Susan dung to the railing of the topmost platform.

     'Can't you hurry up?' she said. 'We're only at the Bi's at the moment.'

     'I've been pedalling for ages!' panted the oh god.

     'Well, "A" is a very popular letter.'

     Susan stared up at the shelves. A was for Anon, among other things. All those people who, for one reason or another, never officially got a name.

     They tended to be short books.

     'M ... Bo ... Bod ... Bog ... turn left . .

     The library tower squeaked ponderously around the next corner.

     'Ah, Bo ... blast, the Bots are at least twenty shelves up.'

     'Oh, how nice,' said the oh god grimly.

     He heaved on the lever that moved the drive chain from one sprocket  to another, and started to pedal again.

     Very ponderously, the creaking tower began to telescope upwards.

     'Right,  we're there,' Susan shouted down, after a few  minutes of slow rise. 'Here's ... let's see ... Aabana Bottler. . .'

     'I expect Violet will be  a lot further,' said the  oh  god, trying out irony.

     'Onwards!'

     Swaying a little, the tower headed down the Bs until.

     'Stop!'

     It rocked as the oh god kicked the brake block against a wheel.

     'I think  this  is her,'  said a voice  from above.  'OK, you can lower away.'

     A big wheel with ponderous lead weights on it  spun slowly as the tower concertina'd  back,  creaking and grinding.  Susan climbed down the last few feet.

     'Everyone's  in  here?' said the oh god,  as  she  thumbed through  the pages.

     'Yes.'

     'Even gods?'

     'Anything that's  alive  and  self-aware,'  said Susan, not looking up. 'This is ... odd. It looks as though she's in some sort of ... prison. Who'd want to lock up a tooth fairy?'

     'Someone with very sensitive teeth?'

     Susan flicked back a  few pages. 'It's all ... hoods over her head  and people carrying her and so on.  But . . .' she turned a page  '... it says the last job she did was on  Banjo and ...  yes,  she got the tooth  ... and then she felt as though someone was behind her and ...  there's  a ride on a cart ... and the hood's come off ... and there's a causeway ... and. . .'

     'All that's in a book?'

     'The autobiography.  Everyone has one. It writes down your life as  you go along.'

     'I've got one?'

     'I expect so.'

     'Oh, dear. "Got up, was  sick, wanted  to  die." Not  a gripping  read, really.'

     Susan turned the page.

     'A tower,' she said. 'She's in a tower. From what  she  saw, it was  tall and white inside ...  but  not outside? It didn't look real. There were apple trees around it, but the trees, the trees didn't look  right. And  a  river, but that  wasn't right either. There were goldfish in it ... but they were on top of the water.'

     'Ah. Pollution,' said the oh god.

     'I don't think so. It says here she saw them swimming!

     'Swimming on top of the water?'

     'That's how she thinks she saw it.'

     'Really?  You don't think she'd been eating  any of that mouldy cheese, do you?'

     'And there was  blue sky but  ...  she must have got this wrong  ... it says here there was only blue sky above ...'

     'Yep.  Best place  for the sky,' said the oh god. 'Sky underneath  you, that probably means trouble.'

     Susan flicked a page back and forth. 'She means ...  sky  overhead  but not around the edges, I think No sky on the horizon.'

     'Excuse me,' said the oh god. 'I'm not long in this world, I appreciate that, but I think you have, to have sky on the horizon. That's how you can tell it's the horizon.'

     A sense of familiarity was creeping up on  Susan,  but surreptitiously, dodging behind things whenever she tried to concentrate on it.

     'I've  seen  this place,' she  said, tapping the page.  'If only  she'd looked harder at  the trees  ... She says they've got brown trunks and green leaves and it says here she thought they were odd. And ... She concentrated on the next paragraph. 'Flowers. Growing in the grass. With big round petals.'

     She stared unseeing at the oh god again.

     'This isn't a proper landscape,' she said.

     'It  doesn't sound  too unreal to me,' said the  oh god.  'Sky.  Trees. Flowers. Dead fish.'

     'Brown tree trunks?  Really  they're  mostly a  sort  of  greyish mossy colour.  You only ever see brown tree trunks in one place,' said Susan. 'And it's the  same place where  the  sky  is only ever overhead. The  blue never comes down to the ground.'

     She looked up. At the far end of the corridor was one of the very tall, very  thin windows.  It looked out on  to the  black gardens. Black  bushes, black grass, black  trees.  Skeletal fish cruising 'm the black waters  of a pool, under black water lilies.

     There  was colour, in a sense, but it  was the kind of colour you'd get if  you could shine a beam of  black through  a prism. There  were  hints of tints, here  and there a black you might persuade yourself  was  a very deep purple or  a midnight blue. But it was  basically black,  under a black sky, because this was the world belonging to Death and that  was all there was to it.

     The shape of Death was  the shape people had created for him,  over the centuries. Why bony? Because  bones were associated  with death.  He'd got a scythe because agricultural people could spot a decent metaphor. And he lived in a sombre land because the human imagination would be  rather stretched  to  let him live somewhere nice with flowers.

     People like Death lived in the human imagination,  and got  their shape there, too. He wasn't the only one ...

     ... but  he didn't  like the script,  did he? He'd started  to  take an interest in people. Was that a thought,  or just a memory  of something that hadn't happened yet?

     The oh god followed her gaze.

     'Can  we  go after her?' said the oh god. 'I say we,  I think I've just got drafted in because I was in the wrong place.'

     'She's alive. That means she is mortal,' said Susan.  'That means I can find her, too.' She turned and started to walk out of the library.

     'If she  says the sky is  just blue overhead, what's between it and the horizon?' said the oh god, running to keep up.

     'You don't have to come,' said Susan. 'It's not your problem.'

     'Yes, but given that my problem is that my whole  purpose in life is to feel rotten, anything's an improvement.'

     'It could be dangerous. I don't think she's there of her own free will. Would you be any good in a fight?'

     'Yes. I could be sick on people.'

     It  was  a shack, somewhere out  on the outskirts of the Plains town of Scrote. Scrote had a  lot  of outskirts,  spread so widely  - a busted  cart here,  a  dead  dog  there  that often  people went through  it without even knowing it  was  there,  and really it only appeared  on  the  maps  because cartographers get embarrassed about big empty spaces.

     Hogswatch  came after the excitement of the cabbage harvest when it was pretty quiet  in Scrote and there was nothing  much to look forward to until the fun of the sprout festival.

     This shack  had  an  iron stove, with  a pipe that went  up through the thick cabbage-leaf thatch.

     Voices echoed faintly within the pipe.

THIS IS REALLY, REALLY STUPID.

     'I think the tradition got started when everyone had them big chimneys, master.' This voice sounded as though it was coming from someone standing on the roof and shouting down the pipe.

     INDEED? IT'S ONLY A MERCY IT'S UNLIT.

     There  was some muffled scratching  and banging, and then a  thump from within the pot belly of the stove.


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