Till Human Voices Wake Us (17 page)

“You can use the stage,” Robin said brightly when he turned to see if the space was open enough. “Everyone’s cleared out but the janitors.”

Raphael nodded curtly and walked onstage, Kasian following him. With all the lights up and the scenery removed the boards were bare and dusty black. Kasian paced out the steps for the beginning position and stood waiting.

Raphael caught himself from saluting in the European manner and instead bowed carefully, with all appropriate flourishes, the way he remembered from when he was young. He had failed miserably in the duels their father had taught him, while his twin had won even more frequently than Tefen.

Kasian had taken Hamlet’s weapon, so Raphael held Laertes’s plainer one; its balance felt strange in his hand after half a hundred evenings of the other. He felt stupid and clumsy, his magic gone, his body shouting at him, his heart somehow both dry and heavy. It was nearly midnight, six hours since he’d drunk the
nirgal
slaurigh
, and his magic was gone.

So. Kasian came three days before the end of the Game. The day before the end he drugged Raphael. Then he challenged him to a duel, with bated swords to be sure, but yet … Raphael found he didn’t care what Kasian was doing. He didn’t feel angry. He felt like the Stoic’s dog. They used to say that a man under fate was like a dog tied to the back of a cart: he could choose to run or be dragged, but either way he was following.

Happy indeed he who could subject fate to his feet.

Raphael breathed deeply, the way he took a deep breath before entering Hamlet’s character, and entered the character he had developed for himself through the years of the Great Game Aurieleteer, that of someone who knew what he was doing with a sword. He was not as great as his father, of course, but he was proficient enough nowadays.

He took a step into the Lord of
 
Ysthar, felt the immediate lack of response from his magic with sickening force. He jerked half a step back from the Lord of
 
Ysthar, into James Inelu in full glamour. He could do that without magic.

Kasian took the first move, as he always had, beginning with the questioning probes of their first lessons and later warm-up practices. It was these Raphael had dredged from his memory when he began to fence again; nevertheless he was surprised that he could block them so easily. He relaxed a little, shut off his mind from the audience and the identity of his opponent. This was just as well for Kasian, hastening through the more advanced probes, launched suddenly into a full-out attack.

Raphael began to move about the stage freely. He had a small advantage there, for he knew its dimensions thoroughly, whereas it was Kasian’s first glimpse of it; the edge of the stage was present in his mind in a way it could not be for his brother. But Kasian had inherited a large measure of natural talent from their father, talent honed by constant application and one-on-one tutelage from the greatest swordsman of nine worlds.

Even the exigencies of the Great Game Aurieleteer were no substitute for that teacher. Far sooner than he would have liked, for he stayed with his usual mixture of offensive and defensive moves until he had to choose either to go for a killing move or to protect himself against one, Raphael found himself embarking on the defensive pattern he had developed over all those years of practice and fight, a defense that no one had ever yet broken. His hope, at this stage, was that his opponent would tire soon; he did not cheat by recourse to magic. When he had magic to cheat with.

 
Kasian, however, did not seem impressed. He began to frown a little. Raphael, in a place he associated with being stared at, did not think it was concentration, but rather annoyance, or perhaps peevishness. But the defensive pattern worked as it was intended to.

A hollow noise boomed out under the sound of their footsteps. Raphael was so focused on his swordplay he forgot he wasn’t sensing magic until he saw Kasian’s glance flick sideways as it sounded again. It was creakier this time.

 
His brother increased the tempo and weight of his blows. The noise ground out again, and the lights flickered a little. This time Kasian did not flinch: his eyes were intent and emotionless but for the pleasure in motion well executed, and the swords were moving at speed and strength enough that if a blow landed it would have drawn more than welts; close to the full battle mode, where even with the bated tips an ill-placed angle would mean severe injury.

Raphael couldn’t feel the magic swirling around them, but in the buzzing static and deep wooden groans he knew they had awoken the sanctuary protections that he had laid on the theatre when he knew he would be coming every day at regular times in the run-up to the end of the Game.

The sanctuary protections were against violence, raised by any real intention of such they sensed. If he was angry, he couldn’t tell what this emotion was at all, he felt numb and desiccated. If Kasian was angry … dear Lord he couldn’t be seriously trying to kill him, Circe couldn’t have bound him to that, could she? Not with magic—Raphael would have seen that—but there were other ways of binding someone, of twisting them from their right mind, of breaking them to your will, and she was very skilled at those methods.

Raphael stopped and raised his left hand just as Kasian lunged forward. He caught the bated sword-tip in his palm and felt as if he had plucked a sudden blossom of pain.

Kasian, panting, held his lunge. Raphael had forced himself to appear calm and collected in all such occasions for so long that he was able to stand straight and ungasping with the sword pressing against his palm so hard it bowed into a parabolic curve.

The building creaked again, and the lights dimmed in a frill of static discharge. Kasian started a bit and nearly lost his balance, keeping it by dint of leaning into the lunge farther. The sword snapped.

Kasian stumbled upright and looked around the theatre, perhaps at the audience of astonished cast and crew, or at the way the building continued to grumble to itself with creaking wood and flickering lights. “I think,” he said in English, “that we have offended the gods of this place.”

He looked long at Raphael before deliberately slashing his own palm with the jagged edge of the sword. He held out his hand so that several drops of blood fell onto the floor. “My blood for your honour.”

Another old ritual, also learned by rote in those long-ago lessons: blood for guardian spirits, salt for mischief-makers, milk for hearth-keepers, and water and fire to ask fertility of the sky and the earth. Music for the phoenix to come home again in her bonfire immolation, the only time their father would let him sing—

Raphael closed his hand against the welt and turned to Robin, who was gaping with something between astonishment and glee. “I’m sorry for the sword.”

Robin took both hilts, Kasian offering the broken one to him as Raphael gave him his, and blinked rather fetchingly. “You don’t feel the need to give blood to the
lares
?”

Raphael had set the protections for the houses of sanctuary on Ysthar; he knew the secret names of the spirits that kept watch, and it was his hand that punished law-breakers. Anyone who acted with violence raised the guardian magic in warning; anyone who assaulted another after the warning was bound into punishment. There had not been many who had broken them, but their chastening was on his head.
 

How angry was Kasian, to raise them so strongly?

“I shall be surety for them,” he said blankly, and walked out of the theatre.

***

He made it most of the way to the river before Kasian caught up with him. His brother grabbed at his arm so he perforce had to stop. “What is wrong with you? You keep saying the most exasperating things—or the most intriguing!—then leaving. Don’t you have anything to say? You seem much happier to walk off and brood melodramatically than deal with your problems.”

You poisoned me
, he did not say.
What did Circe promise you? What did she say you were doing? What did she claim those spices would do?

Raphael went back to his mental image of a cathedral and began to shore up his flying buttresses again. High above London the clouds were an immobile lid under the great winds. “I don’t want to talk.”

“Do you ever want to talk?”

He shrugged, stiffly, his shoulders hunched tense. He straightened them with resignation and realized he’d walked blindly if most briskly down a street that led to Lambeth Bridge. They were nearly there already. Kasian kicked a stone and swore when he stubbed his toe. It wasn’t a swearword Raphael knew but it certainly sounded rude. He caught himself wondering what language it came from and when Kasian had learned it and whether he was ever tempted to swear in highly inappropriate situations, perhaps when holding court. Whether it was appropriate for how he himself felt this moment, with Ysthar’s magic dammed behind powers he could not access, the winds couched awaiting him, his heart dead.
 

“Your friends told me that they’ve never seen you lose control. They’ve debated drugging you just to see what you’d say.”

They were on the bridge. Raphael stopped when he realized his stride had carried them halfway across. He couldn’t even see his house. That quiet discovery broke some barrier of reticence in him, and bitterly he said, “So you thought you would oblige them?”

“I thought—” Kasian stopped, swore again, robustly, and turned so vehemently Raphael backed up against the balustrade. “I wanted you—I wanted you to be—why didn’t you ever come
home
?”

Raphael very carefully held back the first three things that came to his lips. As temperately as he could he said, “I am home, Kasian.”

“You know exactly what I mean. Did you think we didn’t care?”

“I have seen no evidence to the contrary.”

“I came to find you.”

“You came too late.”

There was a plunging silence. Raphael realized in shock he was serious. Kasian raised his hands in something like despair, or anger, or sheer affront: Raphael was contemplating the way he felt, as if he’d snapped a teacup: and his brother thrust him off the bridge.

The air held him for a moment. The water looked strangely bumpy, lumps of smooth water girdled with braided ripples and pointillist bubbles. He had a confused impression of lights red and white and yellow around him. Then he hit.

For a moment the water was welcoming, but it did not take long to turn against him. The downstream current dragged at his clothing, his legs, his shoes; the upstream, almost its equal in force, yanked his hair across his face and his collar tight against his throat. The tide was turning.

He spun. He opened his eyes. The river was a deep murky green fading to black in all four directions. Two drew him, opposite each other, though he had no idea whence they came nor whither they led. One tugged relentlessly on a hard knot somewherebetween his throat and his gut. The other one was as dark but from it came a thin trickle of music, old familiar music. Sunlight and shadow in his mind, the softest echo of a song he had tried to capture in the thought of high green valleys on a windy day. Music he had once known with every pulse of his heart.

He spun. Now the other two directions were above and below him, both of these flecked with silver bubbles of air. His ears were ringing with the tintinnabulation that was not his music. The edge between the greenlit water and the darkly shining was blurred with ribbons that might have been magic or might have been waterweed or might have been both. No, not magic. He still had no magic. Whatever the ribbons were they came with deathly slowness through the silver froth until they wrapped—gently, slowly, softly—around his limbs.

He spun. He had no idea which direction led to the surface, upstream, downstream, the river-bed—and, he knew—without words, simply with ancient instinct—three of those ways were death. The water was heavy on his skin and his thoughts heavy in his mind—he searched slowly as a somnambulist after that echo of a memory of music—music that drifted away from him.

It danced tenderly just outside of his reach, a thread of gold-green music far too slight to hold his weight. But he wanted only to hold it, just one more time, just to hold—once he had tried to support himself with it, and that time the thread had snapped. He had learned his lesson then, as the tapestry of which that thread was one bright strand unravelled under his fumbling touch.

He had been so good at music once; and yet now it was all gone.

He reached out to the tendril of music but hesitated before his hand closed around it. And what if he broke this phantasm? Would the remnant of the great song, his lost song of songs, break rhythm and fall silent? What would happen then? How would he know?

And what, whispered yet another voice, even more quietly, what would his dying now do to his world, his mad beautiful Ysthar? … What would happen to all that extra magic stored up behind his will, those winds bound for tomorrow by his attention, those other powers he had arranged for the end of the Game? What would happen to Robin, the only other great mage at hand, the one most likely to be affected besides himself and Circe? … What would happen to Kasian … ? Kasian who had come too late …

Kasian
had
come too late … or too late for everything except destroying Raphael this night before the end of the Game.

In that, he thought bleakly, Kasian had succeeded.

Yet Raphael had given up his music for his magic, and now with his magic gone he was offered again his music.

The water was fading to black closer to hand, the shadows falling closer. He was completely disoriented now, the only thing he could feel besides the tug-o’-war pressures the little spill of light cupped in his hands. He wanted to follow it. He had no idea whether it came of the One Above or that shadow below, the shadow that he had stood against once, full of folly that anyone could stand against it untainted.

His whole body seemed to concentrate itself in the place where his nose joined his throat. He clenched in a spasm of passion—and thought, with some bare part of himself that still cared—it was better he died humiliated tomorrow than taint that little remnant light, if light it was from above.