Ysabell laid her hand against his mouth.
'Listen!'
Mort mumbled a bit through her fingers and then got the message. He strained his ears, striving to hear anything above the heavy hiss of absolute silence.
And then he found it. A faint, irritable scratching. High, high overhead, somewhere in the impenetrable darkness on the cliff of shelves, a life was still being written.
They looked at each other, their eyes widening. Then Ysabell said, 'We passed a ladder back there. On wheels.'
The little castors on the bottom squeaked as Mort rolled it back. The top end moved too, as if it was fixed to another set of wheels somewhere up in the darkness.
'Right,' he said. 'Give me the candle, and —'
'If the candle's going up, then so am I,' said Ysabell firmly. 'You stop down here and move the ladder when I say. And don't argue.'
'It might be dangerous up there,' said Mort gallantly.
'It might be dangerous down here,' Ysabell pointed out. 'So I'll be up the ladder with the candle, thank you.'
She set her foot on the bottom rung and was soon no more than a frilly shadow outlined in a halo of candlelight that soon began to shrink.
Mort steadied the ladder and tried not to think of all the lives pressing in on him. Occasionally a meteor of hot wax would thump into the floor beside him, raising a crater in the dust. Ysabell was now a faint glow far above, and he could feel every footstep as it vibrated down the ladder.
She stopped. It seemed to be for quite a long time.
Then her voice floated down, deadened by the weight of silence around them.
'Mort, I've found it.'
'Good. Bring it down.'
'Mort, you were right.'
'Okay, thanks. Now bring it down,'
'Yes, Mort, but which one?'
'Don't mess about, that candle won't last much longer.'
'Mort!'
'What?'
'Mort, there's a whole shelf!'
Now it really was dawn, that cusp of the day that belonged to no-one except the seagulls in Morpork docks, the tide that rolled in up the river, and a warm turnwise wind that added a smell of spring to the complex odour of the city.
Death sat on a bollard, looking out to sea. He had decided to stop being drunk. It made his head ache.
He'd tried fishing, dancing, gambling and drink, allegedly four of life's greatest pleasures, and wasn't sure that he saw the point. Food he was happy with – Death liked a good meal as much as anyone else. He couldn't think of any other pleasures of the flesh or, rather, he could, but they were, well, fleshy, and he couldn't see how it would be possible to go about them without some major bodily restructuring, which he wasn't going to contemplate. Besides, humans seemed to leave off doing them as they grew older, so presumably they couldn't be that attractive.
Death began to feel that he wouldn't understand people as long as he lived.
The sun made the cobbles steam and Death felt the faintest tingling of that little springtime urge that can send a thousand tons of sap pumping through fifty feet of timber in a forest.
The seagulls swooped and dived around him. A one-eyed cat, down to its eighth life and its last ear, emerged from its lair in a heap of abandoned fish boxes, stretched, yawned, and rubbed itself against his legs. The breeze, cutting through Ankh's famous smell, brought a hint of spices and fresh bread.
Death was bewildered. He couldn't fight it. He was actually feeling glad to be alive, and very reluctant to be Death.