Till Human Voices Wake Us Read online

  It was a great fall of a cape. It was the colour of sunset over the desert lands of the west, or sunrise over the eastern sea; the stark beauty of the first dawn of the summer in the countries to the back of the North Wind, or the blazon of a night falling in the tropical lands. It made Circe’s dress look like dying embers.

  It was more than weightless: it floated on the air, billowing silently as if it were a cloak of candleflames that burned in gentle horizontal curves.

  His anger blew out as abruptly as a candleflame. He spoke unsteadily: “This is not something that can be given.”

  Circe held her curtsey, her eyes kindled in the light from the feathers. She said, “You have won it.”

  Raphael looked at this cape of phoenix feathers, this glory of beauty, this thing that he realized was a relic of his first ancestor, the first lord of  Ysthar, the firstborn of creation. The phoenix cloak of ancient legend, made from the very feathers of the Lord Phoenix for his beloved Shargán of the Desert, when he courted her under the World Tree, in those days before the first Game Aurieleteer cast the Shadow King into the Abyss.

  The Cloak of Shargán, it was called. The Veil of the Morning. In his hands it felt like the three trees of the part of his garden that was not his garden.

  Circe said, “This is what you have chosen.”

  Raphael’s words ran out of him in a great inrushing of silence, like water through a broken dam. He stood silent in a greater silence held by the frozen storm. Nothing moved: nothing but the feathers on the air. The winds were blank to him, shocked, awestruck, nearly brought into human form by the beauty of the thing he held, by its magic that went back to the first days of creation.

  Only Circe had the strength to speak.

  “You gave me my life. I give you my forfeit. Accept what you have done, O Lord. This is the new age of the world, and you wear its crown.”

  And she dropped down to the obeisance that had once been granted to the Emperor of Astandalas alone.

  If the whirlwind had spoken he could not have been more devastated.

  Still clutching the box to his chest he fled home with the Veil of Shargán floating silently behind him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Long Night

  He had no idea what to do with the phoenix cloak.

  He had nowhere to put it. His first thought was to hang it on one of the trees by the fountain, like the golden fleece of Colchis, but it was still steadily pouring rain and once he let go of the storm he felt obscurely unclean, that he should purify himself before daring to step foot on the hill again. That left … nowhere. The cloak deserved a great temple or cathedral; not the back of an old chair in his living room.

  He put it on the back of the chair and then sank to the floor trembling. His neck ached.

  Everything ached, inside and out. He sat and stared at the mesmerizing shift of colours in the phoenix feathers, shivering, cradling his right side with belated protectiveness. He had no words in his thoughts, nothing except a great howling unhappiness and the pulsation of tremors.

  ***

  Much later he realized his head was pounding.

  ***

  Much later still he realized that the pounding was at least partially external. Someone was banging inefficiently just on the edge of his domestic protections.

  When he lifted his head everything stabbed with pain. He gritted his teeth and pushed himself upright, grabbing at the chair to get his legs to unbend. It was night. From how he felt it might have been the night of a thousand days since the last time he had seen the sun.

  He stumbled out to the stable door. The pounding continued, an irregular pattern as if the knocker was going in fits and starts. Raphael opened the door so that Kasian staggered to keep himself upright.

  It was raining finely outside his threshold. Robin and Kasian both looked bedecked with fairy dust or tiny gemstones on their hair and clothing.

  Robin closed his mouth from his momentary arrest. “You are the Lord of   Ysthar. Will you teach me?”

  “What?” Raphael said stupidly in response.

  Robin’s voice was passionate, far removed from his usual detached mockery. “Will you teach me magic? Please? If you decide you don’t want to be a hermit after all—or even if you do, I could give up the theatre if you insisted.”

  Raphael looked at Kasian, whose expression was mostly sombre except for the tucked-away smile. His brother shrugged. There was a pause, one that Raphael felt very awkwardly. Finally he said, “Why?”

  At this (which he thought a reasonable question, given his recent behaviour), Robin tipped back his head and laughed. A ringing fairy laugh; it echoed against the sober buildings of Millbank on the other side of their combined protections. Raphael’s were meant to protect himself from everybody but them, at the moment; Robin’s to prevent him and Kasian being noticed.

  Raphael could start to stretch his magic out to touch Robin’s magic now, though he felt nearly as incompetent as when under the influence of the nirgal slaurigh.

  When eventually the laughter diminished into giggles at his continued bewilderment, Robin wheezed out, “You can’t be frigging serious asking me why.”

  Raphael rubbed his forehead. “Aren’t you angry?”

  “Oh, furious.” Except his voice was light and mocking and friendly, and Kasian’s tucked-away humour grew into a definite expression of fond amusement.

  Raphael hesitated in confusion and wavering emotions, then grasped at one slippery bright fish of hope—his only coherent thought that he did not want to be left alone any longer with that cloak beholding him—and said, “You’d better come in.”

  They came into the courtyard, Robin mincing curiously. Raphael stumbled on the uneven flagstone he usually avoided. Kasian caught him, though the sudden jar was painful enough Raphael’s vision swam. “I … I need to sit down,” he managed, and sat down on the old mounting block without even going inside.

  Kasian knelt before him, peering into his eyes. Raphael tried to slide his glance away, look down, but Kasian grabbed his chin and forced his head to remain still. “Don’t do that,” Raphael said leadenly, but his brother ignored him.

  “Did you eat anything today?”

  He shrugged painfully. Kasian sighed. “Raphael, you may be the greatest magus in the nine worlds, but you’re still a human being.”

  “Ah,” said Robin; “that answers a question that has been debated.”

  Raphael let Kasian pull him up when his brother took him by the left arm. He led him and Robin into the kitchen, where Raphael sank onto the stool and Robin happily started examining the spices. “I didn’t realize you cooked this much, Dickon.”

  Kasian said, “Not of late, he does not. Do you have wine? Brandy?”

  “In the cellar.” Raphael rallied himself. “Through the green door and down the stairs.”

  Robin said, “I’ll get it!” and bounded off with a whistle. Raphael could hear his thumps all the way down the stairs accompanied by rattling glasses from his cupboard. Kasian went to the bread box and found the leftover biscuits. He pushed them at Raphael, who stared in revulsion at them for a long while before managing to choke one down. To his surprise he shortly felt less roiled. He nibbled at the crumbs of another.

  “Sha óm, I didn’t mean to poison you. They said it would work for an hour or two at most, though they increased the power of the nirgal slaurigh as much as they could.”

  “Who?”

  “Who made it? Pira Danzel and her apprentice, using Cael’s best stock.”

  Pira had been a friend once. Raphael had taught her magic. “She made it, knowing it was to bind me?”

  “I think she relished the chance to try. She knew I didn’t want to harm you. You couldn’t tell it was her magic?”

  “I wasn’t looking.”

  Kasian pulled down the three crystal goblets and set them on the table beside him. “No. You were preoccupied with the storm you raised.”

  “I didn’t raise it on purpose.
”

  His voice came out quiet and sad; not what he intended. Not that he was intending much. Everything felt leathery, his mind, his tongue, his heart. His soul, out in the garden with his phoenix, distant. He crumbled one of the biscuits between his fingertips.

  Robin came bounding back into the room as energetically as he had left it, several bottles in his hands and a grin of delight on his face he was obviously trying to repress. The attempted repression for social niceties was understandable. The delight, less so. For finally seeing Raphael’s house? For discovering he was the Lord of  Ysthar? For finding a legendary vintage in Raphael’s cellar?

  Probably the latter, Raphael thought, when Robin placed the bottles reverently down beside the glasses. Kasian switched into Shaian rather than Tanteyr but otherwise ignored the prince. “Raphael, I don’t understand. What happened, that you reject music the way you are? The storms …”

  Robin looked up alertly. “Not to mention my living room will never be the same.”

  Raphael gripped his hands together, resting forearms on the table edge. His right shoulder lessened its ache, leaving in sharper relief his heart. And still, he knew, he had to keep control. He retrieved his manners, his composure, his self. “I’m sorry. I lost … control.”

  “But why?”

  He kept silent. Robin said, “I’ve seen great magi lose control. The Queen my mother, for instance, when I told her I was emigrating to Ysthar, where things are less … whimsical. What you did in my house was not losing control. That was—hmm—a slight loss of composure. Withal I grant that is something, coming from you. Which is why I let Kasian persuade me there was an invisible house in a place I’ve walked by hundreds of times and never noticed, and stood for five hours trying even to find its walls before you came to the door.”

  Raphael felt a small sting of pride. “I am very good at magic.”

  Robin lapsed into English to say, “No shit, Sherlock.” He continued in Shaian, which he spoke—of course, Raphael thought, Robin would speak with a refined accent, he was the Crown Prince of Fairyland. His bearing changed with the language as well, to a high prince before a greater prince, formal, courteous, grand. “Lord, will you not explain?”

  Lord, he said. Saavel. A lesser lord was savel; a great lord, the lord of a world, saavel, the lengthened vowel barely noticeable unless you were listening for it.

  Lord, Robin said: the distance Raphael had created between them, this week. He might not have been swallowed by the winds, but he had been marked by them even so. He had won … and this was after. Still the shadow lay awaiting his misstep.

  He closed his eyes, drowning in weariness, wanting to crumple up on the table and weep, but not doing so. There were no tears in him, just burning-hot tension in his nose, the roof of his mouth, the inner corners of his eyes.

  There was a sudden pop and he jumped, banging his body so it constricted in a yet more intense burn. He rode out the pain, recomposed himself, landed his gaze on Kasian who had done his trick with his pocket knife and the cork again and now held the bottle guiltily. “I’m sorry for making you jump.”

  Robin poured them wine. Raphael stared into the glinting meniscus. Kasian sipped his experimentally, eyes not leaving Raphael; he could feel them. Robin examined his glass carefully, said, “These are beautiful. I bet they have a marvellous sound.”

  When Raphael looked up at him with genuine confusion Robin licked his finger and ran it around the rim.

  The sound was marvellous, the first music Raphael had heard in his own house but for the endless tolling of Big Ben. He listened, shaken, until the sound faded into suddenly-crystalline air, all his magic crowding into the room. He bit back agony, bit back the desire, but when Kasian said, “Raphael, the Game is done. It is time to go forward,” he could not bite back his next words, and he whispered: “I mustn’t. It’s not right.”

  “What isn’t? Raphael, how could you believe that that music—your music—it is your music?—was bad? How could such beauty be bad?”

  He thought of Eahh, so much more beautiful than he had ever imagined; of Circe, smiling at the sun; of the dragon, with his fire. He thought farther back, of how the Eater of Worlds had been beautiful. The shadows thickened in the corners of the room, and abruptly he heard Circe’s voice in his mind, saying, Now begins the new game, the game of truth and consequences.

  Consequences …

  But also truth.

  He made up his mind to show them what it was that he was fighting against, struggled to his feet. They both looked surprised, even more so when he said, “Come,” and led them stiffly into the living room, where the phoenix cloak hung over the back of the couch like nothing he had ever seen before but a vision of light in a beech wood long ago.

  He looked at their faces, saw that Kasian knew what it was by the awe; and Robin said huskily, without a doubt in his voice, “That is the Veil of Shaharkan.”

  Shaharkan, the Shaian name for Shargán of the Desert, beloved of the Lord Phoenix.

  “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t here before,” Kasian said unsteadily. “Was it? I thought it was lost, not part of the regalia of Ysthar. The sword and the crown …” He gestured at the fireplace, where the sword lay on the mantel. Raphael didn’t remember putting it there. He wondered where the crown was. Back in its box in his study, perhaps. Divine gifts were not easily abandoned.

  “Circe gave it to me. As my winnings.”

  “You say that so harshly,” Robin said.

  Kasian said, “I begin to see. You’re distracting us again. Very well: I’ll take the bait. Do you want to describe the final duel to us, to push us away? Do you think you will by telling us how you killed your childhood friend? Do you think I can’t guess at what she did to you?”

  Raphael reached out to touch the cloak and did not place his hand on it, feeling something—sacrilege?—boil up in his throat.

  Kasian sighed again. “When I went to the University in Ixsaa I was beaten for insubordination, whipped for illegal duelling, fined for gambling, suspended for inappropriate fornication, and given all sorts of creative penalties for a variety of misdemeanours, crimes, and outrages.”

  Raphael turned his head to look at him, couldn’t, his glance sliding sidelong away to the dark embers in the fireplace.

  “I actually read through the University and town statutes to figure out what I could do without being expelled, imprisoned, or executed, and then went and did it. All of it, including daring the High Chancellor of the University to a game of Firewater and Ice, which is modelled after someone who cheated a dragon out of his hoard, and which I won, and thereby—by a rule that had been upstanding but never successfully upheld in fifteen hundred years—won the freedom of the University despite cries of protest you could hear halfway to Tholarr. I will also tell you I am close to hating my country with enough passion to want to sell it to the highest bidder.”

  Conflicting thoughts rose in him. Robin was sipping his wine quietly, face sober. Raphael found this more disquieting than Kasian’s words, said through a dry mouth, “Not really.”

  “No. But if there were anybody but you legally able to take the throne, I’d abdicate tomorrow and start a revolution in Ixsaa the day after. I don’t suppose you want to be King?”

  He managed to raise a ghost of a smile. “Not really.”

  “By which I hear, not before the Abyss mends.”

  “The Abyss …” His smile dropped immediately, and he looked on the cloak, and the light reflecting from it off the sword, and thought of the thing in the chest in the corner that had once belonged to the Eater of Worlds.

  “What of it?”

  “You speak with such passion,” Robin observed, with an abstracted air as if he were mostly perceiving the room through his magical senses. “My mother may make her tithe to him, but I can’t say I have ever come across any substance to the rumours of the Adversary.”

  “You’re a fortunate man.”

  “I have sometimes thought to go l
ooking—” And he stopped in amazement, for Raphael had reached forward and gripped him hard around both wrists with his own hands, bound Robin’s magic in his own. Blown-out it might be but here he stood in the heart of his power and could hold anyone.

  Robin spoke quickly. “I won’t, if you feel so strongly about it. Raphael.”

  The second time a friend had named him. Raphael blinked away from his instinctive reaction, sickened by that impulse to control. He let go of Robin’s wrists and stood back, shaking noticeably to himself. “Don’t joke about it.”

  Kasian probably didn’t believe in the Adversary, either, Raphael thought. At any rate, he said, “Whatever the Game has done to you—or you have done in the Game—you are my brother. You are not the Lord Phoenix, and I am not the Shadow King! We do not have to play those parts, Raphael. Circe was doomed when she challenged you to the Game. Every child singing skipping rhymes knows that the Great Game Aurieleteer ends in death.”

  What horrible things children sang unwitting, Raphael thought. He had written some remarkably callous songs as a child—he ricocheted away from that thought, only to fall into a deeper conversational hole: “I didn’t kill her.”

  “Raphael.”

  “Kas. I couldn’t. It was wrong, all wrong.”

  The silence stretched out, not a companionable silence as his house was for him usually, not friendly, not with that roaring cataract of magic in the form of the phoenix cloak beside him, judging him. In Egypt they used to say that the heart of the dead was weighed against the feather of Maat, truth, and if it balanced the soul was saved, and if the balance fell the crocodile ate it.

  The Tanteyr story was that one’s satall, the mysterious bird who came on the naming-day, left at death, carried one’s soul across the Sea of Stars to the tree where the Lord Phoenix sat in judgment. And there it was weighed, the soul against one of his feathers, the Abyss at his feet. If the soul was judged worthy, the satall carried it to the hatching grounds of Paradise, brooded over it until it could be born again into the new life on the other side of the world.