“General Fri'it has other business,” said Vorbis. “Most pressing and urgent business. Which only he can attend to.”
Fri'it opened his eyes in grayness.
He could see the room around him, but only faintly, as a series of edges in the air.
The sword . . .
He'd dropped the sword, but maybe he could find it again. He stepped forward, feeling a tenuous resistance around his ankles, and looked down.
There was the sword. But his fingers passed through it. It was like being drunk, but he knew he wasn't drunk. He wasn't even sober. He was . . . suddenly clear in his mind.
He turned and looked at the thing that had briefly impeded his progress.
“Oh,” he said.
GOOD MORNING.
“Oh.”
"THERE IS A LITTLE CONFUSION AT FIRST. IT IS ONLY TO BE EXPECTED.
To his horror, Fri'it saw the tall black figure stride away through the gray wall.
“Wait!”
A skull draped in a black hood poked out of the wall.
YES?
“You're Death, aren't you?”
INDEED.
Fri'it gathered what remained of his dignity.
“I know you,” he said. “I have faced you many times.”
Death gave him a long stare.
NO YOU HAVEN'T.
"I assure you-
YOU HAVE FACED MEN. IF YOU HAD FACED ME, I ASSURE YOU . . . YOU WOULD HAVE KNOWN.
“But what happens to me now?”
Death shrugged.
DON'T YOU KNOW? he said, and disappeared.
“Wait!”
Fri'it ran at the wall and found to his surprise that it offered no barrier. Now he was out in the empty corridor. Death had vanished.
And then he realized that it wasn't the corridor he remembered, with its shadows and the grittiness of sand underfoot.
That corridor didn't have a glow at the end, that pulled at him like a magnet pulls at an iron filing.