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Instead I just cuffed the two of them, lightly, only hard enough to make them drop their knives and sit down for a bit. After they’d stopped looking dazed and rubbing their heads, I told them how matters stood.
"Any day now, a mob will be after us with bludgeons and flaming torches," I finished. "Are you planning to wait for them, assuming you haven’t killed each other before that?"

After a great deal of muttering and darting venomous looks at each other, they decided to accompany me, and I sent them off to pack. I’d always kept my own belongings in a small bag slung over my shoulder, so I could leave at a moment’s notice, and while waiting for them I went outside and made sure there was no assassin lying in wait. The three of them seemed a long time coming, and I’d begun to think they’d decided to have another go at each other, so I turned back to roust them out, and I stopped, astonished.

The building wasn’t there. It was a pretty substantial building, too, which must have been a warehouse or something back in the old factory days. All right, it was night, but it wasn’t so dark that I could miss a building five times the size of this one at twenty paces. And it hadn’t been blown up, because I hadn’t heard a sound and there was no rubble, apart from the fact that since the Great Collapse there hadn’t been any explosives anyway.

As I stood pondering this, I heard a slight sound to my right, exactly as might be made by a man running lightly at me with a knife in his hand. I turned quickly and saw that the sound was made, of course, by a man running lightly towards me, with a knife in his hand. I broke one of my cardinal sage’s advice points at that moment. I didn’t call a halt to proceedings to ask him what he wanted and try and work things out like civilised people. For some reason I didn’t think it would quite work. No, I jumped to once side like a scalded cat and whacked him as he rushed past.

He was huge, but extremely fast, that man. My fingertips had hardly touched him before he threw himself to the side. He was up again almost before he’d hit the ground and was coming back at me, swinging his knife, so I had to jump to the side and swat at him again. Even as he ducked under my hand and fell, I saw something strange and bizarre out of the corner of my eye – something so strange and bizarre that it took all my attention.

What was it, you ask? Simply this – the world was blotting out.

It didn’t happen all at once. Bits and pieces began to disappear like a jigsaw puzzle, leaving the darkness smeared across the face of the night, until – in far less time than it takes to tell it – I was surrounded by a whirling tube of darkness. Even the ground beneath was growing dark and fuzzy. Only, above, was a circular patch of sky, sprinkled with stars. One of these stars glinted on the knife as my antagonist scrambled to his feet and drove it into my heart.

I died, of course. I died immediately, and fell into that tube of darkness, along with my killer, who realised too late what was happening. His terrified scream followed me all the way down until my life drained away.

Let me tell you what happens when you die. You die, you fall a long long way, and then you open your eyes and see a devil looking down at you and scratching his ear with a thoughtful hoof.

He wasn’t that big a devil – say, the size of an elephant. Later I was to see devils the size of blue whales, and devils even larger, devils so large that they literally had lost the power to move. He looked at me this way and that, with a distinctly puzzled expression on his face – if a face vaguely like a lizard’s, with huge faceted eyes like those of a dragonfly, can be said to have any expression.

"What are you doing here?" the devil asked at last, turning his head to scratch at his shoulder with the tip of one horn. Later, I noticed why he, and many of the other devils, always seemed to be scratching themselves; their skin was crawling with small, scuttling parasites. "I was not expecting you."

He seemed to expect an answer, and I couldn’t think of one that wasn’t along the lines of "Whom did you expect, the Queen of Denmark?" I looked around for inspiration and found my killer, sitting up rubbing his head. The knife was still in his other hand.

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