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This is the bright candlelit room where the life-tilasses, one for every living person, pouring their fine sand from the future into the past The accurains makes the room roar like the sea

This is the owner of the rooh it with a preoccupied air His name is Death

But not any Death This is the Death whose particular sphere of operations is, well, not a sphere at all, but the Discworld, which is flat and rides on the back of four giant elephants who stand on the shell of the enormous star turtle Great A’Tuin, and which is bounded by a waterfall that cascades endlessly into space

Scientists have calculated that the chance of anything so patently absurd actually existing are icians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten

Death clicks across the black and white tiled floor on toes of bone,the rows of busy hourglasses

Finally he finds one that seems to satisfy him, lifts it carefully from its shelf and carries it across to the nearest candle He holds it so that the light lints off it, and stares at the little point of reflected brilliance

The steady gaze fro eye-sockets encoh the deeps of space, carapace scarred by comets and pitted by meteors One day even Great A’Tuin will die, Death knows; now, that would be a challenge

But the focus of his gaze dives onwards towards the blue-greenslowly under its tiny orbiting sun

Now it curves away towards the great e called the Ramtops The Ras and considerably raphy than they knohat to do with They have their own peculiar weather, full of shrapnel rain and whiplash winds and permanent thunder-storms Some people say it’s all because the Raic Mind you, so

Death blinks, adjusts for depth of vision Now he sees the grassy country on the turnwise slopes of the mountains

Now he sees a particular hillside

Now he sees a field

Now he sees a boy, running

Noatches

Now, in a voice like lead slabs being dropped on granite, he says: YES

There was no doubt that there was soical in the soil of that hilly, broken area which – because of the strange tint that it gave to the local flora – was known as the octarine grass country For example, it was one of the few places on the Disc where plants produced reannual varieties

Reannuals are plants that grow backwards in tirow last year

Mort’s farapes These were very powerful and ht after by fortune-tellers, since of course they enabled theover the et over it

Reannual growers tended to be big, serious iven to introspection and close exalects to sow ordinary seeds only loses the crop, whereas anyone who forgets to sow seeds of a crop that has already been harvested twelvethe entire fabric of causality, not to mention acute e to Mort’s faest son was not at all serious and had about the same talent for horticulture that you would find in a dead starfish It wasn’t that he was unhelpful, but he had the land of vague, cheerful helpfulness that seriousinfectious, possibly even fatal, about it He was tall, red-haired and freckled, with the sort of body that seeinally under its owner’s control; it appeared to have been built out of knees

On this particular day it was hurtling across the high fields, waving its hands and yelling

Mort’s father and uncle watched it disconsolately from the stone wall

’What I don’t understand,’ said father Lezek, ’is that the birds don’t even fly away I’d fly away, if I saw it coining towards me’

’Ah The huo all over the place but there’s a fair turn of speed there’

Mort reached the end of a furrow An overfull woodpigeon lurched slowly out of his way

’His heart’s in the right place, mind,’ said Lezek, carefully

’Ah ’Course, ’tis the rest of him that isn’t’

’He’s clean about the house Doesn’t eat much,’ said Lezek

’No, I can see that’

Lezek looked sideways at his brother, as staring fixedly at the sky

’I did hear you’d got a place going up at your farm, Hamesh,’ he said

’Ah Got an apprentice in, didn’t I?’

’Ah,’ said Lezek gloomily, ’as that, then?’

’Yesterday,’ said his brother, lying with rattlesnake speed ’All signed and sealed Sorry Look, I got nothing against young Mort, see, he’s as nice a boy as you could wish to meet, it’s just that --’

’I know, I know,’ said Lezek ’He couldn’t find his arse with both hands’

They stared at the distant figure It had fallen over Soeons had waddled over to inspect it

’He’s not stupid, mind,’ said Hamesh ’Not what you’d call stupid’