Till Human Voices Wake Us (15 page)

 
“Raphael, tell me,” Kasian commanded, his words erupting into Raphael’s headache like a stab of light, “who was Orpheus?”

He tried to persuade himself that Kasian probably was trying to be kind.

“I told you,” he said, and to his half-deaf ears his voice was rough and ugly as concrete, “he was a very good musician.”

Kasian’s voice suddenly rang with kingliness; he used, in the Tanteyr fashion, the royal pronoun for himself. “Don’t take that tone with me.”

Simmering rage overmastered Raphael, an acrid wrath jagged as broken glass: he wanted to hit his brother. Instead he leaped to his feet and back to the window. A low keening wail erupted out of nowhere and drove the remaining leaves of the crab-apple before it, struck the water from the sky.

The pain splintered into lightning. His hands scrabbled for purchase but the air slipped away from his touch. The memories in his thoughts were chaotic, nauseatingly inchoate, images in his imagination that dissolved into profound blackness.

He blinked, and for a moment his emotions so overcame him he saw no magic.

Inside the room draperies swayed decorously. In the faint ghost of his image on the window he saw that his face was perfectly calm, as if all this storm were two fish below the surface of a pond. Sherry and Angelica were laughing as they came back out from the kitchen, bearing food on wooden trays.

“Where did that come from?” Angelica said. “I’ve never seen a storm come up so fast.”

The sky was writhing: a storm roiled out of the upset teapot of his soul.

Raphael drew a deep shuddering breath that he felt to the soles of his feet. Outside the wind howled like a demon wailing. He gripped the window-sill and refused to speak until he knew he would not shout or rage or rave or crack like the bottle that the woman on the Underground platform had knocked.

“James?” Sherry asked. “Are you coming to eat?”

He had almost let himself forget that long-practised ruthlessness the Great Game Aurieleteer had taught him. His fingers closed a few times convulsively on the sill, and though they were still not properly his, the movements were the last fumbling reaches towards what he forced himself to acknowledge was a mirage. The water was elsewhere, and if he drank of illusion he could not expect to be refreshed.

With that realization composure filled him, a cool plastic force fitting neatly into all the nooks and cracks of his selfhood. He must be in control: that was the ground of his duty. He stepped away from the window, and magic filled his vision again, and his temptations fell silent.

“‘Every sky has its beauty,’” he said, quoting George Gissing with a feeling of gratified destructiveness, like stomping thin ice in a puddle. He sat down on a cushion and Sherry passed him the lamb and rice and accompaniments. He felt distant, protected by his composure, enveloped by their presence but untouched by it.
 

They ate in silence for a while, then Kasian turned to Sherry and asked her what the chutney was. Raphael kept his thoughts trained on smoothing the recently bound and easily-roused magic swirling behind the dams, responding desultorily to Angelica’s occasional attempts to draw him into the conversation.

After several helpings Kasian set down his plate on the table and stretched languorously. “That was excellent,
Amiar
Sherry.”

“Thank you,” she said, and smiled at him so that dimples Raphael had never noticed before became apparent. “Do you have plans for this evening?”

“Yes, I am to visit with our cousin. Much of my, ah, goods are in his house.”

“You have a cousin here?” Sherry said. “I’ve never heard you mention any relatives, James. Who is he?”

He said nothing, knowing that Kasian would answer for him. His brother did so, though not without directing a look at him. “Gabriel the messenger.”

Angelica looked speculative. “And tomorrow? Do you have plans?”

“I do not know,” he said. “Raphael, what say you?”

It took Raphael a moment to realize his brother meant the question, and another while for him to formulate an answer. Finally he said, “We don’t.”

“None at all?”

Thunder rumbled a bit in the background of his thoughts. He ignored it. “I do.”

“But
we
do not.”

“No.”

“Have you a suggestion of what I shall do tomorrow, then?”

Kasian’s voice was sharp. Raphael could hear the authority straining to come out from the forcibly nonchalant phrasing. He was glad that his brother suppressed his emotions. “You should stay with Gabriel. I have things to do.”

“Things to do,” Kasian repeated. Sherry and Angelica exchanged glances, but between his brother, his magic, and the storm straining to be free to pound London, Raphael could spare no attention for them. “Do you care to explain yourself?”

He knew with utter certainty that he must not. “No.”

At this Kasian flushed, paled, and flushed again into a high noon-tide brilliance. Little froths of emotion spurted up beneath Raphael’s skin, but he refused to let himself be moved. Before either of them said anything more, Sherry, a consummate hostess, said: “We have a treat for our afters.”

She rushed off, returned remarkably quickly (or perhaps that was just him, as he folded his magic away again, folded his temper away again, tried to ignore Kasian’s accusatoryexpression) with a tray of tea things. Or not tea; in the centre was a tall pitcher like a chocolate pot, though the scent rising up with the steam was almost not unfamiliar.

Raphael touched it curiously with his magic, discovered the beverage was from Daun, with overtones of spices from even farther away, Voonra perhaps. Before he could decide whether to bother analyzing it further Sherry said, “Kasian brought some Daven
slaurigh
for us to share.”

“Yes, it did seem to me a drink once you liked, Raphael. Or not Daven
slaurigh
but Kaphyrni we had in Astandalas.”

At first he wondered when on earth Kasian had had the opportunity to give Sherry anything, as he hadn’t carried it with them in the taxi. Then he was washed over with a deep guilt that Kasian should have to go to such roundabout lengths to share such a thing with him, had done so despite the displays of icy temper and bad behaviour. At once so prickly and so cold. He gathered himself into character, smiled apologetically at Kasian, who, however, frowned.

As he sipped from the cup Sherry gave him, Angelica asked, “What is the difference between Daven and Kaphyrni
slaurigh
?”

“They do come from a differing world.”

The
slaurigh
had a complex lingering taste, somewhere between coffee, chocolate, and crème brûlée. Raphael remembered the
slaurigh
of his childhood as a magical adult drink, expensive and imported, only to be had on high days and holidays. Nutmeg and cloves he could taste, and something softly fruity, like blackcurrant.
Slaurigh
was mostly derived from some tropical nut, like chocolate or coffee, and probably had caffeine in it too.

It made him relax, remembering happy moments, before he had magic, when his only problems were his persnickety father and the odd bully, both of them buffered by Kasian. Trying to learn swordplay and failing, for the most part, though he’d later discovered he remembered far more of swordsmanship than he’d ever thought possible as a child. He smiled a little more readily at his twin as the drink coursed through him.

Although he felt rather warmer the room seemed to be draining of its depth of colour, everything collapsing into a strange hardness of outline, the air fading invisibly into faint touches on his skin.
 
The colours were definitely cooler as his temper softened.

The North Wind had arrived, he thought, and automatically lifted his awareness to check. Nothing happened. He focused abruptly on his brother.

Kasian had been explaining their older brother Cael’s trading empire at length. He concluded with, “And so, you see, the Daven
slaurigh
is spiced otherwise, and the most rare and precious is this,
nirgal slaurigh
,
nirgal
meaning in Calandran—”

“Snowfall.”
 

“Yes, I thank you,
Amiar
Scheherezade. ‘Snowfall’ because to every one it is calling, sorry, calming, and to magi it lets them forget their magic for a while. You sit inside yourself by the fire while the snow falls, see?”

Raphael realized with horror that this was so. His magic had drained out of himself as it had out of the room. He locked his face into calm, carefully did not stir except to set his cup down in its saucer.

It rattled.

The other three all jumped and looked at him. He saw them through strange eyes, ordinary eyes, mind huddled into his physical perceptions. He’d always considered Scheherezade one of the most beautiful women he’d ever known, with her rich black hair and shapely face, luminous eyes, her voice strong and flexible; through her whole demeanour her great soul shone forth. She was lovely to his eyes: but now he saw in terms of formal aesthetics that Angelica (along with many women, perhaps) was the prettier.

Sherry’s voice was even lovelier, however. “James? Shall I pour you some more?”

“No!” His own voice sounded completely strange to him. He cleared his throat. “No. Thank you. No. How … how long, do you know, does the ‘snowfall’ effect last?”

“I am unmindful of your magic,” Kasian said, ambiguously. “It seems to be one thing for one, another for another.”

“I’ve heard anything from a few hours to a few days,” Sherry offered. “Usually a day or so.”

“Ah,” he said with as much self-control as he could muster. A day from now was the final duel of the Game. He finally looked at Kasian, who was regarding him with a mixture of speculation, defiance, and guilt that suggested nothing so much to Raphael as that his brother had just poisoned him on purpose.

He didn’t cry aloud. He who was so controlled, so perfectly in command of his body, the great actor (he was that, if never superlative because there was always a part of him he never let into the character): he didn’t break.

He stared at his hand holding the saucer now with absolute steadiness. It looked strange to him, a bit burned from the border with Eahh last night, the prick that Ishaa had given him a faint red welt, the sinews standing out from his knuckles as if they belonged to Michelangelo’s
David
.

How many years, hundreds of years, thousands of bitter-rooted years, he had spent battering himself into control. All for the end of the Game tomorrow. All for the moment he had to stand there to defend or lose the crown of
 
Ysthar. All he had given up for that: which was, what? Everything. He had never gone to the land of the dead, he had never left Ysthar to find his family, he had never said to anyone he—

He was so fully present in his body it hurt. But he did not lose control. He was grimly proud of that fact. Instead he gently set down his saucer on the coffee table and said, “And what plans do you have for tomorrow, Angelica?”

She stared at him with something like wonder, something like fear. “I didn’t know you were a mage, James.”

“It’s a quiet magic,” he replied, with supreme indifference. “No reason you should have known.”

“Oh …” She continued to stare, while he ruthlessly compressed all these extraneous emotions into polite courtesy. He smiled with faint encouragement, and she faltered onwards, gathering strength as she spoke. “I have shopping to do. A new gown for the Spring Ball. They say they’ve invited the Lord of
 
Ysthar to come, though of course that’s not very likely, is it? He never goes anywhere so public. Will—will you be going, James?”

“Possibly.”

“Will you still be here, Kasian? The magic folk have a gathering ball every year in the spring. It’s quite marvellous. You must come if you’re still here.”

Kasian had reclaimed his own social countenance, though it was more troubled than Raphael let his be in public. He said, “I am not certain how long it is I will be remaining upon Ysthar.”

There was a faint question in that. Raphael ignored it, as he ignored also the worry in Sherry’s face as she looked on him.

He shifted to cross legs the other direction, and felt bruises from that brief fight with the muggers on Sunday night, from falling upon the dragon’s treasure, from the sword of Damocles plummeting down upon his head.

Kasian was frowning. Raphael smiled brilliantly at Angelica and said, “Do you have plans for the summer?”

She glanced uncertainly at Kasian, bit her lip in a gesture as consciously charming as Raphael’s present demeanour. “I’ve been thinking of going into business for myself, actually.”

“How delightful. What business are you considering?”

“Interior decorating.” She blushed. “I know, that sounds silly, but I am good with helping people set up their places, you know, I helped Angharad with her new place. It’s just that the magic folk usually don’t know where to go to get all the things they need here, you know, like sword racks or alambrics.” She giggled self-consciously. “That’s not the right word, is it?”

“Not if you mean an alembic, or possibly a baldric?”

“Alembic, that’s what it is. Sherry has been helping me to plan, and get the word out, and I think this summer I’ll be able to do it. Assuming the Game ends well. When I was talking to Darius today he said the borders were closed yesterday. That’s why I have the day off, nothing can go through Talaria Travel while they’re down. Up. I don’t know how you describe it. So we just have to wait and see what happens. But I’m sure the Lord will win.”

The tentativeness of hope in her face was lacerating. Raphael slammed his emotions down again and said with utter honesty if mendacious tone, “We can hope so.”

“Yes,” Sherry said, but when Raphael glanced at her he saw she was resolutely keeping her eyes fixed on the
nirgal slaurigh
pot. She continued after a moment, her voice not doubtful but not particularly certain either, “I have no doubt he will triumph.”

“Hopefully,” said Kasian, “at not too high a cost. Though richer and more rare than merriweather cloth, the crown of
 
Ysthar is yet merely a crown. It is to be hoped the Lord of
 
Ysthar will not forget the purposes of his power.”