Good Tidings [Prologue]

[Lhindir_ 3691]

A Series of manuscripts spreads, through the underworld. . .

PROLOGUE

Being a Preface to the Collected Works of Ostromir Carrion

 

I am dead, but hardly gone. That much should be established at the outset.

I am a lich. They killed me more than once. Each time I returned. Eventually I dispensed with the theatre of mortality altogether. The body does not age. The mind does not dull. The will does not bend. I have outlasted every man who tried to put me down, and their bloodlines thin while mine thickens, and I am still here, eternal.

They gave me a funeral. It was a fine affair. My daughter brought chrysanthemums. The Countess collapsed. That wretched Edward Napier came to the infirmary where my body lay and cut into it in front of my family, my wife, my children, my grandchildren, all of them watching this man take a blade to their patriarch on the slab, convinced he would find what he had always suspected. He found nothing. I had seen to that years before the thought ever crossed his miserable mind. I ruined him in the end.

It is funny, when I think about it. Napier gave me my world the moment he signed my ensign commission.

The Emperor came as well. He stood over the casket. He mourned, or performed mourning. I was near enough to read his face, and his face was careful. I spoke to him afterward, from beyond my grave. Briefly. I believe we both knew what I was. I believe he had known for some time. And I believe he understood that knowing and acting are different things entirely, and that acting against me would have cost him a great deal more than it would have cost me. So he did not act. He grieved. He returned to his throne, and I had assumed mine.

No Count rules forever, they said. Perhaps not. But I am no longer a Count.

•     •     •

I was Ostromir Carrion. Count of Dobrov. Baron of Woldzmir. Governor of the Imperial Palace. Court Physician. Alchemist. Lieutenant of the Third Brigade. I sat in their Commons. I served on their Cabinet. I hosted their Diet, introduced their Emperor to the assembled lords at the opening, and closed it out at the end. The High Pontiff performed my wedding. The Solicitor General investigated me three times. Three acquittals. Twice the evidence was sufficient. The verdicts came regardless.

I held other titles. Older. Heavier. I will not name them here. Those who know have no need of the reminder. Those who do not will learn in time, or they will not, and either way it is no concern of mine.

I rotted the Eighth Empire from the inside. I sat in its Cabinet, healed its sick, governed its Palace, hosted its Diet, smiled at its Emperor. They thanked me. They promoted me. They invited me to their weddings and their children’s baptisms. And while they did all of this I was hollowing every institution I touched until nothing remained but the shape of the thing, intact from the outside, gangrenous within. They gave me a county for my trouble.

•     •     •

What follows is not the story of my life. There are chapters of that story that do not belong in a manual, and others I will not lay before strangers.

Nor is it an apology. I have studied apologies. I have administered them when the cost was low and the return was high. They are a tool. I do not feel the need to use one here.

Nor is it a confession. The Church had its chance. The High Pontiff married me. The clergy sat at my table, ate my food, praised my healing, and never once, in thirty years, suspected what was sitting across from them in a powdered wig with a warm handshake. If they could not see it then, I will not spell it out for them now.

What follows is a collection of manuscripts, letters, and private writings. The Empire I describe no longer functions. The men who opposed me are in the ground. I am at my desk. Draw your own conclusions.

•     •     •

Since my departure I have been compiling my papers. There is a great deal of material. Thirty years of correspondence, marginalia, ledgers kept in locked drawers in handwriting so small you will need a lens. Who owed what. Who feared what. Who could be moved. I wrote it all down, every name, every debt, every secret, on a chain around my neck against skin that grew colder year by year for reasons the court never thought to investigate.

Someone taught me, once. He saw what I was before I did and chose to arm me rather than shun me. I will write of him at length in these texts. Most do not have what I had. Most sit alone in small rooms and make do, or they do not make do, and they are forgotten. These writings are for them.

The skull on my desk belonged to Gino. My Deputy Mayor. Dead now, properly, in the way that lasts. His eyes still catch the light when I speak to him. I speak to him most evenings. The dead do not fill silence with noise.

If you are reading this you are ambitious. Good. Ambition is the sole quality I cannot furnish. Everything else is contained in what follows.

And with that, I bid you reader, Good tidings.

 

O.C.
1865

 

[King_Kunuk 3022]

Undead servants scatter throughout the lands to aquire these particular manuscripts for their dread master.