Till Human Voices Wake Us (6 page)

There was nothing of Tanteyr literature he could quote from memory. Only scattered pieces of Shaian poetry came from his youth, primarily Fitzroy Angursell’s great subversive epic
Aurora
, which he had quoted last night to Circe and thereby lost the penultimate move in their little game of truth or dare. But the deeds and misdeeds of that princess offered him nothing.

Kasian offered, “We thought you were dead, you know,” so conversationally Raphael wished he had come up with a line dripping in satire first. He made himself nod amiably.

“Yes,” Kasian went on. “You were gone—and then, of course, there was the fall of Astandalas. Earthquakes. Magical destruction. The nine worlds torn apart and rearranged. All that sort of thing. Most of the city simply disappeared and everyone with it. Most of
Ysthar
disappeared. We thought you must have died … You weren’t in our part of the city, the part that ended up around Kilturn on Daun.”

Raphael traced the patterns the wind made around him, the magic tilting towards Salisbury Plain. He smoothed out the energies couched around Stonehenge, the circles of protections that he hoped would prevent his and Circe’s magic from spilling out beyond the vicinity on Wednesday. Kasian looked up, hastily down again when Raphael carefully did not meet his gaze.

“Later, when things settled down and people started travelling again, when a handful of people dared hazard a journey between the worlds, we asked those who came from Solaara looking for their relatives. Another part of Astandalas ended up there, did you know that? In Solaara on Zunidh. Anyhow, we asked everyone if they had seen you. A Tanteyr boy in a city of Shaians … you would be so obvious, we thought. But no one had seen you there.”

Kasian let that silence drag out such a long time Raphael finally said, “No.”

“I always hoped you weren’t. Dead, I mean. I always thought you couldn’t be, that I’d
know
, but they said—I was sure you’d come home if you weren’t—I mean, Da said.” He laughed, a bit nervously, Raphael thought, thinking that nervousness was not a trait he would ever have ascribed to his brother. “I was terribly sick for a while, after the Fall, but so were plenty of others. Da especially, from our family.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “You recovered?”

“As you see me!” Kasian laughed again, more naturally. “I did have a relapse later, on my—
our
—twenty-first birthday. It was all very awkward, I collapsed in the middle of high court. Very bad omen, that, given my—
our
birthday’s the winter solstice. At least it wasn’t the summer one! That would have been worse. But nothing seemed to come of it besides a few broken dishes, and bed-rest for me.”

Raphael sifted through various thoughts, wondering what he could ask that would be least dangerous. “High court?”

“Oh, of course, you wouldn’t know, would you? I’m the king.”

He asked, because with Kasian one couldn’t really be sure, “Of where?”

“The Realm, of course. The Tanteyr Realm. Only kingdom I’m remotely entitled to! Though I’d be king of Ixsaa in a heartbeat.”

“Ixsaa—”

“I know, I know, they’re set on rule-by-committee. Democracy, if you’d rather. It’s not a particularly efficient system, I don’t think. No one who’d actually be any good at running a country ever seems to stand for election. What about you?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You’ve got the broad outlines for me. Fall of Astandalas—Kilturn—oh, yes, I went to the University of Riddles in Ixsaa for a bit,
 
before being suspended, whereupon I went exploring up the Whitefeather, found the Realm, and was offered the kingship. King I have been since my—
our
—eighteenth naming-day. There you are. What about you?”

Raphael considered all the options available to him in response to that question and settled for, “I act.”

“In what?”

Everything, he thought, gazing balefully at a shoal of runners rounding the corner of Lambeth Bridge. “Plays, mostly.”

“And you’ve done that since we were fourteen?”

Perhaps being a king meant Kasian had learned to watch what he said, for he did not give voice to his incredulity. Raphael at fourteen had been brutally shy and stuttered. “Also a bit of magic.”

Kasian threw out his hands in fierce mockery. “I do believe that was very nearly a complete sentence! Do you enjoy magic? You hadn’t any before the Fall. I daresay you’re not the only one to have had magic woken in them by what happend. Have you lived here, on Ysthar I mean, since then?”

“Yes.”

“From what I’ve heard, that’s been a lot longer than on Daun—centuries and centuries, not just a handful of years off, like Alinor. I suppose they say it’s been nearly a thousand years on Zunidh, too. It must have something to do with Zunidh and Ysthar being the old centre of the Empire … Has it really been that long, for you?”

“Yes.”

Vigils for the dead, phoenix years, a bare few years, sometimes even a decade or two, at any one apparent life, then starting over somewhere else as someone else. Moves of the Game, movements of magic, letters and friendships and enmities and slow crashes of civilizations. The Lord of Zunidh thought the warped time was due to—something he couldn’t actually remember at the moment. He shook his head at himself.

Kasian caught the movement. “And what are you thinking, to shake your head so, O brother mine?”

Raphael glowered at the gunmetal river, the flashing white gulls, the neon-bright runners. Beware looking back, Gabriel had said. No—
Don’t look back
. Don’t. The word rang in his mind like a warning bell. Don’t look back—Don’t look—Don’t—

He found he did not want to tell Kasian that the end of the world was in three days. Two and a half days. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. He did not want to say anything. He wanted simply to keep going, as he always had, smiling politely (he had found his store of polite smiles), running down the centre of his life like a canoeist down the narrows, avoiding such thrown boulders.

No one was more surprised than he, therefore, to hear himself suddenly ask diffidently, with that finely-gauged disinterest he had worked so hard to make the natural tone of his voice, “Would you like to come to my house?”

Kasian smiled as sardonically as if he had quoted
Aurora
. “Very much so.”

Raphael touched the edge of his magic and stopped dead, the wind circling him like an anxious dog.

The gulls settled down again in the wake of a boat navigating the bridge piers and the turning tide. The shoal of runners unravelled into jogging units, more than one slowing to gawk at the unexpected sight of film star James Inelu in the park. He tried to calm himself so as to fall back into obscurity, failing miserably. One woman actually stopped to retie her shoelaces just past them, struggling to undo a too-careful knot. Kasian caught Raphael’s distracted glance and gave her such a cheerfully knowing grin that she blushed and ran off with the laces still trailing. As soon as her back was turned Raphael shifted the magics so that he and Kasian were hidden, making a space in his enchantments for his brother. Then once again he found himself frozen in place. He could barely feel the wind nosing at the back of his trouser-legs.

“Are we going in, Raphael, or shall we stand out here in the rain a while longer?”

He hadn’t realized it was still raining. Kasian had never enjoyed getting wet unless deliberately in puddles. Raphael liked the rain, how it felt, how it looked, how it sounded. Once he had watched rain fill a new lake in the caldera of a volcano, in those years which were so full of magic he had been able to fly as easily as think.

All of a heap, like a landslide, it came to him that it really was Kasian standing there outside the door to his house, that it really was Kasian who stood looking at him, that it really was Kasian whom he had just found in the park.

The air trembled around him. His balance tottered as some great emotion caught the back of his throat. He prevented his immediate instinctive attempt to analyze it by saying, “Come in,” and turned his back on the runners and the gulls and the river and the rain.

Even to his ears it seemed painfully choked, but Kasian merely smiled and followed him.

As they walked across the garden in a spiral of confused mist and wind Ishaa flew around the hill like a splash of sunlight, as if to warn or welcome him; but Kasian did not seem to see her.

***

Unsure of what else to do, Raphael made tea. He picked one at random from his collection: Chinese tea, from the mountains like standing waves, famous for their sages clambering up to seek peaches and immortality, as unreally magnificent as Venice. Pouring a second cup Raphael realized that for Kasian tea (which, like roses, grew only on Ysthar of the nine worlds) would seem as flashy an extravagance as black caviar and pink champagne, and in a stifled paroxysm of embarrassment managed to ask, “Are you hungry?”

They were in the kitchen, Kasian on the stool and Raphael leaning against the stove. The half-wild magic of the house swarmed around them, come like a cat to investigate this intruder. Raphael wove and unwove his shields in quick succession, trying to settle his mind and his body both. His brother was a juddering knot in the room.

“Yes, I am, as it happens.” Kasian spoke with a disarmingly apologetic smile. “If you don’t mind.”

Mind
was not really the right word. Any notion of hospitality cried for generous food for a stranger, let alone his close kinsman. Closest kinsman. Raphael moved to the cupboard where there was half a loaf of bread; which of course was stale. He put it back and found crackers instead. In the ice box there was cheese and salami and olives, and those were fine. Kasian said, “You don’t have any servants?”

Raphael turned with a round of Stilton in hand, startled into speech. “No.”

“Why not?”

They’d grown up in a civilization that took servants for granted, though their own household—full of children and their parents’ ever-changing rescues, and their parents’ deathly secrets—did not have anyone but someone who occasionally helped with the small magical tasks that were also a usual part of life in Astandalas. In other houses, other lives, he’d had servants. More often been one. Not here, though.

Kasian was smiling, obviously being polite and ordinarily curious. His expression was so open Raphael marvelled, so free it was from political indifference, so mobile and merry. He made sure his own voice was shaded towards warmth. “I like to do things for myself.”

“Do you have someone come in to clean?”

Raphael looked around his kitchen with stranger’s eyes, anxious for what he would see. But it was rigorously clean as a dairy, even the sculpture in the window free of dust so that its jewels and gold glowed in the diffuse grey light. “I prefer to do it myself,” he repeated. Forestalling any other questions, he added, “I’ll get another chair.”

The matching stool was in the conservatory. The moist air embraced him as he passed through it, a steady torrent of growth, the room scented with lemon verbena and nutmeg geranium, loud with the rushing calm of green and growing things in a winter held at bay by glass and steam and subtle magic. There were ripe oranges, a gift from the trees in their tubs to him, from him to his brother. He held them balanced like juggling balls in his left hand, the chair in his right, magic reaching ahead to open the door—when it opened.

His heart skipped a beat. Kasian grinned and reached to take the chair.

The humidity beaded on Raphael’s upper lip and brow warned him of physical demands. By natural extension he thought of greater demands, hospitality first in present concern, his wider duty to Ysthar foremost in importance. Even though Kasian would hardly guess it from his behaviour so far, he was quite renowned for his hospitality in other houses. He forced himself to relax, smile thanks. He was the Lord of Ysthar, who was kind to strangers.

It was easier, he reflected, with strangers.

He brought plates and glasses and, doubtfully, wine. Kasian opened the bottle handily with a knife from his pocket stabbed into the cork and expertly flicked out, a facility that woke questions Raphael was unprepared to ask. He picked at his food distastefully, hardly able to keep his attention anchored in his body enough to use his hands, let alone care about the food. The salami was richly odorous and the mustard nauseatingly pungent. The untoward tension in the magic as the end of the Game approached had roiled his stomach more than he’d realized.

Finally Kasian settled back with a contented sigh. Raphael braced himself. His brother began judiciously with compliments, nodding at the mobile in the window. “That’s a wonderful sculpture.”

“It was a gift.”

“It’s magnificent. One doesn’t often find gold-and-diamond sculptures in kitchens.”

“It seemed a good place to put it,” he replied, more defensively than he meant. No one had ever commented on it; but then Kasian was the first person who had ever been inside his home, let alone inside the kitchen. He’d gone there automatically to make tea, not thinking of what it would be like to have someone looking curiously at his place, wanting to read him through this house that was not a set-piece for any role, just the accumulated
bric-à-brac
of his life.

Kasian smiled reassuringly. “Just unusual. Though probably you get people telling you that frequently.”

Raphael was taken aback by that evident desire to reassure, and answered with only slight mendaciousness. “I shouldn’t say frequently.”

“No? Or do not many people get to eat lunch in your kitchen?”

Kasian was a king, unused to kitchen hospitality, let alone kitchens untenanted by servants and cooks. Raphael stood. “We can go into the sitting room.”

Going there was a mistake, he saw, as he saw the room through his brother’s judgmental eyes. The bottom of the original tower, it was a square room, moderately large and high-ceilinged, the walls plastered white over old rough stone. Between the windows three large paintings: trees by Monet, a Turner sea-and-cloudscape, a pointillist scene of his garden he’d done himself. A Chesterfield sofa in old leather that was missing half its buttons, a faded grey-blue wingback chair, two Louis XIV end tables with gilded lions-claw feet. Between all these a beautiful Persian carpet, showing a much-ramified tree in blue and gold and white. Floor of a dark wood nearly black. A fireplace with a sword on the mantelpiece above it.