Nathan disagreed.
"What if we are meant to conserve ammunition? We - "
Jeremy cut him off in a blur of words.
"It's a test. I mean, if we go crazy and shoot all the weapons off then we'd show we have no battle discipline and not be worthy soldiers.”
"Yes, it's a test," agreed Ian, lifting the cover and sliding out the blunderbuss. The musket's weight bore down his left hand's grip on the barrel; the thing slipped and clattered upon the flagstones. Ian grinned.
Lights winked on, small crystals studded to the inner seam of each table leg. They appeared much as summer streetlamps do, one beaming to life, then the glittering birth of its thousand brothers a second later. The boys were torn. A bewilderment of weapons was ripe for the taking on all sides, an orchard heavily laden with fruits of primed gunpowder and razored steel. Jeremy’s anxiety was clear to Nathan. To progress was to be in an ever more deadly part of the collection, that much was obvious. By his reckoning, Nathan could see the promise of modern guns but a few hundred metres away.
He told his friends of his theory and they were quick to agree.
“This is Death’s armoury, his arsenal, his storehouse,” said Jeremy. The boy smiled and hefted a mace whose flanged blades caught the lamplight with an understated malice. Kneeling to peer at the table bottoms, Ian’s voice was insistent.
“No, it’s like a museum. Of the all the ways people have killed each other.”
A realisation came to Nathan.
“They are both one and the same thing,” he whispered. “But will there be neutron bombs at the end, or something else, I wonder?”
Jeremy seized the thread quickly.
“I think this could be like a continuum of death,” he declared. “An eternal place out of time’s reach. We could see plasma rifles, mass driver guns and cool stuff from the future at the end.”
Ian jumped suddenly and planted both sneakers into the nearest case, which failed to break but cracked ominously. Nathan winced now.
If this is Death’s property, we should show it some respect, he thought. Regret overcame him for his earlier mocking thoughts. Death was most certainly nobody’s fool.
Nathan looked to find their patron in the dark, but could not.
“We will be wanting the best guns,” Ian said with conviction. Then his eyes fell on Jeremy.
“For the mission,” he added. He repeated this statement to the ground.
“For the mission,” repeated Jeremy, stacking his hand to Ian’s, Three Musketeers style. The boys looked to Nathan and he knew he could not give voice to his misgivings.
Not now.
The space atop Jeremy’s hand seemed ringed with flame now.
“For the mission,” he said in a voice not more than a whisper, and brought his palm down to the others.
They decided to press on without pause. Jeremy occasionally bashed a case with the club; Ian whisked a samurai sword about to liven his passing. Nathan found a jewel-encrusted octopus cresting a wave of pearls. Only a being with an eye for whimsy could have placed such a bauble beneath its cowl of glass.
The boy’s heart leapt for a moment, contemplating Death’s revolving the piece in his claw as he now did, the eyeless sockets hungry for its playful dance in the moonlight. The pressure of Nathan’s hand must have hit a recessed button, for tiny blades sprung from the tentacle-tips, making the jewellery a throwing star. His vision evaporated, and he placed the shiny weapon upon the nearest table.
There are no surprises here, he thought. There was only the clinical sureness of blade and barrel. Jeremy swept his mace to the horizon.
“They’re like a family of fireflies!” he exclaimed.
Nathan smiled.
“Not a rally, old boy. Quite a large … a large …” - the Field Marshall’s voice faltered – “Con … con …”
Ian screamed then, startling both boys.
“Conflagration!”
Jeremy and Nathan looked at each other in amazement. After a moment, they could not contain their laughter. The stars were out now. Jeremy wished he knew more of constellations and nebulae, so that he might look skywards and know that he trod on alien ground. The moon slid from behind weak clouds, and Nathan’s mind was sloughed with frustration. Where had he read of the moon as a ghostly galleon tossed on a sea of cloud? Probably a storybook, long discarded upon the pile forming a small Mayan pyramid beneath his bed. A sigh became audible, the sea’s incessant whisper. This, however, was not the crash of falling waves. The sound was an unrelenting thunder, giving the boys an image of ocean flowing to land’s end, there to torrent into a gulf of nothingness.
“Can you hear it?” asked Nathan.
Jeremy looked concerned.
“It all can’t all end here. We are only amongst rifles from a hundred years ago, I’m guessing.”
The boys murmured agreement.
“Right. So we would all agree there are more deadly things in the world,” finished Jeremy.
Ian said then that he hoped there were. Nathan smiled, his apprehension dulled for a moment.
I hope there are, too, he thought.
“Have any of you seen Death?” asked Jeremy, with an urgent lilt to his voice.
Ian prised a heavy rifle from its case and snapped an attendant bayonet in place. Then the boy shook his head. Jeremy’s voice was clear and to the darkness.
“We’re hungry, Death,” he said, while glancing quickly at his comrades for a nodded confirmation.
“We don’t want to walk any more today. Give us some food and a place to sleep, please.”
Hearing this, Nathan and Ian hissed nervously at their friend. It seemed too bold.
“We should still vote on all tactical decisions,” said Nathan.
Jeremy was about to speak when his friends drew close to him, an instinctive shielding before the dark thing who joined their company with a soundless leap from the near dark. Ian returned the rifle to its velvet cradle, forgetting to remove the bayonet in his haste. The cover straddled the blade and rocked back and forth with a clunking sound. It drew the trio’s attention from the hooded skeleton for a second, and when they looked back it was slipping away between the tables.
Nathan was sure now that the valley was sundered by a rift, and falling within that divide would be a green bank of ocean wide as the sky’s breadth. Receiving the torrent would be an abyss whose depth Nathan dared not contemplate. A thrill arose in his stomach at the thought of it. The trailing of Death’s long robes mesmerised the boy, the soft lights sheening over the fabric like a lake of rippling velvet.
Yet Nathan saw that the robe’s underside was utterly black. With the cloth fluttering above the winking footlights, Nathan could see now that there was no highlight or texture about its surface. It was as if that portion of their guide’s form was animated, and the cartoonist had chosen the blackest black in all the world to ink the robe-bottom. The effect was startling, and Nathan though at once of a Black Hole.
“Nothing can escape a Black Hole, not even light!” their teacher had said brightly, to the general ambivalence of the class. Nathan had barely looked up from his drawing of a dragon shooting a giant squid with a howitzer. He already knew this, of course; whether gleaned from computer or science show or book, he could not recall. She said something then that burst a bright flare in his brain:
“Not even gravity can escape it!”
The boy closed his eyes: he could now feel the enormous forces at its core wrenching the lattice of reality ever inwards upon itself to sure dissolution. The teacher’s continued drone began to annoy Nathan, her words now tainting Black Holes with a malevolence he knew in his heart was undeserved.
They do what they’re meant to do, he thought. Nothing more and nothing less. . They came from a crushed star, not a little orange marble like the sun but a gas giant, a billion year old monster with burning hydrogen for guts. Yet that great god of red fire becomes just a tiny shell in space.
Then Jeremy had piped up:
> “Miss, they have recently theorised that every galaxy, even our own, has a giant black hole at its core. One they recently discovered has a mass several billion times that of our own sun. It sends a blast of superheated plasma from its core that is 6,000 light years long.”
Groans from his classmates; these corrections in science class were regular and consistent in the volume of information offered. Their teacher blinked hard. Jeremy continued.
“But yet … yet … paradoxically, for both big black holes and small ones, the Event Horizon inside is still an infinitesimally small point removed from both time and place, where the rules of the universe do not apply. And here trillions of Earths find their end, in a seething mass of quantum disorder that is dwarfed by a single atom from … from … the hair of an ant.”
Nathan smiled. Much of this was paraphrased from Jeremy’s reading, yet his friend spoke with absolute authority. Nathan looked at the skin of his palm. He could hold the Event Horizon there, and watch it devour the earth through a vortex of diminishment, the very seas made steam and the mountains dust.
“Death’s clothes are lined with the stuff from black holes,” he told Jeremy.
His friends pondered this as they walked. Ian favoured rushing their host and casting their heads into the blackness under his cloak to see if the idea had any merit. Before Jeremy could answer, Death halted and his robe settled about him again. The bulkheads of some great war engine lay exposed from the flagstones ahead. A swelling of armour plate was embedded before it, and atop the pitted steel rested