The Doktor's Spyglass

Chapter 19.1

Falling from a great height was not how Irik Thijis expected to die.

Given his chosen profession, a sudden pistol shot to the head had seemed more likely. It certainly held far greater appeal. A loud bang, then blackness. It was dignified. Humane. Even a belly full of lead and a few minutes bleeding out would have been preferable to this.

With people, there was always a way out. Always a chance of survival, no matter how slim. Men had second thoughts. Guns jammed. Backup arrived. Your reflexes surprised you.

But there was no talking your way out of a one-night stand with gravity. Gravity's kind of a bastard that way.

The wind of his passing whipped at his face, freezing his cheeks and bringing tears to his eyes. The tails of his dinner jacket snapped and fluttered like flags caught in a gale. If he'd been slightly less terrified, he might have managed to vomit. Perhaps it would have choked him to death before he hit. It occurred to him, as he fell, that there was something unaccountably unfair about having several seconds to contemplate the absolute inevitability of his demise before painting the rocks below with his vital organs. Five seconds is a lifetime when you've been thrown off the tip of Oridos.

Of old the Oridosi peninsula was called Nepthun's Spear, after one of the old pagan gods, for the way it jutted into the sea like a lance. Its point, crowned by abandoned ruins, stood out as a promontory, an aerie five hundred feet or more above the Inner Sea, with a view rivaled only by the unreachable peaks of the Pillars of the Gods. Thijis had never truly appreciated it.

Sunslight shimmered silver on the waves below. Even past the buffeting air, he could hear the cries of gulls out over the water.

Beautiful, he thought.

It's strange what passes through the mind in the moments before death.

And so he fell, deciding in the final moments to simply accept it, wondering only what Dalia would think if she could see him now.

In the end, there was no pain. Only a flash of golden light, a feeling like floating, and then nothing. Not so bad after all.

* * *

He tasted brine and bile. He was choking on it, in fact. Perhaps he'd vomited after all. Strange, because he didn't think the dead had a sense of taste. His head hurt.

There was an incredible, rib-straining pressure on his chest, and then he felt the brine and bile rise and he was vomiting, and he rolled over to press his face into the uncomfortable ground and coughed painfully.

He opened eyes that felt a hundred years old and stared at the pale light of the sky, which was blocked by a dark silhouette that loomed over him like an angel of judgment.

"I'm dead," said Thijis.

"Not yet," said the shadow, its voice low and deep. He felt his eyelid peeled back, and a sharp pinch in his neck, and then he died again.

His last thought was to wonder how he could die if he was already dead.

* * *

The chamber he woke up in was something from another age. The walls were cut stone, charcoal grey, smooth but not polished. Even upon first glance, it looked like nothing so much as a jail cell—except the heavy, iron-strapped wooden door stood open, a dim light filtering in from whatever lay beyond. He lay on a small wooden cot. Someone had undressed him.