Till Human Voices Wake Us Read online

  He left them and climbed the mountain himself. Phos was called the island of light for its beauty, for being the first land in that part of the world to receive the morning and the last to relinquish the evening. Iridathet was a tall mountain with snow on its peak, where it was said the rainbow lived. As he climbed the day drew into a glimmering night. He paid no attention to it, as he climbed silently to the cavern-mouth where Eurydice had fallen, as he stood there gazing down.

  When it came to people she had perhaps been the clearer-sighted, but when it came to magic few could rival him. He looked down that hole in the mountainside, down and down to where it passed beneath the sea, down below that even to the roots of the mountain, which stood in the foundations of the world. Nowhere could he see the green-and-gold of her, nowhere hear the music of her existence. Out of all the things he saw there and all the things he heard, none of them were she; he disregarded the rest. He looked down until the sun rose, and when the first light touched him there on the peak of Iridathet he took up his lirin.

  He played until he lost himself in the music.

  He had never done that before: usually it was when he played that he was most himself. Then he knew luminosity and grace, then his mind was at the height of its brilliance, his heart and soul greatest, his whole being most complete. He felt it, and others saw it. Eurydice had told him that there were those who watched him play simply for the glory folded about him like the wings of the seraphim, who listened to the voice of the god informing his, who loved him for his ability to show beauty with a slow smile and a handful of notes.

  But when he played that lament he lost himself and did not see how the clouds gathered and the shadows deepened around him. Autumn fled without her cornucopia; winter came early that year. The island of light, Phos that he loved, which had adorned itself so gladly for his wedding, became a grave. He would not have done it on purpose; but he lost himself, and did not know what he did.

  The death of the year roused him. The sun that should have risen late and set early, on that shortest day, that year, that day, did not rise at all.

  Phos was the island of light, first to receive the morning and last to relinquish the evening. When the sun did not rise, something cracked in the deeps of the mountain, and the island cried out in a voice to penetrate even his shadows. He woke from his grief to see what he had done: he had failed in his duty.

  Once he ceased his playing he heard the song of the world, to which he had not been listening for a quarter of a year. He heard halt limping music that should have been swift and glorious. He set his mind to its reparation as soon as he had shaken it free of emotion, of course. Of course. He learned soon enough that he was too late.

  A fissure had opened up below the roots of the world. Darkness came roiling up beneath his feet, darkness and silence that covered and uncovered in shifting shadows … something. And he—he with his magic, and his clear sight for such things, that had looked on the face of his god—he saw what few had ever had the misfortune to see in waking life.

  He had never described the face of the Adversary to anyone. Nor had he slept a night through undrugged since. (In time he persuaded himself that his wakeful vigil for the dawn was in honour of the sun, which is what he would have said, had any asked him, why he was always awake for its rising. No one had ever asked him.)

  Yet he stood upright before the Enemy, upright in the conviction that it was his duty to hold the Eater of  Worlds back from his Ysthar as long as he could, and he said, “Go back. You are not welcome here.”

  He did not like to speak, for his voice when he spoke stuttered and hesitated like a broken-winged bird. When he spoke he knew no one but Eurydice could imagine how he could be the great musician and mage; he was not like the one before him, whose voice was beautiful even in ruin, as all liars’ are. Standing before the Adversary with his magic around him perhaps he looked the part of the Lord of  Ysthar, seventh in succession from the Lord of Light, who had cast the shadow into the Abyss; he did not sound it.

  The Adversary laughed. “No? Small fool, you cannot even speak. You think to stand before me?” And he bent as if to sweep him aside with one negligent gesture.

  “Yes.” If his voice hesitated, his will did not. The Lord of Ysthar—it was not Orpheus, then, in that moment, who looked up, nor Raphael who had denied his name—the Lord of  Ysthar met the Enemy’s gaze, and it was not he who looked away.

  The Eater of  Worlds drew great wings of darkness around him, until he was entirely enclosed in darkness, where there was no magic but his own, and all the music he knew was silenced.

  The Lord of  Ysthar lifted up his head. He thought of the light and the laughter and the love he had known, and the day he made the white rose, when he had first told Eurydice he loved her. The first rose of all was made by the Lord of Light in the days before the Adversary fell, and it had ever since been the emblem of  Ysthar. He held the image of that day in his mind, and he smiled at the darkness, and he said, “Go back. You are not welcome here.”

  For a moment even the Adversary was taken aback. The Lord of  Ysthar moved his hands to the lirin he still held, but his fingers found the positions they had taken so long that year, and the note he played was of sorrow, not joy. The Eater of Worlds might have been cast out by joy—played on that instrument? Surely joy would have cast him out—but not by grief, which was something he knew well.

  When the Lord of  Ysthar played a chord of longing without quite meaning to, he hesitated, and that thin shadow falling across the images of light and love and laughter in his mind was all the opening the Adversary needed.

  Those who watched from neighbouring islands saw something like a single bright star in the darkness suddenly wink out, and they were afraid. (He heard the stories told of that day, later, when he came back unrecognizable from the wilderness, with no music in him, his bitter consolation the ability to speak clearly and walk without stumbling.) On Phos he fell to his knees, for in his mind suddenly there was nothing. For all his long life and power, in the end he was human, and the one before him was not.

  The shadow moved slowly this time, rummaging through his now-opened mind, and the white fire of his magic ran before it like a sanderling before the sea.

  The Adversary was so intrigued by this mortal who dared play the song that none but he had played—dared rival him, once best of creation—that he ignored his victim’s response. He did not care that the young man fallen before him had once had another walk through his mind, long ago when the magic first woke in him during the fall of Astandalas, except that it meant there were unhealed scars tender and inflamed by his presence.

  Raphael, mind splayed open like an over-ripe pomegranate, sent all he could control to protect those his duty claimed, tracing a wall around the island, around the shadow, around himself.

  On those other islands the watchers saw a golden circle drawn on the sea.

  When his mind was empty of magic the Eater of Worlds laughed again at him. “Small fool, why do you fight?”

  Raphael had nothing in his mind but the lesson of Persephone in hell. He wished he could remember that one day of perfection he had known, when he had met his God in a golden wood, and heard all creation singing as it had sung before the Adversary fell.

  He wished he could remember his own name. He wished she were there.

  The Adversary was a soft slow shadow in his mind, creeping along the musty corridors of his memory, musing with horrific ordinariness. “We are kin, you and I, and you are not so different from me. You have the lirin that was mine, and the music that was mine, and the world that should have been mine. And you have the power that was mine.”

  Raphael looked him once more in the face and knew it to be true; this time it was he who looked away. When he turned his gaze there was nothing to see but the endless shadow, a thousand ages deep. He could not even see his lirin where it had fallen from his hand. The god had given him that lirin, that time in the woods, so he could play the song of
songs, the gift beyond price. But there was a price: he was the lord of the world in payment for it.

  “Cousin,” said the Adversary, his voice beautiful in that infinite silence, beautiful, gentle, kind. “Cousin. Why do you mourn?”

  His mind was full of the sudden stupid loss, the unnecessariness of it all, the fact that she had not called on him for help, when she fell into the mountain, into Iridathet beloved of the rainbow, there on the island of Phos. Grief blazed white in his heart, burning him breathless.

  The coldness slinking through his mind soothed the flame into cool ash. “Cousin, you need not mourn. She fell, but what was fallen may be raised, what was broken made whole, what was dead brought again to life. Did you not realize you can change what happened?”

  A wild despair sprang in his heart. He had loved her so much, her only of all women, her alone.

  The soft voice filled his mind as the world was used to. “I will show you.”

  Raphael’s magic was wild magic, touching the world without tool or intermediary, dependent on his knowledge and imagination for its effect. He had never tried to fashion it along the links of his music, never tried to force the world to sing to melodies of his choosing. It had never occurred to him to try, before that beautiful voice spun his power into his music.

  As his lament transformed into a spell, his songs into enchantments that could bind as thoroughly as the chains of causation, he knew that this was what he was made for, that this was why his magic was the way it was, that this was why he alone of mortal creation could hear the song of songs.

  He could make it so Eurydice had never died; he could make the whole of his world just as he wished; he could do … oh, anything. It was all there in his mind.

  But in one part of his mind that was separate from the places where the shadow fell there was a golden circle in the sea, the colour of phoenix fire on the water. It was a clear and steady note, like a bell endlessly ringing warning.

  It rang steadily in his mind, the sound of the alarm-bells of Astandalas ringing down the fall of the empire, the sound of his mind breaking under the serried enchantments of that other enemy who had walked in his thoughts, the sound of warning, of fear and fire and loss.

  He knelt there under the shadow, and remembered those bells ringing when Astandalas fell. All he had heard for so long afterwards was the echo of those bells sounding in his ears, until at last the clean darkness had brought new music to him, and he had heard the stars whose song he had written as The Wanderer. Now he heard them again, the phoenix fire on the water, the warning bells ringing, holding him to his duty.

  He had lost everything that last night of his old life. But he had rebuilt himself, built a new life, found love and happiness, even if they were lost now, too, there in the darkness of the island of Phos. He could do it again. He knew how.

  He said, “No.”

  In his astonishment the Adversary let lift his shadow. Raphael (oh, he remembered now) heard the world start up again with that music only he and his enemy could hear. Yet even as he wrestled to his feet his mind grew increasingly muddled, losing the clarity he had known in his music and his magic.

  He drew one thread of power away from the golden circle and it came willingly to him through the paths of his music—but it changed those paths as it came, transformed the song of the world, made a fearsome avalanche tumble down from the mountainside as the music and the magic twisted together out of his control.

  The Adversary laughed.

  Raphael stretched forth his all to thrust the Enemy back. The Adversary fell, still laughing, in one crashing discord that collapsed half Iridathet into itself. Raphael threw the rest of the mountain after the shadow in a frenzy to block out that laughter and his own bilious horror. All the noise of that island’s destruction was not enough to silence it.

  He was in some place where the magic protected him, trying despairingly to straighten out his mind so the melodies surging through him were not wrapped about so with magic. He could not disentangle them, for he was used to both, used to music being half his thought and magic half his activity, and his attention went in those familiar channels first. He could hold half a song in his mind, half a handful of magic in his grasp, yet still the world melted about him and fell into the Abyss. The Adversary had made it so that he could not think of music—and he thought in music—without his magic following the path of his thought and changing reality.

  Most of Phos fell into the fissure between Ysthar and the Abyss before he could stop himself. At last he stilled his mind. He was far from his body but felt tears on his face, screams in his throat. He had no idea how long it took him to force his will into submission, when at last he did. Then he did by force what none of his attempts at skill had managed, the ripping apart of his magic and his music.

  His thoughts splintered under the strain of holding them separate, for the Adversary had changed him as he rummaged through his mind. Originally he had come by them differently in time and manner—how different in manner, one the ever-burgeoning joy of innate ability, the other scarce redeemed from a violation near as bad as this—now they could not be held separate, save by the force that was cracking him as the world had cracked under his carelessness.

  For that one moment his mind was split he realized he had a choice, that suddenly his path forked before him. He could choose one or the other, either his music or his magic. He had not the strength to hold them apart for long, nor any longer the will to keep them together.

  He hesitated half a moment, for he loved his music beyond anything; or he thought he loved it beyond anything. Then he chose the path of his magic, for his duty lay there, and he closed his ears to song. The rest of Phos slid under the sea, blocking the fissure. There was noise, so much noise; but none of it his music.

  ***

  He was caught in the memory, in a dim quiet place, a place of perfect stillness, as if he stood on the pivot-point of a balance. He could sense Kasian still sitting there with the wine-glass in hand and the candle beside him casting a warm illumination on half his face.

  You are not the Lord Phoenix, and I am not the Shadow King.

  It wasn’t the Lord Phoenix he was afraid of becoming.

  Raphael had no words at the moment to express to himself what he was feeling. Not even any quotations came to mind but for Kasian’s words.

  You are not the Lord Phoenix, and I am not the Shadow King.

  The way he had learned to remember was to use physical features as placeholders for what was to be recalled. The Romans had used their grand buildings, Renaissance aristocrats their palaces and theatres. Raphael, who had more to remember than most, even blessed as he was with a good natural memory for things heard and things seen, had begun with the library of Alexandria and soon spilled out of it into the city. It had not been long, even in a city like Alexandria in its heyday, before he had begun to follow the roads of all the continent.

  Twenty-two hundred years on, he could follow the paths of his memory as easily as he walked through the geography of his world. Some places were more densely criss-crossed with memories than others, of course, but most of the world was there in his mind twice over.

  There were two places that weren’t. One of them was a valley in the Caucasus he had never been. In his mind it was set into the filigree of memory and knowledge like a pearl into wrought silver. He didn’t know what was there, had never even looked into it from afar but for the once when he had stood on its western ridge and peered into a well-watered valley, a green land between high mountains, with woods and meadows and lakes that winked at the sky.

  It looked like his own idea of Paradise, and he had thought it would be good for there to be one thing for him to dream of, one thing always yet left to know, one place he had never been, and so he had let it be.

  The second place was his own home, which held memories enough on its own. He sat there now in its embrace, with the world keeping to its fretwork beyond the bounds of his houseprotections. Sword of the Lo
rd Phoenix before him, crown above him, cloak behind him, his brother waiting for him to decide what next to do.

  As soon as he thought that, he realized he was in the place of choice. He’d been there before, when he realized what the Adversary had done to him.

  He’d found himself on the shore across from Phos, looking at the debris-studded waters where the island had been. His ears rang with silence: he had never heard the sounds of things divorced from that inner music before. It was like losing a foot and all balance with it. No, it was more intimate than that. He had lost a whole sense, one passive and subtle: like suddenly being unable to taste, or smell, or feel. Like losing his magic under the nirgal slaurigh.

  He had fled Calaïs and Gabriel, who had both tried to comfort him with words that had done nothing but hurt, fled into the wilderness and begun once again the long reconstruction of his life, blocking off who he had been stone by stone until the wall was high and strong and his mind secure within its fortress.

  He had made that grim edifice beautiful in time, he’d thought; had decorated it in the course of the long siege with creation in the form of painting and even acting, with banners of formal beauty in mathematics and magic. Until Kasian came and knocked it down and left him in its ruins. Raphael had taught himself to forget: but now he remembered.

  The wind was blowing from the past, and it frightened him. The Eater of Worlds was patient; he thought nothing of time. He was still there, waiting, and he would still remember Raphael, the heir of the Lord Phoenix, the only mortal ever born with the gift that the Unnamed One had had. He would remember the one who had defied him once before.

  He would remember the one who was playing—had played—had played—and won—and won—the game whose rules he had set into creation. He would not have forgotten Raphael. And now Raphael, who had taught himself to forget, remembered what he had been, and had, and turned from, and lost; and why.