The campfires burned near the shore. From where the two men stood it was almost impossible to tell where those fires ended and the reflections of the stars, sunken in the ocean's black waters, began. They could see the city's watchfires, too, burning atop the high walls of Kentauri. But the men were apart from both shoreside-camps and city, now.

Scraggly trees stood around them, those few that had not been cut down for the wood over the past long year of siege. Lysis sat on the stump of an ancient tree; his hair and beard black, save where the moonlight sparked and broke off his curls.

He grinned, his blunt face softening. "Some silly affair has broken loose. It's all that I've heard about for the past week."

"It makes a good change. How long can you talk about a siege? Or how long can you want to?" Kel rubbed at his head as he spoke, twisting his neck until it cracked.

"A far sight longer than I want to talk about how so-and-so is greasing some perfumed fop." Lysis laughed but then grew silent, his face suddenly brooding. "My brother died yesterday. They talked about that," Lysis said finally. He didn't look at the other man, but simply stared off into the night.

"I know," said Kel. "Everyone knows." He hesitated a moment. "I saw him fall."

"I wish I had been there. Everyone says it was glorious." A harsh laugh. "Is that true, Kel?"

"As 'glorious' as it can be. He did what he was on the field to do."

"All his wounds were in the front." He looked at Kel, at the other man's fair, shaven face. "He came back a bloody, bloody ruin, regardless," he added softly.

"A dozen other men died fighting over his corpse." Kel's words, with their strange, harsh accent, were precise and level; they were more understanding of and consoling to Lysis than anyone else's had been.

"Ah, the sacrifices made for the honor of a noble corpse." Lysis grunted as he stood and looked off towards the ships. "We meeting next week?"

"I wonder if there will be a next week." Kel's fine brows drew together, making dark pits in the hollows of his eyes, and he glanced at the high-walled city.

"Fair enough. Three days from now."

"Three days, friend." The two man clasped wrists for a moment, feeling the weapon-scarred skin and sinew. Then Lysis turned and walked away, not dragging quite so much as when he had come.

* * *

Lysis felt the strange lightness at the back of his head as he trailed silently behind the bier. He could almost still smell the acrid scent of his burning locks of hair, shorn and lain on the funeral brazier as an offering. The stink of the burning hair had risen towards the sky unaccompanied; no one had had better goods to offer - in a city under siege, there were no cattle or lambs to be sacrificed even for the dead son of the king.

It had been a bitter few days, even by the city's dimished standards: the one-time bastion of Kentauri, prince Ektor, lay pallid and bruised in his funeral procession; the day after his death, a message had come from the Archon of Athos, regretfully apologizing for his inability to produce further troops for the defense of the city. Months ago, twenty-five Athosian soldiers had come to join the Kentauri garrison, but nothing since; a dozen times that number of Kentauri men had died fighting in Athos's border wars five years prior.

The procession halted briefly as Myron, king of Kentauri, unwound the chain that held shut the gates of the royal crypt. His liver-spotted hands quavered, not entirely from age. The chain rattled and hissed through the tarnished bars; a young soldier pushed the gates in, and the procession passed underground.

The honor guard's lamps flickered and gleamed, sometimes bringing into view the empty eyes of a long-dead king laid on a stone shelf but as quickly dropping those sockets back into darkness. The floor of the crypt was here and there stone, elsewhere dirt, and they walked a long ways past the ancient dead.

On one wall, a crude carving of a raging lion slid past in the shadows. Lysis smiled faintly to see it, though his eyes tightened at the same time. He remembered stalking through these tunnels with his brother, but he could barely recall any of the stories they had woven about that carving. They had chosen this setting both for the awe of their ancestor's presences and for the impious seasoning the crypts granted their games. Many times he had wished to take up the verdant-tarnished weapons and armor of his forebears, a sacrilegious, self-defeating attempt to have a warrior's honor early. But now the procession passed the lion, past the royal dead, and they had come to the place prepared.

The bier-carriers slipped their burden into the empty shelf, and the white-robed priest stepped forward. "Here we lay thee, already in the dark earth, that we might hasten thy journey down and away from this tempestuous life," intoned the priest. He was a young man, and his voice was uncertain - the aged high priest had died in one of the sicknesses that had swept the penned-together people. "Go now! I give thee direction, that thy spirit may no longer wander the walks of our world." Dust fell between his fingers onto the corpse's torn and discolored flesh.

As the procession shuffled out of the catacombs, Myron shuffled to Lysis's side. He stood beside his son, nearer than others might have but still not close. Finally, he spoke. "You are the heir now." Lysis saw a stoicism close over his father's face like a bronze mask. He knew that expression - it meant that the old man had something more he wanted to say but never would, supplanting those wishes with responsibilities. "And… now you must keep the city's spirits alive." Myron hesitated a moment, and left.

Lysis stood there alone, losing himself in memory and thoughts. It may have been only a fancy, but he thought he felt a breath of air from the dark and dusty passages. For a bare moment, it seemed he could follow that breath of air, taking what and who he cared for with him. Just after, though, he chided himself for his sentimentality; Lysis the warrior of Kentauri could hardly run from his besieged city, and Lysis the man had nothing he could carry with him.

* * *

Kel Naan buckled on his bright steel armor and hooked his cloak into the rivets on his shoulders. He had ticked off his routine, step by step, till he was in the full uniform for Viven's legion commander. No battle would happen that day - the man he was about to visit had seen to that - but Kel had a part he was about to play, and he firmly believed in being dressed for it. He rubbed a thumb against his breastplate, clearing a fair film of dust from the engraving there, and went out of his tent.

Looking to the left, he saw the sun just setting over the ocean, turning the crests of the waves fire red and the troughs black. A few hundred yards away, the beached ships cast long shadows on the sand. The timbers of the ships were beginning to dry, Kel observed, and soon enough would begin to show gaps between the boards. He made a mental note to order the ships better cared for; Kentauri was only the beginning, and his plans did not involve returning home (for the few more years that far-off place would still exist), but there were yet people and materials to ship from the cities they had left behind; Kentauri and the lands of Lakechyris were the future of his people, but that hardly called for casting aside what little they could retain of their past. On some level, Kel knew that he was casting his mind back to Viven for reasons other than military utility.

His thoughts were so engaged as he walked through the rows of tents, and out away from them. A pair of sentries saluted him. A large patch of worn ground showed where Ap Hal's men had once made their campsite, now moved a quarter-mile down the shore; Kel allowed himself the luxury of recollections of home for the walk down the shore.

Ap Hal's tent was larger than the rest, and placed exactly where Kel expected the commander's tent to be. The guard standing beside the pinned-up tentflap neither hindered him nor came to attention as he entered.

There sat the man - in the only chair in the tent, Kel noted. Ap Hal's steel-and-leather armor lay mockingly on a pure white cloth by one edge of the tent. The man himself wore his common clothing.
Planting himself in the center of the tent, Kel clasped his hands behind his back. "How long are you planning to play this game?"

Ap Hal arched his eyebrows. "This game? How long are you going to insist that you are the legitimate commander of my troops?" He learned on one arm of his chair, and brushed his fingers through his golden hair.

"The rules of command succession are absolutely clear."

"Clear to you only. When they favor you."

Kel Naan stood motionless there for almost half an hour; many more words were said, but nothing accomplished.

* * *

It was night again, pale grey clounds pocked with sparse patches of starry sky. Kel waited in the copse, but he had no need to wait long before he saw Lysis's bulky shadow. Twigs cracked under the man's feet as he came near.

"Catch," said Lysis, and Kel fumblingly caught the thing lobbed at him. It took him a moment to realize what it was - a broad and shallow pewter cup. Lysis kicked leaves and twigs off a tree stump, clicking another cup onto it. "King's vintage," he said, as he brandished a fluted jug. He cracked off the clay seal and tossed it aside. "I almost have a right to it, after all. I've been made the heir." He laughed, and tilting the jug to pour a stream of dark wine into his cup.

"Congratulations."

"Bring your damn cup over here." Lysis nodded approvingly when Kel placed his cup on the stump. "There's no point in congratulating me. My father is going to be the last king in Kentauri; we both know that."

Kel sat heavily on the leafy ground, breath rushing out of his mouth. He took his cup when Lysis had filled it, and raised it in a kind of salutation. "I have no comment on that."

"Oh, for the sake of the thirteen little lesser gods of animal breeding." The cup sat in his hand, forgotten for the moment. "You and I both know that Kentauri is sapped, bleeding, and ready to collapse if you shove it hard enough. Our people have given up. Many of our warriors have too, though most of us will die on our honor."

"Lysis! That's enough - I don't want to hear any of this from you."

"All right. All right." He sipped at the wine for a moment. "I used to dream of being king." He said this almost as if it was part of the same thought, but Kel took a moment to catch up.

"Boys dream about becoming Tribune where I come from. It's the same thing, I suppose." Kel smiled faintly, fine creases appearing on his angular face.

"I wanted to become king so I could build up the walls. I wanted to build them so high… so high that the city would last forever. So even if it fell, and the towers burned, the walls would leave a mountain. And the imaginary battles I fought on those walls…" He drained the last of his wine, abruptly setting the cup down. "Friend, do you actually expect to survive this?"

Eyes tightening, Kel looked away. Then, he looked back at Lysis and smiled, though the tightness remained around his eyes. "I'm not of much use if I don't, am I? It would be a shame to fail in my duty at this point."

"I want to show you something." Lysis's words were abrupt, before he turned and began walking away. It took Kel a moment to trot up after him.

Lysis led them out of the scraggly copse, away from the shore and away from the city. The ground rose in this direction, with rocks great and small protruding from the earth. It was to one such stone, a rounded gray dome taller than a man, that Lysis led them. Lysis knelt near a scruffy bush that grew near the stone, and pushed its branches aside. There was a black void between the stone and the ground.

Lysis glanced up at Kel. The blond man looked pained. "Lysis, what are we doing? And where are we?"

"Please trust me a little longer. This hole widens just under the stone." With that, he slid his legs into the darkness, and grunting, vanished into the earth. Kel delayed a moment, but finally followed after. He was slimmer of build, so more easily worked his way down. It was still a process several minutes long, and after a tight descent pressed in with the musty smell of earth and dust, he dropped a few feet onto a hard, stony floor.

Lysis was here, a faint red glow brightening as he touched a coal to the wick of a lamp. The pale flame flickered and wavered, pulled by the draft up towards the crevice. Curls and arcs of smoke twisted through the air.

Hunching under the tight ceiling, Kel glanced around the stony passage. More than a few feet past the lamp, the passage was simple darkness proceeding towards an unknown direction.

"What is this?" he asked after a moment.

"This isn't really anything. Just a cave - just a little rocky crack. A little further, though…"

"A little further?"

Lysis looked away, at one blank wall. He was silent for a moment, his features tightening as he caught his lower lip between his teeth. "This cave connects to the royal crypts. My brother and I found it, a long time ago… I really don't think anyone knows about it.

Kel's face was suddenly guarded, the expression he wore to ready himself for war or other conflict. "Your point being?"

"The crypts go under the walls and come to ground in the middle of Kentauri. Their gates are unguarded. It is possible-"

"Stop. Now."

"It is possible to reach both the palace and the gate-"

"Damn you, stop!" The guarded expression was gone, and Kel's lips peeled back from his teeth as he spat out the words. "Don't tell me this, you unmitigated bastard!"

Lysis gazed at him, waiting for the angular man to finish speaking. "This changes nothing. Kentauri will not hold, but going in over the walls or through the gates will be the most brutal thing you've ever seen. No; the most brutal thing you've ever done - I know where you lead men from."

"What in hell is your point?"

"I'm trying to do you a favor. My point is that there's no good reason for you to get your fool, scrawny self killed deciding this issue, because it's already decided." Lysis's large hand clenched and loosened. "Every man in Kentauri is going to die on his honour, whether he wants to or not. You're the only one here with alternatives."

"I don't want your favors! And I don't want to use you for my damn advantage."

Lysis grinned suddenly, a toothy, victorious grin. "But if you don't, you'll betray your duty."

Kel struck the wall, and swore in a language Lysis didn't understand. The theme, if not the content, of his words was clear to the black-bearded man.

* * *

The sun was bright, but the smoke was black. The remnants of Kentauri's gate were still burning. Corpses were strewn along the gaping walls, armored men facing the sky and facing the dirt. Though shouts and shrieks still came from inside the city, the dust had already begun to settle near the breached gate. The remnants of men were palled over with it, gray and brown; they seemed to become stones themselves.