In the midst of life, we are in death. -- Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None

There was only so much theoretical planning a person could do. Everything else had to be left up to chance, with the certainty that it wouldn't turn out at all in the way the planner expected.

Ilaran thought and thought about the steadily-nearing trial. He always called it that in his mind, grimly determined to never lose sight of his goal in all this. It was the first thing he thought of in the morning and the last thing he thought of at night. When he lay awake for hours he contemplated possible ways it could go wrong, and how he would salvage the situation if it did. It was the only thing on his mind during the day. At breakfast, dinnertime, and supper the idea of something going catastrophically awry preyed on him and turned his food to ash in his mouth. His endless plans and fears haunted him through every hour and every minute.

If he had still been in Tananerl someone would have noticed the toll it took on him. Kivoduin had been his most trusted friend for over eight hundred years. She would have seen the ever-darkening purple shadows under his eyes and his increasingly haggard expression. She would immediately have hunted up some relatively unimportant matter for him to deal with. Or insisted he leave the palace for a few hours. Anything that would distract him and stop him thinking about the same thing over and over and over. Even if Kivoduin wasn't there, the rest of his household knew the warning signs. They knew it was a very bad thing to leave Ilaran alone with his thoughts at times like this.

Here in Eldrin no one knew that. No one even knew him well enough to notice any real change in him. The servants he brought with him gave him worried looks and occasionally ventured to comment on how the city clearly didn't agree with him. When they were so far from home they didn't try to push the subject, especially not when he brushed off all their worries. The servants who already worked for the royal family never said anything at all. Even if they noticed the deterioration in his health and temper they decided it was none of their business.

After five days of never-ending headaches -- the sort of headaches that no painkillers could lessen -- and a queasy, twisting feeling in his stomach when he tried to eat, Ilaran himself had to admit something had to be done about this. If he was still in Tananerl he would have gone riding somewhere out in the grasslands around the capital city. For miles there was nothing in sight but hills, rivers, and birds wheeling overhead. Ever since he was a child he had found its emptiness was the perfect thing to clear his mind. But there was no similar place in Eldrin.

Now that Siarvin's manor was barred to him, he had nowhere else to go. All his mother's acquaintances in the city were either dead or had no reason to care anything about him. He hardly even remembered any of their names. So, with no other options, Ilaran took to long walks all over the city. He changed his distinctively Tananerlish clothes from unremarkable Saoridhian ones, and studiously avoided any colours that might attract disapproving attention. When he went out he blended in with all the crowds of people out and about. No one spared him a second glance. It was too noisy for his liking, but at least it distracted him from his thoughts.

It was on one of his wanderings around the city that he stumbled upon something very odd indeed.

The Day of Comets was one of the largest festivals in the Saoridhian calendar. As implied by the name it always coincided with a meteor shower clearly visible throughout most of the empire. According to myth the meteors were the messengers of the gods bringing good fortune to anyone who saw them. For weeks leading up to the festival people everywhere would crowd to get the best possible view of them. It wasn't unheard of for fights to break out over who stood where. All the main streets were so crowded that no one could get through unless willing to wait for hours. Naturally everyone who could began to use smaller side-streets instead. Ilaran, who preferred to avoid all crowds, stayed as far away from the busy city centre as he could. He wandered around the parks and visited the libraries that were generally almost empty at this time.

One of those parks was right next to a graveyard. Indeed, it was difficult to tell where graveyard ended and park began. Very few people ever visited graveyards around the Day of Comets. It would only be inviting ill fortune, they thought. Yet just as Ilaran sat down on one of the park benches and took a book out of his bag, he saw two people climb over the graveyard fence.

That was strange enough on its own. Graveyards' gates were never locked. Why would anyone go to the trouble of climbing over the fence if they could just open the gate? The obvious answer was they were up to no good.

From the park bench he had a reasonably good view of the graveyard. Or at least of the part that was nearest him. Which, as luck would have it, was the part that the people stayed in. He watched suspiciously as they stopped beside a grave. From this distance he couldn't make out any distinguishing features about either of them. They were both tall and black-haired, both dressed in black -- and both armed with shovels.

As he watched suspiciously the two of them began to dig up the grave. The sheer nerve of doing such a thing in broad daylight was somehow more baffling than them robbing a grave at all. Ilaran stared, hardly able to believe his eyes, as they struggled with the shovels.

Clearly they weren't very intelligent grave-robbers. Half the time they got in each other's way. They piled the displaced earth too close to the graveside, and it fell in again when they dug too close.

I don't think I have to do anything, Ilaran decided. They're foiling their own plans without any help.

He set his book down and sat back to watch the misadventures of the bumbling grave-robbers.

"Oh, this is hopeless!" Abi groaned. She tried to comb the earth out of her hair with her fingers. Unfortunately her fingers were so dirty that she just made matters worse. "It'll take us all year at this rate."

Irímé scooped up a shovelful of earth and attempted to pour it onto the solid ground beside the grave. The edge of the shovel clanged against the headstone. All the earth cascaded down into the grave again. More than half of it got into Irímé's shoes.

"I still say we should use magic," he grumbled.

He leaned against the headstone and balanced on one foot as he took one of his shoes off. After he shook the dirt out of it he put it on again and took off the other. Unfortunately another mini-landslide fell just as he put the second shoe on again. Both his shoes immediately filled up with soil for the umpteenth time.

"Argh!" Infuriated, he stabbed his shovel into the grave. It promptly hit a stone. Its resulting shudder twisted the handle right out of his hands. With a resounding thunk it hit the headstone with enough force to leave a scrape on the marble.

"I don't know if using magic for this will have an effect on necromancy," Abi said dubiously. She looked down at her own shoes, which were now encased in an outer crust of soil, and the absolutely filthy hems of her trousers. The earth in Eldrin had a nasty tendency to become thick, cloying mud when it rained, and it took whole weeks of sun before it dried up properly. Until then it was a horrible sticky loam that clung to everything it touched. No amount of washing would ever get all of the stuff off her clothes now. "...But I think we'll risk it."

She scrambled out of the grave, dislodging more soil and getting more of it on her clothes. At this rate she'd look like something that had crawled out of a mud lagoon before the day was over. Her parents would have conniptions.

Irímé climbed out on the other side. He glared down at the grave as if it had personally offended him. The effect was somewhat ruined by the streaks of mud on his face.

Abi gathered her magic and concentrated. She pictured the soil neatly piling up on the side of the grave. Then she cast the spell. She and Irímé had to quickly jump away as the earth poured itself out of the grave like a waterfall flowing uphill. The grave had been filled in only the day before. Within seconds all the gravediggers' hard work was undone, and a small mountain of earth sat beside the open grave.

The afternoon sun glinted off the surface of the coffin. It wasn't nearly as dirty as Abi would have expected it to be. Especially after being under all that mud for a full day. The two would-be necromancers peered down at it.

"So what do we do now?" Irímé asked. "Open it? Drag it up?"

For a minute Abi pictured the two of them jumping down into the morass beneath the coffin and trying to lift it out of the grave. She shuddered. "No. I'll try reanimating the body while it's still in the coffin. Then it can open the lid itself."

Irímé gave her the sort of dubious look that generally preceded, 'Are you sure you know what you're doing?' At least he was polite enough not to say it out loud. She would have been infuriated if he had; after all, he was only here because he volunteered.

She gathered her magic again. Eyes closed, she imagined a dead body. It was unfortunately a faceless dead body, as she had no idea what the person in the coffin looked like. She'd chosen them solely because they were the most recently deceased resident of the cemetery. Then she pictured the body waking up and pushing open the coffin lid. When she was sure she had a clear enough picture of what she wanted the spell to do, she cast it into the coffin.

The thing about magic in general was that it was so much simpler than most people thought. That included the sort of magic dismissed as "dark". Books about it always created an air of mystery around it. Every last one of them claimed it was very complicated and required arcane rituals. The scant information available on necromancy took this to its logical conclusion and portrayed raising the dead as something that only a person who'd spent centuries studying dark magic could ever hope to understand.

In reality it was very simple. All you needed was to know what you wanted and to tell your magic to do it. Of course there was the potential for disaster. But by and large it was as easy as using a spell to boil a kettle.

No sooner had Abi cast the spell than shuffles and creaks began inside the coffin. The lid slid open and landed in the mud with a squelch. Silently the dead body stood upright in the coffin.

It was the body of a surprisingly young woman, perhaps less than two thousand years old. She was dressed in traditional blood-red funeral clothes, complete with a see-through veil over her head.

She was also not moving any more.

Abi groaned silently. Another mindless puppet that would do nothing unless she outright commanded it. The trouble with necromancy was that the necromancer had to spell everything out for the corpses.

Or perhaps not. A thought struck her as she frowned down at the motionless body. Carefully she imagined a heart -- not a realistic heart, but the best mental image of one she could come up with. Then she imagined it beginning to beat. Next she pictured a pair of lungs, and made them start to breathe.

She cast another spell and hoped for the best.

At first nothing seemed to happen. Irímé leaned forward, holding onto the headstone for support, and reached out to poke the dead girl's shoulder.

"Are you sure it's working?" he asked doubtfully. "She isn't very... Well, she's not exactly... She doesn't look very alive, does she?"

Much as it pained her to admit it, he had a point. Abi knelt down at the graveside -- her trousers could hardly get any dirtier by now -- and took the girl's hand. She pressed her fingers against her wrist. Seconds later she gave a startled yelp and jumped back.

Irímé stared at her like she'd gone mad. "What's wrong?"

Abi grabbed the girl's wrist again. Her own hand was shaking so much that she could hardly hold it properly. Yet there could be no mistake. A strong and very definite heartbeat thrummed just beneath the skin. Even as Abi still held her wrist she felt the corpse's cold skin was steadily growing warmer. When she let go of the wrist the arm didn't fall lifeless at the girl's side. It stayed outstretched, the fingers noticeably twitching.

The girl took a deep, gasping breath; the sort of breath someone would take after swimming underwater for as long as they could. Her head turned from side to side. She reached out and touched the walls of the grave. Slowly she tapped her hands against them, as if she expected to find a door handle somewhere.

Abi looked at Irímé. His mouth hung open and his eyes might very well fall out of his head if he widened them any more. She would have teased him about it if she wasn't sure she looked just as flabbergasted.

Nor were the shocks over. The perhaps-no-longer-dead girl found the edges of the grave. She grabbed them and heaved herself up. A minute later she stood beside the empty grave, her bright red clothes muddy, out of breath from climbing out.

The three of them stood frozen for a long time. Abi and Irímé couldn't have moved if their lives depended on it. The girl, even though she was somewhat alive, stayed as still as when she had been just a puppet.

At last someone spoke. Someone who was definitely not one of them.

"What the hell?"