A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (13 page)

Charan’s eyes were wet, breath coming ragged as he saw his
sister’s fingers flinch against the cold haft of the white blade in her hand.
Her skin was silk smooth, all the marks of their dark labor in the sewer washed
away.

As he watched, Jalina shuddered, convulsed once as she vomited
blood and black water and her eyes opened wide. The wound at her breast was
closed, the pale perfect skin sealed over without so much as a mark. She stared
up, meeting Charan’s gaze where he loomed over her, trembling. He fumbled for
her soaked tunic, found one corner cleaner than the rest and gently washed the
slick of blood from her face and neck.

Shaking, she raised herself up to kiss him hard, wrap herself in
his arms.

They stayed that way for a long while, and when their clothes had
dried well enough in the braziers’ golden heat, they slipped back through the
deep-night castle, then to the secret ways only they knew that led past the
servants and to their separate chambers. The same secret ways that had taken
them to the White Tower, a lifetime ago now. The ghost blade was clutched tight
to Jalina’s breast, the dagger whose darkness was the endless night in Charan’s
hand when their other hands reluctantly parted at last. Fingers slipping from
each other, they went their separate ways without a word.

Apart, Charan waited, watching and dozing at the high windows
that opened up to the great green-garden courtyard across from his sister’s
suites. First dawn touched the gleaming towers of the city, twisted the shroud
of shadow to a veil of gold across the sky and the star-shining black of the
bay.

He remembered the night of shared dreams. From the dark shelter
of his own slumber, he walked inside Jalina’s mind, feeling the song her
thought made, seeing the bright desert dawn that was the backdrop to all her
fear and youthful longing.

He felt her dreams and the warmth of a kindling passion he had
never felt before. He remembered his own face seen in her mind’s eye. Remembered
what it felt like to love and be loved that way.

He felt the hunger that had so long twisted through him finally
settle and shape itself to something else. He was dreaming of Jalina, the day
breaking blue and bright beneath a cloudless sky, when the frantic knock came
at the door and the rest of their lives began.

SHE HAD BEEN NAMED Szirha’mun, which was the Darkmoon in
his people’s tongue. So it was that he dreamed her always watching him over
nine days of blood-red shadow that were the nights of sacrifice and remembrance.
Those nights when he could be himself once more.

The grey wind was cold along a heading from the distant sea,
threatening a storm but seemingly unable to make up its ageless mind when it
should arrive. He was naked now save for a necklace of yellowed bones around
his neck, looking every bit the monster he was. It had been a decade of exile
since he was forced to forget the flesh into which he was born. Long years as
the Mockery that he was now, his features pale as cloud, no color or strength
to his sickly-smooth flesh.

Ten years ago, he fled the Sorcerers’ Isle and the wild marshland
that had been his clan’s home since the time before the first songs were made.
Now, his mottled flesh was wracked with cold, the shivering hands stunted and
deformed. Less strength in his spindled fingers than he had commanded as a
child.

His senses, too, were dulled in the Mockery’s form, but he had
long grown used to that weakness. So it was that even against the hiss of wind,
he heard the telltale rustle of movement in the tall grass behind him.

He was weak and he was bent, kneeling in muck and pain throughout
the long day to await the red moonrise. But the instincts of the warrior he had
always been still lingered at a level deeper than the prison of his flesh. From
the ground where he set them, he pulled his knives, locked his hands in a
defensive stance as he scrambled back, staying low to the ground. He felt the
blood loud in his misshapen ears, felt the taste of metal in his mouth that was
the Mockery-body’s fear.

It was the ninth day of those nine days of the full Darkmoon, and
he was waiting for the change that would let him die. Let him pass from this
world as he once was, remembered by fate as more than the monster he had
become. And staring, his weak eyes saw a girl with a sword standing on the far
side of the mottled clearing, curtained by the regular rhythm of grass rippled
to fast-whipped waves by the wind.

At the fore of his mind, held tight in the rage that broke and
was lost within the weakness of his flesh, there was a name he had not spoken
in ten long years. He had saved it for this moment of waiting, had waited to
whisper it with his last breath, but the moment was ruined now. He silently
cursed his weakness, cursed the child standing motionless in shimmering shadow.

She is named Szirha’mun, which was the Darkmoon in his
people’s tongue, and he watches her die.

He lowered his hands, felt a sudden shaking twist through them as
he turned the knives clumsily down. He carried no sheathe to set them in where
he stood naked as the day he was born, so he locked them to the soft skin of
his arms, held them there. Conscious of the pain where their edge threatened to
cut him. Not caring.

The girl was young, barely a child. The sword that she held
point-down before her was the dull grey of brushed silver, its guard and grip
of black leather. In his own hand, even with this stunted body, it would have
been a short arming blade, suitable for close-quarter fighting and little else.
Where the child clutched it, the pommel came almost to her chest, the
leaf-shaped blade comically broad.

He didn’t flinch as he stood, felt needle-points of pain shoot
through bird-thin legs. Though he was naked, he felt no shame. The Mockery-body
possessed no feature that would have startled a child, even one as young as
this. The girl’s golden eyes were wide, but not with the fear he expected.

“I saw you pass along the edge of the village,” she called. She
spoke the trade tongue that was the common speech of the uncivilized, like him.
Like those who wore the form he wore. Her voice had a reedy quality that
carried an echo of the wind around her, the words coming matter-of-fact. “It
was nine days ago.”

“So? And so?”

“I followed you.”

“And found me. What of it?”

“You were sneaking, so I followed you.”

“Those who have reason to sneak are often best left alone.” He
spat the metal taste from his mouth, felt a string of spittle bitterly catch
the grizzled hair that clung to his misshapen chin. “Or did your parents not
teach you this?”

“My parents taught me to look after myself,” the girl said. Something
changed in her voice. A faint echo of sadness shadowed the bright eyes, but
still there was no fear in her. And even as he heard that sadness, he looked
into those eyes and felt himself caught there. He felt the pain again, rooting
deep and bitter in him as he turned away.

The clan lord, name ever-unspoken and burned ember-bright in
his memory takes her innocence in the hot blood of the Darkmoon’s night, and
she is broken mind and spirit, flesh and bone.

Crumbling shadow blurred his vision as he squeezed his eyes shut,
fought back against the memory. He opened them only to take a final glance
behind as he pushed himself into the screen of tall grass. She was watching him
as he turned from her, looked quickly away, as if she saw the weakness that was
his legacy.

He was a sellsword now, and had been for a decade of days spent
living hand to mouth. The southern deserts were his home most of that time, a
place where the Mockery he was now would fit in. He knew of other lands he
could have fled to, certainly. On the Sorcerers’ Isle where he was born, there
dwelled countless folk who lived with the weakness that was his curse, and
monsters in plenty more frightful still. But that road was closed to him now,
by the pain that pushed him over the narrow sea, down through Gracia and the
mountains. Away from where the voices alone would have been enough to remind
him who he had been.

He had needed new voices, new songs, new names when he took the
first of the long caravan trains from the foot of the Shieldcrest, the great
mountains snow-shrouded and silent as the secrets he left behind. So far north
now. So far gone.

As the months wore on, he grew more and more accustomed to the
crippling heat that rose from the slate-grey sands. Accustomed but never fully
accepted, the harsh air of Ajaeltha’s desert scrubland still tearing at his
throat as he breathed it. But despite the hardship, he found himself in time
counting the unintended blessings of this desolate land.

When they come for her to invoke the rites, she fights them.
For her audacity, for her insolence, they beat her nearly to death, but in that
cunning way of hard killers who fill the narrow window between near-death and
life with the memory of all the pain a body might endure. Let her linger long
in the knowledge of all they do to her, body broken and mind ravaged and no way
to stop for her the sight those memories make.

No lakes spread here in the land of sunburned soil and scrubland.
No great flow of waters tumbled, save for the trade rivers to the north, wending
through their green fields. No seasonal ponds, no standing water to speak of,
and all the wells of the thousand villages he passed through covered against
the harsh and endless drift of sand. So it was that he could go for days, for
weeks, for whole months without ever catching sight of his reflection. Whole
months without being blindsided by the self-made sight that was the Mockery he
had become, staring up at him from pool or still stream bank, his narrow eyes
set like pale coals in a malformed head.

He had walked a score of his weak strides into the shadows where
his meager camp was set when he realized she was following. He glanced back
again, saw her watching him as intently as before.

“Are you not afraid of me?” he called. From his gear, he sought
for the cloak that would wrap his unnatural form. It covered him while he
slept, the softness of the Mockery’s flesh feeling the cutting edge of every
chill night and storm wind. He had set it aside that morning, discarded the
heap of his belongings in it. Making it easy for whoever found him to dispose
of what was once his.

“I am afraid of your outside. But I know that what is inside is
good. The sword tells me.”

He set the cloak across his slack shoulders, watched the girl for
a long while. She shifted where she stood, let the blade lean back against her.
Where the Darkmoon’s sanguine gleam caught it, even his weak eyes could see the
razor sheen of its edge. “Be mindful of that.”

“But it will not cut me.” She shifted again, let the blade stand
centered over its own weight. He fought the revulsion of imagined pain as she
drew her palm along its edge, lifted it to show him. No mark. “It protects me,”
she said.

“Some sword,” he said.

“I will sell it to you,” she said, and there was an even tone to
her voice that told him this is what she was wanting to say, what she had
practiced, waiting for her chance to approach him. Beneath the words, he felt
the unease. A sadness that told him the girl held other words still unspoken
that were more important by far.

“They say that your kind carries gold and silver,” she said.
“They say you covet it above all else. I see your knives, but they are not
strong. You could use a sword like this.”

“Because I am weak? Misshapen?” He took three steps toward her,
felt himself lurch as the sharpness of an unseen stone cut the cracked flesh of
his foot. The golden eyes were impassive.

“You are ugly,” she agreed in the matter-of-fact appraisal of the
innocent. “But it is not your fault. The sword told me.”

He felt a chill that was not the wind. He wrapped the cloak
tighter around himself. “What is your name, child?”

“Hoi’ul,” she replied. “It means green.”

“It means more than that,” he said. “Hoi’ul is the green of
spring’s first leaves, wet with sunlit dew.” To her look of mild surprise, he
said “I know your people’s tongue, child.”

“What is your name, then?”

He had practiced his answer to the question for all the long
years of his new life, but he faltered now for the first time.

“I am called Lárow,” he said.

The girl laughed, a musical sound. “I know your people’s tongue,”
she said. “Lárow is not a name. It is what your kind call the leaders of the silver-slave
gangs. ‘The boss.’ ”

He was silent a while. The Darkmoon was cresting the trees now,
fighting to stay afloat on a torrent of thin cloud boiling in from the distant
sea. “That is what I am.”

“But what is your name?”

He heard the wind, hissing in the ears set low on his head as
lumps of gristle. “My name is gone. My story is gone. What I am now is what I
do. I am Lárow.”

“All folk have a story.”

She is fighting to breathe when he finds her, fighting to shed
the last tears that mask the sight of him as she dies in his arms. He sees only
darkness, feels the dank must of water and rot that claims her body as she
slips into the fen and away. And he rages then with the fury of all his
ancestors. Pushes into the rope-vined trees with a strength that shatters
branches, drives his footsteps at a silent run, clears the path between him and
bloody destiny.

In his memory, he saw the eyes that had been the bright amber of
the girl’s own gaze cloud over. She looked down to the sword still leaning
against her, appraised it as if she had forgotten it was there. He felt the
pain of heart and memory, felt his vision blur. Grasping for words, for some
distraction.

“What is your story, Hoi’ul?”

She looked up again, and the weight of that golden gaze drove
into him like a mailed fist. The wind picked up, clawing the clouds as twisting
shadow scoured the trees.

“The sword belonged to a lord named Voosal’hal. I killed him.”

He is young then, and he bears both the name and form he was
born with. She is named Szirha’mun, which was the Darkmoon in his people’s
tongue.

For the nine days that the Darkmoon blossomed full against the
fading dusk, he had lived in this isolated arm of a larger spread of swampland,
its scent and the low whistle of night wind in the reeds speaking to him of the
home he made himself forget. He came here alone, moving always in the shadow of
dusk and dawn to hide from those who might see him. Those who would react with
fear and distrust to the Mockery-face he had learned to hate.

He had found the village after nightfall. At the edge of the
larger watercourse that lost itself in the mire where he rested, then trickled
to a muddy wash twisting south and east to meet the sea. He passed by once, was
drawn back to gaze at the small cluster of huts and stockade pens rising from
the wetlands. Shallow-bottomed swamp boats rocked gently at a dock of sweetly
rotting redwood, bells glimmer-singing along their prows to ward off the spirits
of the night. He smelled roast meat, saw the firelight at shuttered windows. He
heard the music of laughter, sensed the warmth within as he passed by again,
unseen.