Dead Reign

by T. A. Pratt

  Marla shook off the weight of her regrets. She had things to do in the here-and-now, and the past was better left buried. On her way out of the cemetery, she paused by the casket Ayres had exhumed. A couple of Hamil’s apprentices would be along shortly to bury it. She patted the coffin’s lid. “Sorry we disturbed you,” she said. “Rest well.”

  The next morning, Ayres sat seething on an iron bench on the esplanade, staring at the deep blue waters of the bay. Yes, he’d helped raise Somerset from the dead, though the Somerset that came to life was not the fearless visionary Ayres had expected, but a monster rendered insane by too many years of death. Ayres regretted his part in the affair, but Marla’s arrogance was insufferable. Ayres had been a prominent sorcerer in Felport when Marla’s mother was in diapers. He’d been born and raised in this city, steeped in the magical subculture from his earliest youth, when he’d first discovered the ability to speak to roadkill in the street and raise euthanized butterflies from the dead. Marla was an outsider who’d come to this city in her teens and stumbled into magic. Yes, she had a certain rough-edged charisma, and was said to be one of the most potent martial magicians the city had ever seen, but the ability to damage people physically didn’t qualify one for leadership. She wouldn’t even allow him to raise a servant. It was intolerable. He needed a servant—he was an old man, even by the long-lived standards of sorcerers, and he couldn’t very well scrub his own toilets and carry his own burdens or conduct his own reconnaissance. But what Marla didn’t know…

  He rose and began walking, every step easing his stiffened joints. Once, he’d believed that stiffness was rigor mortis setting in, but he was alive, he knew, and the pains were only encroaching age. It would be a waste of time to try exhuming another corpse. Marla was surely having him watched. Fresh corpses were easiest to raise, but in truth he would prefer a nice mummy or bog-man, a corpse that had been preserved by the old methods. They flaked a bit, but didn’t fall to rot and wormy ruin as other corpses did. There was a mummy in the natural history museum, but he couldn’t spirit that away without being found out. He had to act in secret. Perhaps there were other options. He had some connections from the old days who might help. Somerset and Sauvage were not the only masters he’d served. He’d sometimes consulted with Hamil, but the man was Marla’s lapdog. Ayres needed someone he could get leverage over, who could be convinced to defy Marla….

  He stopped. He smiled. He twirled his walking stick, feeling almost jaunty, and set off for one of the access points to the secret catacombs beneath Felport, the tunnels and caverns and vaults hidden to even the most seasoned of sewer workers, known only to sorcerers like himself. He went down a crumbling concrete stairway that led to the bay. The tide was out, revealing a strand of rocky beach. Ayres picked his way along carefully, the stink of low tide reminding him of his own rotting flesh—no, no, he was alive, still alive, he’d never died! After a while he reached the spot he remembered and slowly clambered up a few slick boulders, working his way carefully up to the face of the sea cliff. He used his stick to clear away hanging curtains of seaweed, revealing a mossy iron gate, which he pulled open, the hinges squealing and protesting from years of disuse, and he wondered if anyone else even remembered this passageway. Well, Viscarro would, of course—Viscarro was Felport’s subterranean sorcerer. He’d been here for as long as anyone could remember, carving his vaults beneath the street, drawing magic from the darkness, raising mushrooms with peculiar properties, hoarding gold and stranger treasures. He had a little bit of everything hidden away, it was said…and Ayres knew a secret about him. For sorcerers, secrets were power, and Ayres knew more than a few.

  Ayres entered the stinking passageway, stepping around puddles of pooled filth. Soon the concrete walls turned to brick, and farther along to the black stone of natural caverns, walls furry with mold. Ayres finally reached a modern gate of steel bars, where a cadaverously pale attendant sat in an illuminated booth behind a Plexiglas barrier, his head resting against one wall as he dozed.

  Ayres rapped on the Plexiglas sharply with his stick, and the attendant shot up. “Very shoddy,” Ayres said, leaning close and shouting through the cluster of holes punched in the glass to allow communication. “Does Viscarro know you sleep on duty?”

  The boy—he was perhaps in his forties, and to Ayres, any man who wasn’t old enough to be dead of natural causes was a boy—sputtered, “I…no one has come to this gate in years!”

  “I need to see Viscarro.”

  The apprentice frowned. “Who may I say is calling?”

  “Ayres, the necromancer.”

  The boy scribbled something on a sheet of paper, tucked it into a glass-and-brass cylinder, and shoved the whole thing into a pneumatic tube, where it was whisked away to some deeper place in the vault. “It’ll be a few minutes,” he said, not quite apologetically. “I’d offer you something to drink, but, well…” He gestured at the bars that cut him off from Ayres.

  “Viscarro’s hospitality is as fine as I remember.” Ayres leaned patiently on his stick.

  A few moments later a cylinder dropped in the pneumatic tube. The boy unrolled the note inside, frowned, and said, “Viscarro sends his apologies, but he can’t see you right now. He suggests you come back next month, when the moon is new.”

  This was not totally unexpected. “Tell him to see me now, or I’ll reveal his deepest secret in a way calculated to cause the greatest possible damage.”

  “What secret is that?”

  Ayres just stared at him. The boy sighed, scribbled a note, and sent it up the tube. After another interminable wait, a return note arrived. The attendant glanced at it and pressed a button, sounding a buzzer and making the metal gate swing open. Ayres passed through the opening and followed the apprentice to a solid-looking metal door. Beyond the door, Viscarro’s lair looked like something between a bank and a university archive—a series of rooms with low ceilings, crammed shelves, and endless rows of filing cabinets and desks, all lit with hideous fluorescent lights, with industrious men and women poring over heaps of papers. They walked past dozens of vault doors, all shining metal with enormous handles shaped like ship’s wheels and complex locking mechanisms that combined technology, magic, and sheer dense physicality. Viscarro was a hoarder, and he’d been under the city for a long time. Whenever a sorcerer in some faraway place died, Viscarro sent his agents to attend their estate auctions or—it was rumored—to simply steal their treasures. He’d raked in whole libraries and art collections over the years, and his horde of apprentices went through them diligently, sorting the genuinely valuable items from the frauds and trinkets and objects of merely sentimental value. Viscarro made a good living as an antiquities dealer, but his real wealth was here, in the vaults. In addition to countless charmed, enchanted, cursed, and haunted items, Viscarro was rumored to have half a dozen genuine magical artifacts—those strange items of intrinsic power, of mysterious and ancient origin, which sometimes seemed to have minds of their own.

  Ayres had only ever seen one artifact up close, and that was the dagger of office that every chief sorcerer of Felport inherited in their turn. The stories said the dagger could cut through anything, and that if wielded by a hand other than that of its rightful owner, it would turn and kill the holder. Ayres wondered about that last part. It sounded like apocrypha meant to scare would-be thieves. Artifacts were items with motives, though, so who could say? Marla was said to possess another artifact, too, a strange purple-and-white cloak with powers of healing and devastation, though Ayres had never personally seen it, and she was reportedly reluctant to wear it anymore because of the damage it did to her psyche. Which just went that much further toward proving her unsuitableness to rule Felport. If Somerset had possessed an item of such power, he would have used it to expand his control of the city, make it into an empire. He’d been a ruler with vision. Viscarro was no better, though—if he got his hands on the cloak or the dagger, he’d just shut it away in some deep vault, thrilled by the mere fact of
possession.

  “The master is through there.” The apprentice gestured to an office door marked “Management.” Ayres went to the door, knocked once, then stepped into the dim office beyond. The room smelled of sweet spices. Viscarro sat behind a large antique desk, illuminated by the glow of a banker’s lamp. The skin of his bald head was so white and papery it made his apprentices look tan in comparison, and his ears seemed subtly wrong, too pointed, perhaps. He looked up from the papers on his desk, the monocle in his left eye catching the light and glinting, and offered Ayres a brief, toothy smile. “I should have you cut up into food for my worm farm. To come here and threaten me with nonsense about secrets?”

  Though he hadn’t been offered a seat, Ayres sat down in the leather chair before Viscarro’s desk. “It’s good to see you, too, old friend. It’s been too many years. I understand you could not visit me during my time in the hospital—I know sunlight and fresh air do not agree with you—but you might have sent a letter.”

  “We are not friends,” Viscarro said. “You were a tradesman. You worked for my friends.”

  Ayres sniffed. “I was one of Somerset’s closest advisors.”

  Viscarro laughed. “Nonsense. Perhaps it amused Somerset to let you think so, or perhaps your delusions extend beyond the belief that you’re dead and rotting, hmm? You were a vassal, Ayres. You should leave your betters alone.”

  “These pleasantries are nice, after so many years in the low company of mindless homunculus orderlies at the Blackwing Institute, but perhaps we’d better get to business? I need a mummy.”

  Viscarro cocked his head. “Are you still here, O de-filer of corpses? Perhaps my suggestion that you leave was too subtle for your vulgar senses, so now I say it directly—be gone, or be fed to the worms. Some of them are very big worms.”

  “You wouldn’t have let me in to see you if you weren’t worried about the secret I know.”

  Viscarro leaned forward. “Understand this, unclean man—I am the master of secrets. I do not fear secrets. Secrets fear me.”

  “It’s said two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.” Ayres was enjoying himself. “But, of course, I can speak to the dead, so no one can keep secrets from me. If you are so unconcerned, you won’t mind if I go see Marla Mason, and tell her one of the ruling cabal of Felport is an undead monster. Good day.” He rose.

  “You lunatic. You say I am dead now? I see your madness has turned outward. Say what you wish, no one will believe you.”

  “Oh, really? You don’t think Marla will investigate? You think she’ll come down here and check your pulse personally? You know how she feels about dead things that don’t lay down. Ever since Somerset’s return to life, she’s had a certain…understandable prejudice. And you, sir, are just such a creature.”

  Viscarro sat very still. “Your allegations are ridiculous.”

  “You’re a lich.” Ayres leaned forward and put his weight on his walking stick. “Because of some horrible genetic quirk, the normal life-extending spells wouldn’t work on you. So you cast a dark magic and allowed your body to die. You are little more than a spirit haunting the shell of your corpse, like a ghost haunts a house. Your soul is locked away in a phylactery somewhere in these vaults, probably a jewel, knowing your tastes, and as long as it’s protected, you are immortal. But you know Marla’s beliefs—a spirit in an unliving body begins to curdle like milk, the humanity sours, and eventually only a monster remains.” He shrugged. “When she finds out you are such a monster, masquerading as a live man, she’ll kill you as she would a dangerous animal, and your treasures will be scattered to buy the loyalty of her other lieutenants. Now, about that mummy…”

  “It will not be a quick death for you. Those who threaten me die slowly.”

  “I’m not new at this, Viscarro.” Ayres was growing exasperated. A bit of sparring was all well and good, but he was too old to muck about with posturing all morning. He had dead things to raise. “If I do not return home in good time, several letters will reach Marla Mason, detailing exactly what I just said to you. Can we please move beyond the threats and denials? Somerset told me about your…condition, your inability to extend your life by normal magical means. As I said, I was one of his closest counselors.”

  “I—that’s not—”

  “Somerset helped you become a lich,” Ayres continued. “He cast the spells, and wielded the enchanted blade that drained your life. Who do you think he came to for advice about the process, you fool? Who do you think showed him the rites and incantations? You owe your unlife to me. Besides, I’m a necromancer—I can sense the dead, and you are dead.” Once, that boast had been true, but now living people often seemed dead to Ayres, or like figures carved from wax, poor imitations of the living. All part of his illness. He knew the delusions were false, but sometimes they still troubled him. Viscarro needn’t know that, though. “I smell the spices you’ve used to preserve your body, to keep rot at bay. This is my area of expertise, Viscarro. So shut up and give me a damned mummy.”

  Viscarro rose from his place behind the desk. He didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, he nodded. “One mummy. And you’ll keep your…wild speculations…to yourself. Your allegations are untrue, but it would be inconvenient to have you spread such lies about me. Understood?”

  “Oh, I think we understand each other beautifully.”

  2

  I can’t believe I have to do this,” Marla complained as Rondeau eased the Bentley through the crowded summer streets. “In the past few weeks I’ve dealt with the return of the beast of Felport, a crazy blonde in a leather catsuit who thought she was a super-hero, and a godsdamned attempted invasion by interdimensional hedonists.”

  “They were elves,” Rondeau said helpfully. “From elfland. Or faeries, from faeryland.”

  “There’s no such thing as elves.” Marla scowled at a cab turning left through a red light. “If stupid people want to call those creatures elves, I can’t help that, but I’m not going to. Anyway, my point is, things have been busy, and the last thing in the world I want to do is plan a fancy dress ball. I don’t do balls. Or cotillions. Maybe, occasionally, a kegger, but that’s about the extent of my party-planning expertise.”

  “Eh, it’s only once every five years, and it keeps the ghosts of the founding families from destroying the city, right?”

  “I think the Chamberlain made it all up just because she likes parties. Why doesn’t she plan the thing? I mean, she’s the presiding sorcerer up on the Heights. The ghostly ancestors of Felport’s upper class are her responsibility, not mine. Let her keep them entertained!”

  “She does keep them entertained, except for one day out of every 1,826.”

  “Stop being reasonable, Rondeau. I count on you to share my outrage. Five years ago I wasn’t even invited to the Founders’ Ball.”

  “You were a badass freelancer with a scary reputation back then. Nobody knew you were going to kill Somerset and become the big boss of Felport. Besides, we had way more fun at the block party.”

  “Well, yeah.” Founders’ Day had a strange magic in Felport—street parties and other celebrations broke out spontaneously among the city’s ordinary citizens, a sort of magical-resonance response to the more stately revelry of the Founders’ Ball. By the same magic, if the founding families were unhappy on Founders’ Day, the populace of Felport would riot. It had happened once before. Historians called the events of that night the Great Fire of Felport. “Give me a monster to slay or a wall to knock down or an evil conniving bastard to out-smart, and I’m golden, I’ve got it covered. But I’ve never planned anything like this before. I’m gonna need, like, caterers. Waiters. Decorators. A whole party-planning squad. And they have to be people who won’t freak out when ghosts start appearing, dressed like refugees from a costume drama, twirling around in a ballroom!”

  “That’s why we’re heading up the hill, boss. The Chamberlain was pretty stoked when I called to set up this meeting. She said she was beginning to th
ink you were going to hire a DJ and hang some crepe paper from the ceiling and call it a job well done.”

  “The Chamberlain always looks at me like I’m an idiot. Every time I see her I think about class warfare.”

  “She wasn’t always so hoity-toity. She came to the city alone, working as a maid or some shit, right? But the ghosts took a shine to her, and now she’s their chosen one. The two of you probably have more in common than you think.”

  “But she’s the kind of woman who wears evening gowns and likes it. We’re fundamentally incompatible, her and me.”

  “You’re always telling me how rich people got rich, how the ruling class became the rulers.” Rondeau honked the horn at a slow-moving flotilla of high school girls crossing against the light. “They were the meanest, smartest, toughest bastards around, and they killed and schemed and murdered their way to the top, right?”

  “Yeah, and then those tough bastards had kids who grew up soft and spoiled, and their kids grew up even softer and more spoiled.”

  “Sure, but the founding fathers of Felport were those original tough bastards. Maybe their ghosts like dressing up in ectoplasmic tuxedos and listening to string quartets, but they started out backstabbing and scheming their way to power. Maybe you and the Chamberlain can relate, after all.”

  “Why are you defending her? Wait. You think the Chamberlain’s hot, don’t you?” Marla said.

  “She wears high heels all the time,” Rondeau said, a little dreamily.

  Marla grunted. They had to drive the long way around, because the rather redundantly named Market Street Market was in full swing, and that meant four blocks of prime downtown was closed to vehicle traffic and transformed into the weekly summertime street bazaar. The Market Street Market had started life as a farmers’ market, but over the years had mutated into a strange hybrid of a swap meet and a county fair, where you could buy anything from heirloom tomatoes to motorcycle parts of questionable provenance to deep-fried candy bars. Marla loved the market, the press and jumble of her city’s people afoot, and wanted nothing more than to walk there now, chatting with the guy at the carnivorous-plant booth, tossing a coin into the big fountain everyone used as a de facto wishing well (and which, local legend said, actually granted one wish in a million), drinking beer out of a plastic cup, and messing with the fake psychics. But she had to take a meeting. The Chamberlain had probably never even been to the Market.