Managing Death Read Online Free PDF

warm. Someone was here, only moments ago. I look around, wondering if they’ve really gone. But there’s no one. I look down at the plates. There’s no hint there of whoever I’ve displaced, just crumbs and jam.
    Aunt Neti picks the plates up and slides away to her kitchen with them, saying, ‘Plenty of visitors today, my dear. But none as special as you.’
    Wal raises an eyebrow at me. Neti is one of the two caretakers of the interface between the living and the Underworld. The other one is Charon. Both have their unique ways of running things. Charon with his boats; Neti with her residence, which, like a web, is connected to everything. She lives in these few rooms: a parlour that intersects every office of Mortmax in the living world. Like Charon, Aunt Neti’s an RE, a Recognised Entity.
    And despite appearances, she’s not that fond of me at all. Mr D tried to explain why a few weeks ago. Something about the Orpheus Manoeuvre that I pulled to get Lissa back from the Underworld, and how I should have gone through her, not Charon. At the time I thought I’d had no choice. Seems I did, and it’s made me an enemy – no matter how unknowingly on my part.
    Aunt Neti comes back into the parlour, walks past me to a tall cabinet. It’s covered in scrollwork and seems to be carved out of the same black wood as my throne. Several of her hands apply pressure to different bits of the cabinet, a palm in one corner, a finger tapping on a carving, another hand applying pressure at its back.
    A door slides to one side. Aunt Neti reaches in and pulls out two stone knives that I’m all too familiar with. She grins at me, revealing a mouth full of crooked black teeth, and drops the knives on the table before me.
    ‘You’ll be needing these,’ Aunt Neti says.
    I pick them up. They’re perfectly weighted and heavy. They mumble and hum.
    I used these on the top of the One Tree in a place the Orcus call the Negotiation, to ‘negotiate’ my way into the position of RM. It had been a bloody reckoning between me and Morrigan – once a family friend, a man as dear to me as any uncle. These knives had slashed his throat and blinded his left eye. They’d cut his soul away from existence itself.
    I need these knives for the Convergence Ceremony but seeing them, holding the damn things in my hands, is terrifying.
    ‘Now,’ Aunt Neti says, laying down two clean plates, ‘be careful for goodness sake, or you’ll cut yourself. That’s for later.’
    I hold them away from me gingerly, my hands tight around the stony handles. Until this morning, I hadn’t expected to see them again for a very long time, had hoped that it would be even longer than that. They whisper to me.
    Hello.
    Hello.
    ‘Put them down,’ Neti says, and slaps my wrists. ‘Put them down.’
    I drop them back onto the table, cracking one of her plates with a knife hilt. My breath catches. The stony knives grumble.
    ‘That’ll cost you.’ Neti’s laugh is shrill and horrible. ‘Oh, it starts with plates, and before you know it, you’re putting a vast crack in the world.’
    ‘Sorry,’ I say.
    ‘Never you mind, Mr de Selby. Never you mind. Was just having a joke at your expense. I’ve a room,’ she jabs a thumb at a door to the left of us, one of many, ‘a big room crammed floor to ceiling with others, just like them. I make them from the bones of the dead – it’s a hobby. You’d be smashing plates from dawn till dusk for a century or more before you’d put a dint in the size of my collection. And how many have I used in all these ages? Just a dozen or so.’ She smacks her lips. ‘Now I trust you will indulge me, and have a scone.’
    I do, and it’s delicious. As long as you don’t think too much about where it’s come from. There’s something too sanguine about that jam. But it’s sweet, and it’s no real trouble to have another one.
    Neti looks at the knives. ‘You know what you have to do with those?’
    I nod. ‘Yes, I have been