Dead But Once

by Auston Habershaw

  Perwynnon had Tyvian’s red hair, bound in a long braid that ran over his left shoulder. He would have been a tall man, but lean. His chin was Tyvian’s, there could be no doubt, but his nose was rather larger and more hawklike. He wore a short goatee with no hint of gray. On his chest he clutched his famous broadsword, Justice. He wore mageglass plate of staggering quality, and lay among a sea of white carnations and blue roses. Tyvian looked on him in silence.

  Tyvian had been ten years old when this man died. Ten. For all those years—both before and after—he had asked for his father, over and over again, and his mother had never told him. To think he might have met the man, perhaps even remembered him. Had he? He tried to throw his mind back that far, but all he got was the impression of a thousand social events, him standing next to Xahlven in a starched ruff, bowing to men and women whose names he could never hope to recall. He knew he had always been on the lookout for a man who might be his father. Perhaps their affair was a secret one. Perhaps Perwynnon hadn’t even known he existed.

  The thoughts were a kind of pain he had never experienced. Tyvian felt hollowed out, like the very tower he now stood in.

  The Guardian entered and knelt. “Your Majesty.”

  Tyvian tore his eyes away. “What?”

  The Guardian remained on his knees. “Your Majesty, with so many people inside the palace, I will be unable to afford you my fullest protection.”

  Tyvian frowned—a threat or simple honesty? It scarcely mattered. “I am not the person you need to worry about protecting, sir.”

  “If I may, Your Majesty, who is?”

  Tyvian sighed. “The peasantry. Or possibly the peerage. Depending.”

  “I don’t understand,” the Guardian said, still staring at the floor.

  Tyvian remembered that he had to bid him rise, and so he did with a little wave of the hand. “When I was a boy and I would fight with my brother, my mother’s solution was often to lock us in a room together and demand that we reach an accord before we were allowed to leave.”

  The Guardian, for the first time since Tyvian had known him, exhibited a facial expression. It was one of complete shock. “So, you plan to . . .”

  Tyvian grimaced. “Your task is to make sure no blood is spilled, never you mind what I intend to do. Now, if you will excuse me, I am overdue for a bath.” He brushed past the Guardian and, casting one last look over his shoulder at the man who was his father, began the long, long trek back to his bedroom.

  Chapter 37

  Coronation

  Artus woke up when the light of the setting sun rested upon his face. Late afternoon. He was alive. In his room in the palace. “Tyvian?” Artus murmured.

  “His Majesty is . . . he’s busy.” Michelle sat by the side of the bed. She was dressed in a spring green gown that highlighted freckles in her thin cheeks. She looked very pale.

  “Since when do you have freckles?” Artus asked.

  Michelle laughed and each laugh was accompanied with a little snort. Then she blushed. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh! Please forgive me!”

  Artus tried to sit up, but the room spun and his stomach blazed with pain. He rested back into the pillow with a groan. “Michelle, I’m not gonna stop talking to you just ’cause you laugh at something I say. I’m not like those jerks you hang around with.”

  Michelle’s eyes grew wide and she nodded. “I know. Gods, I know you’re not. That’s why I’m here. I had to say I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t do anything,” Artus said, smiling at her. “You got nothing to apologize for.”

  Michelle sighed. “I hung around with Elora because she was a climber . . . and I guess I was, too. I always figured, when she became a great lady, I could become her handmaiden or some such. Maybe even marry one of her husband’s squires.”

  Artus reached out to take her hand, but of course the bed was too enormous, so Michelle had to sit on the edge and reach back. Her fingers were hot. “You listen here, okay: Elora Carran is never gonna be as great a lady as you.”

  Michelle blushed. “I should go. The king has banished all of House Davram from the palace. I shouldn’t even be here.” She stood up and gathered up a parasol.

  Artus blinked. “Wait . . . king? What king . . . Tyvian?”

  Michelle nodded. “He’s being coronated tonight. People have been filing into the palace all day, common and noble alike.”

  Artus gaped at her. “Kroth’s teeth! That . . . that idiot!”

  Michelle blushed at his profanity. She pointed to the bedside table. “He left a letter for you. I hadn’t noticed it before, but he’s really very regal, isn’t he?”

  Artus had no answer for that. He reached for the letter and Michelle handed it to him. With weak, trembling hands, Artus cracked the wax seal and began to read:

  Artus,

  First you must allow me to apologize for placing you in the situation you now find yourself. There is no excuse for it. I have made a mess of many things in my life, but your life was never intended to be among them. I have taken you for granted. I am very sorry. Tonight, I plan to set many things aright. Do not try to find me because where I go, you are forbidden to follow. The death of a king is no small thing, and it would be best if you were well away from here before it comes to that. In the ultimately likely event a speedy and surreptitious escape is required, I’ve rigged the corner room on the top floor of the south wing so that you can pull a Galaspin (remember?) and get away. Please live a long, happy life somewhere far from here.

  Your friend, forever and always,

  Tyvian Reldamar, King of Eretheria and all its Counties, etc, etc.

  P.S.: Put the funds to good use. I trust your judgement.

  In the envelope was the heavy iron key—the key to Hool’s vault beneath the House of Eddon. Artus looked up from the letter at Michelle, who was halfway out the door. “Wait!”

  She looked back at him. “What?”

  “Help me up!” He held out his hands.

  Michelle ran to his side and tried to press him back into bed. “You shouldn’t be up! You’re gravely hurt!”

  “You don’t understand!” Artus yelled, “Tyvian—the king! He’s going to let them kill him! You’ve gotta help me!”

  Michelle chewed her lower lip for a second and then nodded. “Okay. What do I need to do?”

  Artus pointed to the armoire. “First, get my pants.”

  The great necromantic ritual was completed with the last rays of the sun to fuel it. Myreon had never experienced such power before. The ritual space in the ancient cavern glowed with sun-bright radiance, and the magic circle—the veta—was but a column of pure white energy. Lightning arced from it, striking corpse after corpse that Myreon and the necromancer had so painstakingly arrayed over the last two days—all of them lying in perfectly ordered rows, stretching down the path that led to the veta and into the sewers beyond. Soft green light came to life in their hollow eye sockets. Slowly, the bodies began to rise.

  They were soldiers, mostly—taken from catacoombs and mass graves from ancient Eretherian battlefields, amassed here by the necromancer for years. Once Myreon got past the horror of seeing the dead walk, she could see the poetry in it. Many of these poor souls had been levies as well, or poor men-at-arms or mercenaries, all of whom had died for some noble house or another and had nothing to show for it. They had died for the vanity of their so-called betters, and now, after long ages, they would have their revenge.

  The necromancer waved his hands gingerly over the glowing Lumenal script that powered the ritual. The focusing medium was a great block of quartz at the center of the veta, and it was so full of power Myreon could not look at it. The necromancer nodded, his blind eyes oblivious to the glare. “The animation construct is holding. Five hundred and two score risen dead await our bidding.”

  Myreon caught up her staff. “I will lead them into the palace via the sewers. You will maintain the ritual?”

  The blind old sorcerer laughed. “No.
I would join you. I would see this thing done.”

  Myreon snorted a laugh. “You’re blind, old man.”

  “Permit a blind man his metaphors. You are certain the palace wards shall not hinder us?”

  “No wards will hold me back. Not tonight.”

  The necromancer grinned. “Then sound the advance.”

  Myreon nodded and thrust her staff forward. As one, her undead legion took one faltering step forward, then another, then another. They were on the move.

  Myreon was officially a necromancer.

  She only hoped she was a good one.

  The night of Tyvian’s coronation was cloudy but warm, with a stiff breeze blowing up from the south. A new throne—one more comfortable and personable—had been set up at one end of the grand ballroom, beneath the massive portrait of Perwynnon, lest anybody forget who exactly Tyvian was and why he was here.

  The nobility arrived early, the rows of stately carriages stretching the full length of the palace’s vast front courtyard. As there were no traditions associated with coronations, per se, and particularly not for ones requested on such short notice, royal blue was in evidence on most everyone’s attire—something that typically would have been a faux pas. They knew this and wore it anyway—an act of defiance. You do not rule us, it said.

  Tyvian tried not to read into it.

  The peerage was, as Tyvian had predicted, accompanied by a vast array of professional duelists, hard-faced sell-swords, and hired goons. They were dressed well, of course (being accompanied by a poorly dressed bodyguard just wasn’t done), but their bearing made them stick out like bears in a henhouse. Tyvian’s ingrained threat senses were in a state of high alert, as everywhere he looked were men who had the physique and confidence of trained warriors and killers. The vast majority, he couldn’t help but note, weren’t Eretherian at all. They were Galaspiners, Ihynishmen, dour Illinis, sharp-eyed Verisis, and even the occasional stiff-backed Eddoner. Some were even more exotic than that, hailing from the Deep South, beyond Kalsaar, or from the distant Eastern Islands.

  He mingled freely with them all, dragging the Guardian along into indefensible positions—surrounded by Ousienne’s sell-swords at one moment, accepting drinks from Yvert and Duren the next. He felt wild, almost out of control, even though this ought to have been the safest of environments, watched as he was on all sides by teams of rivals eager for his favor and flanked by armed men. He knew better, though.

  Tonight was the night he died.

  The common folk showed up just before sundown, after the day’s work was done. They came in family groups or in little clusters of twos and threes. They were dressed in their feast-day best, which was several orders of magnitude less impressive than even the most humbly dressed palace servant. Still they came, and Tyvian had left standing orders that they were to be made welcome by the Guardian and his golems. Whether the Guardian did it or not was on his conscience. It was abundantly obvious that, as much as Tyvian would have liked to control every aspect of this harebrained scheme of his, it was quite beyond any control at all. He was merely the man who spiked the dam. The encroaching torrent was truly beyond him.

  But it was exciting.

  He threw himself among the commoners next. They knelt in his presence, they laid kisses upon the hem of his ermine robes, they held their children on their shoulders. There were those, he noted, who drew away, who scowled—but they were the minority. He touched heads and spoke quiet words of encouragement—empty as they were insincere, he felt—but they worked anyway. He left women trembling. He made old men weep.

  I can’t believe it, he thought as he wound through the press of hands and faces and bodies, these people really think I can save them. I could say the word, and they would die for me.

  Then the Guardian touched him on the shoulder. “It is almost time to begin.”

  Tyvian nodded and extricated himself from the crowd. He retreated to his chambers, where his formal robes of office had been laid out, along with an orb and scepter. Here, alone, he would prepare himself for his formal crowning, just as Perwynnon had done, and emerge on the ballroom floor as the first announced to take his seat and prepare to formally receive the title of King.

  And so Tyvian, clad in regal robes, was installed on the throne and the nobility were paraded before him, each being introduced by the Guardian with the proper number of thumps from his staff. Two hours later, Tyvian sat back as the last of them did their curtsies and bows. Two of the last hours of his life wasted being introduced to people. Gods.

  The peerage had arrayed itself along the walls of the ballroom and, beyond the doors at the other end, a press of peasantry peered from behind a length of velvet rope. In the vast empty aisle of blue and white tile that stretched out before him, standing at perhaps the center of the room, his mother held a crown on a cushion. She was serene, beautiful—a sorceress from a storybook, wearing her black robes and bearing a long staff.

  Tyvian was surprised to see her, though of course it made sense—the magi had been crowning the kings of the West for over a thousand years and, retired or not, Lyrelle Reldamar was the ranking mage present. Whispers coursed among the crowd. Tyvian knew what they said; he didn’t need to hear. There is Perwynnon’s lover. Behold her bastard son. Can you believe it?

  Tyvian stood, adjusting the long cape of ermine that draped over his shoulders. He took a deep breath, and recited the lies he had written just hours before. “I wish to welcome you all to the palace of my father, and of his ancestors before him. I know you are all afraid of what is about to happen—I am afraid, too. But I also know that the noble peers and good people of Eretheria can overcome this fear. That we can all start anew, amend our faults, and join together. I stand ready.”

  The ring, interestingly enough, remained silent.

  Lyrelle nodded deeply—approval? Impossible to say. She started toward him, moving at a stately pace, the crown held high for all to see.

  This was it. Tyvian marveled at the madness of it all. He saw the crown approaching as though in a dream—he wondered whether if he tried to flee, his feet would find purchase on the ground or not.

  The shouts of alarm, when they came, caused him to crash back to reality. Oddly, with the beginning of his death, he found he could breathe again.

  All heads were turned toward the doors. Shoving through the press of the peasantry was a tall man, balding—Sir Damon. With him was Hool.

  Tyvian frowned—this he had not expected.

  “My liege!” Sir Damon yelled, panting. “The hosts of Dellor are at the edge of the city! They march upon us as we speak! To arms! To arms, Eretheria!”

  Cries of dismay and roars of anger rose up from the mob. Tyvian sighed as he heard them—he had been hoping for a few more hours, at least. Just a few more.

  Hool was by his side. “It is Sahand. He has come.”

  Tyvian shook his head. “Sahand can’t hold the city—never in a thousand years. He must know this.”

  Hool snorted. “He isn’t here for the city, stupid.

  “He is here for you.”

  Chapter 38

  Ultimatums

  The Delloran army, masquerading as mercenaries, marched in neat blocks up the grand avenues that led from the edge of the city to the palace and lake at its center. They came up the Freegate Road from the northeast and along the Old Coast Road from both west and east. From the pillars of smoke arising from the north, Tyvian guessed that Sahand had spiked the spirit-engine tracks. Anyone who sought to impede them was impaled on the foot-long tips of their pikes and left to bleed out in the gutters. There was no apparent escape.

  Tyvian stood atop one of the few flat turrets of the old palace and watched them approach, his face grim. Hool was with him. “I can’t believe I didn’t see this coming. Gods, Sahand must have been placing these men in position for months. This was his endgame all along. Not conquest of Eretheria, just . . . just petty revenge.” Tyvian cursed—he’d been distracted, too self-involved in his own per
sonal nonsense to see this simplest, most obvious of plots. Gods, what a dunce he’d been!

  Hool didn’t seem to care for his self-pity. “Everyone is running around like scared rabbits. You need to tell them what to do.”

  “I’ve got five warring factions down there and a giant crowd of unarmed civilians. Does it really matter if they die running around like idiots or while standing in neat little rows like idiots?” The ring gave him a twinge, though. Yes, he supposed it was his duty. Even if he hadn’t been technically crowned yet. He sighed. “Fine. But don’t blame me when this goes sideways.”

  “Everything with you goes sideways,” Hool said.

  Fair enough.

  The Guardian, through his golems, tried to spread word that everyone should gather on the floor of the congress. It had partially worked, and the majority of the nobility and some quarter of the peasantry had crammed into the vast chamber. The five great doors stood open, meaning people could cluster in the wide halls beyond and still be able to hear. The great vaulted ceilings echoed with panicked cries and angry shouts. That many people made the air stale and hot. Yet when Tyvian entered through a secret door the Guardian revealed to him, the mob grew quiet.

  Tyvian didn’t have time to balk at the enormity of the danger or the absurdity of his command of it—he had expected chaos, just not of this kind. Fine. He would improvise even his own demise, it seemed. “Ladies and gentlemen, Banric Sahand and his army will be at the gates of the palace in less than half an hour, at a maximum.”

  Somewhere a woman howled in terror.

  Tyvian shook his head. “This great palace, in Perwyn’s wisdom, was not built for defense, but rather for diplomacy—Sahand will not besiege us, he will simply assault. The wards upon this place will keep his men out, but they won’t stop him from bombarding this place and reducing it to rubble.”

  Tyvian took a deep breath. Time to lie. “The good news is, we outnumber him—with the collected might of the mercenaries brought here by the peerage and the patriotism of the people, we can throw him . . . ow . . . back.” The ring gave his finger an awful wrench, so hard he had to sit down. He pressed on. “Together, just as in my father’s time, we can overcome the Mad Prince.”