Till Human Voices Wake Us (11 page)

He sloughed off his ordinary human understanding of space and time, dropping with relief into that place beyond emotions, where all became subtleties of knowledge and action. He sometimes wished to remain there, in that place where his name was nothing but a seed-pearl hidden far from even his own awareness. In that place he saw large patterns clear and free, seeing none of their consequences, simply their beauties.

Once he had tarried there a century of ordinary time, reshaping the great patterns until they fit smoothly together, like a clockmaker taking apart a mechanism, cleaning its pieces, putting it back in working order. He had been so pleased to think he had done his duty properly, finally; thought he had learned what it meant to be the lord of the world.
 

That had been enough, at first, that the nagging desire to remain something recognizably human to himself had seemed only a faint and unnecessary temptation. Then at last he had gone out into the world, to see what had passed during that century where the world’s magic came into better alignment.

Plague, famine, changes in the weather, war, restless invasions of entire peoples, and some of the greatest art works of three civilizations. On the one side, the Crusades. On the other, the Alhambra. Raphael had looked at the evidence and decided that he was meddling with things he did not understand, and not tarried again so long in those dispassionate places.

Now, however, he yearned to leave behind his distraught emotions. He drew lines of power around himself until he cupped the half-sleeping world in the palm of his magic’s hand, his own magic lightly tracing over the deeper currents that in other moods, other modes of his thought, would destroy him merely to brush against.

In this mood, in this place of his power, in this time so close to the end of the Game, Raphael could waken the world and have it acknowledge him. There were higher powers than he, but they bowed to old rules that had been written into the fabric of things in the early days, and one of those rules was that nothing was to be held above the rules of the Great Game Aurieleteer. It was not just the players who obeyed them.

For nine years of the phoenix Raphael of
 
Ysthar had battled Circe of Aiaia with wit and magic, force and cunning, skill and chance and all manner of secret knowledge. He had earned the respect of those powers who bowed in obedience to the rank he held, the power symbolized by the crown and the sword and the third gift he had been given in the golden wood long ago.

He closed the final few propped-open borders of the world so that the magic pooled instead of flowing freely. It followed the channels he had shaped in the long nights of the past centuries, spilling gently into him, as if he were a valley newly dammed. He held himself balanced there for a while, absorbing strength, filling up the crannies of his energy lost to poor sleep and stressful days, until he felt replete with the eddying magic.

Far in the east the sun touched the edge of the sea.

It was nearly enough, would be nearly enough, but there were other powers yet he could call on. When he faced Circe he would need all the strength he could muster. She would be calling her own allies, magic of the endless twilight of the Border countries between the worlds where magic coursed in patterns wholly unknown to him. Even if she had not taken up the dark magic, the blood magic, the black magic her husband might have taught her, she was still a great magus in her own right; and she knew him very well. His advantage was that he was lord of the world she was claiming, and its magics knew him.

Raphael stood on the parapet of Tower Bridge, let free his shadows, wrapped the light around him so that any watching him might have thought that there indeed stood one who was seventh in succession from the Lord Phoenix who was firstborn of creation. He knew what he was doing, that what he was calling down would be the wall that would protect by separation. Kasian, Sherry, Robin, Will, all his people, on the one side. He and Circe on the other, with immortal power in them.

It wasn’t that this calling was forbidden, but that the calling of it was so wrenching—he had come to it once before in terror and awe, remembered it still in the dark dreams between midnight and dawn—that it broke all ordinary human connections. Not immediately, perhaps he would be able to feign another day’s human life, but if he won the Game by opening himself to those powers he invoked now he would be under their claim. That was a rule even older than the Game, that all power has its price.

He stared into the morning. He thought of the candles Kasian had left for his homecoming, of Robin’s completely untoward attempt at sympathy, of Sherry’s acceptance of his brother simply because he was his brother. He thought of the humming city around him, the vibrations in the bridge from the traffic crossing below him, the airplanes winking as they angled past the sun. He thought of his decision, that what mattered was the salvation of this his mad, beautiful world. He thought of all the things he was not telling Kasian, of what was locked inside that wooden chest beside the fireplace.

He thought of the dragon speaking of Swallow and Urm, and the wasteland that had once been the Garden of Kaph, and that once he had sat by the rivers of Babylon while the first cities of the new Ysthar were being built, and that was all desert now.

He thought of how his phoenix rejected him, yet stayed in the garden—why?—as witness, perhaps, to some beauty, some possibility, some potential route he was not taking. He thought of what Will had said of the choices between duty and conscience, and of how it had felt to stand in the ruins of cities and read what Dante had written, that year he communed with powers above him, how he had wept for what he had lost.

He did not weep again. By this time he knew the Game would not be won by self-pity. But he did hesitate a few more minutes, watching the sun rise over the river, thinking of Kasian asking the gods through a phoenix dream how to find him, so long after he had thought him dead.

Then he spoke seven names very quietly, and the winds came.

Chapter Six

The Garden of the Hesperides

By the time he had finished his bindings it was nearly eight. With the winds coiled about him he flew home. It was not the innocent flight he vaguely remembered from the first days of his magic; there was no joy in it, simply the concentration of will and action. He willed himself to his house, and there he went as the crow flies.

He was slightly disturbed by how vague his memory was, but only slightly.
 
The magic was funnelling into him more thickly now, the pools gathering strength, and almost all of his attention was preoccupied with it. He could tell he had emotions, in the same way he could tell he had a body with arms and feet and a beating heart: at nearly marionette distance. He felt things the way one sees through thick glass.

What was fully present to him was his magic. It was Tuesday morning, twenty-eight hours before the final duel. Raphael entered his grounds by the river door on foot, with the resolution to maintain appearances, so that his brother would remember him fondly.

Kasian was sitting on the terrace in a patch of sunlight with a cup of coffee, a pile of papers, and a distracted air. Raphael walked up the path to him, making sure to settle his veils of insignificance so he was nothing more noticeable than the tiny breeze turning over a dried leaf by his brother’s foot. Kasian watched him come inattentively, only really seeing him when Raphael stopped before him.

Kasian’s expression flickered from distraction, through worry, to annoyance, and finally landed on curiosity. “Where have you been?”

Raphael sat down on the edge of the terrace balustrade. He carefully isolated part of his attention to deal with these social niceties. “Working. What have you been doing?”

“Oh … reading some correspondence. I thought you might be back earlier.”

“My apologies.”

“I forgot to tell you yesterday, Scheherezade invited us to lunch today. If you don’t have anything else planned.”

“Not for lunch, no. What time did she invite us for?”

“One o’clock.”

 
Raphael nodded, and left him to pick up his papers while he dressed. He felt his jaw and shaved, not having spent long enough in the high place of magic for his body to be totally unaware of time’s passing. Kasian, as he saw when he fossicked in the kitchen for breakfast, had obviously made himself quite at home already; there was barely any food left. Raphael found cheese and fruit, but no bread and little else, not even eggs. He put what there was on the table and made tea.

“Don’t you ever eat?” his brother asked when he sat down with his cup of tea, already halfway through a generous plate. (Second breakfast?) “I haven’t seen you do anything but toy with your food.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You still need to eat. Magic doesn’t replace all natural functions, you know.”

Raphael shrugged affably, magic humming in his veins, pure energy filling up his soul. “Magic is a natural function.”

“Why can’t everyone do it, then?”

“It exists as potential in everyone, though it’s not always actualized.” Listen to him, he thought with a kind of faraway amusement, sounding like a good Aristotelian with his potency and actuality.

“And the Fall actualized your innate potential?”

“Yes.”

“What about … what else do you do, Raphael? Magic, and acting, you said.”

“Yes. They take up most of my time.”

Kasian twiddled his fork against his cup. Raphael let his thoughts drift sideways under the whirling magic’s influence, pulling his attention back when his brother added, “What about music? You were so definite at the tavern.”

And, having been so definite, he thought, did Kasian think he would want to talk about it? He said: “I have nothing to say about it.”

“As you say nothing about our family, either.”

There being nothing Raphael could think of to say about that, he merely shrugged and poured them both more tea.

Kasian fell silent and returned to his breakfast. Raphael drank his tea and tried to remember when he had last gone grocery shopping. At least a fortnight ago, before he had gone to a moot of the rivers at the Humber’s bequest. The South Wind swirled in a great arc around London and settled to roost on Saint Paul’s dome.

“Forty-five minutes,” Kasian said abruptly.
 

Raphael focused with some difficulty down from the upper air. “I beg your pardon?”

“I have discovered something about myself, which is to say that I can’t go longer than three-quarters of an hour sitting across from you in silence. As you appear to be finished with your tea, will you show me your garden?”

He found that a strange question from his brother. “Why?”

Kasian rolled his eyes. “Because at least it will give me something to look at while you stare off into space. It seems an extensive park, and quite lovely. Liassa will want to know about it. My seneschal too, he’s a gardener at heart.”

The part of him that remembered to be courteous spoke up. “What does he grow?”

“Tomatoes, mostly. Do you remember them from Astandalas? They’re a kind of savoury fruit.”

“We have them here, too. From the American continent.”

“That’s the new one, right?” Kasian opened the door outside into the garden and stepped out. It nearly banged shut on Raphael, and he thought that perhaps he should fix its hinges to close less rapaciously. Not though it had bothered him much in the last … century, was it, since he had replaced it? He retrieved his attention again when Kasian continued. “I had to get someone to redraw all my maps when the news came that there were two new continents. It seemed excessive, I must say. One new continent—well, it is possible one had just missed it before. It could happen to anyone. But
two
?”

“Four, actually. North and South America, Australia, and Antarctica.”

“That really is excessive, O brother mine. It’s one thing for countries to change borders, quite another for a
world
to change borders so much. Mind you, Ystharian political geography changes so frequently I don’t bother to keep up with all the details.”

“Time can pass quickly here.”

“How many years has it been for you?”

“I’m not sure.”

Kasian stopped and stooped to finger the furled stubs of what would later be scarlet tulips. “Could you hazard a guess?”

Raphael frowned at a scattering of winter aconite, each yellow flower folded asleep against a green ruff like an Elizabethan collar. “Twelve or thirteen years of the phoenix.”

“How are
you
not certain? Of all people, you should know.”

Raphael glanced up the hill, at the three trees, not even sure if Ishaa was still roosting there. “I lost count.”

“I find that hard to believe, from my brother who was offered a place in the Imperial University for mathematics at the age of thirteen.”

“Time passes strangely here,” he said, “and sometimes the years are very full.”

He led his brother to the small court enclosed by the wings of the library, going widdershins around his house to leave the hill aside. He gestured at a few interesting plants, primroses and snowdrops and the witch hazel that was indeed blooming with spidery flowers in hot orangey pink and sulphurous yellow. Kasian seemed more interested in the architecture of the courtyard, went up to the stone table, drew his hand over its polished top. It was inlaid with a chess board, brought here from a house where Raphael had often had guests.

Sherry had been a guest in that house, he thought suddenly, the memory cresting like a fish in a river. She’d told him stories upon stories of the adventures she’d had after she met the Lord of
 
Ysthar in the desert, in full veils with a phoenix in his arms—two years of the phoenix ago that was, when Ishaa had built her bonfire nest somewhere in what had once been the Fertile Crescent—when he’d rescued her from the elements, and then told her that some of her stories were true.
 

He had been so glad she hadn’t recognized Domenico degli Innocenti the Venetian glass-blower as the Lord of
 
Ysthar, that they could be friends. She’d rescued Domenico—him—from murder, pretending on no acquaintance whatsoever (that she knew of) to be his wife, so that they could run off laughing merrily. How they had laughed about her instant improvisation once they were safely out of the city.