver honked in protest, but gave him room. He turned another corner, now going east—and the arrow swung again. It was definitely pointing somewhere.
    He turned north, then east, orienting as well as he could on the direction shown. The arrow remained true to its heading—but now the cat’s eye was changing, growing larger on its stone. That must mean he was getting closer. It was a perspective-stone, telling him when he got near his destination.
    But the cat’s eye was expanding very slowly; if its rate was linear, he would never get to his appointment on time. Somehow it seemed very important that he do so. Was lateness as bad as an outright balk?
    Zane turned another corner—and noticed that the green gridstone brightened as he did so. What did that mean?
    He turned again—and saw that a button on the car’s dash glowed in concert with the flash of the green grid.
    Experimentally, he turned again, ignoring the chorus of protests by other cars to his erratic behavior, and touched the button with his forefinger, just as it flashed.
    The car wrenched. The outlines of the city blurred. Zane felt as if he were in a space shuttle, zooming atsupersonic velocity across the terrain of the world. Then, as abruptly as it had started, the blurring stopped.
    Zane looked around, startled. He knew immediately that he was in a different city. He guessed it was one a significant distance northwest of Kilvarough—perhaps all the way across the continent. Maybe even the great port city of Anchorage.
    But he had no time to be concerned about that. The cat’s eye had grown abruptly and significantly larger, the two dots on the gridstone had merged, and his watch was down to a single minute. He was very close to his object.
    With this assurance, Zane proceeded with greater confidence. He was beginning to get the hang of the use of Death’s instruments. He now understood that the eye grew until it covered the stone, and that