Till Human Voices Wake Us Page 2

  “Honest Iago.”

  He was touched by this, as Will usually refused to play the game of quotations; if somewhat miffed by the choice of which particular allusion to bring in. “Honey-tongued Will. I am sure you could persuade us that Acheron ran through Argos.”

  “If you insist, I have also considered the shape of the story of Orpheus the musician. He was of  Thrace in the stories; there could be a river there. And indeed he did cross Acheron.”

  “It would be a complex play with both Agamemnon and Orpheus to treat.”

  “I have a ready pen; I can write more than one. They would pair well in some ways. Orpheus came to a confliction of desires, not duties. But in both there are the prohibitions.”

  “There are duties in that story.”

  “He chose to enter the land of the dead for his love. That is a fine tale indeed, but what duties are there? He flouted the human duty of obeying necessity for the higher love of—what shall we call his Eurydice?”

  “It seems even less like a river,” Raphael observed, carefully tucking a few loose strands of magic back into their places.

  “Even better: the farther from the reality, the better the analogy. Consider the man who loves enough to follow his beloved into the land of the dead! What is she? His soul? His art? His muse? I would follow my muse far and away.”

  “You did follow her to Fairyland.”

  “And you? How far would you follow yours?”

  “I have none.”

  “Honest Iago! Your voice goes flat, your shoulders tense, your hand gestures a dismissal half-seen in the glimmered reflections cast upon you by the river. Truly you have no muse. Very well. Do you seek one? Your assignations of the older days and now: what of them? Are they your search for a light to light your way?”

  “They are errands, nothing more.” Errands of his duty to Ysthar, he called them to himself. He made his shoulders relax, settled himself again into character: the openly pseudonymous James, Will’s friend and Robin’s, well known to the magic folk of Ysthar as a small mage, vaguely connected with the reclusive Lord of  Ysthar; a far cry from the glittering film star James Inelu, or indeed the splendid lord magus; or himself.

  “Errands—fine word! Whither do you wander on your errands? What path do you stray from? Shall I use you as my model? Are they after pleasures or duties or both? Agamemnon chooses duty, aye, but perhaps his tragedy is that he prefers his duty to his conscience.”

  “I should be concerned indeed to know I was your model for all the characters you’ve written me to play.”

  “Honest Iago.”

  Raphael thrust his hands into his pockets and considered some responses of varying wit and temper to that. Not that he’d played Iago for Will. By the time he thought of what to say, he had drawn ahead, Will having stopped to retie his shoelace. Realizing he was a hundred yards ahead Raphael turned back to see three figures advance out of the narrow alley between two converted warehouses.

  By the time he covered the distance Will was down, his balance compromised. Raphael felt a faint affinity with that warrior Agamemnon as he strode into the affray, laying about with elbow and edge of hand and foot and Will’s dropped umbrella. He fought as cleanly as was compatible with a quick victory, his self-imposed rules to avoid causing permanent injury or using magic. The men were thugs, not skilled assassins, and, though certainly sent by Circe, were not expecting his skill. Perhaps forty seconds passed before they fled.

  Raphael did use his magic to assure himself of privacy while he pulled Will upright. The poet was breathing heavily, his eyes narrowed with surprise, indignation, and pain, fear not yet fully present.

  “How are you hurt?”

  Will spat, coughed weakly, spat again. “A buffet to the stomach. Faugh.”

  Raphael let his adrenalin diminish, heart thundering. He was astonished at how angry he was. It was the last week of the Game; by its fourth rule he was not to be the object of attack. He had felt safe to walk with his friend, and here he had brought him into danger.

  Will unbent slowly. “I shall be sore upon the morrow.” He peered around nervously, caught Raphael’s calm gesture. “You’re not afeared they’ll return?”

  “No.”

  “Shall we report it?”

  “No. Can you walk?”

  “I’m bruised, not broken. Aye.” He gasped as he took a step, but Raphael saw from his movements there were no injuries beyond the battering. “What of you? That was a magnificent rout. I’ve rarely seen you brawl before.”

  “I’m fine. We should get you home.”

  Will nodded shakily and grasped him by the elbow. Raphael let him lean, bounding his step to Will’s slower one. He picked the shortest route towards Robin’s Belgravia townhouse, which took them through the City instead of along the river. It was perhaps half past twelve in the morning, and the moon had set behind the Isle of Dogs. Alert now, Raphael was unafraid of taking narrow alleys, covered mews, strange routes that he knew from many a midnight ramble through London.

  As he led Will into the dark crack between a bank and a church his friend said, “Are you certain we should take this way?”

  “It’s most direct.”

  “I’ll grant that, but we’ve been attacked out of a dark alley once this evening. Or I have. You sent them off with dispatch.”

  “I’m sorry. I doubt we’ll be attacked again. I’m watching now.”

  “A comfort indeed. You know who those men were?”

  “I know who sent them.”

  “Your errands take you into darker corners than ever I suspected.” Raphael led him at this sideways along a garden wall, through an ivy-hidden gate, and finally up via a series of stepped walls onto a roof-line that afforded them a view of north London as an ink sketch against scudding clouds. Will gasped slightly. “And also to finer vistas.”

  Raphael leaned against a wide, warm chimney so Will could rest. As the echoes of their soft footsteps quieted he took note of the new CCTV cameras since his last jaunt along this route. He fitted them into other known dangers: the hollow roof that boomed under an unwary step, the narrow railing that Will probably could not have managed to cross even uninjured, the lit portions and the jump and the hidey-holes of people and things he did not want to deal with at the moment.

  “Who did send them?”

  “I have an enemy,” he replied, deciding on the route. “I’m very sorry you were caught in it. I wasn’t paying enough attention. I cry you mercy.” He paused, waiting for the clouds to flood the landscape with a grey wash. “It would be better to be quiet this next stretch.”

  “I defer to your wider experience, as the river said to the sea.”

  Raphael thought that was perhaps something Will had heard from Robin. With careful haste he brought him home over the rooftops to where Robin’s servant Zebulun awaited with a fire and wine and a nod for Raphael’s murmured comment that they’d had a slight scuffle. Will let himself be bundled off with his only parting comment being, “It is a great gift to have good light; I shall be able to write another hour yet before bed.”

  He didn’t say whether he was inspired by the river or the fight or the conversation, and Raphael, turning his attention back towards his duties, did not ask him.

  Chapter Two

  Views from the Underground

  He strode south through a series of winding alleys given over to the peculiar businesses between Belgravia and Westminster, shabby cafés in the bottoms of government buildings and purveyors of ecclesiastical odds and ends. Walking briskly and silently he reached the river not far from Vauxhall Bridge.

  A ladder descended to the river near it. He clambered over the railing and stood at length on the mud of the river bed, near an opening in the embankment that would let him into the under parts of the city. A fog was rolling up along the inky river counter to its ebb tide.

  His vision adjusted slowly to the deeper darkness. He felt his direction more by way of magic than by sight. He sometimes saw a glimpse o
f stone or water, but more often he saw the shapes of corners and hollows by the sinuous motion of ribbons and pools and threads and upswellings of magic.

  Sometimes he wondered if he might, ghostlike, be missing half the solidity of the undergirdings of the city; he caught himself every once in a while halfway between a wall and the river, or standing with no awareness of how he had come to be there in the middle of some subterranean lake, or catching a glimpse of a sudden silver streak as the Tube wound its own way apart from him.

  He came quite close to the lowest of the Tube lines, drawn there by a faint intimation of danger. It was not strictly speaking on his path, but he made his way to the shadows opposite the platform, beyond the edge where the light fades but where there was still room to stand between the train and the wall. There was a woman on the platform, standing alone and obviously nervous about the two men laughing and joking roughly at the other end. Raphael waited a moment, watching.

  There was a bottle of ginger beer by the woman’s foot. One of the men pushed the other so he stumbled towards her and she started, knocking the bottle. It rolled off the edge of the platform and landed with an attention-catching chink on the line.

  The bottle did not break on impact, but spun quivering. It lay spinning on the rail as the pressure built for only a few moments: but when it exploded the woman and one of the men shrieked.

  All three laughed, and the tension shattered with equal finality. When the train pulled up in a blast of stale air Raphael felt no qualms leaving her to get on. He himself went through a cleft in the wall opposite him and continued downwards.

  The path corkscrewed down and down until the only sounds were the low breathings and strange noises of the blind places of the earth.

  It was the sort of place where he expected to come across Cerberus at every corner, to come upon a door superscribed with:

  Through me one enters the sorrowful city;

  Through me the eternal woe;

  Through me the lost.

  Justice moved my high Maker:

  Divine power made me,

  The highest wisdom and the first love.

  Before me was nothing created

  That was not eternal, and eternal I endure.

  Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

  Despite himself, when he came to Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, he paused to listen to the thick and turgid air. He heard no breath let out in a triple growl, no snarl of the dog who guards the gate, no hint of any life at all, in fact. His own heartbeat was small against the weight of the blackness, and he could hear nothing; without magic he would have been entirely blind.

  Raphael picked his way through the caves that echoed high above his head in sharp staccato beats. The tunnel twisted about itself, growing progressively more entangled with the border with Eahh. So close to another world his awareness of his own was sharper than his awareness of his body; he felt as if half his being were implicated in the overlapping layers of magic.

  Here there was none of the gentle fraying into the Tangled Borderlands that marked most of the other borders, where one might stray back into Ysthar as easily as out of it: here the border had cut-edged clarity. Circe was the wife of the Lord of Eahh, and her occasional crossings kept the connections between the two worlds wider open than he much liked. This particular passage gaped even further under the weight of the dragon who had chosen it for his lair.

  Fulgor Goldhladen had neither died nor gone elsewhere, as Raphael had half-thought he might, seeking climes where gold and treasure were more easily gained than modern Ysthar. The dragon lay asleep on a hoard so vast the ransom of whole continents had spilled unattended into the farther reaches of the caves.

  As Raphael neared the central lair he found himself growing short of breath from the nearness of Eahh, the weight of its otherness crashing against his mind. Finally he came to where Fulgor’s tail poured down a waterfall of blue and red and purple gemstones, and he started to pick his way along the furlongs of his length.

  It was only after he ducked under the arch of one talon nearly half again his height that he began to hear the sound of the dragon’s breathing, slow and strong and the same almost-regular pattern as the asymptotes of the moon’s orbit. He walked on, now beside leg, now wing, now leg again, now furled mass of body, now proud arch of wingtip, now foreleg, angling towards the place where the dragon’s head rested, the bulging eyes that were larger than his full span closed. In his slumber the dragon’s head had slipped half across the diaphanous veil between the worlds.

  At length Raphael halted beside the dragon’s throat, amazed not at the pulsating muscle beside him but that he could see parts of Eahh through the rippling border. He saw a winter landscape: frozen lakes and water-meadows and precipitous pink and grey rocks, trees like spruce and pine and birch, snow in a heavy blanket.

  From what he could see he was looking out from the mouth of a cave, quite high up. The land, with its mantle of dark green and grey forest and white-clad plains, unfolded itself below him in stark magnificence.

  It was lit with sunlight of such intensity that he was surprised that it did not reflect into where he stood in darkness. Above him lay miles of earth and stone and habitation, and above that the yellow fog, and the coming morning that would not be as luminous as this landscape.

  He had never thought Eahh might be beautiful.

  He was standing close to the dragon’s head, very close to the border so as to see through it. He had to strain to see past the streamers of magic that constantly skidded from one side to the other, in and out of Ysthar. Leaning forward to see how the land changed towards what he took to be the east—for it seemed as if there might be habitation in that direction, though for thousands of miles it was wild in every other—he brushed his hand against the very border itself.

  Pain speared through him and he stepped back in shock, only to trip over a pile of metal and fall heavily on knobbly bones still beneath it. He was stunned by a double sensation, the first that he had actually burned himself, and the second that blinding white light was pouring forth like a small sun from the fabric of the border.

  Even as he winced away from the light the dragon woke.

  Fulgor twisted his head upright and writhed his serpentine bulk into a series of taut arcs, his scarlet crest upraised and scales abruptly rough-hackled. He focused on Raphael: and then he roared.

  Oh, how he roared. The sound filled all the empty spaces around them and set the metalwork belling.

  Without thought or effort, Raphael’s magic reached up to the flamboyant sound. He wrapped himself in tendrils of power around its central core of bitter-hot fire. In unconscious desire he scrambled along the shifting surface to stand upright, hands uplifted.

  The fire hurt his mind and body but even as he noticed the pain it grew into a savage desire, the strength of it like strong wine in his veins. Gold spattered around him from the heat; but his bones thrilled with resonating power. He caught the magic reflecting back and forth from dragon to border, absorbing it into his being, reaching into the fire.

  The burning gold smelled hot and almost languorous, the smoke lotus-scented.

  His shadow stretched enormous in front of him, but it shrank before the dragon. Fulgor loomed larger than reality seemed capable of holding, filling the entirety of a cavern the size of a mountain, blazing with fire of all colours. His fire sparked from the gems and gold melted onto his scales and reflected back a thousand times from jewels—carbuncles and rubies and emeralds and diamonds—and goblets and coins and crowns and mirrors and necklaces, sapphires and pearls the size of ostrich eggs, and armour of steel and enamel and gold and the magic craft of Fairyland.

  Fulgor roared again and fire and smoke filled the air of the cavern, until Raphael’s shadow splintered about him and he stood in the black shadow of a blossom of dragonfire and smoke.

  The dragon was as old as the North Wind, his fire sharper even than Raphael’s heart’s desire to bite down on it. Raphael pushed himse
lf into the burning, his magic reaching up the coils—stepped forward—shifted the golden hoard. A pile of coins from the old empire of Astandalas skittered down to his feet: and with the small noise his astonishment suddenly snapped into perspective.

  He raised his protections out of insignificance and lifted his head and spoke in a voice that cleft the echoes: “Why do you roar so, Fulgor Goldhladen? Speak if you would to me; otherwise be silent, and I shall do the work I came here to do.”

  The dragon struck out at him, fixing his eyes with his own. Great eyes, seductive eyes, eyes that burned black and white and gold, eyes like the deep heart of the planet, eyes like suns.

  Raphael met the dragon’s glance squarely, and when their gazes locked he did not flinch. Here he had no need to keep his attention contained for fear of accidentally touching another too fiercely. He stared directly at the dragon without fear for what he might do, for here he stood on the edge of his world looking inwards, the quiet heart of a storm of noise and fury.

  The dragon dropped with a resounding thud of ringing silence. A few tinkles as small bits of metal settled again. Raphael’s ears were full of a tintinnabulation of sounding brass and cymbals like the sound of continents colliding. He listened to the sound so nearly music with an agonizing desire that shocked him with its intensity, more bitter than dragonfire in its heart. As he flinched inwardly away from the emotion, he heard a deeper rumble from the dragon’s gullet: “I was sleeping deeply, and was surprised by the light. I apologize, lord, for threatening you.”

  Raphael half-reefed the outstretched sails of his magic, focusing strictly on his present concerns. He let the desire pass as if it were the shadow of a bird crossing before the sun, and only when he was firmly in character as the Lord of  Ysthar did he speak again. “I accept your apology.”

  The dragon sighed, and there was the judder of Cerberus for him, the echoes doubling and tripling the sound until it might have been voiced by the guardian of the doorway to the Land of the Dead. “O lord,” he said, “I feel the end of the Game coming down the wind.”