Till Human Voices Wake Us (3 page)

The path corkscrewed down and down until the only sounds were the low breathings and strange noises of the blind places of the earth.

It was the sort of place where he expected to come across Cerberus at every corner, to come upon a door superscribed with:

Through me one enters the sorrowful city;

Through me the eternal woe;

Through me the lost.

Justice moved my high Maker:

Divine power made me,

The highest wisdom and the first love.

Before me was nothing created

That was not eternal, and eternal I endure.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Despite himself, when he came to
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
, he paused to listen to the thick and turgid air. He heard no breath let out in a triple growl, no snarl of the dog who guards the gate, no hint of any life at all, in fact. His own heartbeat was small against the weight of the blackness, and he could hear nothing; without magic he would have been entirely blind.

Raphael picked his way through the caves that echoed high above his head in sharp staccato beats. The tunnel twisted about itself, growing progressively more entangled with the border with Eahh. So close to another world his awareness of his own was sharper than his awareness of his body; he felt as if half his being were implicated in the overlapping layers of magic.

Here there was none of the gentle fraying into the Tangled Borderlands that marked most of the other borders, where one might stray back into Ysthar as easily as out of it: here the border had cut-edged clarity. Circe was the wife of the Lord of Eahh, and her occasional crossings kept the connections between the two worlds wider open than he much liked. This particular passage gaped even further under the weight of the dragon who had chosen it for his lair.

Fulgor Goldhladen had neither died nor gone elsewhere, as Raphael had half-thought he might, seeking climes where gold and treasure were more easily gained than modern Ysthar. The dragon lay asleep on a hoard so vast the ransom of whole continents had spilled unattended into the farther reaches of the caves.

As Raphael neared the central lair he found himself growing short of breath from the nearness of Eahh, the weight of its otherness crashing against his mind. Finally he came to where Fulgor’s tail poured down a waterfall of blue and red and purple gemstones, and he started to pick his way along the furlongs of his length.

It was only after he ducked under the arch of one talon nearly half again his height that he began to hear the sound of the dragon’s breathing, slow and strong and the same almost-regular pattern as the asymptotes of the moon’s orbit. He walked on, now beside leg, now wing, now leg again, now furled mass of body, now proud arch of wingtip, now foreleg, angling towards the place where the dragon’s head rested, the bulging eyes that were larger than his full span closed. In his slumber the dragon’s head had slipped half across the diaphanous veil between the worlds.

At length Raphael halted beside the dragon’s throat, amazed not at the pulsating muscle beside him but that he could see parts of Eahh through the rippling border. He saw a winter landscape: frozen lakes and water-meadows and precipitous pink and grey rocks, trees like spruce and pine and birch, snow in a heavy blanket.

From what he could see he was looking out from the mouth of a cave, quite high up. The land, with its mantle of dark green and grey forest and white-clad plains, unfolded itself below him in stark magnificence.

It was lit with sunlight of such intensity that he was surprised that it did not reflect into where he stood in darkness. Above him lay miles of earth and stone and habitation, and above that the yellow fog, and the coming morning that would not be as luminous as this landscape.

He had never thought Eahh might be beautiful.

He was standing close to the dragon’s head, very close to the border so as to see through it. He had to strain to see past the streamers of magic that constantly skidded from one side to the other, in and out of Ysthar. Leaning forward to see how the land changed towards what he took to be the east—for it seemed as if there might be habitation in that direction, though for thousands of miles it was wild in every other—he brushed his hand against the very border itself.

Pain speared through him and he stepped back in shock, only to trip over a pile of metal and fall heavily on knobbly bones still beneath it. He was stunned by a double sensation, the first that he had actually burned himself, and the second that blinding white light was pouring forth like a small sun from the fabric of the border.

Even as he winced away from the light the dragon woke.

Fulgor twisted his head upright and writhed his serpentine bulk into a series of taut arcs, his scarlet crest upraised and scales abruptly rough-hackled. He focused on Raphael: and then he roared.

Oh, how he roared. The sound filled all the empty spaces around them and set the metalwork belling.

Without thought or effort, Raphael’s magic reached up to the flamboyant sound. He wrapped himself in tendrils of power around its central core of bitter-hot fire. In unconscious desire he scrambled along the shifting surface to stand upright, hands uplifted.

The fire hurt his mind and body but even as he noticed the pain it grew into a savage desire, the strength of it like strong wine in his veins. Gold spattered around him from the heat; but his bones thrilled with resonating power. He caught the magic reflecting back and forth from dragon to border, absorbing it into his being, reaching into the fire.

The burning gold smelled hot and almost languorous, the smoke lotus-scented.

His shadow stretched enormous in front of him, but it shrank before the dragon. Fulgor loomed larger than reality seemed capable of holding, filling the entirety of a cavern the size of a mountain, blazing with fire of all colours. His fire sparked from the gems and gold melted onto his scales and reflected back a thousand times from jewels—carbuncles and rubies and emeralds and diamonds—and goblets and coins and crowns and mirrors and necklaces, sapphires and pearls the size of ostrich eggs, and armour of steel and enamel and gold and the magic craft of Fairyland.

Fulgor roared again and fire and smoke filled the air of the cavern, until Raphael’s shadow splintered about him and he stood in the black shadow of a blossom of dragonfire and smoke.

The dragon was as old as the North Wind, his fire sharper even than Raphael’s heart’s desire to bite down on it. Raphael pushed himself into the burning, his magic reaching up the coils—stepped forward—shifted the golden hoard. A pile of coins from the old empire of Astandalas skittered down to his feet: and with the small noise his astonishment suddenly snapped into perspective.

He raised his protections out of insignificance and lifted his head and spoke in a voice that cleft the echoes: “Why do you roar so, Fulgor Goldhladen? Speak if you would to me; otherwise be silent, and I shall do the work I came here to do.”

The dragon struck out at him, fixing his eyes with his own. Great eyes, seductive eyes, eyes that burned black and white and gold, eyes like the deep heart of the planet, eyes like suns.

Raphael met the dragon’s glance squarely, and when their gazes locked he did not flinch. Here he had no need to keep his attention contained for fear of accidentally touching another too fiercely. He stared directly at the dragon without fear for what he might do, for here he stood on the edge of his world looking inwards, the quiet heart of a storm of noise and fury.

The dragon dropped with a resounding thud of ringing silence. A few tinkles as small bits of metal settled again. Raphael’s ears were full of a tintinnabulation of sounding brass and cymbals like the sound of continents colliding. He listened to the sound so nearly music with an agonizing desire that shocked him with its intensity, more bitter than dragonfire in its heart. As he flinched inwardly away from the emotion, he heard a deeper rumble from the dragon’s gullet: “I was sleeping deeply, and was surprised by the light. I apologize, lord, for threatening you.”

Raphael half-reefed the outstretched sails of his magic, focusing strictly on his present concerns. He let the desire pass as if it were the shadow of a bird crossing before the sun, and only when he was firmly in character as the Lord of
 
Ysthar did he speak again. “I accept your apology.”

The dragon sighed, and there was the judder of Cerberus for him, the echoes doubling and tripling the sound until it might have been voiced by the guardian of the doorway to the Land of the Dead. “O lord,” he said, “I feel the end of the Game coming down the wind.”

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.