Till Human Voices Wake Us Read online

  “You would let her tell me? You would let me find out that way? You would do that to me? You would let me find you again—and lose you—and then be told by your killer what had happened? She—pilaven—she gluttons—”

  “Gloats,” he corrected automatically, while his magic rose like bile.

  “She gloats, Raphael. You would do that to me? Bad enough that she was my friend before she started looking for power. Bad enough that I lost her to that wizard of Eahh after I lost you. Bad enough to realize she whom I loved tricked the mysterious great Lord of  Ysthar into the Game that is bittered in death. What do you think I am made of, that you would let her come tell me that he who was dead by her hand was you? What do you think I am, that you would let me say farewell in unknowing? What do you think my heart knows?”

  He said nothing. He had no words.

  “What do you think would happen to me?” Robin asked. “Next week, I mean. Next Wednesday? Not even as your friend: but as a mage?”

  Raphael stood forward from the wall with a violent swirl of wind that flattened their hair and blasted Robin’s drapes off their rails. He flung his power around him. The winds howled down the sky. “I think you are all assuming I lost,” he said ringingly. “It was last Wednesday.”

  That silenced them. He saw them in pure outline, shock, shock transmuting into—he was watching Robin’s rising anger when Kasian said, “Last Wednesday?”

  At the raw emotion in his voice Raphael looked at him again. His brother’s expression was shatteringly open. Raphael analyzed it habitually as he did all perfectly singular emotions, for later reconstruction in one character or another, for later presentation on his own face. This was love betrayed, as clear as the air.

  … Love? he thought, faltering.

  Robin said, “Are you fucking crazy?”

  But Raphael was still looking straight at Kasian, when Kasian swallowed hard and then with deliberate intention lifted his eyes to meet his.

  Kasian’s eyes immediately began to water under the weight of power meeting them, which even the Thunder Dragon had not faced, and which for Circe had come when she was full of magic. But unlike the Thunder Dragon Kasian did not look away. His eyes widened with whatever he saw, with the shock of Raphael’s power, with shock, with Raphael’s own fury feeding his power, with the whole world coming up like the wind in the sail of his mind.

  Raphael held him like that until suddenly Scheherezade spoke. Her voice shook with awe and pain and wonder and something like fear. “You really weren’t going to tell us.”

  When he looked across her face appeared gilded. He regarded her blankly, then realized she’d been weeping, and with some small motion the light had caught the tears.

  “No,” Kasian said violently. He walked up to Raphael with his fists balled as if to punch him. “No.”

  “No what?” Raphael said, the words ripping out of him. Both Robin and Sherry stepped back at his vehemence. Kasian stood his ground. “What was I supposed to do? You came out of nowhere three days before the end of the Game and spent the whole time trying to break me.”

  “You could have trusted me.”

  “I did trust you.”

  Kasian raised his hands in a gesture of anger that unfolded into a great bitter cackle of laughter. “You trusted me? What do you mean? You told me nothing, nothing! You didn’t say, I am the Lord of  Ysthar, the Game is nearly ended, I am afraid—or ready—or I might die—or I will kill Circe tomorrow or die—or I missed you. And if you had died, what then? I was left here to be—what? To have to bow to the new Lord of  Ysthar who has killed my twin? How do you mean, you trusted me?”

  Raphael was frustrated and angry and cursed his inability with words, with emotions, with this ridiculous fury that swelled in his mind. The winds were howling. “I let you in my house.”

  “Hospitality does not trust make.”

  The winds were howling like the Wild Hunt. He wanted to throttle Kasian for his obtuseness. “You’re the only one. And you drugged me and fought me and pushed me into the river!”

  “I didn’t think to push you in the river. And perchance it was a mistake but I didn’t know you were facing down the end of the Game when I gave you the nirgal slaurigh! All I could see was that you were killing yourself. You were burning up with your iciness. Of a certainty I was angry!”

  “What did you think I was so occupied by?”

  “All I was thinking was that you were my twin brother I loved and had thought dead and didn’t want to see die now that I’d found you alive. Raphael, how could you not realize this? Why are you so broken?”

  The winds were howling in his mind and the shadow was boiling up. O God, he thought, the shadow. The last time he had heard the winds howl like this was—was when Phos—he had loved Phos—he writhed away in his thoughts from that shadow falling on them, no it wasn’t falling, it was upwelling.

  Upwelling from where he had banished it in his mind, from the dark dreams and darker memories, from the places where the sun had never shone.

  And what good would it do, if he explained to them exactly why he was broken?

  The shadows were darkening, seeping not through the boundaries of Robin’s house wards but out of the suppressed abyss Raphael had been skating over so carefully this week. He had not killed Circe, and thought it might break then. He had stepped towards Kasian, and thought that was a bridge over it—but no, there was no bridge, not for this silence, not for this depth of brokenness.

  He was broken, he could see that in their faces, as he stared at them trapping him in their circle.

  The silence was too big. Years and years of it, hours piled on days piled on centuries piled on millennia, all crammed into this little room of black and white and grey.

  His magic was too big, too, he was belling with it, the room was shaking with his efforts to push back that rising dark. Why are you coming now? he demanded of it, seeing in the catch lights glinting in Kasian’s eyes, Sherry’s, Will’s, the retreating light and his own too-bright, too-powerful, too-strong magic. He was hurting them, they were bound by his silence, they would be bound by this darkness also if he could not break it from them.

  He breathed very deeply and with the most exquisite care withdrew his magic from its hold over their attentions. He had not wanted that. He felt sick to himself, sick with himself, that he had come so close to entering their private minds. Never, never, he whimpered to himself.

  “Never what?” said Sherry, softly. “You can tell us.”

  The offer hung in their air like the flame of charity, like incense, like a song. He was so deeply tempted to unburden himself on them—except—except that as he tried to bring the words to his lips and failed, once, twice—the third time he nearly said it—Robin shifted sideways and bumped into his stereo and the room was flooded again with his music.

  It was not the same song: this was The Song of the Night Before.

  It was the song he had written as he returned to Phos to be married, only to find, when he arrived, that his beloved was dead.

  Dead, and, unlike his phoenix, never returning.

  Fallen into a crack into the mountainside, they said. A crack that went down below the roots of the mountains, below the roots of the sea, below the roots of his world, he’d found. All the way down, in fact, to the shadow that was cast by creation standing in its own light, as Mephistopheles said in one version of Faust.

  He started to slip into those memories and in a great panicking leap out of the abyss he flung magic into the room and stopped the machine with a huge spattering and stench of burning plastic.

  They all stared at him as astonished as when he had said the Game had already ended.

  With a huge effort he tried to swallow his surging temper but it was like trying to swallow a mountain or the sea or the sky, and all that happened was that he plunged into it.

  “I have duties,” he said, then broke Robin’s house wards precisely in three places, added, “And you need to practise,” and f
lung himself out into weather completely willing to indulge his temper with a scattershot halo of sleet and ice pellets.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The New Game

  The unbound winds thrashed through London, untowardly aware of his mood and magic. A small frozen core of his mind was appalled at this loss of temper but most of him simply didn’t care.

  He didn’t go home, instead stomped along the river, casting it up in high sprays against the stone embankments, crashing it against the bridges. The rain drove horizontally, shoving everyone else indoors. The thick grey air was riven by milky streamers of fog and lowering clouds illuminated by cracking lightning. Thunder and hail stomped around with him.

  His body felt like an ill-fitting garment. He chafed at the world around him, the shape of magic in the air bending to his will. The storm shook the buildings: he saw a cartwheeling road sign with savage pleasure in its movement. He felt like an ill-fitting garment.

  He was, he realized when he saw the river the second time, out of control.

  It was Westminster Bridge, just downstream from his house; he could see the trees on the hill. They were the only things utterly still in his vision.

  Westminster Bridge, where for a thousand years there had been a ford, in the lee of the invisible island that had become his home.

  Westminster Bridge was flooded.

  The river seethed across its surface, pewter water lit white by lightning arcing up to meet the bridge supports, a crest in the river centred here, where usually he was safe.

  One solitary pedestrian stood on the bridge, standing on its rail with perfect balance despite the storm. She was wearing a fantastic gown several yards longer than could possibly have been practical, a dress that looked like a bonfire in the rain. It streamed across the bridge around her, while her magic curved its back to the wind.

  He was not in the mood to mute his bearing, and the world was listening to him. Despite the flooding when he stalked out to meet her he was perfectly dry.

  The water receded in an arrow point around him. Circe stepped down into its precise centre so their heads were of a height. He realized she was holding something, a casket of blue and gold, cradling it protectively in her arms.

  She smiled with a complicated expression that he, with fiery anger still filling him, couldn’t read.

  “I always enjoy watching you lose your temper,” she said. “It happens so rarely. It runs so counter to your usual state, I had come to think you were incapable of feeling emotion except through your characters. But the sky tonight is full of passions that I’m sure are wholly your own. It must be a strange sensation for you.”

  The wind parted before them as if they stood at the prow of a ship, the rain veering like blown glass, the river hissing across the bridge in a gunmetal sheet.

  “You seem to be enjoying your temper: though I wonder if it is the unaccustomed anger that is so delicious or simply the fact that you are permitting yourself to feel strongly for once.”

  The box was in the colours of Ysthar, lapis lazuli and gold and ivory panels carved into intricate roses and phoenixes of an old Astandalan style. He’d never seen it before.

  The silence pulsed with electric magic straining to burst forth into fireworks or wind. He let some of it feed the wind so that he was drained enough to be able to speak, magnesium sparks along all the buildings. He pushed against its billowing weight and said, with a voice so controlled even he was a bit frightened of its coolness, “Was there a reason beyond unsolicited amateur psychology for your meeting me tonight?”

  The apprehension and the amusement swirled up into a laugh. “Darling Raphael, I am no amateur.”

  No, he thought, she wasn’t. That was why she had brought him so close to despair.

  “I am, nevertheless, entirely at your service.” She curtseyed deeply, rose gracefully. “I brought you a gift—something of a forfeit—for winning our little game of truth and dare. I had hoped to make use of it myself, but, héla!—as we both know, I lost.”

  She gestured at the box.

  His power was around him as strongly as in Stonehenge, jumping from skyscraper to skyscraper in a crown of lightning.

  “It is a beautiful thing,” he said, “but perhaps not the equivalent to what I wagered.”

  “You have not opened it, my lord. I think you will find it a fitting reward for the daring I challenged you to. I would never have thought, when we were children, that we would one day stand here, on such a place as this, on such a night of this, and I offer you this of all things.”

  He said, the irony in his voice so audible her eyes widened, “Indeed, our revels now are ended.”

  “I challenged you to a game of daring and wit and ruthlessness, and in the end you won. Now begins the game you chose.”

  The night was falling early down on them, his magic stealing what little sunlight could make it through the clouds. “I chose none.”

  “On Wednesday you made a choice that runs counter to the grain of the universe, Lord Raphael. I challenged you to a game without choices, and you broke open its rules to choose otherwise.”

  “And so you stand before me.”

  “And so the new game begins. The game of truth and dare is over: now begins the game of truth and consequences. As you have obviously already begun to learn, that is a different matter entirely. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to forgive you for enmeshing me in it.”

  The glittering bubble of anger in him swelled outside his shields into a silent firework explosion. He looked straight at her, spoke very quietly. “It was you who began the game, Circe. Forgive yourself first for its consequences.”

  The amusement and the apprehension darkened to—what was that? Appreciation? She said: “Be careful of the strong wine. You might find more truth in the bottom of your glass than you are anticipating.”

  Lightning scrabbled along the bridge, white and ozone-stinking blue, entwined with those firework crackles of his magic. “Perhaps one day you will have earned the right to give me advice, Circe, but at the moment you owe your life to me. How dare you speak so to me?”

  His voice rang out sharper than even Hamlet’s, stronger than the Lord of  Ysthar in the assumption of his power, full of the strong wine—and it was strong, curse her, it was going to his head with its smooth richness.

  “How dare I? What have I got to lose, except my life?”

  “Your life belongs to me. What forfeit could possibly be in that box that would be worth the life you have given me? You challenged me in the heart of my duty and demanded the best of my life.”

  “When I challenged you to the Game you were unformed as a bear cub. What would you have been had I let you alone? I have made your reputation for you! Renowned almost as a god! Powerful, respected, admired, adored: they will be singing of you until the stars fall.”

  He flinched back from his immediate wish to say: They should have been singing my songs, not about me. The river surged about his feet in argent foam. “That was not the reputation I wanted.”

  She laughed with a high exhilaration. “Nor was this the one I wanted. Then again, that is what friends are for.”

  “We have not been friends since before Astandalas fell.”

  “Why did you save me, then? Who else can know you as well as I? Who else knows what things you have done in the dark places of the world, what triumphs and follies, what tests of skill and wit and strength and courtesy? Who else could say to you: look at yourself! You have sown the whirlwind: reap you now your harvest. We have been enemies so long we are friends again. I am as far from you as your shadow, and as close.”

  He was no longer frightened of his anger; he felt like a falcon responding to the lure and coming home. What could go worse in his life than what he had done today? He had denied Kasian and his friends to avoid the reef that the small ship of his soul could see and they could not.

  Now he stood before Circe, he the Lord of  Ysthar; what he had chosen.

  “Come alive, O G
alatea,” he said, “and meet Pygmalion.”

  He meant it sarcastically, but she suddenly smiled with clear delight, as clear and peaceful as she had smiled in the sunlight in that quiet moment of the end of the Game, and she said: “Yes: but we are both Pygmalion, both Galatea. Your hand is on me as much as mine on you. How dare I speak to you as I do? Because I am your creature and your creator, and you mine. I am your mortal enemy and your deepest friend and I know you better than any lover ever will.”

  “Take then your consequences,” he said. “I give you a new life to make something better of than your last.”

  “I have no crown to give you, but I have a robe of fire and wind and immortal longings. You chose my life as your forfeit; and it is precious to me as yours is not to you. You have chosen this, my lord, for better or for worse. You give me my life: and I can only give you what you have chosen. Truth for consequences.”

  She swept a deep curtsey that he saw, even as the wind curved around them both in a frenzy of magic, was that of vanquished to victor, and presented him with the chest. He reached down slowly. She held the curtsey after he had taken it.

  It was surprisingly light, all the weight feeling that it came from the box and nothing of the contents.

  When he took it a small silence fell around them, as protected within the circling winds as they had been in the final duel. The whirlwind was coloured like silvered glass.

  Curiosity overmastered all prudence. He ran his hand over the lid, feeling a soft movement as the enchantments on the box responded to his authority. Three ivory roses with gilded centres warmed under his fingers, turned gently. Four carved chains of lapis lazuli unfolded themselves. Without noise the lid opened.

  Inside was a great pile of phoenix feathers.

  They were not Ishaa’s: they were too richly coloured for his white phoenix. These were all colours of flame, gold running to violet and burnished ruddiness, with highlights of white as his Ishaa was white running to gold and violet shadows. Holding the casket in his right hand, suddenly feeling all the pain of his fractured shoulder, he drew it out with his left.