What possessed Peter to ask his father’s ghost this question he might never know. It came, just as his defiance of his mother had, from seemingly beyond him. Yet there was no mistaking that the words had come from his mouth. Ivan’s confusion at this reached him as two pale blue eyes looking back through the smoky haze of their father’s spectre.

  “Peter, we said—”

  “I had many plans…” their father interrupted. “The most important… the grooming of an heir… a new necromancer… a worthy one…”

  “You mean heirs?” Ivan asked.

  “No…”

  “W-Who?” asked Peter.

  “You…” the ghost replied.

  The cold outside seemed to seep through Ivan’s pores and enter his skin until he felt as though he were encased in ice.

  His voice crackled. “To whom do you refer when you say…”

  “Peter…”

  “Why? Why Peter? Because he was born first!?” Ivan yelled, his voice echoing through the forest.

  “You have no gift… no aptitude… for the art… for what is needed…”

  “So why did you train me!?”

  “Katya… asked this for you… I told her… it would come to nothing…”

  Ivan’s throat shut and his lungs refused to feed them more air. His father had encouraged him at every step to be proud of his necromantic heritage, to practice it and master it and to one day stand as a master necromancer of the Smertsky clan. Ghosts could not lie. They lacked the will to affect the world of the living. Whatever the ghost believed was true, yet…

  “Who are you?” Ivan asked.

  “Vladimir Smertsky…”

  Ivan jumped to his feet. “Another Vladimir! Our clan is enormous, there must be another Vladimir Smertsky. Peter, we grabbed the wrong ashes!”

  Peter, for the third time that evening, felt a will overtake him that it was no longer possible to deny originated from himself. There was something in him, something that in his youthfulness he presumed to be nothing but the whisperings of ghosts, which forced him to ask the spectre:

  “You are Vladimir Smertsky, son of Alyosha and Iraida Smertsky, husband of Katerina, and father of Peter and Ivan?” Peter asked.

  “I am…”

  “And you died of brain bleeding?” Peter said, adopting the doctor’s term.

  “I did…”

  Peter was silent for a moment. Another part of him stood in awe and horror at what he had done to squash his brother’s doubt, but another part, one which was growing more influential by the second, saw this as nothing but the upholding of the truth. It was a truth Peter had known for some time, though their father had never outright said it. His younger brother, Ivan, was a poor necromancer. That Ivan had never been subjected to the cold, rational, ruthless side of their father told him as much. This side their father had reserved for Peter on whom his expectations lay.

  There was a reason, after all, that Peter had done all the work for this ritual.

  “I don’t understand, Dad…” Ivan said. “Why am I a failure? Why can’t I learn!?”

  “Weak… and dependent… and rebellious…”

  “Bullshit! You liar!” Ivan screamed.

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  “Ivan! Be quiet!” Peter said in a harsh whisper.

  “I am not weak! I put up with those fucking bastard children in town to follow in your footsteps, father, what about that!? What about that, eh!?”

  “Worthless… a distraction… to draw my attention… I care not…”

  Peter’s mouth filled with saliva as he heard spoken aloud all those things which he was forced to pretend did not exist. All these things he knew but had been forbidden to say. He wanted to hear more of such things. More of their family’s unspoken secrets.

  “Our great-grandmother, the woman whom you performed the ritual for, how did she die?” Peter asked.

  “I killed her… a mushroom in her tea…” the spectre replied.

  “So you could get permission to marry our mother?”

  “To marry Katya… yes…”

  Ivan began to hyperventilate. There was something pathetic, Peter thought, in such a large boy being so utterly oblivious. Ivan was larger and stronger than himself, and yet he was as naive as a child.

  “I-I’m going to tell the townspeople about this! I’ll turn your name to filth, you prick! You bastard! Everyone will hate you as they hate me! What do you think of that!?” Ivan said.

  Their father was silent.

  “You will not,” Peter said, rising from the linen sheet to look his brother in the eye. “As patriarch of our family, I forbid you from tarnishing our clan’s name. Do you understand what it would do? You would ruin not only our family’s legacy, but the entire clan’s. We would have our royal monopoly revoked! Do you understand that!?”

  A dormant history of blood rushed to the forefront of Peter’s mind and he could see similar situations played out across their clan’s ancient history. The family’s rules had been broken countless times, and would continue to be broken. And he realized that all of the patriarchs knew this and ignored it. The rules were nothing but an end to the preservation of their family business. All that mattered was that nothing endangered their royal monopoly on necromancy.

  “I don’t care,” Ivan said, shaking his head and laughing softly. “I don’t care. I don’t care! Our family can burn in a pyre of its own sins for all I care. Let me be the first log! That way we can restart as something truly respectable and not some rotten, foul, putrid farce!”

  Ivan turned to leave and Peter grasped his wrist. “You’ll come back with me, or you will not come back, do you understand?”

  “I have no intention of coming back,” Ivan replied.

  “No, you don’t understand, you will not be coming back.”

  Ivan tore his wrist away from his brother. “I do understand. Leave me be!”

  As his brother walked away, Peter felt the spirit of his ancestors, their phantoms filling his blood with their wishes, absorb his spirit. He picked up the ritual bowl, their father’s ashes spilling out across the linen, and with it drew up behind his younger brother and cracked him over the head. Ivan turned to him, eyes wide in bewilderment, but a second blow across his temples robbed the life from his eyes and the firmness from his limbs and for the second time Peter witnessed a body collapse into a heap in front of him.

  He dropped the wooden bowl, its purpose finished. For minutes he stood staring at Ivan’s body, trying to figure out when it would get up and begin to move again. When he finally accepted that it would not he felt revulsion flood a very small compartment of himself which only minutes before had constituted the entirety of his consciousness.

  As his mind settled, Peter realized his next task would be to bury Ivan. In Khargrad, his brother’s body would never decompose. Only by cremation could the dead be reformed into something new. But to bring his brother back to the town’s crematorium with two blows to his head under such strange circumstances would bring suspicion onto their clan. Ivan could not be cremated, yet Peter could also not allow him to be discovered, for to do so would be to leave a dead man with a tale to tell. No, Peter concluded, he must be buried.

  Wrapping his brother’s body in the linen sheet, Peter returned to the house to grab a shovel. His mother was waiting for him on the porch, her cold eyes watching as he entered the manor’s gate. He forgot the shovel for a moment and followed her inside.

  “Where is your brother?” she asked through a tight-lipped frown.

  “I killed him,” he said.

  His mother rubbed her forehead. “I knew this would happen. I should’ve stopped you two, I should have…”

  “He was going to tell the town about what you and father did to our great-grandmother.”

  His mother flushed with anger. “How do you know that!? Why!? Who—” her jaw loosened as she realized what had transpired. “You spoke with Vladi?”

  Peter hung his head and nodded.

  “You idiots! You fools! Good for nothing stupid sons! Have you buried him yet? No, you came back for the shovel. Off with you! Go! Bury him where no one will find!”

  At this she broke into sobs and since there was nothing more Peter could do for her he went to the garden shed and grabbed a shovel and thereafter returned to the dark woods where his brother’s body lay in its heap.

  The work of digging the grave took several hours and Peter had to stop frequently when he could no longer hold the shovel from the cold numbing his hands. But knowing this was his family duty, he continued digging until his shovel finally struck something solid. He cleared the dirt away and when he saw what it was he started laughing. Below his shovel, at the bottom of the pit he had dug, was a body, unmistakably a member of the Smertsky clan, and he wondered what sorts of tales they might have to tell.