Death and the Emperor

Book 1 Chapter II: Kilan in the Underworld

If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later. -- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"You should not be here, child. You must go back." The voice was gentle and soothing. Everything it said sounded like perfect sense. And yet something nagged at the back of Kilan's mind. "Your parents will worry for you. They will weep for you. Is that what you want?" No, he didn't want to make his parents cry. But why? Why would they cry? He was fine. "Go home, child."

He didn't see why he couldn't wait a while. He wanted to sleep, and he was comfortable where he was. The cloth beneath his cheek was so soft, almost like feathers, though the arms around him were strangely cold.

Wait a minute. Cloth? Arms?

Kilan's eyes snapped open. At first he could see nothing. Wherever he was, it was so dark here that there was no difference between having his eyes closed and having them open. But slowly, he could make out shapes. They were just faint outlines at first, like trees seen through a thick fog, but as his eyes adjusted to the dark they became sharper and clearer.

He was in a strange, wide room built entirely from stone -- a strange, black stone so smooth and glossy it was almost like glass. It stretched on far longer than the longest corridor he had ever seen. Stone pillars rose from the floor at regular intervals, presumably up to the ceiling, which was so high it was impossible to see it through the darkness. A river that looked as if it were made of oil rather than water oozed its way slowly and noiselessly across the floor, flowing away into the shadows of the far side of the room. There was no furniture, no decorations on the walls, no sign that anyone had been in this place since it was built. Indeed, the room looked as if instead of being built, it had simply grown.

And yet there was someone here.

Kilan was sitting in their lap.

He tried to draw back, but found himself slipping and almost falling to the floor. The arms around him tightened and pulled him up.

"Do be careful. You wouldn't like to fall in that river."

It was the stranger he had hugged, the woman who had tried to take Varan. It seemed she had settled on an appearance; her face no longer between one age and another. Now she looked like a teenager or young woman, but with a curious haggard expression in the angles of her pointed face that made her seem much older. Her eyes were either white or a shade of blue so pale they might as well have been white. Her hair was black one minute, white the next, and a combination of the two after that. Her clothes were black, made of some fabric Kilan had never seen before, and draped over her shoulders was a cloak made from the long, fan-shaped black feathers of some exotic bird.

She was so odd-looking that he almost forgot to be afraid. He reached out to examine the feathery cloak more closely. The feathers were soft and silky to the touch.

"Who are you?" he asked, tilting his head back to look the stranger in the face.

She laughed. "I have enough names to fill a library, child. Which one do you want?"

He thought about this. "Which one's your favourite?"

Her thin eyebrows shot up almost to her hairline. She was silent for a moment. Her mouth opened and closed, as if she was searching for something to say. "Death, I suppose. It's short, accurate, and to the point."

Kilan was only eight, but he knew what Death was. He had heard of fishermen drowning in the lake. Three years ago he had helped his father bury his pet dzacei[1]. When he was still in the nursery, his nurse had told him stories of the gods and monsters of their people. Death had appeared in many of those stories, usually as the callous monster who took the hero's soul despite their friends' pleas.