The Reluctant Champion

11. The Judges

In the end, the choice was no choice any more than any choice had been real ever since Galen had started out on this journey. The track down the cliff face was the only way forward, and he must take it. He edged onto the crumbling rock and began to inch his way downward.

It was a difficult, exasperating journey. The rock was a jagged bitumen, sharp edges painful under his fingers. Underfoot it was rotten, so that he had to shift his weight cautiously onto each foot, testing it for strength before trusting his full weight to it. Even so, the edge of the lip under his feet frequently crumbled away to leave him dangling over the sheer drop, face and body pressed sweating to the harsh cliff wall.

In other places, the cliff overhung the path so sharply he had to go down on his hands and knees to get by. Once he actually had to slide down from the path, clinging to it with his fingers and bracing against the cliff below with his feet, until the slope above allowed him room to climb back on to it again.

He didn't even know for sure what would happen if he fell—are spirits crushed in falling from a height as though they had bodies?—but he was sure that if he did fall, he would never return to life. So he was as careful as he would have been on any other cliff, and his arms and legs ached, and his fingers bled, and his eyes smarted with the sweat that ran into them just as they would have had he still been clothed in his body.

The path ended while still some way above the floor of the broken valley. It edged across a sheer face that tried his strength as much as any stretch before, then climbed to a knoll or outcrop that stood out from the cliff. There, without warning, it ended. Galen climbed the path to the top, breathing harshly, and found himself standing on perhaps four square feet of relatively level ground. His throat was sore, scoured by the sulfuric fumes rising from the valley below. Wholly focused on the path he was following he searched for its a continuation, getting down and examining the cliff with fingers as well as eyes. There was no way forward. The path ended here. At last he looked up, toward the valley that was his goal, and realized with a jolt that he had already arrived. He stood slowly.

He had been too focused on the path and the cliff to look around him on this last section, so difficult had it been. Now he saw for the first time a platform raised opposite the knoll he stood on. The knoll faced this platform so that he stood on it like a prisoner before a court.

And there, as if it were a court of law, stood a high bench, and behind the bench sat three judges in black robes. They stared at him—at least, he supposed they stared, for none had the sort of face that made it easy to see where they were looking.

On the left, Death was a skeleton. The hollow eye-sockets in the pale skull turned in his direction; the bony hands rested on the table before him, fingers steepled like a schoolmaster about to administer punishment. The black judicial robes hung from his frame as from a rack.

On the right, Death ran with the plague. The pink skin of his face was a mass of sores which suppurated a bloody discharge. One eye was gone entirely, the socket a well of corruption; the other was filmed with purulence. In the hollow under his chin a continual writhing suggested maggots. His hands, swollen and gangrenous, rested flat on the table.

In the middle, raised slightly above the other two, Death sat in majesty, cowled and gloved, a dark crown set on his dark head. No features at all showed in the shadows under the hood. This was the figure that spoke first, and his voice was hollow and full of the wind that blows in forests at night, reminding tardy travelers that they are small and insignificant in a universe that is largely indifferent to men.

"Mortal man, you are here before your time. Yet you are here, and judgment shall be passed on you as on all who walk that road."

"I do not come as a resident but as a supplicant," Galen replied. "I seek another who is here before her time, to win her release by my body and by my prayers."