18
Falling Water
At the far eastern edge of MidMerica, near the EastMerica border, was a home with a river running beneath it, spilling from its foundations into a waterfall.
“It was designed by a very well-known mortal age architect,” Scythe Curie told Citra as she led the way across a footbridge to the front door. “The place had fallen into disrepair; as you can imagine, a home such as this couldn’t survive without constant attention. It was in a horrible state, and no one cared enough to preserve it. Only the presence of a scythe would bring forth the kind of donations required to save it. Now it’s been returned to its former glory.”
The Scythe opened the door and let Citra step in first. “Welcome to Falling Water,” Scythe Curie said.
The main floor was a huge open room with a polished stone floor, wooden furniture, a large fireplace, and windows. Lots and lots of windows. The waterfall was right beneath an expansive terrace. The sound of the river running beneath the home and over the falls was a constant but calming white noise.
“I’ve never been in a house with a name,” Citra said as she looked around, doing her best to be unimpressed. “But it’s a bit much, isn’t it? Especially for a scythe. Aren’t you all supposed to live simple lives?”
Citra knew such a comment could bring forth the scythe’s temper, but she didn’t care. Her presence here meant that Scythe Faraday died for nothing. A beautiful home was no consolation.
Scythe Curie did not respond in anger. She just said, “I live here not because of its extravagance, but because my presence here is the only way to preserve it.”
The decor seemed to be frozen in the twentieth century, when the place was built. The only hints of modernization were a few simple computer interfaces in unobtrusive corners. Even the kitchen was a throwback to an earlier time.
“Come, I’ll show you to your room.”
They climbed a staircase that was lined on the left by layered sheets of granite and echoed on the right by rows and rows of shelved books. The second floor was the scythe’s bedroom suite. The third floor held a smaller bedroom and a study. The bedroom was simply furnished, and, like the rest of the home, had huge windows framed in polished cedar, wrapping around two entire walls. The view of the forest made Citra feel as if she were perched in a treehouse. She liked it. And she hated that she did.
“You know that I don’t want to be here,” Citra said.
“At last some honesty from you,” Scythe Curie said with the slightest of grins.
“And,” added Citra, “I know you don’t like me—so why did you take me on?”
The scythe looked at her with those cold, inscrutable gray eyes. “Whether or not I like you is irrelevant,” she said. “I have my reasons.”
Then she left Citra alone in her room without as much as a good-bye.
• • •
Citra didn’t remember falling asleep. She hadn’t even considered how exhausted she was. She recalled lying down on the comforter, looking out at the trees, listening to the river roaring endlessly below, wondering if the noise would eventually go from soothing to unbearable. And then she opened her eyes to stark incandescence, squinting at Scythe Curie who was standing in the doorway, by the light switch. It was dark outside now. Not just dark but lightless, like space. She could still hear the river, but couldn’t see even a hint of the trees.
“Did you forget about dinner?” Scythe Curie asked.
Citra rose, ignoring the sudden vertigo when she stood. “You could have woken me.”
Scythe Curie smirked. “I thought I just did.”
Citra made her way down toward the kitchen—but the scythe let her go first, and she couldn’t quite remember the way. The house was a maze. She took a few wrong turns, and Scythe Curie didn’t correct her. She just waited for Citra to find her way.
What, Citra wondered, would this woman want to eat? Would she silently accept anything that Citra prepared, as Scythe Faraday had? The thought of the man brought a wave of sorrow chased by anger, but she didn’t know who exactly to be angry at, so it just festered.
Citra arrived on the main floor ready to assess the contents of the pantry and refrigerator, but to her surprise she found the dinner table set for two, and steaming plates of food already there.
“I had a hankering for hasenpfeffer,” the scythe said. “I think you’ll like it.”
“I don’t even know what hasenpfeffer is.”
“Best if you don’t.” Scythe Curie sat down, and bade Citra to do the same. But Citra wasn’t quite ready, still wondering if this might be a trick.
Scythe Curie dug a spoon into the rich stew, but paused when she saw Citra still standing. “Are you waiting for a formal invitation?” she asked.
Citra couldn’t tell if she was irritated or amused. “I’m an apprentice. Why would you cook for me?”
“I didn’t. I cooked for me. Your grumbling stomach just happened to be in the vicinity.”
Finally Citra sat and tasted the stew. Flavorful. A little gamey, but not bad. The sweetness of honey-glazed carrots cut the gaminess.
“The life of a scythe would be dreadful if we didn’t allow ourselves the guilty pleasure of a hobby. Mine is cooking.”
“This is good,” Citra admitted. Then added, “Thank you.”
They ate mostly in silence. Citra felt odd not being of service at the table, so she got up to refill the scythe’s glass of water. Scythe Faraday did not have any hobbies—or at least none that he shared with Citra and Rowan.
The thought of Rowan made her hand tremble as she poured, and she sloshed some water on the table.
“I’m sorry, Scythe Curie.” She grabbed her own napkin and blotted the spill before it could spread.
“You’ll need a steadier hand than that if you’re going to be a scythe.” Again, Citra couldn’t tell if she was being serious or sardonic. The woman was even harder for Citra to read than Faraday—and reading people was not her forte by any means. Of course, she never realized that until she spent time with Rowan, who, in his own unobtrusive way, was a master of observation. Citra had to remind herself that she had other skills. Speed and decisiveness of action. Coordination. Those things would have to come into play if she was going to . . .
She couldn’t finish the thought—wouldn’t allow herself to. The territory where that thought led was still too terrible to consider.
• • •
In the morning, Scythe Curie made blueberry pancakes, and then they went out gleaning.
While Scythe Faraday always reviewed his notes on his chosen subject and used public transportation, Scythe Curie had an old-school sports car that required substantial skill to drive—especially on a winding mountain road.
“This Porsche was a gift from an antique car dealer,” Scythe Curie explained to her.
“He wanted immunity?” Citra asked, assuming the man’s motive.
“On the contrary. I had just gleaned his father, so he already had immunity.”
“Wait,” said Citra. “You gleaned his father, and he gave you a car?”
“Yes.”
“So he hated his father?”
“No, he loved his father very much.”
“Am I missing something?”
The road ahead of them straightened out, Scythe Curie shifted gears, and they accelerated. “He appreciated the solace I afforded him in the aftermath of the gleaning,” she told Citra. “True solace can be worth its weight in gold.”
Still, Citra didn’t quite understand—and wouldn’t until much later that evening.
They went to a town that was hundreds of miles away, arriving around lunchtime. “Some scythes prefer big cities; I prefer smaller towns,” Scythe Curie said. “Towns that perhaps haven’t seen a gleaning in over a year.”
“Who are we gleaning?” Citra asked as they looked for a parking place—one of the liabilities of taking a car that was off-grid.
“You’ll find out when it’s time to know.”
They parked on a main street, then walked—no, strolled—down the street, which was busy but not bustling. Scythe Curie’s leisurely pace made Citra uncomfortable, and she wasn’t sure why. Then it occurred to her that when she went gleaning with Scythe Faraday, his focus was always on the destination, and that destination wasn’t a place, but a person. The subject. The soul to be gleaned. As awful as that was, it had somehow made Citra feel more secure. With Scythe Faraday, there was always a tangible end to their endeavor. But nothing about Scythe Curie’s manner suggested premeditation at all. And there was a reason for that.
“Be a student of observation,” Curie told Citra.
“If you want a student of observation, you should have chosen Rowan.”
Scythe Curie ignored that. “Look at people’s faces, their eyes, the way they move.”
“What am I looking for?”
“A sense that they’ve been here too long. A sense that they’re ready to . . . conclude, whether they know it or not.”
“I thought we weren’t allowed to discriminate by age.”
“It’s not about age, it’s about stagnation. Some people grow stagnant before they turn their first corner. For others it could take hundreds of years.”
Citra looked at the people moving around them—all trying to avoid eye contact and get away from the scythe and her apprentice as quickly as possible, all the while trying not to be obvious about it. A couple stepping out of a café; a businessman on his phone; a woman beginning to cross the street against the light, then coming back, perhaps fearing that jaywalking would get her gleaned.
“I don’t see anything in anyone,” Citra said, irritated at both the task and her inability to rise to it.
A group of people came out of an office building—perhaps the tallest one in town at about ten stories. Scythe Curie zeroed in on one man. Her eyes looked almost predatory as she and Citra began to follow him at a distance.
“Do you see how he holds his shoulders, as if there is an invisible weight upon them?”
“No.”
“Can you see how he walks—a little less intently than those around him?”
“No.”
“Do you notice how scuffed his shoes are, as if he doesn’t care anymore?”
“Maybe he’s just having a bad day,” suggested Citra.
“Yes, maybe,” admitted Scythe Curie, “but I choose to believe otherwise.”
They closed in on the man, who never seemed to be aware that he was being stalked.
“All that remains is to see his eyes,” the scythe said. “To be sure.”
Scythe Curie touched him on the shoulder, he turned, and their eyes met, but only for the slightest moment. Then he suddenly gasped—
—because Scythe Curie’s blade had already been thrust up beneath his rib cage and into his heart. So quick was Scythe Curie that Citra never saw her do it. She never even saw the scythe pull out her blade.
The scythe offered no response to the man’s awful surprise; she said nothing to him at all. She just withdrew the blade, and the man fell. He was dead before he hit the pavement. Around them people gasped and hurried away, but not so far away that they couldn’t watch the aftermath. Death was unfamiliar to most of them. It needed to exist in its own bubble, as long as they could stay just beyond its outer edge, peering in.
The scythe wiped her blade on a chamois cloth the same pale lavender as her robe, and that’s when Citra lost control.
“You gave him no warning!” she blurted. “How could you do that? You don’t even know him! You didn’t even let him prepare!”
The cloud of rage that billowed forth from Scythe Curie was so powerful it was almost a visible thing, and Citra knew she had made a terrible mistake.
“ON THE GROUND!” yelled the scythe, with such volume it echoed back and forth between the brick buildings of the street.
Citra immediately got to her knees.
“FACE TO THE PAVEMENT! NOW!”
Citra complied, fear overcoming her fury. She splayed herself, prostrate on the ground, her right cheek pressed against the pavement, which was searingly hot from the midday sun. Her view was now of the dead man, just a foot away, whose eyes were empty, and yet staring into Citra’s at the same time. How could dead eyes still stare?
“YOU DARE PRESUME TO TELL ME HOW TO ACCOMPLISH MY TASK?”
It seemed the world had frozen around them.
“YOU WILL APOLOGIZE FOR YOUR INSOLENCE, AND BE DISCIPLINED.”
“I’m sorry, Scythe Curie.” At the mention of Scythe Curie’s name, a murmur erupted among the bystanders. She was legendary everywhere.
“CONVINCE ME!”
“I’m truly sorry, Scythe Curie,” Citra said louder, screaming it into the face of the dead man. “I will never disrespect you again.”
“Get up.”
The scythe was no longer raging with earthshaking wrath. Citra rose, furious at the weakness of her own legs, which shook beneath her, and the incontinence of her eyes, which spewed tears she wished would evaporate before Scythe Curie or any of the bystanders could see.
The world-renowned Grande Dame of Death turned to stride away, and Citra followed in her wake, humbled, hobbled, wishing she could take the scythe’s blade and stab it into the woman’s back—and then furious at herself for wishing such a thing.
They got into the car and pulled away from the curb. Only when they were about a block away did the scythe speak to Citra.
“Now then, it will be your task to identify the man, find his immediate family, and invite them to Falling Water so that I may grant them immunity.” She spoke without the slightest hint of the fury of just a few moments ago.
“Wh . . . what?” It was as if the scene on the street had never happened. Citra was caught completely off guard—a bit dizzy, as if all the air had been sucked out of the car.
“I have forty-eight hours to grant them immunity. I’d like them to gather at my home this evening.”
“But . . . but back there . . . when you had me on the ground . . .”
“Yes?”
“And you were so angry . . .”
Scythe Curie sighed. “There is an image to uphold, dear,” she said. “You defied me in public, so I had no choice but to publicly put you in your place. In the future, you need to hold your opinions until we are alone.”
“So you’re not angry?”
The scythe considered the question. “I’m annoyed,” she said. “But then, I should have warned you what I was about to do. Your response was . . . justified. And so was the consequence I levied.”
Even at this end of the emotional roller coaster, Citra had to admit that the scythe was right. There was a certain amount of decorum required of an apprentice. Another scythe might have exacted a punishment far worse.
They circled back, and Scythe Curie let Citra off on a side street just a block from where the gleaning had occurred. She would have an hour to find the family and extend them the invitation.
“And if he lives alone, both our jobs will be easy today,” the scythe said.
Citra wondered what about gleaning could possibly be easy.
• • •
The man’s name was Barton Breen. He had turned the corner many times, had fathered more than twenty children over the years, some of whom were now over a century old themselves. His current household consisted of his most recent wife and his three youngest children. These were the ones who would receive immunity from gleaning for one year.
“What if they don’t come?” Citra asked Scythe Curie on the way home.
“They always come,” the scythe told her.
And she was right. They arrived a little after eight in the evening, somber and shell-shocked. Scythe Curie had them kneel right at the door to kiss her ring, granting them immunity. Then she and Citra served them dinner, which the scythe had prepared. Comfort food: pot roast, green beans, and garlic mashed potatoes. Clearly the family had no appetite, but they ate out of obligation.
“Tell me about your husband,” Scythe Curie asked, her voice gentle and sincere.
The woman was reluctant to say much at first, but soon she couldn’t stop telling the tale of her husband’s life. Soon the kids joined in with their memories. The man quickly went from an anonymous subject on the street to an individual whose life even Citra now missed, although she had never known him.
And Scythe Curie listened—truly listened—as if she were intent on memorizing everything they said. More than once her eyes moistened, reflecting the tears of the family.
And then the scythe did the oddest thing. She produced from her robe the blade that had taken the man’s life, and set it down on the table.
“You may take my life, if you like,” she told the woman.
The woman just stared at her, not understanding.
“It’s only fair,” the scythe said. “I’ve taken away your husband, robbed your children of their father. You must despise me for it.”
The woman looked to Citra, as if she might know what to do, but Citra only shrugged, equally surprised by the offer.
“But . . . attacking a scythe is punishable by gleaning.”
“Not if you have the scythe’s permission. Besides, you’ve already received immunity. I promise there will be no retribution.”
The knife lay on the table between them, and Citra suddenly felt like the pedestrians at the gleaning: frozen just on the other side of some unthinkable event horizon.
Scythe Curie smiled at the woman with genuine warmth. “It’s all right. If you strike me down, my apprentice will simply bring me to the nearest revival center, and in a day or two I’ll be as good as new.”
The woman contemplated the blade, the children contemplated their mother. Finally the woman said, “No, that won’t be necessary.”
Scythe Curie removed the blade from sight. “Well, in that case, on to dessert.”
And the family devoured the chocolate cake with a passion they hadn’t shown for the rest of the meal, as if a great pall had been lifted.
• • •
After they were gone, Scythe Curie helped Citra with the dishes. “When you’re a scythe,” she told Citra, “I’m sure you won’t do things my way. You won’t do things the way Scythe Faraday did, either. You’ll find your own path. It may not bring you redemption, it might not even bring you peace, but it will keep you from despising yourself.”
Then Citra asked a question she had asked before—but this time she suspected she might get an answer.
“Why did you take me on, Your Honor?”
The scythe washed a dish, Citra dried it, and finally Scythe Curie said the oddest thing. “Have you ever heard of a ‘sport’ called cock fighting?”
Citra shook her head.
“Back in the mortal age, unsavories would take two roosters, put them in a small arena, and watch them battle to the death, wagering on the outcome.”
“That was legal?”
“No, but people did it anyway. Life before the Thunderhead was a blend of bizarre atrocities. You weren’t told this—but Scythe Goddard had offered to take both you and Rowan on.”
“He offered to take both of us?”
“Yes. And I knew it would be only so he could pit the two of you against each other day after day for his own amusement, like a cock fight. So I intervened and offered to take you, in order to spare you both Scythe Goddard’s bloody arena.”
Citra nodded in understanding. She chose not to point out that they hadn’t been spared the arena at all. They were still facing a mortal struggle. Nothing could change that.
She tried to imagine what it might have been like had Scythe Curie not stepped forward. The thought of not being separated from Rowan was tempered by the knowledge of whose hand they’d be under. She didn’t even want to imagine how he was faring with Goddard.
As this had turned into an evening of answers, Citra dared to ask the question she had asked so inappropriately on the street, before the man’s body had even gone cold.
“Why did you glean that man today without warning? Didn’t he deserve at least a moment of understanding before your blade?”
This time Scythe Curie was not offended by the question. “Every scythe has his or her method. That happens to be mine. In the Age of Mortality, death would often come with no warning. It is our task to mimic what we’ve stolen from nature—and so that is the face of death I’ve chosen to recreate. My gleanings are always instantaneous and always public, lest people forget what we do, and why we must do it.”
“But what happened to the scythe who gleaned the president? The hero who went after corporate corruption that not even the Thunderhead could rout. I thought the Grande Dame of Death would always glean with greater purpose.”
A shadow seemed to pass over Scythe Curie’s face. A ghost of some sorrow Citra couldn’t even guess at.
“You thought wrong.”