Till Human Voices Wake Us Read online

  Raphael nodded solemnly, and he saw from Kasian’s face that his brother was remembering that he was the Lord of  Ysthar. With a sense that if tonight he could touch the phoenix cloak his brother the king could touch the God’s gift he said: “Here.”

  Kasian took the lirin gently, running his hands across the wood, reverent, wondering, almost awed. He pinged one string and winced. “Not exactly what it’s meant to sound like,” he said, returning it, smiling wryly “I’d be better with the sword. I’m not sure about the crown.”

  “They would suit you better than they do me.”

  “Ah, but then I am not generally considered to be the greatest magus of the nine worlds.”

  Raphael shook his head. “I don’t feel great at the moment. I feel very tired.”

  Kasian smiled more lightly. “Where is your crown? I’ve always wanted to see it.”

  That struck him as an odd desire. “Why?”

  “Why? I find crowns interesting. And I’ve never been able to visualize what ‘three rose branches twisted together’ looks like.”

  “It adds up to ‘uncomfortable’,” Raphael murmured, and hauled himself upright by dint of leaning on Kasian’s shoulder. He sent his magic out in a gentle wave, which was really all he could manage, and found the telltale glimmer of power. “Ah. It’s in the library.”

  They walked there slowly. Raphael’s ribs were hurting and his shoulder throbbing; playing the lirin had certainly not been good for either. He didn’t feel exhilarated now that he had stopped. He felt rather numb, with his mind echoingly empty, and, after his small defiance of the inevitable, tired and depressed.

  “You’re going quiet again,” Kasian observed as he opened the door. “Please don’t—What a lovely room this is!”

  The unconsidered exclamation lifted Raphael’s heart. He did like the library, a room he’d originally built in the Georgian period, with rich blue draperies and stained-glass windows between the tall built-in bookcases. The furniture was from a house he’d had in Edwardian Piccadilly, comfortable leather and brass chairs interspersed with plants and art. A jasmine sprawled halfway up one wall and across some of his less frequently read books. The room was two stories high, the roof a semicircle painted blue with stars on it, not a Georgian (now that he thought of it) but a later fancy.

  Kasian looked up at it and then grinned at him. “My bedroom ceiling is painted like that.”

  Raphael crossed the room to where the sandalwood box containing the crown rested on the lectern shelf. He stood there for a moment, feeling wobbly, and when he picked up the box it was heavy in his hands. He sank down into the nearest chair and watched his brother turn about the room.

  “You’d like my palace,” Kasian murmured. “It’s like this room. But surely these aren’t all your books? Or is there magic to the shelves?”

  “There are some hidden recesses. Most of my books on magic are in my study upstairs, and the rest are in the attic. These are my favourites.”

  “You read so many languages. I’m envious.”

  That reminded him of what Kasian had said, as they walked the streets of London before the end of the Game. “Do they really say Tell the Lord of  Ysthar in Ixsaa as an idiom?”

  Kasian started and then laughed uproariously. “Yes they do, you doubting fool. I wasn’t just prodding you. Ask your friend Scheherezade. She tells true stories.”

  Raphael opened the box, something—another emotion, thought, idea he could not identify, something momentous and quiet—coming together softly, like the first two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The white-gold crown of Ysthar, which he had only ever worn that once, on Wednesday for the duel.

  “This is the crown of  Ysthar,” he said to Kasian, whose jaw had dropped, though Raphael wasn’t sure why, unless it was for its great and terrible beauty. “I took on three things, not just the lirin: there was the sword and this crown as well. The sword, I thought, for justice; the crown, for duty; and the lirin … the lirin was what I wanted. Beauty, perhaps, or creation, or … I don’t know. I’ve always thought of the sword and the crown as going together, with the lirin separate. Those two belonging to the Lord Phoenix; the lirin to his brother.”

  “Power and authority. But creation shouldn’t be separate from them, surely? Otherwise it’s sterile. Me in my palace rather than me in Ixsaa.”

  “Justice and duty keep power and authority sweet. I think I made a mistake about the lirin. It wasn’t given to me over, or instead of, the others. They were all three given together. To take the lirin I had to accept the others.”

  “And when you met the Shadow King?”

  Raphael looked at his brother with sudden understanding. “I should have remembered that along with equilibrium and entropy there is creation. Along with all the strife, there is—”

  “Love.”

  Raphael stared. “What do you mean?”

  “Your magic isn’t bad, Raphael, no matter how terrible its beginnings were for you. You’ve made it something good. You love Ysthar, the way you love your music.”

  “I haven’t had music for years,” he replied uncomfortably.

  Kasian smiled with wry humour illuminating his face and reminding Raphael forcibly of their mother. “No, I suppose you haven’t. You lost it when you met the Eater of  Worlds. But you never abandoned Ysthar. Look how you have broken yourself but never faltered this week. And you played for me just now.”

  Raphael focused on the jasmine, which had put out a few dozen sprays of delicate white-and-pink blossoms at some point since they had entered and was surreptitiously opening them as if it didn’t want him to notice it was perfuming the room. “The blackbird’s singing inspired me. It wasn’t anything else.”

  His brother laughed. “You keep telling yourself that, Raphael, just keep telling yourself that. Will you play for me again? There’s so much of yours I’ve only heard rumours of.”

  The air fell close about him. “Not now,” he said. “My shoulder’s hurting.”

  “But soon?”

  Raphael had dreamed of this day for years, wanted this question to be asked all through his childhood and even long past the time when he had spurned his name and its memories, all the way to the moment when he had seen his path split between the lirin and the crown and the sword, and had not realized that those three paths were all deceptive, that the split was in his mind, that the shadow that flies before the dawn had known him too well.

  He looked out the window and saw faint greenish hints of dawn behind the walls of his garden.

  To have to say no—to be able to say yes—His feelings were too strong for his bruised heart. More easily than he would ever have expected he claimed the third route, the one he had not known to look for when the choice had last come upon him. “If you’d like,” he said shyly. “Once my shoulder’s better.”

  He closed the lid on the crown and set it on the shelf beside the First Folio edition of Will Shakespeare’s works, and then he went to bed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  That Which Moves the Sun

  People always said there were irrevocable steps. They cross the Rubicon, burn bridges, take one step too far.

  Perhaps that was so, Raphael thought, waking unexpectedly from confused dreams of music and roses to those fully articulated thoughts and even more unexpected sunlight streaming through the window directly onto him. He regarded the square of light on the counterpane suspiciously before realizing the unaccustomed brightness in his face was because he was in bed at an unaccustomed hour, and this was how the light fell then.

  He swung himself out of bed with much stiffness and soreness but less actual pain than the previous night. He contemplated the day, and realized there was nothing urgent to be done. There was that twinge in western Canada, but that could wait for a few more days. That was all: the magic of the world was otherwise quiescent, the lull after the Game.

  After the Game. This was after.—He could take a holiday.

  The thought was as unexpected as t
he light in his bedchamber. It opened too far for his mind to grasp, this sense of freedom from the constraints of the Game. He balanced himself with practical thoughts. It was morning, not night, and—

  —he had played his lirin for Kasian.

  That opened up other avenues of terror, until he narrowed his thoughts to a smaller space of time and steadied his lurching imagination on it: right now. Right now he had nothing requiring his activity. Right now no duties were calling him. Right now Kasian was asleep. Right now he could take a bath.

  Getting into the tub required a number of painful contortions and judicious use of magic to manage, and also drove all thoughts away but pleasure in the physical sensation of warm water and cleanliness.

  It was while he stood drying himself afterwards that his thoughts circled back to his waking idea, about the importance of second steps.

  The only large mirror in his house was in the bathing room; he didn’t much like mirrors for a variety of reasons, a few magical but most of them simpler forms of discomfort. He knew his face well enough to shave without looking, and knew his clothing fit (and which items suited his various roles best), and outside of requirements as a film star he found that sufficient. He’d been contentedly ignoring the one in the bathing room until his thoughts came round to the high demands his friends had made of him.

  Remembering Will’s remarks about the mirrors of reason and vanity he let his glance steady on his reflection.

  Dark blue eyes, pale blond hair, rather pallid skin after a London winter, a few scars old and new, spectacular bruising.

  The entire right side of his torso was a spreading column of bruises, yellowing on the edges and still dark purple along both sides of the snaking white and red lines of magefire that led in a shallow diagonal from shoulder blade to ankle.

  Magefire that both Kasian and Robin had recognized, and, so seeing, had recognized the depth of secrets he was keeping.

  Last night he’d played for Kasian. A personal Rubicon, he thought. He traced with light fingers the edge of the bruises he could reach, feeling the lingering traces of Robin’s helping magic from Thursday night.

  It was Saturday, he thought suddenly: the play was over as well as the Game. This was after, when Sherry’s new stories began. He’d crossed the Rubicon. He’d taken off his masks. He’d played for Kasian.

  But the Rubicon wasn’t a brook to be crossed in one step.

  He finished getting dressed, wrapped his lirin in a cashmere shawl someone had given him once under the mistaken impression that he had a wife to whom he might present it with compliments, and that in a waxed canvas bag from some long ago journey by sea, and hastened out to Robin’s house before he changed his mind again.

  ***

  A gentle spring rain pattered down all around him as he stood before the door, a light and restful noise. The buds of the young oak tree in the tiny front garden gleamed brown with a rich sheen, the new leaves still tightly furled, but the patch of ground below it was riotous with crocus, yellow, orange, tawny, lavender, and absurdly rich royal purple intermingled with clumps of snowdrops and glory-of-the-snow. They were half-open in the shifting light as the rainshowers alternated with fast-moving clouds.

  At a stray shaft of light coming between the clouds Raphael’s glance lifted to the detailed moulding around the door frame, its elegant acanthus swirls surprisingly appropriate. He sighed. He knew that Robin was awake—just awake, probably, from the taste of the magic spiralling languidly around the house. Still, after he rang the doorbell, he found himself shifting the bag containing his lirin from one hand to another.

  While he waited for someone to come to the door he thought with some wonder and much trepidation of the new feelings that were slowly unfolding inside him. He had no name for them, not yet. But he didn’t need names; not with his lirin in his hand.

  He was minded of the passage in the Upanishads where the faculties discussed their importance to the body. To solve the argument finally each decided to leave for a year and see which was missed most. Each went—sight, hearing, speech—one by one, and returned; but when the breath began to leave the body they all clamoured for its return, and it won the crown they argued for. That was what came into his mind now: in his dreams he had known only the immeasurable fields of rose-scented stars falling through his mind.

  Zebulun opened the door. He was dressed in a strangely Scottish-inflected outfit, a kilt of the Campbell clan Raphael was fairly certain he had no connection to. He bowed deeply on seeing him, and said, “My lord of  Ysthar.”

  No secrets from servants in a household such as Robin kept. Raphael nodded uncomfortably. “Is the prince at home?”

  “If my lord will come in, I will inform his highness of your lordship’s arrival. Lady Scheherezade is already within.”

  Raphael followed him in to the lower flat, saying as they went down the hall: “Zebulun, I would appreciate it if you were to keep knowledge of my rank within this household.”

  “You have my absolute discretion,” the dwarf replied with another low bow as they paused at the door, then announced to the air, “The Lord Raphael. Lady Scheherezade.”

  She turned around as the door opened, with an expression that moved from delight to concern and then—his heart sank—to fear. He stared uneasily at her, clutching the lirin. His usual icy composure was far away from him, stopped by the feel of the instrument in his hands. By his distaste for the masks, as if they were yesterday’s clothing. By sight of the back wall of Robin’s living room.

  What had been a wall of high-tech entertainment machines looked as if he had made it malleable as putty. The plastic and metal writhed in twisted streaks of black and silver across the wall and part of the ceiling. The centre, which had been the stereo and television screen, was now a hole, as if he’d punched through to the next room. The velvet and silk curtains had been put back on their rails but the grey charcoal painting was half charcoal in truth.

  My living room will never be the same.

  He felt sickened, battered by the aftertaste of his magic in the room. Sherry gazed at him soberly as he looked at it, then abruptly hastened across the room to him. Raphael stood numbly staring as she reached out for his left hand and wound herself into an embrace.

  “I’m so sorry I drugged you.”

  Tangled grief and aching hope for amends pushed out his own truth. “I’m sorry for not …” He couldn’t quite say it. The weight of the lirin was so familiar-unfamiliar he was shaken. “I didn’t want you to know.”

  She let him go. He sank slowly onto the chair nearest him, a white velvet monster he suspected Robin of having Zebulun brush smooth after every visitor. Sherry was dressed in a rich garnet red dress, like something Circe would wear, and looked very well in it.

  “What did you think we would do, to know you were the Lord of  Ysthar?”

  “Curtsey politely and tell me social half-truths,” he said glumly, and to his surprise she laughed and perched herself on the arm of the chair beside him.

  “Oh, Raphael, we have missed you so much these last years. Did you think you affected us so little? That we didn’t care what happened to you?”

  He picked at a loose thread in the canvas sack, eyes on the grotesque ruin of the back wall. “I was frightened you would distract me from my duties.”

  “Truly?”

  He paused, thinking again that he was wading across a river, and halfway across was no good place to stop. “Perhaps that you would not like …” Despite his intentions he faltered.

  “That we wouldn’t like the real you? Do you think you have hidden yourself so absolutely? Who are you, if not the sum of your actions? Are you not the man you appear?”

  “No. I don’t think I am.”

  “Do you know how you appear? Not in the faces that you make for the faces that you meet, but to us who are your friends, and have known you for many years?”

  He shook his head dumbly, frightened at her intensity. He gripped the lirin through the slipping
cloth. “I want a new story to begin. Scheherezade, please help me.”

  She cocked her head askew at him. “You are asking for my help?”

  “You are …” he thought suddenly of how much he hated (at the same time as he courted it) when people he thought of as friends treated him according to his position, not his person. And it was not the Lord of  Ysthar who needed help. He bit back “the Storyteller” and instead said, “You are my friend. Please.”

  “To shape a new story? For the man who once told me not to despair, that some of my stories were true?”

  He looked down at the woven canvas of the bag. “For someone who has forgotten how to take his own advice.”

  From the doorway Robin said, “You really do take yourself remarkably seriously at times, Raphael.”

  Raphael looked up from the lirin and saw again the twisted wreckage of the back wall. He wasn’t sure what to say, except that he had to wonder (with that far-too-distractible mind of his) what Robin had meant—“Why did you say that was only a—a loss of composure?”

  “Oh, my house is still standing.”

  “I’ve never …” he stopped, for of course there was Phos to stand against that denial. Or not to stand: the horror.

  “‘No, never?’—‘Well, hardly ever …’” And Robin laughed. “Shall I ask you why you came here today? Please tell me it’s not just to be sad at us. I’m not sure if I can handle that after last night.”

  The Prince came in with a merry smile for Scheherezade, taking the seat across from them. Will followed more slowly, with a thoughtful frown at the wall. When he saw Raphael was staring anxiously at him the poet said, “What Robin means is that we’re all hung over. After our, ah, conversation, Sherry and I got very, very drunk. It wasn’t as if we could go outside.”

  Raphael felt as if he were missing something. “Why couldn’t you go outside?”

  Sherry said gently, “The storm was … ah …”

  “Apocalyptic,” Robin said cheerfully. “I think coffee is in order!” He clapped his hands; one of his fairy servants appeared and disappeared again, leaving a butler’s trolley behind her, in a soft puff of bronze magic. “Yes, apocalyptic.”