“Not everyone sings songs about their dead,” Fix pointed out. When you are dead, you’ll exist in song, just as your dead fathers do now. They had agreed that four Handlers would come, corresponding to the four Protagonists, each jobber company accompanying one of the two erstwhile partners. “The dead are not to be feared.” Indrajit scanned the gathering gloom, peering past the pillars and down the stone lanes, looking for the Handlers. A lesson of some kind to those who survive.” “A guardian to protect against the spirits of the dead?” “What is that two-headed eagle?” Philastes asked. Joose had been insistent that this was where they would meet.
They stood at the base of a thick column in the center of a small courtyard, atop which Indrajit was just now losing sight of a sculpted double-headed eagle. He hunched forward in his lumpy purple cassock, his four-clawed hands worrying the ivory tube he’d brought, his long triangular head swaying side to side. “You’re not supposed to like it,” Joose said. There were four of them now, and they were experimenting with a uniform. The Protagonists all wore matching armor. Occasionally, the metal studs in his leather skirt caught glints of light, like a thin swarm of fireflies buzzing about his hips. His undyed gray linothorax breastplate, with the Protagonists’ insignia of an ear painted on it, was visible as a whitish blob. In the gloom, the Pelthite’s dusky skin and black hair made him hard to see. “I don’t like this place,” Philastes Larch muttered.
“A Lesson to Those Who Survive” takes place in his Indrajit & Fix series, which includes In The Palace of Shadow and Joy and Between Princesses & Other Jobs. Butler is the author of the Witchy War series, the Cunning Man series (with Aaron Michael Ritchey), Abbott in Darkness, and many other novels and stories.
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