Dead But Once Read online

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to this ugly world of ours,

  and to those who fight to make it better, no matter what and no matter how

  Epigraph

  “A man’s character always takes its hue, more or less, from the form and color of things about him.”

  —Frederick Douglass

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Midnight in the House of Eddon

  Chapter 2: How to Entertain a Killer

  Chapter 3: A Very Public Murder

  Chapter 4: A Sewer of Wisdom

  Chapter 5: Complications of a Poisoning

  Chapter 6: Invitations

  Chapter 7: The Houseguest

  Chapter 8: Guest Lists

  Chapter 9: The Heir’s Day Out

  Chapter 10: RSVP

  Chapter 11: Wild Night

  Chapter 12: The Cost of Conspiracy

  Chapter 13: Family Business

  Chapter 14: Some Semblance of Justice

  Chapter 15: Strong Words

  Chapter 16: The Eddonish Salon

  Chapter 17: The Wrong Kind of Company

  Chapter 18: Well, THAT Went Well . . .

  Chapter 19: Truth and Consequences

  Chapter 20: Belated Epiphanies

  Chapter 21: The Makeup

  Chapter 22: The Breaking of the House of Eddon

  Chapter 23: Loss of Allies

  Chapter 24: Deals for the Desperate

  Chapter 25: Party Crashers

  Chapter 26: Last Dance

  Chapter 27: Masquerade’s End

  Chapter 28: Family Reunion

  Chapter 29: Caught Sleeping

  Chapter 30: An Informal Stroll

  Chapter 31: Dark Thoughts

  Chapter 32: Dueling Day

  Chapter 33: The Many Advantages of Being Stabbed

  Chapter 34: Man-Eater, Heartbreaker

  Chapter 35: All You Can Wish and More

  Chapter 36: Tyvian the First

  Chapter 37: Coronation

  Chapter 38: Ultimatums

  Chapter 39: It’s All Fun and Games Until the Dead Walk

  Chapter 40: The Battle of the Empty Tower

  Chapter 41: A Blow Too Far

  Chapter 42: A Good Death

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  By Auston Habershaw

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  The tax man carried a mace—a two-foot shaft with a two-pound steel ball at one end—and where it swung, bones broke and men crumpled. This was just the beginning of the problem. The tax man wore mail, of course, and rode atop a solidly built mare—a Benethoran Red—barded in mail down its flanks and across its chest. The tax man was not alone either. Two men, also armored, their tabards bearing the white tower and red rose of House Ayventry, kept a keen eye on the alleys and dark corners of Eretheria’s back streets, crossbows loaded and drawn. Thusly guarded, the tax man proceeded on his rounds, a kind of mobile fortress of steel and horseflesh, his satchels jingling with the coppers of peasants unlucky enough to be listed in his fat, leather-bound ledger.

  It was dawn in the Ayventry District. The narrow street markets had yet to come alive, the bustle of livestock and guild members on their errands was still an hour or two in coming. The peasantry was waking up to the sound of chickens clucking and the smell of wet thatching over their heads, and just starting to wonder about eating breakfast, if indeed they were so blessed as to have enough food for the luxury. This was the best time to catch a man at home, and so this was the time the tax man made his rounds.

  People who could afford chickens and breakfast were often first on his list.

  Outside, the last breath of winter had filled the air with a fine mist of icy damp—a kind of rain that did not fall so much as pervade the air. In an alley beside a bakery, from her post behind the rain barrel, Bree Newsome clutched her shawl tightly around her head and shoulders and tried not to shiver. She failed. Not much longer, she thought.

  She drew back into the shadows for a moment and stretched out her fingers, trying to remember the warming spell she had been taught. She recited the energies to herself, Dweomer for ice, Fey for fire, Dweomer for calm, Fey for desire; Ether for darkness, Lumen for light, Ether for dead things, Lumen for life . . .

  The warming spell called for the Fey, and anger, as it happened, was something Bree had in abundance. She found that little knot of rage she had kept in her stomach since her father and brother had been levied into the Count of Ayventry’s armies, clenched her fists, and let its fire soak her with a few grunts and fierce expressions. The warmth filled her, banishing the penetrating cold and damp, at least for a moment. Then the ley of the world reasserted itself against her feeble efforts and, once again, the cold seeped in.

  Bree shivered anew. For the thousandth time in her short life, Bree wished she were a real sorceress.

  Somewhere nearby, Bree heard the jingle of a horse’s harness. She took a deep breath and whistled, soft and low. She caught a glimpse of Gilvey Wilcar, the cooper’s boy, darting across the street. Not part of the plan. What in the name of Hann was he doing? This was supposed to be her plan—they had agreed on it. He’d sworn and spat.

  Fear tightened Bree’s stomach like a harp string. She’d seen someone try to roll a tax man and fail before. That mace had crushed the man’s face like a ripe melon. In a few minutes, that could be her face. Could be Gilvey’s. She tried to take a calming breath, but having channeled the Fey just a moment ago made that hard.

  Don’t mess this up, Gil.

  Please.

  Somewhere close by, an old woman began to sing. It was an old tune—Bree had heard it since she was a little girl:

  Go march to war, my darling,

  The Levy calls your name.

  Go march to war, my darling,

  For Spring has come again!

  And I will be awaiting

  The sound of victory’s bell.

  And I will be awaiting

  The stories you will tell.

  Go march to war, my father,

  The Lord must earn his fame.

  Go march to war, my father,

  For Spring has come again.

  And all thy little children

  Shall crowd about thy door.

  And all thy little children

  Will love their father more.

  There were probably a dozen more verses—every time Bree thought she knew them all, her mother would sing a new one she’d never heard. It was meant as a salve, the song—it was bereft of heartache, of loss, of the struggle to survive when your father was levied into the campaigns. Instead it focused on the joy of reunion and the grand times that would come when your man returned with the lord’s pay in his purse, jingling happily. It was crap, but it was inspiring crap.

  But that wasn’t why the old woman was singing it now. Rather, she sang it as a warning:

  “Where the tax man goes, the press-gang follows.”

  The levies had been the way of things for all of Bree’s life—and of her father’s life, too. The people of Eretheria were used to them, but times had changed for the worse of late. It was all well and good to sing pretty ballads when only one man in ten or twenty was levied off. Quite another when it was one in five. One in four.

  Quite another when the cap was lifted to two men per household instead of one.

  Quite another when the campaigns lasted months instead of weeks.

  Quite another when the tax man came around twice in the same year.

  Bree’s father had been pressed in
to service a week ago. Gilvey’s father had been hiding in the eaves of his own workshop for two days. Nearly every family Bree could name had been paying the tax man by selling their own livelihoods—horses, tools, pigs, ducks, chickens—in the hopes that a black mark in the tax man’s ledger would mean a pass-by when the press-gang came around.

  They were usually wrong.

  Bree wondered what her mother would do if they hit her house again and her family still couldn’t pay. Maybe stick her in a pot-helm and make her march? Maybe levy her baby brother? Did the world just become this crazy, she wondered, sneaking deeper into the darkness of the alley, or did I just get old enough to notice how it’s always been?

  The tax man’s horse passed by the mouth of the alley. Bree pressed herself against the wall and worked the camouflage spell she’d been taught. The Ether was so thick in the shadows that it went off with barely a hiccup. When the crossbowman peered down the alley, he seemed to look right through her. So far, so good.

  Gil’s turn. She heard a crash and a shout. “Look out!” The tax man’s horse neighed with displeasure.

  “Clear the road, by Hann!” the tax man roared. “Ugh! Gods, man, what is that?”

  Gil’s voice was bright and clear. “Fertilizer, milord! Best for sale anywhere.”

  The tax man looked unimpressed. “Just get it out of my way.”

  The crossbowman stepped away from the alley and moved out of sight. Holding her breath, Bree crept to the entrance of the alley, causing the camouflage spell to slip off her.

  An oxcart had been tipped over, its contents—a stack of barrels, cheaply made—strewn across the narrow street. Some had broken open, spilling manure across the cobblestones. Of course, manure on a city street was hardly unusual and the smell ought to have been easily concealed by the potent odors of a thousand other animals and people living in close proximity. This manure, though, had been enchanted. A little thing, of course—a little bit of the Ether infused to create a stench of almost physical density. The manure to end all manure.

  Gil had a rag tied under his nose and hood pulled over his head, both to conceal his identity and to keep the smell from overpowering him. He made a show of fumbling with the heavy barrels. “Right you are, sir. I’ll . . . ugh . . . I’ll have this out of Your Lordship’s way in . . . ummmph . . . a twinkling . . .”

  The tax man clapped his gauntlet over his nose. He motioned to his two guards. “Go and help him, dammit. We’re going to get off schedule.”

  The crossbowmen set their weapons down and approached the pile of manure barrels with all the enthusiasm the task warranted. One of them tipped one barrel upright and immediately began to wretch.

  The tax man groaned beneath his gauntlet. “Come on, man—it can’t be that bad.”

  Gil tried to lift a barrel, only to fumble and drop it again. The barrel broke open. “Oops! I . . . uhhh . . . I’ll get a shovel.” He darted down an alley.

  “Wait! Don’t . . .” the tax man called after him, but Gil was gone. He heaved a sigh. “Bloody imbecile. What fool packs manure in barrels anyway?”

  The tax man watched another moment or two as his men struggled with the odor and the barrels and the overturned oxcart and then, sighing heavily, deigned to dismount. “Come on, now—let’s at least get it so the horse can get by.”

  Bree saw her moment. As the tax man and his guards put their backs into rolling barrels through sticky manure, all of them focused on not vomiting in the street, she slipped out of the alley and to the side of the tax man’s horse, which had been executing a slow and subtle retreat from the enchanted manure since it had been spilled.

  The collected taxes were held in saddle-bags enchanted so that only the tax man could open them. Bree, though, had no interest in opening the bags. She drew out a knife and cut the straps holding them in place with a few precise cuts and then slipped back into the alley. Then, under the cover of relative darkness, she ran for all she was worth.

  After making sure she wasn’t followed, she met Gil three streets away in the yard behind a blacksmith’s shop. Maybe no more than a year older than she, the cooper’s boy was tall and broad of shoulder with a shy little smile and kind eyes—none of which Bree would ever admit to noticing.

  “I was beginning to think they caught you,” Gil said.

  Bree snorted. “What was with you running across the street like that? They might have seen you!”

  Gil shrugged. “The oxcart was stuck. I needed a lever to knock her over. Saw a piece of wood across the street, so . . .”

  “Sloppy.” Bree frowned. “What would Ramper say?”

  “I don’t care much what that no-good cutpurse says.” Gil scowled and offered to take the heavy saddlebags from Bree. She let him.

  “Gil,” Bree said, “we’re all cutpurses now.”

  Gil looked at his feet as he mulled it over. “Yeah, well, let’s get this to the Gray Lady.”

  Ramper could usually be found wherever men played t’suul where their wives couldn’t find them. Today he was in an abandoned barbershop, both barbers having been levied into the armies of House Davram a week or so before. Planks had been laid over the big brass basins where leeches were kept and blood was drained, making a pair of tables on which the multicolored tiles were slapped and money was exchanged. The players were laborers, mostly, gambling their copper commons with clay pipes clenched between their teeth, their eyes bloodshot from the cheap Verisi tobacco smoke that lay yellow and heavy in the room.

  Bree remained in the doorway as Gil went and whispered in Ramper’s ear. Ramper was probably a man in his thirties, but he looked older—his face was creased in deep wrinkles that seemed to run from his forehead to his chin in complex webs of worry and pain. He had few teeth, and so spoke with his lips pursed close together. “Another success? She’ll be cheered by that, my ducks, and no mistake.”

  The men at their game looked up. “Who? The Gray Lady?”

  Ramper grinned despite himself, the gaps in his teeth showing gums stained purple by smoky rooms and conjured booze. “Mind your tiles, gentlemen, lest the Lady lay a curse on curious ears.”

  A few of the men made the Hannite cross and bent back to their game, but Bree knew they were listening just the same. The Gray Lady wanted it that way. Her reputation was as much a tool as the spells she had taught the likes of Bree, Gil, and Ramper.

  Ramper pressed a stone into Gil’s hand. “Follow the light.”

  Gil nodded and the two youths left out the back, where a sewer entrance had already been pried open by a crowbar.

  Gil hopped down into the darkness. He held his hands up. “C’mon! I’ll catch you.”

  Bree might have climbed down by herself, but she let herself be caught and lowered into the dark stink below Eretheria. A globular clutch of sewer demons scattered as she was set down, sending shivers from her toes to her hair. “Quick,” she hissed. “The stone!”

  Gil fumbled in his purse for a moment as Bree held her breath. She could sense the oily little sewer demons closing in as they stood there, the creatures’ eyeless, formless bodies ready to drag them away into the darkness. She could swear she smelled their breaths, could hear their rimless mouths calling her name. She closed her eyes and said a prayer to Hann . . .

  And then the stone flared to life and they were bathed in a white glow. Adjusting to the light, the two teenagers saw that they were alone, the demons having fled. Bree let a little sigh escape her.

  They held hands and delved into the labyrinth of the sewer, the enchanted stone held as high as they could manage beneath the low stone arches. Bree fought back a low, rolling panic as they got farther and farther from where they had come in. She hadn’t done this as often as Gil, and getting lost was a constant terror of hers. She remembered all the stories about the restless dead wandering beneath the streets of the city, ready to snatch the unwary. She could sense the wriggling darkness of the sewer demons, always lurking just beyond the small sphere of light the stone made.

 
; Gil kept his eyes trained on the stone, sometimes pausing at cross tunnels and swinging it back and forth. The false paths caused the stone to dim, the right one made it glow bright, and so they continued, on and on. Gil guided Bree past streams of foul black water and around piles of rotting garbage with all the grace of a prince.

  And then, finally, there was a light ahead—candles flickering by the dozens and dozens in some large, domed chamber. “Damn,” Gilvey muttered. “We’re late.”

  The chamber was perhaps thirty feet across and filled with people—mostly young people like themselves, but also some grown men and women and even a few elders. Each of them was holding a candle, and all of them had their eyes fixated on the woman at the center of the room.

  She wore a dark green cloak of fine quality and tall riding boots caked with grime. She was tall—taller even than some of the men—and had a face out of a storybook. Her skin was pale and unblemished, her golden hair clean and shiny, and her gray eyes seemed to encompass them all at once.

  The Gray Lady. The Dark Mage.

  She was speaking, her voice forceful like a priest’s. “You—all of you—have been lied to.”

  “Good,” Gilvey whispered in her ear. “We didn’t miss much.”

  “Shhh!” Bree said, elbowing him.

  The woman went on, “The people who rule you, who control you—the people who rule and control the whole world—have convinced you that mastery of the High Arts is the result of innate talent. That magi are born and not made.” She smiled; her perfect white teeth seemed to light the room all by themselves. “This simply isn’t true.”

  A mutter rippled through the audience—those who were new, those who hadn’t come before, voiced their doubts.

  The woman held her staff high and made it flash with light and hum with power. The crowd fell silent. “Bree Newsome!” she said, pointing her hand straight at Bree. “Step forward!”

  The people parted. Bree felt a flutter in her stomach; she nearly wilted before the dozens of eyes fixed upon her. Still she stepped forward, straightening her dress and curtseying. “Yes, Magus?”