Dead But Once

by Auston Habershaw

  Xahlven smiled and laughed. “Spare me. You yourself taught me that anything that behaves predictably is a tool that needs only the proper application to be useful. I come only to remind you of the warning I gave you last year.”

  Lyrelle made a show of thinking. “Now, which warning was that, precisely? You scold your own mother on such a regular basis, my dear, it becomes difficult to keep all the threats straight.”

  Xahlven walked around to the other side of the power sink and planted his staff in the ground as though intending to punctuate his seriousness. Of course, in actuality he was planting it to absorb some of the power coming off the pool. Lyrelle might have stopped it, but she let it happen, knowing Xahlven was watching her keenly. Little did he know that she didn’t need to lift a finger: the auguries she had enchanted into the flowerbeds earlier that evening flared to life, recording precisely what it was Xahlven was doing for later review.

  “Eretheria is at a delicate junction, Mother. I realize you believe yourself permitted to meddle in any political sphere you wish, but there are forces at play here that you do not understand. Leave it to those of us whose task it is to guide the world. You are retired—it is time you remembered what that means.”

  “I suppose it means sitting here in my garden, reading a book, and minding my own business?” Lyrelle snorted. “It sounds dreadful. Besides, I have a stated personal interest in what transpires in Eretheria. As do you.”

  “Tyvian.” Xahlven scowled. It never suited his face, she felt—Xahlven had a face meant to smile, and yet he did it so rarely. Lyrelle found herself again wondering where, exactly, she had gone wrong in raising him. So dreadfully, dreadfully wrong.

  “He is your brother, Xahlven. It should go without saying that I care for him.”

  Xahlven held up a hand. “Spare me. I’m aware of how you bolstered that little rumor. It won’t work. Even Tyvian knows it won’t work. He won’t stick his head in a noose—not for anyone. Not even that ring can make him do it.”

  “As ever, you underestimate your brother.”

  “Half brother!” Xahlven snapped. He pursed his lips, ready to say more—Lyrelle saw that anger flare up, usually so deeply buried. It was the same flash she had seen in Tyvian’s eyes when she discussed his father. She felt a little tug of regret, deep in her stomach. What kind of woman am I, to be hated so by her own children?

  Xahlven, though, swallowed his rage. What remained was that arrogant, sardonic expression that made him look so much like Whistreth Reldamar, his father. “This is your final warning, Mother. You have fewer friends in the Arcanostrum than you imagine, and the Keeper of the Balance will do nothing to protect you. You act on your own.”

  Lyrelle couldn’t help but grin. “That has always been the case.”

  Xahlven pulled his staff up from the ground and backed away. “Let it never be said I was less than reasonable.”

  Lyrelle nodded. “Yes. Some things are best left unsaid.”

  Xahlven shook his head and turned away. After he left—after Lyrelle was certain he was gone and had left behind no enchantments, no little imps of his own—she checked the results of her augury to see what Xahlven had drawn from the power sink. When she found out, she sat back in surprise.

  Lumenal energy. A huge amount of Lumenal energy that he’d channeled through the staff and into a series of gemstones concealed beneath his cloak. The Etheric glamour placed upon the staff—to make it suck the light—was more than just a diversion. He was collecting.

  Interesting.

  “Now, my elder son, what precisely do you intend to do with that?”

  Lyrelle went back to the pool, waved her wand, and continued to parse the myriad paths of the future.

  Chapter 14

  Some Semblance of Justice

  Each of the Great Houses of Eretheria maintained a palatial estate in their respective corner of the city, and each of these estates had a grand plaza that splayed outside their gates, usually around a fountain of great architectural and sorcerous ingenuity. Most days this was a place of commerce—street vendors of every description would wheel out their carts of wares by the time the sun rose, there to hawk and sell to the steady stream of wealthy passersby that came to and from those great estates behind their impenetrable wards.

  Before Dovechurch, the seat of House Ayventry and city home of Count Andluss, the plaza was formally known as Tower Plaza, so named for the device at the heart of all Ayventry-sworn coats of arms—a tall tower, resolute and proud. The broad fountain at the center of the square featured a squat turret in which stood an array of regal men and women—Counts and Countesses of old—fashioned from bronze and at whose feet issued the water that filled the fountain. It was, Myreon knew, a favorite place for children to play in the heat of the sun, as the fountain was vast and shallow.

  Since the Illini Wars, Tower Plaza had earned itself a different nickname. Traitor’s Plaza was what anyone outside the Ayventry District called it, because thirty years ago, House Ayventry had been the only Great House to refuse to swear fealty to Perwynnon and, instead, throw in its lot with Banric Sahand. At the time, it looked very much like Sahand was going to roll straight across Galaspin and into Saldor, so the Count of Ayventry at the time, Andluss’s father, had made a political decision based on the size of the armies camped on his doorstep. It turned out he made the wrong bet, and Perwynnon had made him pay for it in blood and fire. The cream of Ayventry’s young knights spilled their life on the tips of Perywnnon’s lancers, and the once-powerful county and house fell into the start of a three-decade decline, now poised to reach its nadir in this year’s campaigns, faced with an ascendant Hadda in the west and a desperate Davram to the south.

  Such politics, though, seemed very distant to Myreon at that moment. Very distant indeed.

  “Magus,” Bree said. Her voice, trembling and soft, was incongruous coming from the lips of her shroud—that of a male farmhand, straw hat pulled low over stick-out ears. “What are we going to do?”

  “Shhh, Bree—if you’ve a mind to talk, at least try to sound like a man.” Myreon’s own shroud was that of a farmer’s wife—bonnet, dress, apron, rosy cheeks and all. The idea was to look like farmers from the countryside, come to the market from the inner fiefs surrounding the capital.

  Of course, there was no market today. Today was an execution.

  Myreon and Bree had heard about it that morning, from the eaves of an old windmill she kept as a safe house—warded so that the Defenders would have trouble finding it. Ayventry criers had ridden up and down the lanes and boulevards of the district, announcing that the men who had murdered a servant of the count with “magicks most foul” were to be publicly punished at noon in Tower Plaza.

  Myreon hadn’t wanted to come. It was an old Defender tactic—she could smell it. What better way to catch a man’s accomplices than to get them to attend his sentencing? She wanted to stay in the safe house for another few days, maybe get word to Tyvian somehow.

  Bree, though, could not be dissuaded. Gilvey’s death last night had sharpened something in the girl. Her eyes had lost some of their vulnerability, their openness—it was like she had pulled back into herself to harden her edges. She was a piece of red-hot iron plunged into a blacksmith’s cooling tank. Myreon wasn’t sure what was going to emerge yet—a lot of it might just depend on what the girl saw today. And that was why she had finally agreed to come. Bree had to see this.

  They stood at the far edge of the fountain, a hundred yards or so from what would be the scene of the action. A stage had been erected just outside the gates of Dovechurch, built to be as tall as a man—everyone was to have a good view. What they were about to view was also abundantly clear; there, at the center of said stage, was a great wooden block with a notch cut out.

  Beneath this notch was an open basket.

  There were a few thousand people in the plaza, all of them crowded shoulder-to-shoulder and the press only becoming denser the closer one got to the cordon of mercenaries t
he count had hired to keep the peace. These were hard-nosed Galaspiners wearing mail and bearing poleaxes—not the kind of men a crowd of peasants was likely to rush. The mood, though, was still raw.

  Myreon squeezed Bree’s hand.

  Bree yanked her hand away and climbed up on the lip of the fountain to get a better view. “It might not be them. They mighta picked up just anybody.”

  Myreon grimaced. There was no way everyone had escaped from the cistern last night. The Defenders had been everywhere and there was enough left of their classroom for a seekwand to get a fix on any number of them. Even now, Myreon was confident the Defenders were combing the city for those who had eluded them.

  And that included her and Bree.

  Myreon scanned the crowd, trying to pick out any mirrored helms, any firepikes poking above the sea of knit caps and straw hats. Nothing. This, if anything, made her more nervous.

  “We should get closer. We can’t do anything this far away.” Bree began to pace along the edge of the fountain, stepping past a half dozen onlookers.

  “Do anything”? Myreon pushed her way through the crowd and caught up with her, catching her arm. “No. Stop.”

  Bree tried to shake herself loose. “Let go!”

  A fanfare of trumpets announced the arrival of a wagon at the back of the crowd. It was flanked by a pair of Ayventry men-at-arms on either side, their shields bearing a red-and-white checkerboard pattern with a white tower in the upper right quadrant—some vassal of the count, closely related, but Myreon couldn’t place it. She would have needed Tyvian there to parse the heraldry, but at the moment it didn’t seem terribly important. As the crowd parted to allow the wagon to pass, Myreon got a better look at who was in the back. Bree saw before she did, and her sharp intake of breath let her know what she was going to see before she saw it.

  Three people—two men and a woman—were bound by head and hands inside a trio of pillories mounted on the bed of the wagon. They were the kindly stable hand from last night, one of the serving girls who frequented Myreon’s class—Shari was her name, she thought—and Ramper. They all looked roughly used, but Ramper most of all. One eye was blackened, and a great cut above his other eye had bled all over his face, drying in crusty brown-black streams. He was awake, though. Calm even.

  In instances like this, it was commonly expected for the crowd to jeer, to throw things, or to otherwise taunt the condemned. Today the crowd was quiet. The unexpected mood made Myreon’s body tingle. Something momentous was going on and she had missed it somehow. She stopped looking for Defenders in disguise for a moment and focused instead on the murmurs of the crowd. Their whispers came to her in disjointed pieces:

  “. . . wouldn’t go with the press-gang, I hear . . .”

  “. . . been learnin’ magic from the Black Mage in the sewers.”

  “Saved a man from his taxes, but the ol’ Count wanted them anyhow . . .”

  “. . . tax men tried to ravish the woman, the men killed him. Same as happened to my sister in Westercity. Listen . . .”

  At the front of the crowd, a coach carried Count Andluss from his own front door and across his own front lawn to deposit him on the steps of the stage. There he was joined by a few powder-wigged, rapier-wearing retainers and a hooded executioner bearing the torturer’s guild tattoo on his right pectoral muscle. Following them were an array of servants holding things the count might need—a chair, a fan, a series of scrolls, a decanter of wine, etc.

  The condemned made it to the front of the grumbling crowd. Myreon turned to caution Bree against anything rash only to find that Bree had vanished into the crowd. “Dammit!” Myreon cursed and hopped up on the fountain’s edge, trying to see. There! About ten yards away and growing—Bree’s shroud was pushing past people, stomping on feet, wriggling between gaps.

  Myreon dove after her.

  On stage, she heard a crier reading the charges in a voice amplified by a brooch at his throat.

  “It was yesterday before the coming of dusk that these three persons acted with extreme malice toward an officer of our beloved and gracious Count Andluss and, with the use of wicked and proscribed magicks, did lay him low with mortal wounds and didst also injure three others most grievously.”

  Myreon tried to make forward progress, but no one would move—she got as many elbows and sharp looks as she did nods and excuse mes. Scowling, she altered her shroud into something more forceful—a mercenary in full mail, a warhammer looped through his belt, his face a patchwork of saber scars. Then, with as little as a sneer, everyone suddenly remembered their manners.

  Bree had a head start, but her farmhand shroud didn’t grant her the same social leeway that Myreon’s battle-scarred mercenary did, and Myreon was closing the gap. She wondered what the girl thought she could accomplish; she wondered also what foolish notions she might have put into the girl’s head over these past months. Her death and the deaths of these others—these were all on Myreon, she knew. Gods, what a horror.

  The crier kept talking. “. . . it is with a sad and heavy heart that your liege lord, Andluss Urweel, Master of the Gap, Warden of the Azure Forest, Steward of the Great Road, and Count of Ayventry, hath seen fit to condemn these killers to death by beheading. May Hann guide their spirits to the Hearth of the Father.”

  Myreon reached out and grabbed Bree by the collar. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Bree saw her—or, rather, Bree saw her shroud and screamed. Myreon laced some Compulsion into her voice. “Calm down. It’s me.”

  Bree stopped kicking, but her farmhand face looked anything but calm. “We’ve got to do something! You’ve got to do something! Please!”

  Myreon shook her head. “There’s nothing I can do, Bree. There’s nothing any of us can do.”

  The count’s men-at-arms dragged the serving girl before the block, her arms tied behind her back. She yelled out over the crowd, her voice shrill with panic. “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do nothing! Hann save me, I’m innocent as lambs! Gods! Gods, hear me!”

  “There is something we can do!” Bree said, clutching Myreon’s illusory mail. “There are thousands of us, Magus! How could they stop us all? We could just . . . just . . . stop this, for once and all. It ain’t fair, Magus! It’s not right!”

  Somewhere out of sight, a drumbeat began. The executioner picked up a massive axe and began to spin it about his body, stretching his arms, testing the weight of it. The crowd gaped in horror . . . and also in appreciation of the spectacle.

  “No! Nooo!” The serving girl sobbed. The executioner’s assistant bent her over the block.

  Myreon didn’t look. She focused, instead, on Bree. “I’m sorry, Bree. I’m so, so sorry.”

  The drumbeat stopped. The axe fell with a meaty thok. The crowd wailed.

  Bree watched with wild eyes. She screamed as no farmhand ought to.

  Myreon looked around, aware suddenly that they’d drawn a lot of attention. Men whispered to one another, backing away. A woman with her children tugged them behind her. Myreon scanned just above the crowd—there!

  Firepikes. A whole squadron of them, coming closer.

  It was Ramper’s turn on the stage. Unlike the girl before him, he grinned at the mob with his gap-toothed grin. “You all know me—seen me about, no doubt. Done good by many a’ you and wrong by those who earned it, eh? We all known this was where the path ended. No tears for me, I’d wager, and Hann forgive if some say otherwise.”

  Myreon looked at him as he scanned the crowd. Looking for us?

  “To those out there think I done a wrong, know this: had I the moment, I’d stick this fat hog Andluss with a spike twice what I done for that tax man, and I’d get fat off the drippings. Daresay there’s some out there who’d say the same.”

  This prompted a gasp from the retainers on the stage. Count Andluss himself summoned a fan to help keep his humors in balance. He also sat in the chair.

  The executioner grabbed Ramper by the scruff and pushed him toward the block.
Ramper dug in his heels. He shouted, “But thanks to the Gray Lady, friend to us all, I’ll have my moment!”

  Myreon tore her eyes from the firepikes and stared at Ramper. What?

  Ramper’s hands were free.

  Bellam’s Instant Release. She’d taught him that spell—a spell for cheap cuffs and poor bindings. “Oh, gods!”

  The crowd shrieked. Ramper pulled a long dagger from the executioner’s belt and slashed the man across the stomach. He leapt across the stage, his ragged hair streaming behind him. Everything in the world seemed to move in slow motion.

  The count’s retainers stood up, seeking to draw their rapiers. The count clutched his armrests, eyes wide . . .

  . . . only to have Ramper plunge his stolen dagger right into the left one. To the hilt.

  A split second later, Ramper was run through by three different rapiers. In his death throes, he shrieked three words in Akrallian: “Mort! Aux! Tyrans!”

  The executioner swung his axe, taking Ramper’s head clean off, spraying Andluss’s retainers with blood.

  Count Andluss stood up, knife protruding from his skull. His arms flopped awkwardly, trying lamely to pull the dagger free. He fell from the stage, backward.

  At first there was silence.

  And then the crowd cheered.

  “We need to get out of here.” Myreon grabbed Bree.

  “He’s dead!” Bree screamed in Myreon’s face, but it wasn’t in terror. The girl was grinning like it was her wedding day.

  There was bedlam on the stage. The stable hand was being muscled toward the block. One of the count’s retainers, his ivory doublet stained with blood, was shouting something, his rapier drawn and still dripping crimson.

  Someone in the crowd threw a rock.

  Myreon pulled Bree away from the press of the crowd as they advanced toward the stage. “Get to the Wheel and Serpent in Davram Heights. Go!”

  “But, Magus,” Bree said, “you’ve got to help them! Use your magic!”