"I can't remember things before they happen."
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.
"What sort of things do you remember best?" Alice ventured to ask.
"Oh, things that happened the week after next," the Queen replied in a careless tone.
-- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

As the head of Death's Reapers, Ngugelzi was well-used to unusual situations. She had collected souls in the most extraordinary of circumstances, had witnessed some truly awe-inspiring brawls between enemies in life who unexpectedly came across each other after death, and had endured the foibles and caprices of Death herself.

Thus, when she went in search of her Queen and found her apparently dozing next to a sleeping mortal who was neither dead nor dying, she merely shrugged and dismissed it as yet another of Death's oddities.

"We need your help," she informed the Queen, ignoring the mortal. "Some of the junior Reapers have gone and gotten Hourglasses confused again."

"Again?" Death scowled. "How many souls have they taken by mistake this time?"

"At least ten. We can't be sure yet."

Death made an inarticulate sound of exasperation, fury and contempt mingled into one. "Damn them! Can they do nothing right?"

"What's happened?" the mortal asked sleepily, opening its eyes.

To Ngugelzi's well-concealed surprise, Death brushed a hand through his hair and gave him an almost gentle smile. "Nothing for you to worry about."

This must be the mortal, then; the lucky (or, as some would say, unlucky) mortal who had currently caught Death's attention. Ngugelzi looked at him curiously. There was nothing about him that immediately set him apart or marked him as special. He was just a typical Caranilnav -- dark hair, skin somewhere between pale and brown, eyes shaped slightly more like a cat's than average citizen of the Carann Empire. Nothing extraordinary about him, except that he had hugged Death. And he came from a family that had caused the inhabitants of the Land of the Dead a good few headaches.

"Where are the little horrors?" Death asked, turning to Ngugelzi. Just like that, the hint of tenderness she had shown towards the mortal was gone.

"Lined up in the throne room. I have my more sensible generals searching for the mistakenly-reaped souls."

~~~~

The next few days were a whirlwind of activity in the Land of the Dead. It was, unfortunately, not unheard of for inexperienced Reapers to take the soul of someone not fated to die yet while leaving alive the person who was supposed to die. When this happened, it meant Death and her more senior Reapers had to work feverishly to locate the souls that should not have been taken, return them to their bodies, and collect the souls that should have been taken, before the whole business tore a hole in the fabric of reality.

When the crisis was past and Death could -- metaphorically -- catch her breath, she decided to visit Kilan and see how he was getting on in his new role.

She found him in a room that had once been a diplomat's office. It was hardly the sort of place one would expect to find the Emperor's brother. The carpet had long since been taken away, leaving only the bare stone floor. A chair with a broken leg stood behind a desk almost buried beneath a coat of dust. Two moth-eaten armchairs sat at odd angles in front of the desk, as if someone had knocked into them and not bothered to set them right. A bookcase lined with mouldering books took up most of one wall, and the other walls were devoid of pictures or any decoration beyond discoloured, peeling wallpaper.

The windows, which to judge from the dirt gathered on them had not been cleaned for a century, were wide open, letting the cold evening air rush into the room. Kilan, dressed in what appeared to be a scarecrow's cast-off clothing, was scrubbing the walls with an expression of grim determination.

Death watched him for a moment.

"What are you doing?" she asked curiously, surprising Kilan so much he dropped the scrubbing brush with a resounding clatter. "Did you offend the Emperor?"

Kilan laughed hollowly. "Emperor? That's a joke. Marin just wants the privileges of being Emperor. He doesn't care about the actual work involved. He keeps trying to palm it off onto Father, but Father has his duties running Rethli so guess who gets saddled with it all?"

"So you are the one truly ruling the country," Death concluded. The thought of certain future events crossed her mind, bringing with it a sense of amusement. "Why doesn't the true Emperor get the servants to do the cleaning?"

"I've decided this is going to be my office," Kilan said without answering, gesturing around the room. "Mostly because it's as far away from Marin as I can get without being hopelessly lost in the corridors I haven't explored yet. I want to renovate it myself, or it won't feel like mine. And," he added, picking up the brush and scrubbing viciously at a stain on the wall, "it gives me a way to work off my anger when Marin drops another hundred papers in front of me at breakfast and tells me to read over them and decide what to do about them. Do you know anything about crop rotation and irrigation?"

Death blinked slowly. "I know what happens when something goes wrong with them." Mishaps like that always gave Famine and his wife Starvation plenty of work.

"Well, the Countess of Venjyre has written a lengthy epistle on how one of her subjects has discovered a new, improved way to do both, but implementing the changes will cost millions of hien[1] and disrupt this year's harvest of brervim[2]. She wants Marin to tell her if it's worth the cost. What am I supposed to tell her when Marin won't even listen when I try to tell him what she says, and when even if he did listen he knows no more about farming than I do?"

"Are you asking my advice?"

"If you have any good ideas, then yes! I'll take anyone's advice right now."

Death had often had mortals ask her -- or whatever personification or deity of Death they believed in -- for advice on how to wage wars or kill people. This was the first time anyone had ever asked her for advice on agriculture. It was a novel experience, and far from an entirely unpleasant one.

"If I were you, I would tell her to implement the changes, and then look elsewhere for enough brervim to make up for the portion of the harvest that will be lost."

Kilan groaned. "How am I supposed to do that?"

"There are such things as trade agreements, believe it or not," Death said dryly. "And surely Venjyre is not the only province to grow brervim."

"But I'm not the Emperor!" There was that sense of irony again. "I haven't the authority to do any of that, and Marin can't be bothered to do it. He's on holiday in some fashionable resort by the sea at the moment. On holiday! Without even bothering to consider the duties he should be attending to!"

~~~~

Marin had been Emperor for a month. Well, Marin had been Emperor in name for a month. Kilan was the one who did all the work. Yesterday he had read through fifty years' worth of legal reports, searching for an answer to a question a magistrate had sent him. Today he had drafted a response to a petition asking that the Emperor intervene in the planned demolishing of half a village to make way for a new factory. Tomorrow, he would have to go in Marin's place to the official launch of a new spaceship, and he would have to concoct some excuse for Marin's absence that wouldn't let the organisers know the Emperor frankly couldn't care less about running his Empire.

Kilan suspected his excuses were giving Marin a reputation as the most sickly Emperor Carann had been landed with for several centuries. "The Emperor isn't well" was the easiest, simplest and generally best excuse he used in most situations.

The only problem was, the longer he used any excuse, and the longer Marin refused to attend official events unless they were parties or something that would entertain him, the more suspicious people would become. After a month of Kilan showing up to council meetings instead of Marin, certain members of the government had already begun to make remarks on how unusual this was, and to ask when the Emperor would be well enough to take on his duties.

If Marin had been willing to do most of the work and had merely asked Kilan to help him with what he couldn't do himself, that would have been fine. But as things were now, Kilan was little more than his brother's clerk, and his own life had been indefinitely put on hold. Twice now he had written to the Duchess to ask her to postpone their wedding because "life is so chaotic at present". He didn't expect her to take it kindly if he asked for a third postponement. He wouldn't blame her if she didn't.

His trips to the Land of the Dead, oddly, had become a way of staying sane. One of the advantages of going to a place with a surfeit of Emperors, Empresses, Kings, Queens, and rulers in general -- every ruler ever to live, in fact -- was that there was always someone he could ask for advice on this question or that problem.

"You should overthrow him," his distant cousin Empress Nolmav told him one night.

Kilan spluttered incredulously. "Overthrow him?"

"Of course." She spoke as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Behind her, her brother and husband Osomí nodded his agreement. "An Emperor who won't do his job doesn't deserve to remain Emperor. You should overthrow him and take the crown. You, at least, will attend to the duties that come with the throne."

Kilan gaped at them. "You can't be serious! However bad he is, I'd never try to overthrow him!"

Somewhere behind him, Death muttered something. It sounded like, "You won't have to."

~~~~

The cracks in the façade truly began to appear with the birth of Marin's son. Little Fenye had scarcely been in the world a full day when Kilan was awakened late at night by someone knocking at his bedroom door. No, knocking was too mild a word for it. They were hammering on it.

Still half-asleep, he staggered out of bed, pulled on a dressing gown, and went to open the door.

"Balaeron?"

He had never seen his sister-in-law in such a state. Her hair was uncombed, her feet bare, her hospital gown crumpled and disordered, and there was a wild, desperate look in her eyes. Tear tracks stained her face, and her whole body shook as if she were either freezing or terrified.

Kilan opened the door wider, startled fully awake by this apparition.

"What's wrong? Shouldn't you still be in the hospital?" An awful thought occurred to him. "Nothing's... happened to Fenye?"

"No." Balaeron spoke as if she couldn't breathe properly. "No, no. He's -- he's fine. I need a divorce."

"A what?" Kilan began to wonder if she was drunk, or if the doctors had given her something that disagreed with her. "Law-sister, it's late, and you should be in bed," he said as gently as possible. "You'll feel better in the morning."

Balaeron let out a piercing shriek. Kilan almost jumped out of his skin. Once, in the Land of the Dead, he had witnessed an argument between two Reapers. It had gotten increasingly violent, until another Reaper, tired of trying to catch their attention, had screamed at them and scared them into silence. The noise Balaeron made now reminded him of nothing so much as that scream. It took him a moment to realise she was laughing.

"Better?" she cried. "Nothing can make this better! I'll kill him for it!"

That settled it. Kilan was seriously worried about his sister-in-law's sanity. Sane people didn't turn up in the middle of the night at the door of someone they had barely spoken more than a few sentences to, ranting about wanting a divorce and threatening to kill someone.

Wait. Divorce? Threatening to kill someone? That added up to only one thing in Kilan's mind. He prayed he was wrong.

Please, he begged whatever god might be listening, don't let this be another of Marin's sins.

Balaeron's wild laughter had died down to humourless chuckles interspersed with sobs.

"What do you mean?" Kilan asked, reaching out to take her hand then changing his mind. What was he supposed to do in this situation?

She told him in a tone unnervingly devoid of emotion.

In the shadows of the palace, Death listened. And waited.

Chapter Footnotes:

[1] hien = The basic currency of the Empire, roughly equivalent to sixty pence in British currency.

[2] brervim = A crop similar to barley, from which bread and some types of alcohol are made.