Free Lyrec by Gregory Frost

vile acts would he have to perform to satisfy … to satisfy whom? There was the question that haunted Slyur.
    Who was Chagri?
    All Slyur knew for certain was that Chagri—impostor or not—would kill him with a touch if angered. And Slyur, no zealot, had no wish to play the martyr. He was forty-five, older than most men in Secamelan. He intended to live twice that long. There were just a few distasteful things he would have to do. Right now, however, there was a little girl whose life he could save. A decent act to offset the other.
    Slyur leaned out the window of his carriage and signaled to his escort.
    *****
    Through every passage and room in the castle of Atlarma sounded the deep, sonorous phrases of a melancholy dirge.
    The disembodied voices singing the lament were especially loud here in the room where the body rested in state. Painted canvases had been stretched across the windows. Torches burned on either side of the door.
    The body of Dekür lay on a red catafalque. A thin candle burned at each corner, collecting him in light without shadow. The hilt of his sword protruded still from his chest. No amount of force bad been able to withdraw it from the congealed wound. Instead, in a grisly act, the blade had been snapped off where it jutted from his back.
    A short, trim man stood over the body of Dekür. His red, sleepless eyes were open but unseeing. Cheybal, leader of Secamelan’s armies, held his hands stiffly at his sides and looked from the body to his own feet. His bearded chin pressed against his leather collar. “What has happened?” he asked the corpse without looking up. “Who committed this act? If you would just open your eyes, Dekür, and tell me who to condemn, who to call ‘enemy’.”
    He glanced up, as if expecting his words to have moved the corpse to revive.
    Cheybal recalled something he had said to Dekür one evening when the two of them were staggeringly drunk. “The unknown,” he had proclaimed, is a thing you can never prepare for, yet it’s the thing you have to prepare for.” A drunkard’s epigram. They had both laughed and toasted the unknown. But he’d been right and here was the unknown, revealed in its true colors: Dekür dead, Lewyn gone, and Cheybal floundering as temporary sovereign of Secamelan. All problems, however irrelevant to matters at hand, eventually came before him. His answers had to be the correct ones. No one ruled above him any longer to certify or refute his wisdom.
    He hated being king. At least it was only temporary.
    Soon enough, Tynec, an eight-year-old boy, would be thrust into that despised position … unless they could find Lewyn.. Cheybal held little hope of doing so. Her abductors had gone like ghosts, departing with the dawn to some world beyond this one. So where was he supposed to look for her? Where on Voed’s noble world? Where?
    The candles around the catafalque flickered. The body seemed to move as their light wavered, bringing abrupt shadows. Cheybal tensed.
    Then he realized the illusion. Someone had opened the door to this vast and empty hall.  
    He turned to see Tynec standing alone inside the door. Cheybal’s mouth went dry. What idiot had let Tynec in here? He must not witness this awful thing. Cheybal wanted to shield him from it, but he could not make himself move between the boy and the corpse. It was too late to do so.
    *****
    Tynec stared fixedly at the body of his father as he moved closer. His face was set hard against the stirring horror; he hadn’t known what to expect; the phrase “your father is dead, boy” had somehow passed right by him without giving him some measure of its meaning. Just words, adult words, pointless words.
    He chose not to see the body lying away from him at eye-level ahead. His gaze shifted quickly to Cheybal, but the man seemed aghast, too awful to look at. Tynec stared at the gleaming sword hilt projecting like some grotesquely wrought silver phallus above the soles of his father’s boots.