"Mira is not dead."
Hundreds of last words spat out the same sentence.
Cassian believed none of them.
They had come from Dona Har's severed right hand—some truths, some truths edited for money.
Only the Innocence Bond ledger embedded in the coffin corpse was certain.
Cassian reached between its ribs. His present chest was scratched from within as the return-body learned his wounds.
He tore the ledger free with paper, heart, and flesh entangled around it.
The corpse closed its eyes.
Cassian did not accept it as his own. Death still could not return.
"Is Mira alive?" Ria asked.
"The words are alive."
"Not the same thing."
"That's why that woman is alive."
Dona pressed her stump with her left hand, smiling.
"You spared me to verify it."
"No."
Cassian opened the ledger.
"To collect the price of a false statement."
A bell rang outside.
Once for the return of names.
Twice for the beginning of distribution.
Before the third, people were trampling one another in the corridor.
* * *
The Nameless Court's table held names instead of food.
One hundred forty-three leather tags for more than two thousand nameless dead.
Wearing one returned the old name, memories, and family.
It also returned debts and sins.
"First come, first served!"
The front-wagon faction blocked the table's left side.
The feverish woman raised a white standard.
"We found the passage. Distribution belongs to us."
Cassian's followers stood on the right.
Sena rolled up a bloody sleeve.
"The dead opened the road. You stole wagons."
"We still arrived first."
"Does a fast thief become king?"
"Here, whoever has a name is king."
The feverish woman took a tag. Sena drew a kitchen knife.
The nameless dead stood trapped between them, unable to identify themselves.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Ria spread the ledger across the table.
"Stop. A returned name brings back more than good things."
"Its debts return with it."
"Its family returns with it."
No one listened.
She read the first tag.
"Orsen Val. Twenty-seven years of unpaid taxes. Desertion. Conspiracy in the North Gate fire."
Hands stopped.
"Marta Ren. Three husbands. Eleven living creditors. Accomplice to a Church-designated heretic."
Then a third.
"Bern Hardy. No inherited land. Two execution orders instead."
People stepped back.
"A name without sin?" Sena asked.
"If there is no sin, there is debt. If neither, there is a grudge."
"Then why take a name?"
An old man beneath the table answered.
"To die."
His throat was half severed and wrapped in cloth. Without a name, death had failed to finish the wound for a hundred years.
"Creditor or executioner, I don't care. I want it to end once."
The nameless rushed the table again—not to live, but to buy the right to die.
Cassian climbed onto it and split one tag with his sword.
A house attached to that name collapsed somewhere in the Court.
"I don't kill for free."
They looked up.
"Pay one of three prices for a name."
"The location of the imperial ledger of erased names."
"A road from the Nameless Court to the capital."
"A body that can fight."
The old man laughed.
"You attach a conscription notice to salvation."
"I never called it salvation."
"If we cannot pay?"
"Keep living."
Crueler than a death sentence.
Sena glared.
"They came to ask for death."
"Which is why they know the price."
"Serve your army and you'll kill them?"
"Serve, and I take them somewhere they can die."
The feverish woman lowered her standard.
"Half the names if you use our passage."
"Was it yours?"
"We guard it."
"Then taking it makes it mine."
Both factions raised weapons.
Hundreds wanted to kill one another. Not one could die properly.
Before the first blade moved, Dona's voice filled the Court.
"I announce the last will of the deceased Cassian Crow."
Ria turned toward the funeral room.
"We left no such words."
"That's why I kept her alive," Cassian said.
Dona was already creating value.
"He claimed the throne of the nameless people."
Coffins opened. The dead knelt.
"Every name shall be offered to the king."
Both factions found the same enemy.
The feverish woman threw her standard first. A hidden awl grazed Cassian's cheek.
He dragged her onto the table by the pole.
Sena attacked from the other side. Her knife entered his flank.
Cassian broke her wrist with the knife still inside him.
"You brought us here to become king?"
"A king would have killed you before your knife reached him."
He pulled out the knife. Blood fell toward the tags, which writhed away.
King's blood would make them royal property.
"Do not bleed!" Ria shouted.
"Every tag will be incorporated under Cassian's name!"
Dona had prepared not only the lie, but the scene that made it credible.
Three prisoners struck Cassian from behind: axe in shoulder blade, hook across neck seam, short spear through thigh.
Cassian beheaded the nearest.
The body remained standing. Black mist rose from the nameless neck.
"See? You cannot kill us!" the head shouted.
"Not dying and not hurting are different."
Cassian kicked the head into a coffin and cut the crawling body's knees.
Both factions stopped.
"It isn't that I cannot kill you."
He picked up a tag.
"I haven't been paid your name-price yet."
He laid it on the headless body.
Body and head recoiled. Once named, pain could become death.
The factions feared the tags more than Cassian.
"I'll bring Dona," Ria said.
"Too late."
"We can file a correction."
"A dead man's last words cost more than a living correction."
Dona still possessed the mouth of the dead Cassian.
The nameless overturned the table. Tags poured across the floor.
The half-severed old man picked one up.
"I'll pay first."
"State the terms."
"One road for one name."
"As offered."
"Not enlistment."
"You won't give me your body?"
"I did not endure a century to be conscripted after death."
He touched the tag, his open throat, then Cassian's sword.
"Return my name."
"Let me see the sin that returns."
"Then finish it."
Cassian studied him.
"If there is no sin?"
"Finish it anyway."
"You could live longer in my army."
"I have already lived too long."
"Accepted."
He was not Cassian's soldier.
He was a customer buying death.
"A door to the capital lies beneath the eastern well."
He hung the tag around his neck.
`Orsen Val.`
Blood flowed from his wound for the first time in a century.
"Now I can die."
A door formed in the Court wall.
A woman and two children stood beyond it, rope marks around all three necks.
Orsen stopped smiling.
"No."
The woman recognized him.
"Orsen."
His family returned with the name.
She hid the children behind her.
"You killed us."
Letters rose in the ledger.
`Orsen Val.`
`Murder of wife and two children.`
`Unexecuted condemned prisoner.`
The dead rose.
Death had found the name of a criminal it had sought for a hundred years.
The execution bell rang.
Cassian's scabbard opened with it.