Till Human Voices Wake Us Read online

  Raphael spoke when the echoes had nearly fallen silent again. “It is nearing its conclusion.”

  “I feel the weight of men heavy upon the earth.”

  “There are, to be sure, many of that race alive now.”

  The dragon growled deeply, at the level where the rumble matched the flow of magic in Raphael’s veins rather than the pressure in his bones. “It may be that the Game’s ending breaks down the walls of the world, and they will know me to fear again.”

  “It may be.”

  “In the days when Agrinalaine defeated Ghizhaur of Kaphyrn in the Game that was played in the third age of  Ysthar the Garden of Kaph was laid waste, and it has never grown again aught but arsenic and dragons, and is called the Great Desert that has never been crossed by mortals save once, and that by the Red Company whose name even dragons know.”

  Raphael waited with a fair pretence at patience he was quite sure the dragon didn’t register in the slightest.

  “On Eahh when the Game between Urm and Swallow ended with the death of both Aurielete the world broke asunder and three continents were lost to the sea. Five great worms of my kindred were killed in that destruction.”

  “So it is said.”

  “It is said truly. My grandsire perished in those days.”

  Raphael swallowed. “It is to be hoped that matters on Ysthar will be resolved less dramatically.”

  “I shall think on this. When I have thought perhaps the Game will be ended, and I shall fly the open airs once again, and men shall know to fear me and to speak my name, and I shall taste sweet blood and quick magic.”

  “The decision is yours. Do you remember, nevertheless, that should you break the pacts of the sanctuaries, or the laws binding the things of the world, or the rule of magic, then shall you answer to me.”

  “I do not forget, O lord, that you threw down the mountain of Iridathet and the island of Phos into the Abyss upon one who broke those laws.”

  Raphael looked at the dragon for a long moment. The border light spilled in reflections caught between magic and mirrors in the farther corners of the great hollow, casting strange shadows added to by the way the dragon’s eyes illuminated the area around him like the proof of medieval optics. The cavern was deeply silent. Raphael felt his power very much around him. At length he inclined his head. “Think, then, as you will.”

  He turned back to the border, and, once again that night, paused unexpectedly. Circe was advancing across the cave mouth, sumptuously dressed as befit the Lady of Eahh, her cloak sable fur, her gloved hand catching up skirts of Tyrian purple and cloth-of-gold. Her dark hair, braided and pinned into a coronet with gold and red ribbons, had red highlights in the Easian sunlight. She looked, he thought after a second, a little tired.

  Raphael was deeply tempted to close the border before she crossed and thereby—well, what? Would it truly prevent the end of the Game? It would not be either of their deaths, the fifth rule’s requirement. It might well end up with a war. Eahh was a rich and powerful world whose lord did more than dabble in black magics. There could be no hope of a quiet transition if he refused her entry. And the dragon might well side with her.

  He paused a moment, as he had paused when the wind tore through his concentration, and then—paused again—but this time he was not Hamlet, nor himself, but the Lord of  Ysthar, nowhere so finely dressed as his opponent but wrapped in resplendent magic.

  When she came to the border she looked up and saw him through the soap-skin shimmer between Ysthar and Eahh, and she, too, paused.

  With the white landscape behind her and the light pouring around her, dressed in gold and crimson as she was, she looked like the heart of a white peony.

  He probably still looked like Hamlet.

  Duty and conscience for once seemed happily married. He made a gesture that was deliberately composed of resigned acceptance of necessity. However tempting those side routes were, the Game would not be won by her trying to delay him by attacking his friends, nor by him simply trying to refuse her entry.

  She inclined her head and stepped lightly across the threshold. “My lord.”

  “Lady Circe.” He spoke politely; there were proprieties to be observed.

  Behind him the dragon slowly began to shift his body across the hoard. Over the gemstones and gold Fulgor’s scales made a surprisingly soft rustle, not all that different than a snake moving through winter’s brittle leaves. Under the earth the echoes gathered the sound into folds that did not fade away. Circe stepped a little forward and stood with her shadow falling just at Raphael’s feet.

  He began to separate out each delicate peony-petal of magic and reorder them into alabaster nautilus curves.

  His eyes did not leave Circe’s, though they both could see that the other’s attention was almost entirely focused on the magic coiling about them as slowly and interminably as the dragon.

  Suddenly she laughed. “You appear less than perfectly excited, my lord.”

  After a moment’s consideration Raphael lifted one eyebrow in enquiry.

  Circe gestured at the cavern with a gracefully dramatic movement of the hand that wasn’t holding her skirts. “In three days our Game will be over. Three days! The next age of the world will begin.”

  He shrugged. She took a step away from him, cloth whispering like aspen leaves. There was a glint in her eyes from the faint light cast by the dragon’s half-lidded gaze. If he were to paint her right then he might have presented it as doubt. It was probably merely that she was watching her steps on the skidding piles of coins.

  “In three days, too, my lord, you shall come to judgment.”

  “‘It is certain because it is impossible?’” Tertullian, he thought, taken entirely out of context. His voice sounded bored even to him. The years it had taken to reach this pinnacle of self-presentation, where he could stand folded up into an anonymous package, all himself neatly wrapped up in brown paper and string.

  “You can hardly collect yourself enough to speak, let alone care. You might so easily do whatever you wanted—” She paused; he waited politely; she continued, smiling: “If only you wanted to.”

  He wondered if Circe were nervous, awaiting the end of the Game. All the moves were finished, all the preparations made; once the remaining borders were closed tomorrow he had nothing left to do but gird himself for that choice awaiting them on Wednesday, when one of them would die, or the world fall, in a blaze of magic. Or it might be both, as the old Ysthar and its lord had died when Astandalas was broken under black magic, or in the final crises of the Games whose stories the dragons knew.

  Circe’s husband the Lord of Eahh had been responsible for the fall of Astandalas, together with his father, who had then been lord of that world. Had Circe taken on their dark powers, in this her last journey back to Eahh before the end of the Game? Raphael regarded her carefully, but her concealments were almost as good as his own, and he did not want to try breaking them prematurely.

  Noticing his glance she smiled at him like the statues of Bast in Egypt. He found himself almost afraid of her, the way she stood there with the magic of other worlds curled around her, red and white like a Tudor rose, her shadow falling on his shadowy clothes. She had a thorn to accompany the flower, a sword in a scabbard of woven gold, with a dark jewel in its pommel whose facets seemed strangely to reflect only the dragonfire lingering in the corners of the cave.

  His voice was perhaps drier than usual. “‘All things change, and we change with them.’”

  “Have you changed so much that you’ve forgotten how to feel? In the beginning you might have shattered the world with your passion. Now?” Her laughter filled the wavering circle of light between the border and the dragon. “Now you might as well be carved from ice, my lord. Surely you cannot say you care now as you thought you did in the beginning?”

  Of course he did not think the same way now, on a wet Sunday night in early twenty-first-century London, as he had long ago when he was young, that dry sunny after
noon near Uruk-the-Sheepfold, when Gilgamesh was king. How could anyone with any pretensions to humanity?

  Many things came to mind, quotations from half a hundred writers in a dozen languages; but there he was under England’s soil, and English writers came most readily: John Donne. “‘The sea is as deep in a calm, as in a storm.’”

  And with what he knew was a consummate display of sprezzatura—he had spent so many years of the Game learning that difficult art—he closed the border behind her in a swirling act of apparently simple magic.

  Circe’s smile quirked with something very close to admiration. Raphael made a courteous gesture for her to go before him towards the tunnel that led ultimately above the surface again. It came out in the South Downs halfway to Canterbury, but he doubted they would keep each other company half so far. She nodded gravely and picked up her skirts again, paced softly beside him. The dragon watched them go with his eyes half-lidded, head perfectly still but long body coiling and uncoiling and coiling again over the skittering treasures.

  “My dear Raphael.”

  He was fully in character as the Lord of Ysthar, who comported himself with even more aplomb than did James Inelu the film star, and so all he did outwardly was turn his head and, after a quietly condemning pause, say, “Heloise.”

  Many years ago, before Phos fell into the sea (the thought came to him immediately on that thought, that of course, it had not fallen into the sea, he had thrown it, in an act of magic that had impressed even the Thunder Dragon; in an act of magic that had been as terrible a choice as Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter); many years ago, before the Game had begun, even before Astandalas fell in a fountain of black magic, Raphael and Heloise had been friends. They had never spoken since of those days, not since they became the Lord of  Ysthar and Circe of Aiaia.

  “My dear Raphael,” she said again, purring her words, “surely you have not forgotten yourself?”

  He could hear the dragon’s rasping movements reshaping his hoard. He lit a soft light around them, pale gold like beeswax candlelight. “I?” he said, quietly. “It was you who began this game of ours.”

  “Aye, for the crown of  Ysthar of the Magic, where the lost boys go.”

  The lost boys, he thought. The ones who didn’t want to grow up. He had wanted to grow up … before the Game, the Great Game Aurieleteer, which changed everything under its relentless thrust and counter-thrust, as brutal as this mortar-and-pestle dark.

  He dreaded what would come at its end. Five thousand years their game had lasted—he had inadvertently held back the world in its courses so that he would not have to stand there on Wednesday afternoon in Stonehenge awaiting the blows received. Or given.

  Yet here he was, three days before the end of the world, and it would be the end of the world, because he could not see how to save it. Or was it better he died than that it broke … except what would she do, who had sought power in such dark places? Was she looking to finish what had begun with the fall of Astandalas? How could he not fight, what would he not give up, to prevent that? He did not have to sacrifice his daughter—he had no family to have to choose between—and his life and his death were both his own to give.

  “Oh yes,” she said, “I know you care for people, Raphael. You have quite a reputation for caring for strangers. You do know what I mean by strangers, don’t you? The people you don’t have to share things with, like love or hatred. Of course you do. You are the mysterious Lord of  Ysthar, whose name no one knows, who is kind to guests. Certainly he is kind to guests.”

  He tried to be; he remembered well what it was like, to be lost and alone and need friends. No—he would not think of that. He let his glance slide onto the stones before them, lit only by his magic; they were far from the hidden border now. He saw broken pieces of ancient masonry feathered grey with powdered time. The Wasteland jumped into his mind.

  And I will show you something different from either

  Your shadow at morning striding behind you,

  Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you.

  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  He did not say it aloud.

  “Kind, indeed, but possibly a little strange, no? Why else would he be so insistently reclusive? There must be something there, they say. Something … some dark secret, perhaps.”

  Had she never understood how much he hated being the centre of attention? Being stared at? The dark was thundering down upon him, stealing all the oxygen out of the air.

  “And then people whisper about the island that was destroyed, utterly destroyed, one day when the Lord of Ysthar lost his temper.”

  He straightened his coat. She followed the movement and laughed, her laughter dashing itself to pieces around his feet like their too-solid shadows in the magelight. “I gave you absinthe once, in Paris before the Great War. You—O, Raphael, my dear, lovely Raphael—you have drunk of Lethe on your own. You have looked on the Abyss, into the face of hell itself, and you broke there.”

  Which way I turn is hell, his traitorous facility for quotation said to him; myself am hell.

  “I say to such people—you wouldn’t have heard them, it’s not the sort of thing they would say here, not here on Ysthar, not when nobody is quite sure who you are. I know you’ve never travelled beyond your borders. Very commendable of you; none of the other lord magi are quite so utterly devoted to their jobs as you. They’re forever travelling to visit one another, discuss the latest gossip or developments—though when kings and great lords gossip it’s really politics, isn’t it? Or professional development, if you want to be terribly modern about it.”

  The shadows were thickening behind them. Idly he thought how much he disliked being underground. They came to a cross passageway, where a dank wind blew strongly past them. Circe stopped and turned to look at him full in the face with a radiant expression composed mostly of pity. He dropped his eyes out of habit; he did not look people in the eyes, not he with his magic. Her hand was resting not quite casually on her sword hilt.

  “I say to such people—the doubters and detractors, I mean—I say that they don’t know anything about the circumstances. Nor do I, to be sure, since we don’t talk about that sort of thing. Yet I do know you, Raphael.”

  She smiled at him with a smile that could have made iron weep. He let it break around him the way the light broke around him, casting off splinters and sparks as it hit him. He had not forgotten that she, too, was an actor.

  “I know you haven’t had the easiest time of it,” she murmured invitingly, as if to confession. “How could you? So unbelievably amazing at magic. The lord magus of a world, famous in song and story, simply bursting at the seams with—how can I put it? The slang works best—with awesomeness. My dear Raphael, don’t blush.”

  He wasn’t blushing. He just remembered what that felt like, when his face lit on fire like sunburn. He had not allowed that part of his self anywhere near the surface of his skin for many years now.

  “The thing is, you are truly incredible. It doesn’t matter that your family couldn’t care less about you and don’t even know that you’re alive. You have made your own way, beholden to no one. I wanted to let you know that I admire you for that, before the end of the Game. Indeed, my darling, I must say it: I salute you.”

  She swept him a graceful curtsey that would have been more appropriate before the Emperor of Astandalas, who in the days of the empire had outranked even the lords of the nine worlds. Yet Astandalas had fallen in a blaze of magic and he—he had survived.

  He responded with as ordinary a tone as he could contrive, but when he spoke the words were strange on his tongue. “‘You may perhaps have forgotten that it was not I who began our contest, nor I who broke off our friendship, nor I who stand to profit from victory. What I am because of it is no concern of yours, though I quite see that it may be to you.’”

  He gathered together his power for a moment, bowed with the utmost of politeness, and smiled as serenely as he could manag
e. “Good night, Heloise. I shall see you on Wednesday.”

  She held her peace, merely curtseying, but her eyes blazed gold as Roman coins, as the hoard they had finally left behind, as the dragon’s. He did not recognize the emotion. She let her magelight brighten and then fade, took three steps backwards into the cross tunnel’s velvet blackness. He held himself ready, but she simply folded space and disappeared in a shower of violet-gold magic.

  He stood a few minutes listening to the mute darkness of the underground. It remained empty and silent around him, all the shadow courts keeping themselves far away from the dragon.

  He could still feel the proximity of Eahh, a queasiness in his senses. The air contracted around him dankly, something rotten billowing out of the passage in the wake of Circe’s translocation. He shuddered and made use of the same convenience, which he normally considered somewhat unsporting, folding space around an arch of the tunnel so that going through it he found himself at his gate.

  He hesitated there a moment, waiting despite his near-invisibility for a series of taxis to go past him—some late-night session at the Houses of Parliament, he supposed—watching the way the water droplets drifted sideways in the street lights, more than mist and less than rain. The human noises were soothing after that echoing cavern. He found he was reluctant to go inside.

  It was absurd to fear what might lie waiting for him, absurd and the result of Heloise’s—Circe’s—unsettling words. There would be no one there. No one but he had ever entered his house, and few into the garden, those very few who finished the quest for the water of life or the golden apples of the Hesperides.

  Few even knew it existed; passers-by found only a smooth lawn broken by a monument and a sculpture in the park between the Houses of Parliament and Lambeth Bridge. When it had been an island in the river they had not found even that, merely an odd bit of turbulence, an eddy or two. Of those who had heard of it very few indeed knew where it was. He had heard rumours of a location somewhere between Zanzibar and Samarkand.