A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (10 page)

He dropped the scepter after it, heard the faint echo a moment later
as both it and the body hit water below.

“The sewers?” Jalina said from behind. “They’ll search every
sewer and tunnel within a league of the castle to find him.

“If you insist on telling me things I already know, put them to a
tune at least.” With a flourish, Charan stood back, beckoning her toward the
open sluice drain. The day’s wash water was still slick on the stones, dripping
at the edges like a rank rain.

“You’re mad,” she said.

“And a fool, apparently, and proud of both. Get in.”

“I will not…”

“You will,” Charan said, “whether you climb or whether I drop
you.” Smiling, he advanced on his sister as one moved on a disobedient dog, saw
her flinch despite her own best effort. “This isn’t done yet, but when it is,
you’ll have an empire to rule. The scent of blood is the first thing you need
to get used to.”

He held her ashen gaze, felt the depth of the anger there. Anger
and something else, but he had no time to try to read it.

Not fear, he knew. Of all his sister’s moods, that alone was the
one he would always recognize.

Jalina turned away. She stepped to the mouth of the black well.

“There’s a ladder,” Charan said, more softly. “The smell is worse
above. Hold your breath to the bottom, you’ll be fine.”

The narrow chute was roughly chiseled, a wide drain descending
what might have been the length of two dozen paces. As his sister lowered
herself, Charan saw her find the ladder, its rungs inexplicably extending a hand’s-breadth
from ancient stone with no sign of support. Steel cylinders descended the
length of the shaft, thin as a finger and impossibly strong, hung there and
protected from corrosion by the unseen strength of spellcraft. He had stolen
them from his father’s arcane armories on a whim when he was a boy, even before
he had any idea what use he might eventually put them to.

She needed both hands to cling carefully as she descended. Charan
went one-handed, the other holding an evenlamp he had taken from the corridor
along the way, its eternal cold flame casting the glow of an unnatural sunrise
across the stones. He slid the grate back into place from below as he made his
way down.

The air was cloyingly damp, Charan’s light shimmering on water
below them. He heard Jalina jump to wet stone as she reached the bottom, her
footsteps loud but steady. He was behind her a moment later. Their father’s
shrouded body lay in a shallow puddle of black water. Charan stepped over it
carefully.

The ceiling was barely tall enough for him to stand beneath,
vaulted stone holding the weight of ground and castle above, slick with moisture
and the sheen of black mold. True to his word, the air within the sewer passage
was clean, scoured by the salt tang of the sea. The broad tunnel was of
finished stone but had no entrance, no exit, no doors. The well they had just
descended opened up as a rough chute in the arched ceiling. Midway along the
walls, a dozen vents opened up to darkness, each as wide across as a child’s
shoulders.

On the wall beneath the ladderway, a larger grate opened up, as
wide to the eye as the drain in the cutting room above. Charan stepped close to
it, Jalina staring, her expression unreadable. “You’ve been here before?”

Charan ignored her. “Look here,” he said instead.

The bars of the slime-slick grate were set at cross-angles a
hand’s-width apart. Beyond them, a shadowed tunnel of cracked and blackened
brick opened up, a grated aqueduct whose mouth dripped water in an intermittent
rhythm. A distant pulsing roar echoed from the darkness.

“It connects to the harbor, beyond the deep docks,” Charan said.
“Seawater flows in at high tide to clean out this and all the other sewer traps
beneath the castle. As the tide turns, it empties again. We remove the grate.
We ensure the body can’t be identified.” He felt his hand absently stray to his
knife, forced it away. “Let the sea take what we leave of him. Consign him to
the depths.”

The grate was black sea-iron, strong as crucible steel but
untouched by rust. The stones around it were weaker, however, their mortar
eaten away by age and the salt-rot of the sea. Charan pulled a chunk free with
little effort, tossed it to the black water where his father’s body lay.

“Tear a stone wall down with our bare hands?” In Jalina’s voice,
he heard a familiar disdain that told him she had secretly appraised and
approved of the plan. “We’ll be here a week,” she said. “They’ll be looking for
him and us before we’re halfway finished.”

Charan smiled as he suddenly grabbed for the wall, pulled himself
up as the jet of water he had heard approaching broke through the bars. He
watched it crash across their father, breaking along the stone floor to make
Jalina scramble back. It pooled in a slick haze, ankle deep now. The inflow
returned to a trickle, steady against the distant howl of the surf.

Charan set the evenlamp on an outcropping near the ceiling. “Then
we’ll need to work more quickly than that,” he said.

They labored together wordlessly, side by side in the wet gloom,
knives hacking at the crumbling mortar that held twisted bars to weathered
stone. At intervals, Charan struck the grate hard with his father’s scepter,
gold plating and gems worth a rogue’s fortune torn away with each echoing blow.
Jalina glanced above her each time he hit, but he knew from experience that no
sound would make its way up the dark well to the castle above.

His shoulders were already aching, but he wouldn’t let Jalina see
it. He watched her as he worked because she was refusing to meet his gaze, focused
wholly on the digging. She paused only when one end of her knife’s guard
snapped off at her attempt to use it as a lever. The death-sign she made at
regular intervals didn’t slow her down. One hand working, the other with
fingers twisting to ward off the fear that he knew her father’s body was
inspiring in her. She would whisper names each time, a faint trace of movement
at her pale lips. Benedictions and the names of deities long dead.

“The gods have already had their say in the matter of the
khanan’s life,” Charan said quietly. “What do you hope they add to it now?”

Jalina’s eyes narrowed as she redoubled her attack against the ruined
wall. “Mock my faith all you wish.”

“I don’t mock your faith. I’m thinking I should embrace it. Seek
the guidance of sun and moons as did the khanans of old.” He twisted his knife,
feeling for and carefully avoiding its breaking point as he dug his way into
crumbling stone.

The fear had been in Jalina when their mother died. Charan felt
it that day when her hand found his at the edge of the funeral bier. He felt it
that night when he drew her to him for the first time, yielding when he pressed
his mouth to hers. He felt it as he led her through silence and shadow up to
the White Tower that had been their mother’s court, empty since the week of
mourning, its servants feted and drugged and burned still living with their
empress-consort on the pyre.

“The khanans of old Ajelast were masters of sun and moons.” Jalina
took the bait, as he knew she would. “The god-emperors captured the magics of the
heavens, and with it built a world the likes of which will never be seen
again.”

Twenty centuries before, Ajelast had been built on the bones of
the great empire of Nesana before it died out in fits of corruption and bloody
magical war long ago in its homeland across the sea. In an age where the
secrets of magic were long divided between the power of life and the power of
mana, the animys and the arcane, it was the hierophants of Nesana who had
married and perfected those disparate sorceries. Those same hierophants had
later been the power behind the ancient empire of Eria that first bound the
lands of the western Leagin as one.

“Your precious Empire cast down that faith and made all Ajaeltha
slaves to others’ ambition,” Jalina said, defiant. “Even as they stole the
power that was once ours. Those who revere the Lothelecan are the dogs never
knowing any life but the search for scraps at their masters’ feet.”

With one final thrust, the last mortar holding in the left side
of the grate fell away beneath Charan’s knife. His father’s blood still clung
to the grooves of the blade, he saw. “The khanans of old Ajelast married blood
to blood. Brother to sister.”

A darkness fell across Jalina’s face like a mask. She turned all
her attention to the keystone at the upper corner of the grate that had loosened
but would not yet move. He stepped in behind her, slipped his hand in to grasp
it. She flinched as he pressed against her.

“It is not for anyone else to tell us what we can and cannot do.
Not anymore.” Charan’s voice was a faint echo over the shadowed rasp of stone
on stone. “I do not claim to know the will of heavens or earth or what gods
live above or below our own lives. I only know what I believe in, and what I
believe in is you.”

“It’s over, Charan.”

There was a resounding crack as the crumbling keystone came
loose, a shower of dust and mortar rubble following it. The slow flow of water
was disrupted for a moment as the grate lurched. Charan was suddenly very cold.

Jalina threaded herself through his arms and away while he stood
unmoving. He watched the stone fall absently from his hand to strike black
water.

“We walk this path together,” he said, but his voice trailed off
against the dripping hiss of the shattered duct. He fought to speak, but his
sister’s words filled his mind and drove all else out.

He had expected those words, but not here. Had known from the
first that this moment would come one day. Jalina pushed along the wall as
splashing footsteps, turned back toward him. The brown eyes burned with contempt.
The taste of metal came to his mouth again.

“We walk together,” he said. “Now more than ever. We pledged
oaths…”

“We were children then,” Jalina said, and Charan once more heard
the child she had been thread through the words. An echo in her voice that cut
him. “Children’s oaths mean nothing. Set the past behind you, brother.”

“We are bound,” he said. He sheathed his dulled knife to seize
the bars, pulled with all the strength his rising anger gave him so that he
wouldn’t have to look at her. He heard stone and brick give way, felt the
muscles knot across his back and shoulders as the bent and ruined grate shifted
in his grasp. “Now more than ever. We…”

“There is no we. Not anymore.”

With a rumbling echo of steel and stone, the grate came loose,
and the response Charan would have made to his sister was choked off behind
that sound and the certainty he heard in her. An argument, he would have
expected, could have dealt with. A carefully crafted distraction, his sister
jockeying as she so often did for any subtle advantage in the eternal tension
that hung between them.

She had sensed the fear in him. Seeing deeper into him, perhaps,
than even he was capable of. Using that fear just as he should have expected
she would.

He dropped the grate to the pool of the floor, heard its drowned
echo ring out. “Father only just cold, and already you speak with his voice,”
he said evenly. “He has no say in what we do anymore…”

“What we did,” she said, all stress on the past. “What we did,
what we were, is why he died.”

He felt it then. Saw it like a mirror held up to his own
uncertainty. She was testing him, he realized. The fear he had learned to
recognize twisted through her words, hiding a truth he could almost see. A
thing he could extract and claim if he was careful, as he had been so many
times before.

The evenlamp on its shelf shed its light behind him. He moved
slowly, Jalina wrapped within his shadow. A hand on her shoulder made her
flinch. Then slipping across, rising to her cheek.

“If your gods do exist, it was their hand that guided my blade today.
They have brought you here. Placed you at the apex of the power that was
promised you the day you were born. They have made you their agent in Ajaeltha
now, and placed me here at your side.”

Charan didn’t see the arch of the ceiling shudder and split above
his head until he felt Jalina’s hands on his arm.

With a strength he had never suspected in her, his sister pulled
him off his feet, dragging him backward land atop her across the floor as the
age-weakened vault collapsed on the spot where he had been standing. The noise
was an echoing roar in the narrow confines of the sewer’s stone walls, a blast
of stale air slamming past to blind him with grit and black mold.

When he could open his eyes, the chamber was silent once more.
The evenlamp had fallen when Jalina saved him, its light shimmering now where
it was half-submerged in the ebb and flow of black water. The scepter and the
grate were both gone, buried beneath a jumbled fall of shattered brick and
rubble rising knee high. A pall of ash-grey dust hung over it, twisting like
storm clouds in the uneven gloom.

“My thanks,” Charan said awkwardly. He felt his sister push him
away as he stood.

Jalina moved back to crouch against the wall, eyes closed and
breathing hard. He stepped toward her, touched her shoulder. She didn’t flinch
this time, but when he put his hand to her waist, she shrugged him off, turned
so she could slip past him.

Charan saw the ashen eyes widen, flicking past his gaze to something
behind him. The fear he recognized again. He crouched low as he spun by
instinct, knife in hand.

At the corner of the haphazard mound of rubble, half-buried and
barely visible beneath the fall of stones and shattered brick, a body sprawled.

Charan scooped up the evenlamp, brought it to bear on the apex of
the collapsed wall. Through a shattered fissure, he saw darkness opening up
above the narrow confines of the sewer chamber. A rising passageway of worked
stone, closed off from the trap at some point in the past. Or perhaps an
ancient sublevel, beneath which the sewers had been extended when the
foundations of the castle were first laid.