DURCHEINANDER

German, "confused; muddled"

Is it better to have your life ended by someone who hates you or someone who loves you? -- Laura Sebastian, Ash Princess

Diarnlan had visited Byuryan exactly once in her first life. She had been sixteen and on holiday with her family. Her clearest memory of the place was how hot it was and how it was overrun with bugs. She didn't know what sort of magic was practiced there. She didn't know if magicians were respected like in Avallot or viewed as frauds like in Cighis. She didn't even know what currency they used or if anyone there spoke Avallese.

In hindsight, perhaps fleeing here in such a hurry was a very bad idea. She should have at least waited a day to do some research on the place she was going to. Then she remembered the skrýszel attack, and she grudgingly accepted she had made the best of a bad situation.

It was less than two days' journey to Byuryan when the weather was good. Diarnlan spent most of the trip on deck. She studiously avoided the other passengers when at all possible. Questions about who she was and where she was going were the last things she needed. She hid Saungrafn in the wardrobe in her cabin to avoid exciting alarm or suspicion.

The ship did not have a library. She couldn't do any research on board, and she certainly wasn't going to ask anyone. So she spent the hours staring over the ship's side and imagining what sort of creatures lurked just below the water's surface.

The only important discovery Diarnlan made on the trip had nothing to do with her destination and everything to do with her magic. For someone who had lived most of her adult life beside the ocean, she was a very poor sailor. Within minutes of the ship leaving the harbour she had to cast a spell to ward off seasickness. It wore off less than an hour later. That was how she discovered her magic was much weaker now than it had been when she died.

Yet more evidence in favour of time-travel, she thought.

On the ship no one heard any news of the skrýszel. Most of the passengers were from the capital city, which hadn't been affected by the attack, and didn't even know yet that there were such things as skrýszel. That all changed the minute the ship reached Cuengüito Harbour.

Merchant vessels travelled back and forth between Avallot and Byuryan every day. They were much faster than ships carrying passengers because they usually contained perishable goods; delivering their cargo quickly was all-important. And unlike passenger ships they usually went to the nearest Byuryan city instead of to the capital itself, saving themselves more than forty miles. They spread the news of the attack long before Diarnlan and her fellow passengers arrived. It spread like wildfire across the country. Within a matter of hours it reached Cuengüito, the capital, and within a day it was talked about in villages on the other side of the country.

Diarnlan, blissfully unaware of what awaited them all as soon as the ship docked, took Saungrafn out of the wardrobe and wrapped it up in her coat. It was amazing how a sword could give the impression of being disgruntled. Saungrafn refused to react to her presence. At the back of her mind she felt a faint hum of displeasure.

"Stop that," she said. Then she face-palmed. Talking to a sword? She might as well just check into the nearest asylum.

Luckily Byuryan was so hot that there was nothing really unusual about carrying a bundled-up coat. Most of the other passengers were doing the same. Diarnlan did her best to make herself invisible as she waited for the gangplank to be lowered. So far no one had tried to talk to her. She wanted to keep it that way.

The gangplank was lowered. The passengers filed off the ship. They all promptly stopped and stared in amazement. A motley group of sailors, merchants, and ordinary people thronged towards them.

"Any news of the monster?" a chorus of voices shouted. "Has it been killed yet?"

"What monster?" several of the passengers asked.

They were all nearly deafened as the entire group began to talk all at once. If Diarnlan had been on the gangplank she would have tried to slip away. Unfortunately she was still on the ship, and the passengers on the gangplank weren't leaving, so she had nowhere to go.

Karandren forgot two very important things in his haste to become a monster-slayer and world-conqueror. He forgot he no longer had his sword. And he forgot that at fourteen he had avoided all weapons training as much as possible. Finding a sword was easy enough. So was finding the monster, for that matter. He just "borrowed" a sword from a now-deserted watchtower and followed the path of devastation. But he didn't bother to practice using his new sword before he came across the skrýszel.

By now it had blundered its way almost to the capital city. All of the great mages had assembled to fight it. The problem was it was so large that it was hard to get close enough to attack its body. And the mages didn't know where its weak spots were.

As soon as he saw it Karandren realised it wasn't the monster Diarnlan had killed in their last lifetime. That one had looked like a frog. This one was more like a bear. It had only two legs and a long tail. Whenever someone got too close it lashed out with its tail. Flickers of lightning danced around the fins of its tail.

That should have been a warning sign. Unfortunately Karandren had never paid much attention to warning signs.

The skrýszel wasn't fatally injured, but it certainly was injured. It was also exhausted, in an unfamiliar land, and surrounded by people who wanted to kill it. Nothing would frighten an ordinary wild animal more. Skrýszel may not truly be animals, but in situations like this they acted like them.

The mages drew back to consider their next plan of attack. None of them noticed a small boy hiding behind one of the few trees still standing. The skrýszel continued to lumber slowly across the field. Karandren tried to sneak up on it from behind. Then he leapt at it.

It saw him before his sword could hit it. Its tail swung round. The lightning struck him square in the chest.

Karandren opened his eyes to the all-too-familiar scene of a frozen lake and a glowing tree.

"Oh no!"

Diarnlan felt dimly that something had gone wrong somewhere. It was the sort of feeling you got when you knew you'd forgotten an important detail but hadn't a clue what it was. That odd sense of wrongness stayed with her as she made her way to a hotel. It was still there the next morning when she began to explore the city. And it got even worse a few days later when she heard the latest news from Avallot.

A waiter at the hotel told everyone about it at breakfast. "The monster has finally been killed!"

Why did it take them so long to kill it? Diarnlan wondered. She had never had any trouble killing monsters quickly.

Saungrafn was still in her room, safely hidden under her coat, but through their strange new telepathic connection she got the distinct impression it was raising its eyebrows at her. Quite a feat, when it had no eyebrows to raise and also should not be sentient at all.

"It destroyed ten cities and killed hundreds before the mages killed it."

She'd always thought her fellow mages were incompetent fools. This proved it.

Ahem, Saungrafn said. A disjointed image of a long, drawn-out battle filled her head. It was both familiar and unfamiliar. Diarnlan firmly refused to think too much about it.

"Now they say another monster has followed it! An even bigger one!"

What? Skrýszel never came so close together. The end of her first life was an aberration that should not have been repeated. Certainly not so early.

Have I time-travelled or fallen into another universe?

Saungrafn remained oddly silent. It was amazing how it gave the impression of rolling its non-existent eyes without actually saying anything.

"I've heard it dived back into the sea and is headed towards us right now!"

If that blasted waiter had thrown a bomb into the dining room he could hardly have caused more panic. Guests leapt to their feet with terrified screams. Several tables toppled over. There was a mad rush for the door. How those people thought all this uproar was going to help matters was a mystery.

Diarnlan stubbornly refused to be moved. She continued eating her breakfast. There was nothing about the breakfast that was actually worth staying for. The toast was so dry and crispy it was practically inedible. She'd have raised hell about that if she wasn't so short of money and had nowhere else to go. The tea was insipid and only lukewarm. But she'd paid for it and she wasn't going to abandon it in a blind panic like those imbeciles.

It was utterly ludicrous, anyway. No skrýszel had ever attacked Byuryan. They came through the veil in Avallot and they stayed in Avallot.

She held that opinion for the rest of the week. In the meantime she began the humiliating process of hunting for a job. It turned out that Cuengüito had so many magicians you could hardly throw a stone without hitting one. All those magicians meant very little work and even less pay for most of them. She would have to leave the city and venture further inland to find enough work. But to do that she had to learn the language. Almost everyone in the capital spoke multiple languages, but once she got away from the coast she would find virtually no one who spoke Avallese.

All her plans came to a very abrupt halt after a week in Byuryan. A skrýszel attacked the harbour. The people fled in terror. Diarnlan contemplated running again. But where was she to go?

She picked up Saungrafn and went out to fight the monster.

"There you are! Took you long enough."

Diarnlan steadfastly refused to look round. Instead she glared at the frozen lake as if it had personally offended her.

"You know, I'm beginning to see a pattern here. We die, we end up here, then we go back in time. I think it's happened more times than we remember. Don't you?"

Perhaps if she broke the ice and jumped into the water she would finally get some peace. Maybe dying forever was the only way out of hell. And this was hell. She no longer had any doubts about it. Nowhere else would she be yet again thrown into the company of her worst enemy.

"I just don't know why. Do you think this happens to everyone after they die? Are we just special?"

Then again, anything might lurk under the ice. She wanted out of this mess but she didn't want to fall into the clutches of some denizen of hell. Perhaps she should climb up that mountain and jump off the highest cliff she could find instead.

"Hey. Hey! Are you listening to me? I've had no one to talk to for ages and even you're better than talking to the tree. So listen!"

You have nothing to say that I want to hear, Diarnlan thought. Only her determination to ignore Karandren's existence prevented her from saying so aloud.

"If we were just here to be... oh, what's the word... That thing where you die and come back as someone else. Reincarcerated?"

She almost laughed at that. Reincarceration was just what he needed. Preferably in a prison he could never escape from, where he would never come back to annoy her ever again.

"Whatever it's called, it can't be why we're here. If it was we'd have become someone else at once and never seen each other. But I had to wait here for weeks after I died before you appeared."

Saungrafn stood propped against the tree beside her. Diarnlan eyed it and contemplated stabbing herself with it.

"I didn't do anything to get stuck here with you. So this must all be your fault and I want you to fix it! Right now!"

That was the last straw. Diarnlan unsheathed Saungrafn and stood up slowly. Karandren continued to babble on in the background. She waited until he had gone off on a tangent about lightning, of all things, before she struck.

Karandren wasn't as distracted as she'd thought. He parried her attack with his own sword. Then he kicked her ankle. The pain made her lose her balance. He immediately swung his sword at her neck. It cut through skin and muscle all the way to the bone. But, impossible though it seemed, it didn't kill her. For a moment Karandren and Diarnlan stood frozen in place, dumbfounded, as she remained standing while blood gushed from a wound that should be fatal. Then the cut knitted itself together and the blood stopped.

There was a brief pause as they both considered the implications of this. Diarnlan recovered first. She raised Saungrafn and cut Karandren's abdomen open.

Multiple deaths preceded by battling monsters hadn't dulled the edge of her soul-weapon's blade. She had sharpened Saungrafn until it was as sharp as any soul-weapon could possibly be. It was able to cut through skin and bone and everything short of magically-forged armour -- or skrýszel hides -- with as much ease as Death's scythe cut through souls.

Blood soaked the snow and trickled down to pool on the ice. Karandren's intestines spilled out of the wound. He looked down with a mildly surprised expression.

"Huh. That's... I'd forgotten how disgusting that is. I thought it would hurt more. Do you think we can't feel pain while we're here?"

Diarnlan wasn't sure what was more disturbing. The fact that not even disembowelment could stop Karandren talking, or the fact he had apparently witnessed it before -- and it made so little impact on him that he forgot how disgusting it was.

Then, like Diarnlan's a minute ago, Karandren's wound healed. It was like watching time flow backward; his intestines moved back into his body and the deep cut knitted itself together. Diarnlan and Karandren watched with expressions of revulsion and -- in Karandren's case -- fascination. Within seconds there wasn't so much as a scar to show he'd ever been injured at all. The only traces of the wound were the cut in his shirt and the blood that covered the ground.

Karandren poked at his stomach where the wound had been. "Weird."

Diarnlan could think of a few stronger words. "So," she said flatly. "We can't die. We can't be permanently injured. What in the name of all the gods is happening here?"

Karandren shrugged. "I don't know, but it's interesting. Do you think there's some way to take this power with us when we come back to life? I don't want to be electrocuted again."

I don't particularly want to be impaled on a skrýszel's horns again either, Diarnlan thought. "If we could take it with us, do you think either of us would have died more than once?"

Her thoughts turned to the possibility of living and dying yet again. Running away to Byuryan hadn't worked. Maybe she should run further. Or maybe the best way to deal with this situation was to kill Karandren as soon as she came back to life.

Yes, that was what she'd do. If he was dead then she would have nothing to worry about. She just needed to find a way to sneak into the academy and kill him.

But first she had to wait for them both to go back again. She waited. And waited. And waited. Days and nights and weeks passed -- or whatever their equivalent was in this strange place where time didn't seem to exist. Diarnlan found she never grew tired, never felt hungry, never became thirsty. At first she and Karandren fought again, more to pass the time than because they wanted to. Even arch-enemies would get tired of fighting when the wounds they inflicted weren't permanent. So instead Diarnlan wandered off across the lake. This was where she'd been the last time she was sent back, she remembered. Maybe that was what triggered their reincarnation.

It wasn't. She walked all the way across the lake and was still stuck in this place when she reached the other side. For lack of anything better to do she began to climb one of the mountains. Out of boredom and a mild sort of curiosity she carried out one of her earlier ideas and jumped off a cliff.

That was how she discovered she could still feel pain. A sword in the neck didn't hurt much, but multiple fractures and several bones tearing right through her skin did. Then she had the mind-numbingly boring experience of lying in the snow and waiting for her injuries to heal.

After all that it was both a relief and an anti-climax when the world abruptly disintegrated around her. Once again Diarnlan found herself back in her old bedroom. She immediately leapt to her feet...

...And promptly collapsed with a shriek as the phantom pain of all her injuries struck her at once.

The trouble with magic was that it did not work logically when acting in self-defence. Karandren and Diarnlan's magic was still linked, even though they didn't know it, and still trying to figure out a way to save their lives. Sending them back without their memories hadn't worked. Sending them back with their memories hadn't worked. Perhaps it was time to send one back with their memories and the other without.

It couldn't think things through and consider all the ways this would go wrong. So that was exactly what it did.

The screams of the academy bell woke everyone within hearing range. Karandren jolted awake in his little room with a headache and a strange pain in his stomach. He got up and went down to breakfast. He had no trouble getting used to his height because he didn't remember being taller. He grumbled over the disgusting food because he had no reason to be grateful for tasting something, anything. And he went to his lessons and paid attention because he thought he was hearing the teachers' words for the first time.

After his lessons were over he went down to the lake to swim. The water was still much too cold for ordinary humans to swim there. It was one of the few places where he knew he could be alone. Karandren dived under the surface and swam at the bottom of the lake for almost an hour. Eventually he felt the urge to resurface for air. He climbed out of the water onto one of the rocks by the lake's shore. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw someone moving behind him. Plenty of people passed the lake when out for a walk, so he paid no attention to that.

The knife in his back stabbed right between his ribs and straight into his heart.

It was incredibly easy to find Karandren. Much easier than Diarnlan had expected, in fact. She knew his name, patronymic, and general location. All she had to do was go to the perimeter of the academy's walls, cast a tracking spell, and follow it right to him. He made her task very easy. For some inconceivable reason the little idiot wasn't even trying to hide. He was outside the main wards, at the bottom of the lake. She just had to wait for him to resurface. Then she stabbed him while he was busy huffing and puffing after coming up for air.

Diarnlan pushed the body back into the water, wiped the knife clean, and set off back to her house. That was one problem dealt with. Now she could worry about those twice-damned skrýszel.