'I was flying,' he whispered, 'I remember the feeling of wings. What am I doing here?'

He tried to stand up. There was a temporary feeling of heaviness, which suddenly dropped away so that he rose to his feet almost without any effort. He looked down to see what had caused it.

'Oh dear,' he said.

The culture of the river kingdom had a lot to say about death and what happened afterwards. In fact it had very little to say about life, regarding it as a sort of inconvenient prelude to the main event and something to be hurried through as politely as possible, and therefore the pharaoh reached the conclusion that he was dead very quickly. The sight of his mangled body on the sand below him played a major part in this.

There was a greyness about everything. The landscape had a ghostly look, as though he could walk straight through it. Of course, he thought, I probably can.

He rubbed the analogue of his hands. Well, this is it. This is where it gets interesting; this is where I start to really live.

Behind him a voice said, GOOD MORNING.

The king turned.

'Hallo,' he said. 'You'd be-'

DEATH, said Death.

The king looked surprised.

'I understood that Death came as a three-headed giant scarab beetle,' he said.

Death shrugged. WELL. NOW YOU KNOW.

'What's that thing in your hand?'

THIS? IT'S A SCYTHE.

'Strange-looking object, isn't it?' said the pharaoh. 'I thought Death carried the Flail of Mercy and the Reaping Hook of Justice.'

Death appeared to think about this.

WHAT IN? he said.

'Pardon?'

ARE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT A GIANT BEETLE?

'Ah. In his mandibles, I suppose. But I think he's got arms in one of the frescoes in the palace.' The king hesitated. 'Seems a bit silly, really, now I come to tell someone. I mean, a giant beetle with arms. And the head of an ibis, I seem to recall.'

Death sighed. He was not a creature of Time, and therefore past and future were all one to him, but there had been a period when he'd made an effort to appear in whatever form the client expected. This foundered because it was usually impossible to know what the client was expecting until after they were dead. And then he'd decided that, since no-one ever really expected to die anyway, he might as well please himself and he'd henceforth stuck to the familiar black-cowled robe, which was neat and very familiar and acceptable everywhere, like the best credit cards.

'Anyway,' said the pharaoh, 'I expect we'd better be going.'

WHERE TO?

'Don't you know?'

I AM HERE ONLY TO SEE THAT YOU DIE AT THE APPOINTED TIME. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IS UP TO YOU.

'Well . . .' The king automatically scratched his chin. 'I suppose I have to wait until they've done all the preparations and so forth. Mummified me. And built a bloody pyramid. Um. Do I have to hang around here to wait for all that?'

I ASSUME SO. Death clicked his fingers and a magnificent white horse ceased its grazing on some of the garden greenery and trotted towards him.

'Oh. Well, I think I shall look away. They take all the squishy inside bits out first, you know.' A look of faint worry crossed his face. Things that had seemed perfectly sensible when he was alive seemed a little suspect now that he was dead.

'It's to preserve the body so that it may begin life anew in the Netherworld,' he added, in a slightly perplexed voice. 'And then they wrap you in bandages. At least that seems logical.'

He rubbed his nose. 'But then they put all this food and drink in the pyramid with you. Bit weird, really.'

WHERE ARE ONE'S INTERNAL ORGANS AT THIS POINT?

'That's the funny thing, isn't it? They're in a jar in the next room,' said the king, his voice edged with doubt. 'We even put a damn great model cart in dad's pyramid.'

His frown deepened. 'Solid wood, it was,' he said, half to himself, 'with gold leaf all over it. And four wooden bullocks to pull it. Then we whacked a damn great stone over the door . . .'

He tried to think, and found that it was surprisingly easy. New ideas were pouring into his mind in a cold, clear stream. They had to do with the play of light on the rocks, the deep blue of the sky, the manifold possibilities of the world that stretched away on every side of him. Now that he didn't have a body to importune him with its insistent demands the world seemed full of astonishments, but unfortunately among the first of them was the fact that much of what you thought was true now seemed as solid and reliable as marsh gas. And also that, just as he was fully equipped to enjoy the world, he was going to be buried inside a pyramid.

When you die, the first thing you lose is your life. The next thing is your illusions.

I CAN SEE YOU HAVE GOT A LOT TO THINK ABOUT, said Death, mounting up. AND NOW, IF YOU'LL EXCUSE ME-

'Hang on a moment-'

YES?

'When I . . . fell, I could have sworn that I was flying.'

THAT PART OF YOU THAT WAS DIVINE DID FLY, NATURALLY. YOU ARE NOW FULLY MORTAL.

'Mortal?'

TAKE IT FROM ME. I KNOW ABOUT THESE THINGS.

'Oh. Look, there's quite a few questions I'd like to ask-'

THERE ALWAYS ARE. I'M SORRY. Death clapped his heels to his horse's flanks, and vanished.

The king stood there as several servants came hurrying along the palace wall, slowed down as they approached his corpse, and advanced with caution.

'Are you all right, O jewelled master of the sun?' one of them ventured.

'No, I'm not,' snapped the king, who was having some of his basic assumptions about the universe severely raffled, and that never puts anyone in a good mood. 'I'm by way of being dead just at the moment. Amazing, isn't it,' he added bitterly.

'Can you hear us, O divine bringer of the morning?' inquired the other servant, tiptoeing closer.

'I've just fallen off a hundred foot wall on to my head, what do you think?' shouted the king.

'I don't think he can hear us, Jahmet,' said the other servant.

'Listen,' said the king, whose urgency was equalled only by the servants' total inability to hear anything he was saying, 'you must find my son and tell him to forget about the pyramid business, at least until I've thought about it a bit, there are one or two points which seem a little self-contradictory about the whole afterlife arrangements, and-'

'Shall I shout?' said Jahmet.

'I don't think you can shout loud enough. I think he's dead.'

Jahmet looked down at the stiffening corpse.

'Bloody hell,' he said eventually. 'Well, that's tomorrow up the spout for a start.'

The sun, unaware that it was making its farewell performance, continued to drift smoothly above the rim of the world. And out of it, moving faster than any bird should be able to fly, a seagull bore down on Ankh-Morpork, on the Brass Bridge and eight still figures, on one staring face .

Seagulls were common enough in Ankh. But as this one flew over the group it uttered one long, guttural scream that caused three of the thieves to drop their knives. Nothing with feathers ought to have been able to make a noise like that. It had claws in it.

The bird wheeled in a tight circle and fluttered to a perch on a convenient wooden hippo, where it glared at the group with mad red eyes.

The leading thief tore his fascinated gaze away from it just as he heard Arthur say, quite pleasantly, 'This is a number two throwing knife. I got ninety-six per cent for throwing knives. Which eyeball don't you need?'

The leader stared at him. As far as the other young assassins were concerned, he noticed, one was still staring fixedly at the seagull while the other was busy being noisily sick over the parapet.

'There's only one of you,' he said. 'There's five of us.

'But soon there will only be four of you,' said Arthur. Moving slowly, like someone in a daze, Teppic reached out his hand to the seagull. With any normal seagull this would have resulted in the loss of a thumb, but the creature hopped on to it with the smug air of the master returning to the old plantation.

It seemed to make the thieves increasingly uneasy. Arthur's smile wasn't helping either.

'That's a nice bird,' said the leader, in the inanely cheerful tones of the extremely worried. Teppic was dreamily stroking its bullet head.

'I think it would be a good idea if you went away,' said Arthur, as the bird shuffled sideways on to Teppic's wrist. Gripping with webbed feet, thrusting out its wings to maintain its balance, it should have looked clownish but instead looked full of hidden power, as though it was an eagle's secret identity. When it opened its mouth, revealing a ridiculous purple bird tongue, there was a suggestion that this seagull could do a lot more than menace a seaside tomato sandwich.

'Is it magic?' said one of the thieves, and was quickly hushed.

'We'll be going, then,' said the leader, 'sorry about the misunderstanding-'

Teppic gave him a warm, unseeing smile.

Then they all heard the insistent little noise. Six pairs of eyes swivelled around and down; Chidder's were already in position.

Below them, pouring darkly across the dehydrated mud, the Ankh was rising.

Dios, First Minister and high priest among high priests, wasn't a naturally religious man. It wasn't a desirable quality in a high priest, it affected your judgement, made you unsound. Start believing in things and the whole business became a farce.

Not that he had anything against belief. People needed to believe in gods, if only because it was so hard to believe in people. The gods were necessary. He just required that they stayed out of the way and let him get on with things.

Mind you, it was a blessing that he had the looks for it. If your genes saw fit to give you a tall frame, a bald head and a nose you could plough rocks with, they probably had a definite aim in mind.

He instinctively distrusted people to whom religion came easily. The naturally religious, he felt, were unstable and given to wandering in the desert and having revelations - as if the gods would lower themselves to that sort of thing. And they never got anything done. They started thinking that rituals weren't important. They started thinking that you could talk to the gods direct. Dios knew, with the kind of rigid and unbending certainty you could pivot the world on, that the gods of Djelibeybi liked ritual as much as anyone else. After all, a god who was against ritual would be like a fish who was against water.

He sat on the steps of the throne with his staff across his knees, and passed on the king's orders. The fact that they were not currently being issued by any king was not a problem. Dios had been high priest now for, well, more years than he cared to remember, he knew quite clearly what orders a sensible king would be giving, and he gave them.

Anyway, the Face of the Sun was on the throne, and that was what mattered. It was a solid gold, head-enveloping mask, to be worn by the current ruler on all public occasions; its expression, to the sacrilegious, was one of good-natured constipation. For thousands of years it had symbolised kingship in Djelibeybi. It had also made it very difficult to tell kings apart.

This was extremely symbolic as well, although no-one could remember what of.

There was a lot of that sort of thing in the Old Kingdom. The staff across his knees, for example, with its very symbolic snakes entwined symbolically around an allegorical camel prod. The people believed this gave the high priests power over the gods and the dead, but this was probably a metaphor, i.e., a lie.

Dios shifted position.

'Has the king been ushered to the Room of Going Forth?' he said.

The circle of lesser high priests nodded.

'Dil the embalmer is attending upon him at this instant, O Dios.'

'Very well. And the builder of pyramids has been instructed?' Hoot Koomi, high priest of Khefin, the Two-Faced God of Gateways, stepped forward.