The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is? -- Jeremiah 17:9, NLT

Death had temporarily taken leave of her senses. That was the only possible explanation. She could not possibly have voluntarily offered to defy her purpose, break the laws Fate had laid down for her, and interfere with mortals who were not about to die.

And yet, hadn't she been doing exactly that for years, in her relationship with Kilan?

Kilan. It all came back to Kilan. He was doing something to her. He made her think and feel and do things she would never have considered before. It was almost unsettling.

She shook her head and went to collect another soul. People didn't stop dying just because Death had become a love-struck fool.

~~~~

The week dragged slowly by. Kilan's duties as Emperor meant that he had to attend operas, balls and public engagements with startling frequency. Normally he accepted these as just another matter he had no choice in. But it grew increasingly hard to endure the stares people gave him, and the way they turned to their friends to whisper about him.

And yet, as the days went on, the whispering died down. The gossips found other scandals to draw their attention. Before the week was up Kilan's life had almost gone back to normal.

It was just as well, because now he had the additional stress of explaining his plan to Qihadal.

His wife had claimed one of the gardens as hers, and she spent most of her time there. It had been made over fifty years before by Kilan's grandfather as a birthday present for his sister, and had largely been neglected since his death. It had once been full of trees and flowerbeds. Now it was overgrown with weeds. Qihadal spent her days pruning and digging. Kilan worried sometimes that she might injure herself. But she seemed happy enough, so he said nothing.

That was where he found her today. She had her hair tied back in a ponytail and she wore an old, mud- and dust-stained shirt and pair of trousers. With a pair of garden scissors she snipped viciously at a creeping vine, looking more like a gardener than an Empress.

Kilan eyed those scissors warily. She could probably chop someone's head off with those. And if this plan went ahead and she faced her rapist, she would probably feel like doing just that.

"Excuse me," he called hesitantly, staying well out of reach of the scissors. "Can I speak to you for a minute?"

Qihadal set the scissors down and turned to face him. "You do not need to ask me, do you?" she said, giving him a puzzled look. "You are Emperor. You can speak at me when you want."

Her Carannish was still not perfect, though she no longer needed a translator to be understood.

"I suppose," Kilan said dubiously, "but it's much more polite to ask permission before speaking to someone."

Qihadal gave him a look of non-comprehension. He decided to let the matter pass.

"There's something I have to tell you," he said. He looked around the garden to be sure there were no servants within hearing range. The only other person visible was an under-gardener digging up a flowerbed at the other side of the garden. "It's about that evidence you spoke of."

Qihadal went very still. Her face turned pale, and a pained expression crossed it. Yet when she spoke her voice was steady. "Go on."

"Death can find the man who... attacked you," he said slowly and carefully, unsure of which words to use.

At the mention of Death something like anger crossed Qihadal's face. Kilan saw it and winced. She had a perfect right to be angry about that. He had made a thorough mess of that situation, and he suspected he would only make matters worse in the future. Why was life so complicated?

Moping over the chaotic, confusing situation Fate had landed him in would be of no use right now. He still had to explain everything to his wife.

"She's going to bring him to the palace, where he will confess everything. And then we can reveal the truth and the Iqui can't accuse us of slander. And you can have him executed in any way you like." Kilan realised how that sounded and hastened to clarify, "The rapist, I mean, not the Iqui. Obviously not the Iqui. We can't execute him, however much we want to." He stopped, his face bright red, feeling that he'd just made a splendid fool of himself.

"It will be not so easy as you say," Qihadal said, shaking her head.

She was probably right. When had anything ever been easy? But Kilan was determined to be optimistic for once.

"Whatever else happens, we'll be able to tell the truth and disgrace your father all at the same time. But will you be able to bear seeing... that man?"

Qihadal was silent for a long minute. Her hands balled into fists. "I can cope with it if I see him die after."

~~~~

It was only when Kilan had walked back to the palace that another thought occurred to him. He stopped in his tracks, his eyes widening.

Wait a minute! How am I to explain him suddenly turning up in Carann to confess his crimes?

~~~~

This new problem kept preying on Kilan's mind for the rest of the day. By morning he still hadn't found a solution to it, and the only thing he could do was turn to his parents.

"Qihadal gave me the name of her attacker," Kilan said, praying no one would think to examine this story too closely. Qihadal would probably back him up once she heard, but it would cause all sorts of unnecessary trouble. "So I asked a... a friend to track him down."

Særnor interrupted here. "Who is this friend?"

Kilan stammered for a moment. What could he say? He could hardly tell them, 'Oh, it was Death, and I'm also sort of married to her but don't worry because Qihadal knows about it and nothing's happening between us anyway'. "It was... Aunt Nimetath."

And there was another person he needed to tell about all this. The list of complications to this plan was growing longer by the minute.

Luckily his parents accepted this explanation without question. Kilan thanked the gods for small mercies.

"She's found him and she's going to bring him to the palace where he'll confess his crime in front of everyone. But..." Kilan trailed off, trying to put his fears and dreads into words. "What if the Iqui claims that we're lying? That we've found some random criminal and forced him to confess to an imaginary crime? And how are we to make the people believe this?"

Arásy buried her head in her hands with a groan. "Kilan, dear boy, why couldn't you have come up with this plan before we gave that nonsense to the newspapers?!"

Kilan winced. "I hadn't thought of it then. Actually it was... someone else's idea."

His mother gave him an enquiring look.

"It was... Qihadal's." Yet another lie. His life had become nothing but lies, with no end to them in sight for the foreseeable future. "She only thought of it after the story we invented had already been published."

Arásy and Særnor exchanged a look. There was no suspicion in their eyes, but the simple fact that they looked at each other sent a cold chill down Kilan's spine. Did they know he was lying? Did they suspect the truth? Had they somehow found out about Death?

He forced his fears back angrily. What was he thinking? How paranoid had he become, that he was afraid of what his own parents might know?

A little voice at the back of his mind whispered that it wasn't paranoia to worry about people finding out about Death. He knew this was true. But he didn't want to think too deeply about it. That would inevitably lead round to him thinking about his relationship with Death and where that relationship might go, how much trouble it could cause. And that way, madness lay.

"We can still spin this to our advantage," Særnor said thoughtfully, oblivious to his son's fears. "We can take care to show your fear of starting a war with Malish, and that you acted as you did to avoid such a war. Malish in general and the Iqui in particular will come out of that looking exceedingly unreasonable at best. And Qihadal can tell everyone about the barbarous Malishese customs that made her too afraid to accuse her rapist at the time, about how the courts there would have blamed her and let him off unpunished."

Kilan remembered something else at this point. "I promised Qihadal that she would watch her rapist's execution."

"Good," Arásy said. "There's nothing better for the victim of a crime than to see the perpetrator face justice."

Særnor looked alarmed. "But he's a Malishese citizen. We can imprison him, but we'll need the Iqui's permission to execute him. Otherwise there really will be a war."

This was something Kilan hadn't thought of before. "I promised Qihadal, and I want to see him dead too." He searched for a possible solution. Something he had heard Ranoryin say once came to mind. "We could put him in prison then make him quietly disappear. It's been done before, hasn't it? And if any questions are asked we can say his fellow prisoners killed him."

Arásy stared at him as if he'd grown an extra head. "Kilan! What are you thinking? That would give your enemies an excuse to call you a tyrant."

It had never sounded like a good idea to Kilan. Put like that, it sounded nothing short of idiotic.

"We'll have to ask the Iqui's permission," Særnor said in a tone that allowed no disagreement. "Doing anything else would be disastrous."

~~~~

"...So we can't kill him until the Iqui gives his permission," Kilan told Qihadal after he finished explaining the additions to the plan. "And he's not likely to ever give his permission."

Qihadal looked at him as if he was a foolish child. "You have enough blackmail to make him approve a hundred executions."

Kilan blinked. How had he forgotten that?

~~~~

Death didn't need to waste any time searching for the culprit. She had only to think of him, and she knew where he was. It was easy then to step from her world into the pub where he was drinking.

Aghar ger-Chinai was well-known among the royal guards for being far too fond of drinking, gambling, and women. But many of the other guards were guilty of exactly the same sins, so none of them raised a finger against him. Death found him half-way through his fifth cup of madotong[1] and bragging to another guard about an encounter with a servant girl.

"She screamed and cried at first," he was saying, "but in the end she gave in. They always do."

It was just as well for him that Death was invisible to mortals at the moment. Had he been able to see the look she gave him as he said this, he would have dropped dead of a heart attack.

Death's job meant that she encountered both the worst and best of mortals on an hourly basis. The best of mortals were very similar: honestly trying to help other people out of sincere compassion. The worst of mortals, however, were always finding new depths of depravity to sink to. This guard wasn't the worst she had seen this week, but he was certainly the worst she had seen today.

It was almost fascinating to see how vile mortals could make themselves. It left a sour taste in her mouth, but it was most educational. If she ever got the idea that mortals were good and pure, all she needed to do was find someone like Aghar ger-Chinai.

The other guard left to order more drinks. Death reached out and grabbed Aghar's arm. She dragged him through the barrier between the worlds before he even realised what was happening.

~~~~

Living mortals were not meant to enter the Land of the Dead. Kilan was the exception, in this as in so much else, because he had made a deal with Death. Even so his first visit had not been pleasant for him. He had collapsed in a dead faint upon arriving in the throne room, and stayed that way for hours.

Aghar was not an exception. His experience was infinitely worse than Kilan's.

The first thing he felt was a terrible, crushing pressure. It was as if he had been buried alive under a mountain of rock, and the entire mountain was squeezing the life out of him. The second thing he felt was nausea and dizziness worse than the most terrible hangover. He couldn't tell up from down. He couldn't tell if his eyes were open or closed. Blood streamed from his nose and mouth. He was falling and floating, freezing and burning, choking, choking, choking...

He gasped for breath. Air filled his lungs. But it was stale, rotten air, like a breath from a tomb. And it burnt his lungs until he felt he was being incinerated from within.

Aghar screamed.

"Oh, do stop your hysterics," a voice said. It pierced his fear- and drink- addled brain like a sword. "You aren't dying yet."

The torment dragged on and on for an eternity. But gradually it began to lessen. He could breath without the burning agony. He could tell the difference between darkness and light. The dizziness retreated. The pressure eased.

He came back to himself to find he was lying in a pool of his own blood and vomit. Aghar pushed himself to his feet, shakily and unsteadily.

The pub had vanished as if it never existed. Instead he was standing in a throne room. He had never seen such a throne room before. It was utterly devoid of furniture or ornamentation, yet somehow it made the Iqui's throne room seem tacky and plastic in comparison.

He turned to face the person sitting on the throne. The sight knocked the breath from his lungs again.

One half of their face was a young woman's.

The other half was a skeleton.

Chapter Footnotes:

[1] madotong = A sort of cheap Malishese alcohol drunk mainly by the lower classes and guards, who as a general rule don't earn enough money for other sorts of alcohol.