A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (11 page)

“Who is it?” Jalina was at his side, her fingers trembling as
they made the death-sign. Despite himself, Charan fought the hope that those fingers
would seek his when they were done, watching as his sister’s hand went to her
breast instead, clenched tightly there.

The mummified form was the black of weathered silver, wrapped in
a torn shroud of rotted cloak and twisted ropes of cobweb. “Dead,” Charan
answered.

“I can see what it is. I asked who.”

“Death makes all the answers the same.”

It wasn’t the sight of death that his sister feared, Charan knew.
It was the spirits of the past. The superstitions of children and old men were
the foundations on which the faith of her once-dead gods was built. Their
church had been resurrected a generation before in the aftermath of the distant
Empire’s fall, and while he heard the liturgy as often and as endlessly as she,
it had never amounted to any more than any other folk tale in his mind. He had
thought his sister of the same mind, once.

When their mother died, Jalina had changed.

“Imperial Ajelasti,” Charan said softly as he bent close to the
body. Jalina gave him a quizzical look. “Judging by the age of him.”

Ajelast, whose ancient empire was the foundation on which Ajaeltha
was raised, had been the most bitterly contended of the lands destined to
become the Elder Kingdoms. Long after Nesana was only a memory, Ajelast stayed
strong. First of the Elder Kingdoms to fight the encroach of Empire. Last to
fall to the Lothelecan’s iron embrace, or so the official histories said. More
accurate accounts told less flattering tales of the complicity of Ajelast’s
last free khanans in the Empire’s final assault against the independence of the
east.

However, all tales spoke consistently in describing how Ajelast
rose in the aftermath of the fall of Empire as Ajaeltha. A new empire forged in
blood and steel by their father’s grandfather. A strength for rule in their
line that Charan saw in his sister in each waking moment, but which for some
reason he had never warmed to himself.

Even under the rule of the Lothelecan, the Ajelasti made sport of
assassination like no people before or since. Military history had been
Charan’s single point of interest in his lessons as a child, forgoing languages,
astronomy, natural history, literature and all else in favor of the endless
recitation of organized bloodshed that his father’s military advisors held in
seemingly endless supply. Wars they themselves had seen, political uprisings
before their time, endlessly talked of and analyzed. Tales of generals and the
nobles who ruled them murdered in more glorious and disturbing ways than Charan
would have thought possible.

His father had always spoken proudly of his son’s predilection
for the bloody politics of history. He found himself wondering now if the khanan’s
opinion had changed in the last few moments of his life.

Their father’s spirit was still locked within his already rotting
flesh. Or so it was reckoned by the beliefs of the temple, and by the magic of
the priests that could have enervated that dead flesh to life with the ancient
rites. For people such as his sister, those rites proved the renewed presence
of the once-dead gods. Banished by Empire and lost to the faithless but never
truly gone, the priests said. For Charan, however, the rites did the opposite,
and he was always quick to point out that the priests’ magic functioned just as
well under the Empire’s godless ochlocracy as it did now.

“Captain or castellan,” Charan said idly. “Or a queen’s consort,
or a king’s lover. Killed and sealed up behind stone. Or sealed alive, more likely.
Open up the old tunnels beneath any castle, you’ll find more like him.”

Charan saw his sister make the death-sign again. He let her hear
him laugh. “You spend your life afraid of shadows, you soon fear the sun and
moons that shed them.”

“I make the mortal warding for you,” she said calmly. “Not for
me.”

Charan felt a flush of heat rise at his chest, twisting up to his
cheeks. In his sister’s voice, there was a sudden edge that he had heard before
and learned to fear. Something had changed in the two dozen words that just
passed between them, and he had no idea what it was.

“Do I look afraid, sister?”

“The dead cast their shadows even in the absence of light,”
Jalina said, not answering. Her face was pale in the glow of the evenlamp, not
meeting Charan’s dark gaze. The water at the ruined duct was a steady rain now,
dripping in an uneven curtain against the stones. “He’s been here all along,
turning this place to a tomb. You let the dead witness your corruption, their
spirit becomes a part of that corruption, tainting it further. Tainting you.
You should be afraid.”

He understood then. He cursed himself silently, even as he
angrily conceded Jalina credit for this thing she had hidden, blindsiding him expertly.
His focus on getting their father through the castle, down into his makeshift
sewer tomb kept his thoughts scattered. He should have seen it. Would have seen
it under any other circumstances.

He laughed in an attempt to cover for the slip, knew that it was
already too late. “So my soul is tainted, is it?”

“Brother, your soul was tainted from the moment of your birth.”

At the grate above, Jalina had told him she wouldn’t descend, her
revulsion all too real. But she hadn’t bothered asking about their dark
destination. Hadn’t needed to, Charan realized now, because she already knew
where they were going.

“Your darkness brought you to this place from the time you were
nine years old,” she said simply. “It made you bring a long line of serving
girls with you, each discarded with silver in hand when you were done with
them. When they had finished pretending they were me.”

The words carried themselves with an ease that made Charan knew
she had waited years to speak them. He only smiled in return, tried desperately
to judge her true tone, her mood. Something was happening. A plan whose
foundations had been laid long ago. Disrupted now by the death of their father,
he guessed. Put into motion early. Or was the khanan’s death merely the
catalyst? A moment of disaster long waited for, in whose aftermath Jalina would
act?

He went for the feint by instinct, summoned up a suitable degree
of chagrin that he could pretend was a response to her discovering his secret.

“If only I had known all those years how much the pretending
would pale against the reality of you.” He stepped close, the sound of his
breathing loud even over the hiss of water as Jalina watched. A shiver threaded
through her. He moved his head down to kiss the nape of her neck beneath the
tightly drawn auburn hair.

He felt her push back against him, too quickly. He lost track of
what happened next.

Steel flashed as she spun away from him, his own knife in his
hand somehow. They locked guards at the first strike, then Jalina was fading
back, footsteps splashing clumsily as her blade slashed past Charan’s neck. He
slid to let it miss him, parried the next blow, returned with one of his own
that she caught and twisted past, behind him suddenly.

Where Jalina crouched, her eyes were bright with the fear he recognized.
“I knew it would end this way,” she whispered.

Charan’s hand was shaking, the battered blade of his knife
weaving points of bright fire in the half-light. He tried to trace back the two
dozen heartbeats just past, but his sight, his mind and memory were the same
blur of red.

He had drawn on her, he thought. But he wouldn’t have. Couldn’t
have. The evenlamp was in the water behind him. He had dropped it in
expectation, needing to free his other hand for balance. Impossible. He shook
his head, saw his sister flinch in expectation of another strike.

The feeling he was forever afraid to name rooted deep in his
chest. He felt the scent and the sight of her overwhelm his memory.

He felt the pain that her words made, felt the fear in her that
was the knowledge that her brother had tried to kill her rather than lose her.
The knowledge that he would try again. He felt the weight of the knife in his
hand.

At the conduit they had torn free of ceiling and wall, a surge of
black water exploded as shadow and white foam. The sea-channel had tipped past
the aqueduct’s unseen halfway point and was flowing steady now, pressing in
with a steady hiss of salt air and the distant moaning of the pounding surf
beyond the harbor’s breakwater stones.

Charan felt for the hot shard of anger at his breast, cooled it
with slow breathing. He lowered his knife as much as he dared without compromising
his ability to parry, wasn’t sure the notched and blunted blade could even withstand
the force of an attack.

“You are the one they will watch,” he called, voice as clear as
he could make it. “Jalina, whose beauty and grace will redefine an empire in
mourning. While all the while, I will be your right hand, silent and invisible
and devoted to your bidding. It was fate that brought you first from mother’s
womb, because you are the one who can lead. Some of us are fated to follow.”

Jalina tried to laugh, voice ringing out like a cascade of silver
over the dank echo of water on stone. With sudden dread, Charan realized why.
He cursed himself for the slowness of his wit. His father’s murder had rattled
him. His father’s death. He corrected himself absently, felt the weight of it
press down on him all the same.

“You’ve spoken those words before,” his sister said.

Charan felt the memory of the White Tower twist through him, hot
wires beneath his skin. He shook his head but kept his silence.

“Do you think often on that night?” she whispered. “Does the
memory come unbidden? And knowing now that it ends, do you feel sorry for
yourself, brother?” Her voice was twisted through with a honeyed sweetness that
brought the taste of bile to his throat. “Cut off from your carnal sanctuary?
Denied this forbidden tryst?”

“It was more than that,” Charan said, and he felt his tongue suddenly
turn to lead even as the words were formed.

“Whatever you thought it was, Charan, you were wrong.”

She struck with the speed of a brush-viper, too fast to see.
Charan managed to twist away in the barest nick of time, felt her knife’s
broken guard tear his tunic and the flesh beneath. And in the sudden blossom of
that pain, his only thought was that he would never know whether her renewed
fury was a sign that she believed his words. Or the final proof that she
didn’t.

The flash of blades between them was a steel-grey rain as they
fought across the shadows of the rapidly flooding chamber. All the effort and
eager practice of two childhoods lost to the training floor of their father’s
war-masters showed now in the grim set of Charan’s mouth, in the smoldering
light of his sister’s eyes. They hit fast, unforgiving, a succession of killing
strokes turned wide by the narrowest of margins. Both their blades dulled by
stone but hitting hard enough to punch through skin and bone if they hit,
Charan knew. Brother and sister striking like the twin serpents they truly
were.

Charan had no illusion about having the speed that would be necessary
to disarm his sister, just as he was sure she harbored no vain hope that she
might wear him down. A terrible passion twisted between them now that replaced
the stolen emotion of the time just passed, of the months before, of the five
breathless years since they had first taken each other in the silent aftermath
of their mother’s ash-rites.

All their lives, mother and father had been the twin poles around
which so much turned. With their mother’s death, they had found a measure of
peace within each other.

With their father’s death, they had found something else, it
seemed.

But even as he thought it, Charan fought to recognize this rage,
this sudden and inescapable fury that twisted between them now with each pass
of the blade. A new emptiness, he thought. A space between them that he had
never felt before. But in feeling it now, he wondered whether it was a thing
that had always been there, hidden by choice and the sweet darkness that
cloaked them both, night after long night.

He was breathing hard, heard the roaring in his ears that was
more than just the pounding of his blood. His feet were numb, water calf-deep
now where the inflow churned it to black foam.

For all the late-childhood trysts that brought him here, Charan
had never lingered belowground to watch the high tide cleanse the trap and the
sewer channels beyond. He had no idea how long it would take for the water to
fill the chamber, but he could guess that the end was coming quickly.

Jalina glanced to one side, avoiding the worst of the spray. Time
enough for Charan to move. He drove hard for her heart, couldn’t risk pulling
the punch of the killing stroke, but even still, he caught her knife instead as
it flashed up to parry, impossibly fast. He screamed as he forced his hand
around, felt hers twist against it, sliding to catch her knife with his guard
and snap it. The shattered blade caught him above the eye as it flashed past, a
spray of red blinding him. He lost his footing for the moment it took Jalina to
spin in the haze of water, up to her knees now, one leg out and coming up to
connect a kick that nearly broke his jaw.

He blacked out for a moment. Fought his way back to consciousness
even as his own knife dropped from his hand to hit the water with a dead-black
splash. Jalina was there, dropping to hands and knees with a shout of triumph,
but the blade was already beyond her reach in the dark water. Charan stumbled
through the fast-flowing surge of the sea, tried to grab his sister, but she
was rolling away from him, wet silk like oil against her lean body as sharpened
fingernails raked his face.

He swung at her, missed beneath her subtle movement as she spun
again and drove her fist into his side, just missing the tight knot of nerves
that would have dropped him. They shifted past each other, clumsy and freezing
in the rising water as they attacked hand to hand, neither managing to land a
blow, their moves too familiar. From the long years of training, from the
shorter time of the dark trysts in the White Tower’s empty halls, each of their
bodies was a map that the other knew too well.