Till Human Voices Wake Us (7 page)

The untidiness: the leftover plates and socks from whenever he’d last sat here, the dirty windows he hadn’t cleaned in weeks, the messy pile of books by the fireplace. For the first time in many years Raphael’s glance also registered the bronze-bound wooden chest those books were piled on, an object so long in its position there he’d forgotten its presence. It too was grimy, unpolished, blackened with time. He hurriedly picked up the socks and sank down onto the grey chair. “I … wasn’t expecting anyone over.”

Kasian took his seat on the couch and regarded the room. Raphael found his assurance discombobulating. His twin said, “I like your house.”

Shargán’s laws of hospitality stated that one should welcome every unexpected guest as if a long-lost brother. She had given that edict while the Fhiannóriel Palace in Tae Rcatha was being built for her, after she had won the heart and hand of the Lord Phoenix over the course of hunting the White Stag, who grants wishes. That was the palace Kasian lived in. If he chose to call Raphael’s house by the diminutive
hianü
, which almost meant ‘cottage’, well, he didn’t know that Raphael had built his
houselet
stone by stone. Raphael spoke carefully. “Thank you.”

“Aren’t you at all curious why I’m here?”

He kept his emotions well back from the surface, instead coolly arching his right eyebrow. This only made Kasian laugh merrily. Raphael remembered slowly that they had spent several months when they were twelve learning to perform the gesture. Perhaps Kasian was remembering that, too—Raphael was suddenly mindful of his brother’s likely emotional state on seeing him for the first time in so long, if he’d thought him dead, and said quietly, “Do you want to tell me?”

Kasian smiled mischievously. “I had a dream.”

Raphael would have taken this for a joke except that before he did more than consider the possibility his brother amplified: “Do you remember when we tried that old saw about being granted prophetic dreams if you sleep with a phoenix feather under your pillow?”

Raphael was puzzled, had to deliberately reach far back into memory. Back before the highways and byways of his memory cities, back before he had magic of his own, all the way back to their last year in Astandalas. Their grandmother, living with them for a bare few weeks after she brought Gabriel to stay with them and before she disappeared, had told them all sorts of old stories that their father hadn’t known. Amongst other marvels, the power of a phoenix feather under the pillow to show you the most important thing in your life.

They were thirteen. They’d tried once, and only once, both of them shattered by the conviction of true reality. Kasian, always a bit more precocious, had dreamed of a woman. Raphael … Raphael had dreamed of a woodland at dawn, of what had turned out to be the day he became the Lord of Ysthar. The most perfectly beautiful day of his life, beautiful enough to carry him through the price he had paid for it in all the long years since.

“You should smile like that more often,” his brother said matter-of-factly. “You look more real.”

Raphael froze while the two parts of his mind cleaved together in a wrench of terror. Slowly, carefully, damnably, he reclaimed his features for his self-control. Everything hung on his ability to control himself, his mind, his body, his magic. He would destroy the world if he faltered in his control, and the dragons would tell tales of him as Fulgor did of Urm and Swallow, or Agrinalaine and Ghizhaur. Three days, he thought, three days.

Kasian went on hurriedly. “A few months ago I was travelling down to Ixsaa when a stranger asked hospitality at my fire. It was a long story, he’d been a merchant ship’s captain, capsized on Colhélhé, had struggled to get home. He’d come by Ysthar, he said, and hoped his cargo of tea would redeem his venture. He told me this because Cael owns his ship, we’d met before. He said he’d met the Lord of
 
Ysthar, who had given him a gift, a feather of the phoenix of
 
Ysthar.”

Cael was their second-oldest brother. Ulass, then Cael, then Tefenadar their older sister. Kasian and Raphael. Liassa, Sharien, the younger girls. What had happened to their other siblings—no, he told himself, no. He wouldn’t ask about them. He’d think about who the merchant ship’s captain could be, to whom he’d given a phoenix feather.

Raphael drank some wine, hardly noticing that Kasian had refilled his glass. Some months ago on Daun … perhaps late-eighteenth century for him. There had been a man he’d met near Archangel in the winter, desperately in need of food, directions, help off the ice floe and onto the land. He’d spoken rough Shaian, and, yes, Raphael had given him a pound of tea and a phoenix feather and a dogsled with supplies to get him to the border with Daun. How remarkable the northern lights had been that winter.

“He showed me the feather when I asked him. And I—Raphael, I recognized it as Ishaa’s, and I had to—all that time I’d thought you were
dead
. Yet there was her feather, and I thought, Ysthar has become so strange and isolated since the fall, perhaps you’d been lost there, perhaps you were still alive. So I tried—I slept that night with it below my head—and I dreamed how I travelled to that park, the tower with the clock and the river and the sculpture of the townsmen.”

Raphael felt all his attention suddenly narrowed into realizing his jaw was clenched. He unclenched it carefully, ears popping. Kasian had come looking for him? Dared he believe that? What could he possibly say in response? Why would Kasian lie? But it was an awfully long way to go just in the hopes that an old fable told the truth.

(Except that the feather dream had told the truth, that other time, to Raphael. He had found himself in that sunlit wood, where the beech trees stood like cathedral pillars and the winds called out to each other. And neither of them had ever doubted that those dreams were true.)

He stared unemotionally at the floor for a long while. When he lifted his gaze the first thing he saw was that wooden chest he’d forgotten all about. It shouldn’t have been in that room, really, except that he’d not wanted to touch it, had thrown a cloth over it, then pretended so thoroughly it didn’t exist he was rather surprised his magic hadn’t done that work for him. It was the embodiment of Kasian’s twin Raphael, he thought: ignored, forgotten, hidden, locked away, but still there. Useless, unwanted, an appendix; but still there. Never moved, in case it jostled open. But still there.

He lifted his gaze higher in faint desire, only to see the sword above the fireplace. His kindled hope faded again into soberer resignation.

Perhaps if Kasian had come a year ago they would have had time to suture together the wound of this distance. A year of the phoenix ago Kasian would have fit right into his life, that gaudy happy time in the London theatres where Will was writing the plays that would fire the world’s imagination, when Raphael was still the sort of person who could make friends. Even an ordinary year of the sun ago Kasian would have found him in the brilliant role of the charismatic film star James Inelu, whose career was skyrocketing and superb, with the end of the Game feeling as far away as it ever had.

But instead Kasian came two and a half days before it ended, when Raphael had closed off everything that wasn’t necessary to survival. And what was necessary to survival? Not his brother; certainly not what was inside the chest. The rules of the Game were very clear on such points, and they were written into the universe at a level deeper than the laws of physics.

Five rules, simple ones. Easy to memorize, he had thought more than once; rather harder to comprehend; and increasingly difficult to live by.

The first had been the hardest to stomach in the beginning:
The challenge itself is binding: to refuse to play is to lose the forfeit
.
 

 
He’d not wanted to give up on his responsibilities quite that soon, not when nine years of the phoenix was so far away. Not when he, like everyone, had only ever heard of the glories won by those who played the Game. He’d never imagined the sordid acts that undergirded those brilliant moments. Never dreamed of the endless complicated subsidiary moves, trying to break Circe’s will, being so broken. Thus he was James Inelu, a successful film star, cynosure of a civilization, wealthy, admired, celebrated: the remnants of his real self lacerated by the attention, frayed a little further by every deliberate act to succeed, by every deliberate act that was not
him
. Not that anyone saw aught but what he showed them, not any more.

Over time he had come to realize the second rule was the worst, truly what had ruined his and Circe’s honour both:
With the exception of those things necessary to the continuance of the universe, all else is subordinate to the Game
. If the first was the anvil, that was the hammer of his adult life.
All else is subordinate
: all codes of honour or morality, all duties, all friendships, all other possible lives, all other possible dreams. Everything.

The remaining three were terrible but simpler; they had beat him into the shape he was now, this simulacrum of what he might otherwise have been, staring down Wednesday with something dreadfully close to pure ruthlessness.

For neither the first nor the last week of the Game shall any moves be made, including attempted finesses; between those dates there shall be at least one move made by each Aurielete during each year of the phoenix of Ysthar
. Finesse: a fine way of suggesting murder. But not in the last week, when the thugs didn’t attack him, but only his friend.

Subordinate challenges may not require the opponent to die or to kill, nor be worth more than one-fifth the value of the Great Forfeit
. No, not death; or at least not death of the body. Though his five years in Hollywood might be among the worst, there had been other terrible periods, years as a beggar, in the Roman catacombs, in Bedlam; and, to be fair, in retaliation he had made Circe spend soul-shaping years as an anchorite and a hedgewitch and in bitter service.

Whether by finesse or accident or final victory, the Game is won with the death of one of the players
. And thus, Wednesday.

Whatever happened on Wednesday Raphael was dead. Oath-breaking, murder, deliberate failure, the pulling down of the world or his soul for his own power: that was what he had chosen when he had agreed to the Game, when he had not given in his crown as the forfeit at the beginning. Nine years of the phoenix had not changed the terms, just made them all so much clearer.

He would have to kill Circe to save the world, and with that action the small remnants of Raphael locked away in that wooden chest would finally be at rest, for he could not imagine opening it afterwards. If there were an afterwards that meant anything to him. Perhaps he would add that to the legends around the Lord of Ysthar, that he had hidden his heart away in a wooden box like some Easian wizard and thereby won the Great Game Aurieleteer against the Enchantress Circe.

He’d already been given the warning of the One Above:
Don’t look back
. It behoved him to listen.

And there: the decision was made. He was obscurely grateful for Kasian’s statement, that Kasian had come here expressly to find him. It made the choice so much clearer, and the necessity of it so much clearer too. Of course his own preferences weren’t worth the world. He’d just needed Kasian there as symbol of what he was fighting for to see it.

(Agamemnon would always choose, always had to choose, Menelaus over Iphigeneia …)

What did it matter what happened to
him
, if Kasian and those like him—Robin and Will and Scheherezade, and (his thoughts suddenly reached out to encompass other friends and acquaintances and mild enemies he’d made in his various roles of late) Marjorie Brown the palaeontologist who had once given him the gift of unexpected beauty and Isaac Zeigenhanck who was a real person as well as a rock star and the absurdly jealous Roderick Maxwell who played Claudius and Hazel Isling who played Ophelia, and the wider circles of magic folk and ordinary folk and all the other people of his world he didn’t know by name—

—if all those people could go about their lives without even noticing the end of the Game, without even Robin realizing how close they’d come to the total upheaval and great destruction that accompanied the transferal by violence of magic from one lord magus to another—if no one had to know there was a magical war going on in the background
at all
—

—If no one ever had to speak of the seventh Lord of Ysthar as Fulgor Goldhladen the Thunder Dragon had spoken of Urm and Swallow, or the death of the Garden of Kaph—

If that was what was gained, there was no choice whatsoever. Kasian was a king; he would understand the choice of duty over preference.

Of course, Kasian didn’t know he was the Lord of Ysthar.
 

Raphael hesitated over that concern, the best way to combine a semblance of brotherliness with the distance required to accomplish those remaining tasks in peace. He looked around the room, saw the sword on the mantelpiece, thought again of the complicated moves of the Game that ramified out from those five simple rules. Perhaps the best thing to do was to finesse it.

Not in the way the Game meant, by assassination, but Castiglione’s
sprezzatura
again, that affection of nonchalance Raphael had spent so long perfecting. He could not always hide in his house like his phoenix in the trees of the garden; he had duties.

Kasian knew he was shy, and Raphael’s friends knew he was private. Introducing them to each other would make them all believe he was opening up, and while they exchanged pleasantries Raphael could let their stories of him replace his actual presence.

Come Wednesday he would be ready, choice finally made, to face down Circe, not looking back at all, with the winds at his back as befit the lord magus of the world.

 
Character built, Raphael entered it by looking up, smiled at Kasian with radiant pleasure shading to shy request, said, “Would you like to meet some of my friends?”

Kasian replied, “I should be most honoured,” with a small bow and what Raphael might normally have considered slightly suspicious gravity, but as it stood he was simply grateful his brother asked no further questions.