On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony Page B

would be when he arrived. When the direction arrow started shifting, though he was driving in a straight line, Zane knew he was there. Just in time, too; his watch’s red hand showed only thirty seconds and counting.
    The eye was maximal, and the arrow spun in a full circle. He had to be right at the scene—but there was nothing here. He was passing through an ordinary intersection. Was this a false alarm?
    He slowed and drew to the side of the street, perplexed. He had thought he had it, and now it seemed he did not. The arrow steadied, pointing back the way he had come. Pointing at nothing.
    The sweep hand on the Deathwatch closed on noon.
    There was a crash in the intersection. A small truck had made a preemptive left turn into the right-of-way of a tiny Japanese subcompact, and the two had collided violently.
    Zane turned off his motor and got out of the Deathmobile, not caring whether it was legally parked. He hurried to the scene of the accident.
    The man in the truck was half-stunned. The woman in the little car had an enormous sliver of supposedly unbreakable glass through her neck. Blood was gushing out of her, flooding the dashboard, but she was not dead.
    Zane hesitated, appalled. He saw no way to save the woman—but what was he to do? Cars were screechingto halts, carpets were landing, and people were converging.
    The woman’s glazing eyes clarified, momentarily. She saw Zane. Her pupils contracted to pinpoints. She tried to scream, but the blood cut off her breath, keeping her silent.
    Someone nudged Zane’s elbow. He jumped. Fate stood beside him. “Don’t torture her, Death,” Fate said. “Finish it.”
    “But she isn’t dead!”
    “She
can’t
die—quite—until you take her soul. She must remain in terrible agony until you put an end to it. She and all the others who are trying to die during this hold period. Do your duty, Death.”
    Zane stumbled toward the wreckage. The woman’s terrified eyes tracked his progress. She might see nothing else, but she saw him—and Zane knew from his own recent experience how horrible the oncoming specter of Death was. But he did not know how he was supposed to finish ending her life.
    The victim’s dress was torn, showing how the glass had sliced all the way down across her right breast, leaving her front a mass of gore. There was absolutely nothing pretty or merciful about this demise. It had to be terminated quickly. Yet the woman tried to resist his approach. She wrenched her left hand up to fend him off, the hand hanging from a broken wrist. Zane had never before seen such physical and emotional pain, not even when his mother had—
    He reached for her, still uncertain what to do. Her wrist blocked his hand, but his flesh passed through hers without resistance. His hooked fingers caught in something that felt like a cobweb, there inside her head. He wrenched his hand out—and it trailed a festoon of transient film, like the substance of a soap bubble. Disgusted, he tried to shake it off, but it clung like a string of spittle. He brought his other hand up, holding the jeweled bracelet, and tried to scrape the stuff away. The thin film tore, but clung to his other hand.
    “This does not become you, Death,” Fate said reprovingly. “This is her soul you are brutalizing.”
    Her soul! Zane’s eyes tried to glaze like those of his victim. He stepped back—and the tattered soul moved with him, stretching out from her destroyed body as if reluctant to separate from it.
    Then the silken strand snapped free and contracted. He held it dangling limply, like the discarded skin of a molting snake.
    The woman in the car was dead at last, the horror and anguish frozen on her face. Death had taken her soul and ended her suffering.
    Or had he? “What happens now?” he asked Fate. His body was shaking, and he felt unpleasantly faint.
    “You fold the soul, pack it in your pouch, and go on to the next client,” she answered. “When you have a break in the schedule,