A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (12 page)

Their father’s corpse was floating, a slick of blood spreading
across the oily blackness of the thrashing tide. The evenlamp was underwater,
its golden light cut to a rippling silver sheen across dark walls. Even in the
grim shadows that the body threw to the ceiling, Charan could see that the
ladderway was all but gone beneath the roar of dark water at the inflow, no way
to even get close enough to climb it now. Before the inflow, the ancient corpse
had been torn apart by pressure, blasted to a shadow-swirling storm of bone and
rotting cloth.

And in that ancient figure’s fractured hands, previously unseen
where the shroud of dust and cobwebs had hidden them, a pair of bare-bladed
daggers gleamed in the evenlamp’s faint glow.

As one, they moved. Charan got there first, only to have Jalina
drive the full force of her fist into the side of his neck as his focus drifted
from her for just a moment. He saw a haze of red, felt the cold as he hit the water,
but then something warm was in his hand and he was up, thrashing side to side
to clear wet hair from his eyes.

His sister stood across from him, brown eyes unblinking, a dagger
in her hand to match the one in his. Razor-edged stilettos, each set with a
wickedly clawed blood-edge that looked as if it might saw through bone with
enough force behind it. Their twisted guards were shaped to suggest the flow of
water, each set with a diamond at its heart, but one gleaming black, the other
brilliant white.

In Jalina’s hand, the metal of the dagger was the blue-white of
the hottest forge fire, glowing now as if it was fresh-struck in her living
grasp. The blade that Charan held tight was black steel that seemed to mark the
emptiness between them, unwavering in his hand despite the pain and the
blood-dark haze still hanging at the edge of his sight.

The water was at his groin now, his legs numb as the two of them
held there, an arm’s breadth apart. Both ready to move with the final strike
that would spell the end.

Charan felt a strength surge through him then. He felt all the
rage, all the uncertainty that had been set in his heart, all of it focused and
made sharper. He felt the weight of his father’s death leave him, felt the pain
of his sister’s love torn away like a shroud of leaves on the wind. He felt
nothing, felt everything. Felt alive. Jalina’s eyes blazed, her teeth set in a
hissing smile that told him she felt it, too.

Charan felt something touch him, felt a bond he couldn’t explain
stretch out across that empty space of longing and laughter and pain. Something
stronger even than the forbidden thirst of the blood and the mind that had
brought them to the tower earlier that night, then brought them to this
black-water tomb.

When he was nine years old, he had slipped into the Red Tower of
courtly magic by dark to steal two talismans from a young vizier just graduated
from the apprentice’s suites. Charan knew the relics would be missed, of
course, but he had already planted rumors of a taste for gambling and the
temple virgins in the vizier’s name. After a well-placed bribe to the castellan’s
office saw the young mage arrested, Charan had made a point of not paying
attention to his particularly unpleasant fate.

For almost a year, he waited for a night of full Darkmoon rising
blood-red with no light of Clearmoon in the sky, as the crumbling scroll that
accompanied the pieces in their leather case had bade him. When the time came,
he drugged the servants outside his sister’s rooms, stole into Jalina’s
bedchamber. He slipped one of the frail star-silver pieces beneath her pillow.

Then all that endless night, as he had longed to do since he was
old enough to remember thought itself, Charan slipped inside his sister’s
dreams.

A sudden rush of understanding swept through his mind with the
force of the sea, surging toward his waist.

In his hand, along his arm, in his ear and mind and only for him,
the black blade sang.

Power threaded through him, touching and amplifying the power of
the white blade as its own song rose. It was a thing beyond words, beyond
thought. A power he and his sister shared suddenly, a nexus of energy that
threaded through them. Their bodies turned to silk, scoured by the warm desert
wind.

The haze that was all that remained of the broken body was a
faint outline beneath the water, but even as his gaze flicked there, Charan was
moving suddenly, faster than thought. He sensed a blur of blades, felt twin
arcs of white and shadow slash between them as he and Jalina struck, parried, a
fast strike caught and spun off a crossguard, the return seeking flesh and
striking empty air, again and again.

His vision sharpened in the darkness, a warmth flooding through
him. But even as it did, he heard his own voice harsh in his head.
Fool,
he called himself, and a chill twisted through him, helped him focus. Smarter
men than he had felt their lives cut short by the dark dweomer of a cursed
blade. Relics left for the finding by those their fell magic had already
killed.

He felt the passage of time slow around him. Felt a wholeness
that filled his mind and forced out all thought but the memory of that perfect
connection he had once felt between his sister and himself.

He saw Jalina start as if she sensed his thought. He heard her
voice, but in the haze of shadow that suddenly shrouded his sight, his mind, he
couldn’t be sure whether she spoke, or whether it was her very act of thought
tracing through him, or whether he dreamed it in the end.

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

He parried, spun the black blade through a feint as a blur of shadow,
struck hard as he slipped beneath Jalina’s return strike. He felt the flesh and
bone of her breast yield with the softness of sand. But even as it did, pain
like white-hot fire flared at his own chest, and a blade that wasn’t there
shattered his collarbone and drenched his freezing-wet shirt with a gout of hot
blood.

As he had tried and failed to do ever since that dark night,
Charan remembered. As he tried to do each time he pulled the shadow over the
two of them, slipping into the wordless space where they were one, he felt that
wonder of touching his sister’s mind.

Charan screamed, scrambling back as his blade pulled free from Jalina.
His hand was locked to the haft by searing pain, teeth set against it. His
sister’s pale face was a mask of fear as she fought her way back through the
flood, clutching at the jagged rent in her tunic to reveal no blood there, the
pale skin unbroken.

Charan fought to stay on his feet, pressed his shaking knife hand
hard to the gash at his chest. He had struck the fast blood, no way to staunch
the wound that should have been his sister’s, the black blade turning the blow
back against himself with all the strength it had borne. The dark dweomer, he
thought. But stronger even than the fear of that magic was the knowledge that
the blow he had taken would have killed his sister had it struck.

He remembered his father’s rage at the tower door. Remembered seeing
that same rage too many times to count, a lifetime of anger that was his
legacy. He remembered the reflection of that anger, bright in the last light of
his father’s eyes when the blade left his hand.

Jalina’s eyes were wet, her voice all but lost against the roar
of water, lapping at her breast now.

“Brother,” she called. “Some of us are fated to follow.”

She hesitated just long enough to let Charan understand that she
knew what she was doing. His utter betrayal of her was the only thing that mattered
to her now, as she lunged forward to plunge the length of the gleaming blade
into his heart.

Charan felt something twist in his chest, felt his breath stolen
away. He saw Jalina’s shift suddenly turn black in the shadows, a blood-flower
blossoming there in time with his own pulse as she fell.

The roar of water swallowed his scream as it swallowed her body,
slipping like a stone beneath the foam. Charan felt the pain at his chest surge
as he pushed forward, but then it was gone and replaced by a sharper agony that
twisted from gut to heart to head, pounding now with the strength of his own
blood and a fear he had never known before.

He was blind in the surge of water and shadow as he fought to 
dive
.
He felt her, lost her. Grasped her again by the edge of her shift and hung on
to seize her fiercely, fighting the current.

He pulled his sister up from the darkness, screamed her name this
time, but her empty eyes were blank. Desperate, he slung her to his shoulders,
unaware of her weight as he looked to the ladderway but saw it already gone,
the vents submerged where black water boiled.

Behind him, against the last grey flare before the light from
below was swallowed, he saw the faintest flicker of firelight. There, beyond
the shattered ceiling where the ancient body had once hidden.

Each slow step was agony as Charan fought his way through the
freezing inflow, aware that the bitter cold staunching his bleeding was the
only reason he was still on his feet. He tried to feel some sign of Jalina’s
breath where her face was slumped against his, but his vision was a pounding
haze, red shadow roaring in his ears. At the ragged opening where the grate had
been, he felt his way along the wall as water poured past and out through the
ancient drain, threatening to sweep him off his feet.

All was darkness. Then from the passageway that had been sealed
came the faint glimmer again. Charan pushed Jalina up, followed close behind
her lifeless body into the narrow darkness. He didn’t remember climbing, his
sister slung across his back as he pushed himself up a narrow chimney of dusty
stone and cobwebs. The gleam ahead grew steadily brighter, the red flicker of
firelight calling him on even as his mind slipped closer to shadow. He felt the
names of all Jalina’s dead gods slip unbidden to his mind as he prayed.

His legs were numb, feet bleeding where they gripped rough stone
when he arrived at the end of the chute. The glow he followed was blazing bright
now, a perfect lozenge of firelight forced through a haze of dust that billowed
with his frantic breathing. A keyhole, it looked like. The bottom side of a
concealed trapdoor, unlatching easily with a shoulder’s pressure from below.

Bright braziers hung by golden chains where Charan pushed himself
through. The air was a shimmer of heat haze, darkness claiming him for a
moment, but then he was back. Jalina’s body sprawled alongside him where he
collapsed silently to a floor of night-cold stone. He couldn’t see, couldn’t
feel anything beyond where he groped with shaking fingers for the blood at his
sister’s throat, found only stilled silence.

He was in the sepulcher, he realized. His sight was shadow and
the braziers’ faint golden smoke, everburning with the spellcraft of the silent
priests. The great tomb of khanans on the lowest level of the castle. Its
vaulted columns of white marble held up a ceiling of shimmering black stone
brought here a thousand years before from the Mountains of the Moons, far eastward
and overlooking the end of the world at the edge of the Great Sea of Storms.
His father’s ashes would have been laid here, once. Now, they would burn an
empty bier, scattered only with the signs and objects of his reign, ready to be
reclaimed in the next life that all the dead gods promised.

Charan had been here last when his mother died. Though he told himself
he should have known which space was hers among the lines of narrow upright
ash-vaults lining the walls to both sides, he couldn’t recall it anymore.

From that first night he and Jalina shared, that night of
dreams that had inspired the hunger of all the nights that followed, Charan
remembered his own face in his sister’s mind. Remembered the longing for him
that struck his heart like some god’s ghostly fist, left him limp and
sweat-soaked in the darkness when he awoke.

On that night when he walked in Jalina’s dreams, the talisman had
turned to ash on his pillow, as he had been warned it would. He had squeezed
those burning embers in his hand as though he might will them to reshape
themselves again, tears flowing and body aching. Suddenly crippled beneath a
weight he had always carried but never felt before.

With shaking hands, he tore the blood-soaked shift from his
sister’s body. He pressed hard at the jagged wound the white blade’s magic had
torn at her breast, but her flesh was ice.

On the floor beside him, the black and white steel of the twin daggers
caught the flickering light.

Charan felt his breath cut off suddenly. He stared.

He didn’t remember slipping the weapons to his belt. Didn’t remember
even seeing the gleaming white steel of the blade with which Jalina had taken
her life. He must have grabbed it even as she fell, he thought. But he couldn’t
have. Must have been holding it the entire time without realizing. Impossible.

Carefully, he reached for them. First one, then the other. He
felt their warmth as they slipped into his shaking hands, left and right, white
and black. And without thinking, without understanding, he shifted to press the
pale blade into Jalina’s unfeeling grasp.

As it did before, the silver-white dagger began to glow. A shimmering
ghost light, the mottled ice-sheen of his sister’s dead flesh.

Charan felt a trace of faint energy thread his trembling fingers,
suddenly stilled as it flowed through them and up his arm. When it reached his
chest, the pain there flared again to remind him how he had forgotten it. But
then it slowed. Stopped.

Where his sister sprawled before him, he saw the jagged wound at
her heart slowly close within its shroud of blood.

Charan had felt the power of the healing magic before, the
animyst-priests of his father’s court ministering to him when he shattered his
leg in a childhood fall from the White Tower roof. He had seen the rites of returning
only once. A captain of his father’s had been brought back from beyond the veil
of death, struck down in combat but deemed too valuable to be left to that
darkness. He died again less than a year later. Took his own life, the stories
said, driven mad by what he had seen in that shadow before the light returned.