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The bees of Death are big and black, they buzz low and sombre, they keep their honey in combs of wax as white as alter candles The honey is black as night, thick as sin and sweet as treacle

It is well known the eight colours ht colours of blackness, for those that have the seeing of therass in the black orchard under the black-blossohs of trees that will, eventually, produce apples that put it like this probably won't be red

The grass was short now The scythe that had done the work leaned against the gnarled bole of a pear tree Now Death was inspecting his bees, gently lifting the coers

A few bees buzzed around him Like all beekeepers, Death wore a veil It wasn't that he had anything to sting, but soive him a headache

As he held a coht of his little world between the realities there was the faintest of tremors A hum went up from the hive, a leaf floated down A wisp of wind blew for a h the orchard, and that was the , because the air in the land of Death is alarm and still

Death fancied that he heard, very briefly, the sound of running feet and a voice saying, no, a voice thinking oshitoshitoshit, I'onna DIE!

Death is almost the oldest creature in the universe, with habits and in to understand, but because he was also a good beekeeper he carefully replaced the co

He strode back through the dark garden to his cottage, reot lost in the depths of his cranium, and retired to his study

As he sat down at his desk there was another gust of wind, which rattled the hourglasses on the shelves andpendulum clock in the hall pause briefly in its intereable bits

Death sighed, and focused his gaze

There is nowhere Death will not go, no erous it is, the more likely he is to be there already

Now he stared through the mists of time and space

OH, he said IT'S HIM

It was a hot afternoon in the late su and above all the most crowded city on the Disc Now the spears of the sun had achieved what innumerable invaders, several civil wars and the curfe had never achieved It had pacified the place

Dogs lay panting in the scalding shade The river Ankh, which never what you ht call sparkled, oozed between its banks as if the heat had sucked all the spirit out of it The streets were empty, oven-brick hot