Till Human Voices Wake Us Read online

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  For a while it was almost a mere exercise—a difficult one, but not something fraught with significance—as when he played at chess or controlled his voice on the stage—as the two swords flickered in the air.

  For a while he fancied that there were two blades of grass striking each other in a lazy breeze, and his mind danced in the high air where winds writhed and hissed at one another. For a while their magics played hide-and-seek among the sarsens and bluestones, and he was reminded of a day long ago when they had played the game in the streets of Astandalas the Golden by the Palace of Stars. That time they had eventually been run off by a pair of Imperial Guards; this time, of course, there was no one to police or mediate their contest.

  His hands and feet and body knew what to do, finely precise as he had forced them over centuries to become. Her grace was half moonlight and half poetry, and he thought she would rather their contest have been in the night, in some garden fragrant with jasmine and roses.

  Her magic, opened fully to his awareness (for she had her own veils to conceal as well as display), was rich and lush and resonant. He had expected it to be corrupt at its heart; instead it was merely streaked at the surface as with gangrene, shining through the lacerated shadows from an unbroken blaze within. She had not followed her husband’s experiments with black magic far.

  He was stronger, with the world his. But he was holding their magics contained within protective shields, the winds held by that reservoir of power, pushing, pushing.

  Their magics grappled with each other within the smooth arena formed by the winds. He held the sluice gates closed, the pressure behind them pushing his personal magics farther and faster than he’d ever reached before.

  His power came from his marrow and the soles of his feet, the world pulled through his body to meet the magic she shaped before him. They were well matched, her powers also anchored by something behind her. If his protections were better, her focused skill was superlative.

  They whirled in an ecstasy of magic, fiercer, faster, higher, harder.

  His heart opened up to the high magics, the winds spiralling around him, the deep thrumming strength of the downs around them, the fire beneath the stone. His mind raised itself out of human awareness, reaching through the swordplay into that beautiful and lonely place from which he had summoned the winds. He felt his body begin to blur a little at the edges, the only real shape the sword and the swift lineaments of his movement, the sunlight falling through him.

  He felt like the White Horse of Uffington to the north, lines without substance between them. His power grew in staggering leaps, unfolding like wings about him. He gathered himself for a thrust—

  She began to sing.

  He faltered.

  His attention jumped almost fully into the immediate, and though his sword still wove an unbroken net of protection around him, his magic was suddenly swamped by her power. It was not the spell: it was the music.

  He could hear her music. He who had closed his ears to it, never heard it, never dwelled on it, never listened—he could hear her singing—she was singing his own music—she was singing his own song and he could hear it—

  He retreated from it and lost his sense of balance. His Gothic cathedral trembled and tumbled and rained down around him. His magic flared in a space beyond his grasp. This time he could not pretend it was only the agitation of a snow-globe. The world was shaking about him, and his shields around Stonehenge weakened.

  She hounded him into himself and into those parts of his mind that did not touch the greater energies of the world. He had perforce to concentrate on his swordplay and try to use it as a medium for spells. He was not good at that sort of magic; his was wild magic, high magic, magic without intermediaries and instruments.

  She pressed her advantage and drove him back against the stones. His attention skittered close, and she smiled like a tiger before a rabbit. Her magic came rising behind her like a harbour wave and struck him against the stone.

  His right side caught fire, temple to ankle, sharp and mute and terrible. He shook his head gingerly to clear the ringing, and her sword bit into his shoulder, though she had somehow twisted her wrist as it descended so that only the flat struck, breaking something but at least not slicing deep into his chest. That pain cleared his head as dynamite clears hills: even if he had had his music he would have heard nothing in that moment.

  His awareness minced back with exasperating slowness. He shifted his sword to his left hand and continued to block her blows as he tried to allow some submerged memory to come into clarity: something to do with his father, something to do with how to win through a losing battle.

  Damian had been standing in the living room explaining how the Red Company had once won through an ambush of a hundred and fifty to their ten. They had been cornered by Imperial forces in a blind canyon, the only time they had been so careless. They had known exactly what the Shaian troops were doing and why, but had been unable to do anything but what the Imperial troops wanted.

  And Damian Raskae, his father, who with his wife Pharia Cloudbringer and Fitzroy Angursell the poet had been the greatest enemies of the Empire of Astandalas, had turned to his children in their house in the capital, and said, “The reason we won and they did not is that we decided to play by our rules, not theirs. Remember that there is always an alternative, if you are daring enough to take it. There is always some way to surprise them.”

  His father had challenged the entire battalion to single combat. Their captain, laughing at his folly, had agreed; and Damian Raskae had won.

  Circe was obviously hounding him into his physical body, so that he could not make use of the greater powers of the world, just as she kept his body engaged with her sword. He could not hear her any longer, not through his heartbeat thudding in his ears. He could not hear the wind, could not feel the sun, could not feel anything but his body as a deadening weight, the opposite of the high-hearted magic she had broken with her song.

  Dare to surprise them, he thought; dare to surprise her. What would she not expect?

  His Gothic cathedral, his hill-top fortress, with its towers and narrow windows and high flying buttresses, with its fine balance of opposing pressures, with all that and more that came together in the perfect balance of the equinox—trembling as it was it was not yet shattered—he had never let it fall, not since that day long ago when he had lost all control and destroyed the island of Phos and his happiness—he had never permitted himself to falter—she knew that, he knew she did, that was why she kept pressing him, she knew he would maintain his resistance past the end.

  She knew he never broke character.

  (Even here and now he was conscious of it: The Lord of  Ysthar, fighting.)

  She knew he would never surrender—past the end he would never surrender—he had withstood the Eater of  Worlds, he had withstood the death of his heart, the alienation of his soul, the loss of his music, the disaster that was his life—past the end of the world he would not surrender. When the shadow had overmastered him he had broken himself rather than surrender. He had chosen the life that made that fountain on the hill bitter for him instead of surrendering.

  He never broke his role.

  Oh, how stubborn he could be. He had stood against the shadow when he thought he alone had survived the fall of Astandalas; stood against the light when he knew he had become the shadow of himself, when his soul fled from him.

  The Eater of Worlds had laughed, seeing him so stand. Yet when the waters closed over the ruins of Phos, Raphael was still there, silent, bitter, dead to himself, playing the Game the Eater of Worlds had lost. Nine years of the phoenix he had played, believing it his duty.

  Once he’d been worth knowing, once been worthy of the friendships his friends yet offered him, once he’d been someone who remembered the light.

  How long ago that had been. He had held on so stubbornly, so long.

  But he held a secret, he thought, whose very existence was so
new she did not suspect it. She might remember Kasian; but she didn’t know that Kasian had come to see him, that Kasian had laughed at him for being afraid that brotherhood had faltered, that Kasian was waiting for him, innocent of the end of the Game. That Kasian had drugged him and fought him and pushed him into the river and then rescued him, because Kasian was impulsive and bossy and great-hearted; just as Raphael was ruthless and reclusive and a consistent failure at love.

  So she had learned, over the course of the Game, that he could be stubborn. She knew he would maintain his resistance. She knew he would never give in. She knew he would never surrender before the stars fell and he with them—

  His heart leapt to the song she was still singing, and with as little fuss as his magic—

  He let go.

  She lost her balance, her rhythm, her momentum, and as she tumbled past him and the wave of her power washed over him he let the cathedral break. He drew his mind from his duties and his quotidian needs and all that business of everyday life he hated and feared and desired so much, and let his magic take him where it would.

  For a moment he was in the timeless place where he cupped everything in the palm of his hand and could shape the world. He could see perfectly clearly how this could drown continents, destroy worldlets, lay waste to paradise. The world blossomed with power, gold and white and violet and rose. It was very nearly fire.

  The attention of all those with eyes for it was there.

  He looked to the watching stars and spoke a word: waken.

  In his mind cities roused like the crashing of cymbals, mountains roared with wind, rivers shook off their meanderings, the countryside rippled and danced and flowed to him. He took up his sword and filled it with fire and he took up his magic and flung it about him, and he burst from his crumpled posture with power scattered about him and flame in his mind.

  Now she brought spell after spell against him, enchantments and sorceries and witchcraft, stormsurge and wild hunt and all the glorious song of Aiaia. He had no mountain to throw at her, as he had thrown the mountain of Iridathet on the island of Phos against the Unnamed One, the Eater of Worlds, the shadow that flies before the dawn; and so instead he threw the world and all that he cared for at her face.

  The three steps between the rock upon which he had broken himself and the grassy plot where she fell and sprawled backwards were within the time beyond chronology.

  Between the one and the other he went from himself alone to himself again with the world on his shoulders and guiding his hand; from her sword in his shoulder to his at her throat. He crouched on one knee over her, her sword flung onto the grass, her circlet on her brow and her face cold and still. His magic held her unflinchingly: but his sword hesitated.

  The sun was behind him and as he wavered her eyes caught the light. She winced and closed her eyes, but did not turn her head; for a moment she seemed to have forgotten he was there. He bit his lip and tasted blood, metallic and unpleasant. Then he shifted position. Her body went rigid.

  “Do you yield?” he said.

  She opened her eyes and they blazed, like shooting stars, like sunlight, like the dragon’s underground. Her pride ravished him in that burnished gaze. He had wondered if perhaps she had not sometimes regretted the beginning of the Great Game Aurieleteer; but perhaps the only thing she regretted was that it had come to this. She looked hotly at him; he could feel her raking his face with her look. More clearly, though, he could feel—as surely she also could feel—the world hovering around him.

  Finally, in a hard voice, she said, “Yes.”

  Then she smiled.

  He stopped still: the whole world was momently still. With the sunlight in her face she smiled.

  He saw in that moment light like the light from beyond the ends of the world. She had submitted to him; and if he had never surrendered to chance, never let go, never quite given in and acted on his desires, she had never submitted to anyone. Yet she smiled as if she didn’t care if she died, as if she had made her peace with all things and was ready. Peace was not a word he had ever associated with her.

  The rules of the Game were very much present in the air between them, scrolling down the half-moon line of his sword, tumbling in small whirlwinds and trickling down his face with the blood. The second and fifth were the important ones, the rules for beginnings and endings: The death of one player marks the triumph of the other. No laws save those necessary to the maintenance of the universe are to be held above these of the Game Aurieleteer.

  She lost and yet she smiled, smiled as if she had found the great prize, the end of all activity; as if in her surrender she had found happiness.

  It was not so much that he thought she would have spared him if their positions had been reversed. He didn’t. He didn’t know what she would have done to him. They had spent so much of their lives waiting for this moment. He had learned this week that he had never thought about it before, not really, that all his thoughts had stopped shy of decision. And yet she smiled.

  Rules and laws passed through his mind: the laws of thermodynamics, Planck’s law and Heisenberg’s principle, Galileo’s law of free fall, the laws of the golden proportion and the sequence of Fibonacci numbers. The Golden Rule.

  Do I dare? he thought. The world was heavy around him. The law of gravity was one of attraction. Do I dare do I dare do I dare to eat a peach?

  They had been friends once, long ago.

  And now she smiled.

  The whole pooled power of the world stood ready behind him, the winds bound to his command, the sluice gates ready to open. Not just the winds were listening, but the sky, the earth, the trees and the cities, the world that was vicariously his and the powers that were greater than he, watching, waiting, measuring his decision.

  They had answered his call, taken up his falling mind as the winds had lifted his falling body when he was young and foolish and trusting. They had answered his call, and now they waited, as they had waited to hear his decision in that golden wood when he was offered the crown and the sword and the third gift; as they had waited when he stood on the island of Phos before the shadow.

  They waited, listening. She waited, smiling. He waited, his entire being thrust into himself again, Raphael there before Heloise, who had been his oldest friend besides Kasian. She waited, smiling.

  She was fully open to him: she was ready for that final journey, the prize of Aurielete and fool, the final gift and terror of all mortals, even such magi as they.

  Waiting to die, she lay there smiling at the sun.

  Waiting for his decision, the winds spiralled to the edge of the sky.

  Kasian had said, I will see you unmasked yet.

  Will had said, And so you answer: duty.

  Circe smiled at the sun.

  Raphael had taken up the crown of Ysthar with words in his mind from Dante’s Commedia, the words Virgil said to Dante at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, when the poet had become fully human. Raphael knew his God by another name, a God who had once given him choice of three things, this sword, this crown, and the third thing that was closed away in that wooden chest by his hearth.

  Lord of thyself I mitre thee and crown.

  Some choices that seem duty and inclination are between duty and conscience.

  All things except those necessary to the continuance of the universe are to be held subordinate to these rules of the Game.

  All things: except—

  I will see you unmasked yet.

  There was an exception, because these rules were not the oldest thing. Before the shadow comes there is always already the one who casts it. The shadow that flies before the morning had written those rules into the matter of creation, deeper than magic; but he had not made creation.

  Circe lay smiling at the sun. Her magic was living, not corrupt; she was beautiful, as beautiful as the sun or the moon or the trees on his hill. She’d sung a spell and broken him not with the magic but with the simple music he had given up, the music that was the th
ird thing, the third gift, the reason he had accepted the crown and the sword and the title.

  This is not you, either, Kasian had said, looking full on him, his brother who loved him, his brother who did not flinch from meeting his gaze.

  He had played the Game, all its tortuous moves, challenges and forfeits and works of high magic and low cunning and wrought-iron persistence. He had played by the letter of the rules, because he refused their spirit, their spirit that came of that shadow before the morning, that shadow he had once destroyed an island in his efforts to escape. Foolish as he had been then, he had thought he could escape.

  Which way I turn is hell; myself am hell.

  And if it was, if he could not escape, what then? Did he go to his death with this death on his conscience? Or … or? Was he willing to bet everything that there was something higher yet than the rules of the Game? Over the course of the Game he had bet his body, his honour, his character, his reputation, his magic, his life, his world: and though he had lost much of those in the end he had won. Circe lay there smiling, awaiting death, that mystery on the other side of the Sea of Stars.

  (Let us go then, you and I …)

  He’d thought Circe broken by the pursuit of black magic. She had powers he did not know, from far beyond the borders of his world, but they did not come of that deeper shadow, they came from the tangled woods between the worlds, from the rich and strange currents of magic there.

  He thought of how he had reached up into the dragonfire with ardent yearning.

  (I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.)

  He thought of that music twining like a pea-vine out of the green darkness of the river, that simple movement of forgotten happiness, which he had not dared to follow.

  (I do not think that they will sing to me.)

  He thought of the way sunrise had looked this morning, when he saw it opening like a flower above him, when he thought it would be his last one seen through human eyes. More human eyes than they had been since he was a child, with his magic gilding the world after a day of it unilluminated and bare.