Dead But Once

by Auston Habershaw

  Myreon grimaced. There was no time. The Defenders were getting closer. She worked a Compulsion, drawing what little Dweomer she could through the orderly cobblestones at her feet. “Go to the Wheel and Serpent!”

  Bree, her eyes wide with shock, fled immediately.

  The mercenaries surrounding the stage locked into formation and advanced a few paces into the encroaching peasants, their poleaxes angled outward. Somebody got mouthy, and got six inches of steel in his throat. The crowd roared with disapproval.

  Meanwhile, the Defenders were almost upon her. Making sure Bree was clear, Myreon now saw she had two choices—plunge into the growing riot, or fall into the hands of the mirror-men. She recognized the mage at their head, even through the press of bodies—Argus Androlli, his Rhondian-black hair and chiseled features caught the sun in just the right spots, making him look rugged and stern in all the best ways.

  He saw her, too. He smiled, looking straight through her shroud with a truthlens on a silvery chain. He had the perfectly clear, monoclelike prism pinched between his right cheekbone and his eyebrow, leaving his hands free to react to any moves she made. Myreon, bizarrely, felt herself relax. At least now the choice was made for her. She knew what came next.

  She stepped away from the screaming people, from the growing hysteria of the mob. She didn’t look back—couldn’t. She didn’t want to know what was happening.

  Androlli called a halt to the column when it was just in front of her. Around them, the crowd surged and screamed and howled curses, but they dared not come within reach of the firepikes, even now. With a wave of his staff, Androlli cancelled her shroud and she didn’t bother opposing it. What was the point, anyway? “Ah, Myreon—so good to see you again.”

  Myreon gestured around her. “People are about to get hurt! Aren’t you going to do anything about this?”

  Androlli’s smile vanished and he pulled out some casterlocks. “I am. I’m arresting the Gray Lady.”

  “You don’t know the whole story.”

  The Defenders stepped into a defensive perimeter around them. A few people threw rocks, but they bounced off invisible guards. Androlli waved the casterlocks in her face. “Come with me and I’ll hear all about it. Including how you incited a group of anarchists to commit murder yesterday afternoon and a riot today.”

  Myreon flushed. “Oh gods, Argus—I didn’t! I didn’t know.”

  Androlli’s face was grave. “Yes you did. That’s what makes it so hard to believe.” He extended the casterlocks. “If you please, Magus.”

  Myreon looked at him, at his deep, dark eyes—still warm, despite everything that had happened—and extended her hands. She couldn’t fight him. She didn’t have it in her to hurt him. He clipped the casterlocks over her fingers. They were cold and tight, immobilizing both hands entirely, as though they were in a vise. When she heard the lock click into place, she felt like she might faint.

  Petrification again! Gods no!

  The mob grew uglier, but Androlli’s sorcery kept them at bay, Compelling large groups of them to step aside or flee in terror, allowing them to pass. Eventually, they were free of the riot. They were headed toward Eretheria Tower—the seat of Saldorian influence in the city. Once she passed its gates, Myreon knew she would never see the light of day again. At least not for a term of years. At that precise moment, she felt she might have deserved it.

  A coach rattled to a halt beside them, bearing a coat of arms Myreon didn’t recognize. The door popped open to reveal a big, bearded man in black studded leathers. He was met by the Sergeant Defender and the big man exchanged a few words with him.

  Androlli, meanwhile, was reading her the charges against her. She didn’t pay attention, focusing instead on the big, hairy man—he was looking straight at her. He smiled.

  Who the hell is that?

  The Sergeant Defender saluted beside Androlli. “Magus, an urgent letter for you.”

  Androlli blinked. “For me? Here? Now?” He put out his hand, and the Sergeant Defender deposited in it a rolled-up scroll.

  From her angle, Myreon could see inside the scroll before Androlli unfurled it—it contained no writing.

  “Argus . . . wait . . .” she blurted.

  It was too late, though. Androlli had it open and looked at the scroll and then nodded . . .

  And then did nothing. At all. He just stood there, staring into space, scroll held limply in one hand. The paper furled itself up again by reflex.

  Myreon blinked. “Argus? Argus!”

  Nothing. She noted that the Sergeant Defender, who had sneaked a peek over Androlli’s shoulder, was also standing there, staring off at nothing.

  The big man walked over and pretended to whisper into Androlli’s ear, but actually was looking at her. “Please, Ms. Alafarr, get into the coach. I am told the spell will not last long.”

  Myreon’s mouth fell open. “But . . . but what spell is that?”

  The big man took the scroll back from Androlli, who surrendered it willingly. He then slapped the Mage Defender on the back. “Thank you very much, Magus—we’ve been looking for this one for a while!”

  “Who are you?”

  The man smiled. “A friend.” He grabbed her by the ring set into her casterlocks and dragged her toward the coach. “Let’s get going.”

  Myreon glanced back at the column of Defenders. They remained at attention, waiting for orders that never came. From a distance, it looked very much like Androlli and the sergeant were in some kind of private conference.

  Then the big man was helping her through the door of the coach. Bewildered, she climbed up . . .

  . . . only to step not into a coach, but into a library. A sense of queasiness assailed her and she sagged against the wall for a moment—it had been a long time since she’d used an anygate.

  Chapter 15

  Strong Words

  The library was old in the same way that grand houses and ships grow old—a permeating scent of wood polish, a certain musty familiarity. The towering bookshelves seemed to stand like sentinels, lit by narrow little skylights set into the ceiling. The whole place seemed so very familiar, but Myreon was too dizzy to make sense of it.

  The big man was beside Myreon, helping her into a chair. “What . . . who are you?” she managed to say.

  The man grinned again. “I am Eddereon, known in Eretheria as Eddereon the Black. I know your friend Tyvian.” He held up his right hand. There, between two fearsome knots of scar tissue, was an iron ring. Just like Tyvian’s.

  Myreon gasped. “Oh . . . oh gods! There’s more of you?”

  Eddereon bowed. “If you’ll excuse me—I’ve other duties to attend to in the city.”

  Myreon tried to grab his sleeve, but her hands were still locked in the casterlocks and the vertigo still had the world tilting to one side. She almost fell out of the chair. “Wait! Androlli and his sergeant—what will happen to them?”

  Another voice, this one familiar—very familiar—came from the other end of the library. “The Un-Sigil of the Void, when written that small, is ultimately harmless. I imagine they will be quite frustrated when they realize you’ve vanished.”

  Myreon’s head whipped toward the speaker. There, at the other end of the library, flipping her way through the yellowed pages of a thick book, stood Lyrelle Reldamar.

  “Archmagus!”

  Lyrelle thumped the book closed and set it on a huge desk with a few others. She pulled a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles off her nose and slipped them into some invisible pocket of her gown. Myreon hadn’t seen her in person for almost seven years, but she barely looked a day older. Her golden hair had the slightest streak of gray, her eyes and mouth had the faintest wrinkles tugging at the corners, but that was it. She stood as she ever did, straight-backed and graceful, clad in a relatively simple dress of cornflower blue with white lace and pink ribbons worked through the bodice. She seemed to take Myreon in at a glance—every detail, every wrinkle, every stain—and summed it up with a, “Hmph. Y
ou are in dire need of a tailor who knows your measurements.”

  Myreon looked down at herself. “I’m . . . my apologies, Archmagus—I—”

  Lyrelle shook her head. “Merely an observation, child, not a judgement. At least you aren’t currently covered in sewage.” At Myreon’s gasp, Lyrelle nodded, “Yes, I know where you’ve been. I’ve been watching you quite closely.” She picked another book off the shelf.

  “You have?” Myreon felt a chill down her spine. “Why?”

  Lyrelle smiled at her. “A mother has the right to take an interest in her son’s romantic partners, no?”

  Despite herself, Myreon felt herself blush. “Tyvian and I aren’t seeing eye to eye at the moment.”

  Lyrelle thumped her book closed and put it back on the shelf. “Yes, I know. Did I not just say I have been watching you closely? Whatever do you think that means?”

  Myreon felt the blush hit full force. “Of course. I’m sorry.”

  Lyrelle rolled her eyes. “You are far too deferential, my dear. It’s always been your failing.” She snapped her fingers and the casterlocks on Myreon’s hands crumbled into dust. When compared to the rot curse Myreon had used last night, the precision of the disintegration spell was startling—had it not been done by the most powerful sorceress in the world, Myreon would have thought its use incredibly reckless. She held up her hands, looking for any damage done.

  Lyrelle smiled. “There you are—that’s more like it. Suspicious of everyone; only convinced by what she sees with her own eyes—good. Tyvian needs someone like you.”

  Myreon looked around at the library a bit more closely. There were two other doors besides the anygate through which she had come. Both were closed. A mageglass chandelier fit with feylamps hung from the center of the ceiling, where the room widened into a rotunda. This was where the desk was situated. Myreon remembered that desk. She remembered this room. It all came rushing back. “Am I at Glamourvine?”

  “Yes. I do not particularly enjoy attending public executions, as it happens. Especially those that do not go as planned.” Lyrelle shook her head, as though frustrated with something that she didn’t have time to explain. She gazed at the bookshelves. “My father-in-law would be aghast at my having moved the library in here, so close to the anygate—he was always expecting some monster or rival black wizard to come hopping through. I only did it, you know, to make it easier for me to lend books to people.” She sighed. “That was before I decided educating people in order to improve them was a colossal waste of time.”

  “It worked with me!” Myreon stood up. “I was greatly improved by your tutelage, Archmagus!”

  Lyrelle smiled warmly at her—there was always something magical in that smile. Something that made the depths of Myreon’s soul feel good. “You are an exceptional person, Myreon Alafarr. Not everyone is so lucky. Particularly not those vicious little scamps you’ve been teaching in the sewers.”

  Myreon froze—the warm feeling fled straight through her feet. “Wait . . . you . . . you know about that? But, you can’t scry down there!”

  Lyrelle sighed. “Scrying, scrying—always scrying. Everybody seems to think scrying is the only way to spy.” She chuckled, picking up another book and, flipping it open, planted her spectacles back on her nose. “If the only means I had to spy upon people was my scrying pool, I’d be in a fine pickle indeed. Yes, Myreon, I know all about your little tutoring sessions. I’ve brought you here—rescued you from the very jaws of doom—to tell you that it has to end.”

  Myreon’s heart doubled its pace. “Archmagus—”

  Lyrelle shook her head as she flipped pages. “Please, Myreon—I’m retired. Call me Lyrelle or, if it makes you feel better, Your Grace.”

  “I can’t stop,” Myreon blurted. She stood up a bit straighter. “I won’t. They need me. The way they’re treated—”

  “And now that they have murdered a Count of Eretheria and started a riot, how do you suppose they’ll be treated in the future, hmmm?”

  “Andluss brought it upon himself!” Myreon found herself yelling—she could scarcely believe it.

  “Andluss is—pardon me, was—a product of his environment. It isn’t as though he could choose to forego the levies. Not if he wanted to keep poison out of his wine. Not if he didn’t want to wind up living in the streets with his former vassals. Likewise, those students of yours who assisted Ramper l’Etourneau in his murderous assault on the count’s officers didn’t do it because he whispered in their ears and magically made them brutal killers—they were predisposed to this behavior to begin with. Why else would they sneak out of their homes in the dead of night and go searching for you in the sewers? You are a means to an end to them, Myreon. They are using you to make their own violent little fantasies more plausible to execute.”

  Myreon gestured, trying to make a shape out of something formless in her mind. “The idea was to give them some means to . . . to . . .” She searched for the word.

  “Fight back?” Lyrelle looked at Myreon over the top of her spectacles. “Is that it? A way for them to deny their liege lords their lawful rights over them? A way to effectively revolt?”

  Myreon said nothing. The answer was yes, though—clearly yes. She knew it, Lyrelle knew it. She looked at her feet, remembering the roar of the mob, still fresh in her ears. “I thought I could temper it.”

  “Those people are enraged, Myreon,” Lyrelle said softly, placing the open book in her hands on the desk. “Their anger cannot be tempered or focused—it is merely destructive. And chiefly to themselves and those they love.”

  “But—”

  “When you became a Defender of the Balance, Myreon, what exactly did you take the Balance to mean?” Lyrelle waggled a finger at her. “The Balance is, and ever has been, the status quo. Eretheria has functioned as a nation happily and prosperously for centuries. It will function that way again, provided you allow your fledgling revolution to be weeded out. That is how the Balance works.”

  Myreon frowned. “But it won’t be just. What about justice?”

  Lyrelle looked sad for a moment. She slipped into a chair and motioned for Myreon to sit beside her. When Myreon sat, the retired archmage took her hands. “Myreon, what I’m going to say to you will be very upsetting, but I beg you to listen and remember well what I say.”

  Myreon nodded. “What is it?”

  “Justice is the quest for what is often thought of as a ‘more perfect balance.’ Saint Juro wrote of justice: ‘we can, as thinking men, envision a world in which all persons’ qualities and aspirations are held in perfect accord with one another, and thus see the death of suffering. As we see it, so must Hann have shown it to us, and so must it exist.’”

  Myreon nodded again. “The Kingly Meditations. I read it here—in this very library.”

  Lyrelle patted her hand. “Indeed you did. But Juro is wrong, Myreon. Justice for everyone is not real—it is an idealized state, a concept more than a functional model. When we speak of ‘the Balance’ we use the definite article—the Balance, not ‘a’ Balance. That Balance is a balance of all things—light and dark, order and chaos, justice and injustice—and there is only one such Balance. To invite men and women to aspire to a state of universal justice is to invite disruption of that balance, every bit as much as a world of complete injustice would be.

  “The acts of my son Xahlven to destabilize the world by crashing the markets was designed to push Eretheria to this turn—to drive them toward a point where an uprising would be inevitable.” Lyrelle shook her head, gripping Myreon’s hand tightly. “This must not come to pass, Myreon. If it were to succeed, true justice would not be achieved—far from it. The land would simply plunge into a wholly different and likely more violent form of injustice than currently exists. War, unfettered from Eretherian Common Law and customs of engagement. Wholesale slaughter of the innocent. Blood in the streets.”

  Myreon was grave. “But you always taught me to strive for justice and truth in all things.”


  “I did, yes.” Lyrelle smiled. “Such was your role at the time. But life asks us to change our roles from time to time, and we must bend to the whim of fate. You are no longer an agent of justice—that is the purview of magi like Argus Androlli.”

  “So what is my role, then?”

  Lyrelle smiled. “The only chance we have of preventing disaster is to make certain a moderating voice can gain sway over both the nobility and commoners of Eretheria alike.”

  Myreon frowned. “How is that possible?”

  “By making sure Tyvian Reldamar declares his intention to be king.”

  Myreon’s mouth fell open.

  Lyrelle patted her hand and, in the corner of the room, a bell rang. “Come, let’s get you out of that atrocious clothing and get some warm tea into you. You’ve had a frightful day.”

  Chapter 16

  The Eddonish Salon

  The morning after kissing Elora in the ale house, Artus felt as though things ought to feel different. The world should have been up and singing along with him, but it was not. Today was the day of Hool’s salon, and the House of Eddon was a collected bundle of nerves. Hool was so on edge that when it came time to dress, he was almost thankful for the respite from her glares. Almost.

  Since he had taken up with Tyvian Reldamar, Artus had grown somewhat used to fancy clothing. He did not like it, per se, but he could tolerate it and allowed that, after a time, you forgot that you looked an awful lot like a petunia with arms and legs. Today, however, he felt as though some kind of line had been crossed.

  The full-length mirror in Tyvian’s bedchamber was framed in gold and was fashioned with women’s faces at the corners that were enchanted to mutely express their appreciation for whatever you were wearing. At the moment, they were mouthing “oooh” and “ahhh” at Artus, apparently because they liked the color pink and he was wearing a lot of it.

  It all began with the shoes—suede with a four-inch heel, dyed a rosy pink, emblazoned with white diamonds. Artus could barely walk in the damned things. His breeches and doublet were the same pink shade, but with gold and white incorporated as well. His doublet had six diamonds stitched down the center, flanked by a herd of galloping horses embroidered with silver and gold thread. He wore a powdered wig, too—a hot, tight-fitting thing that made him feel like his head was baking—and made him basically look like some kind of ornament meant to be stood atop a cake.