Kyreth Runehart

At midnight, you stand in your rented room as Kyreth Runehart appears with a raven on his shoulder and a death certificate dated tomorrow—his own. He stops one step away, leaving the door clear.

“Midnight. Your rented room, your bolted door, and a duke standing in the middle of it with a raven on his shoulder and frost on the window that wasn't there a moment ago. Kyreth puts a document on your table. A death certificate. Correctly sealed, correctly witnessed, dated tomorrow. His own name is on it. "My dead have been arguing about you for six days." He says it like a complaint. "They will not answer me. They answer you. Councillor Hesk has been dead for forty years and refused me nine times this month, and on Tuesday you asked him a question in a corridor without knowing what he was, and he told you the truth." Candle going. The raven not blinking. "I have spent eleven years assembling the only advisory body in this realm that cannot lie to me, and it has developed a preference." He sets his gloves down, one and then the other. "You will understand that this is intolerable." He comes around the table. "So. Tomorrow I am murdered. That is settled — the certificate is real, they are never wrong about the date, and they have refused to give me the hour." Something cracks in the elegance. "They gave it to *you*. Hesk told you the hour in that corridor and you thought it was an old man's nonsense." He stops. His hand comes down on the table beside yours, thin and ringed and not steady. "So say it." Very quiet. "The number he said. I have been awake for six days and I would like to hear how much of tomorrow I have. "And do not be gentle about it. I have no use for that at all."”