A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (20 page)

Without realizing he was going to do it, he kissed her. Her lips
were warm beneath his, parted as her breathing slowed.

“Hold on,” he said.

He saw the first figures smash through the glass doors behind
them as they took to the air. They wore the same uniform as the others, the hammer
and ivy badge in tawny red. He felt her hands lock behind his neck as she
stiffened in fear, the sudden twist of momentum taking them as he willed the
power woven into the black cloak to hurl them up and over the edge of darkness,
the chill night air sharp, washing across them like the surge from the back of
a fast horse as they flew.

He turned back once to see the armored figure at the terrace’s
edge. He was tall, red-haired and close-bearded in the manner of so much Vanyr
nobility. He wore the armor of a knight of those western provinces in black and
ice-blue, a wine-dark cloak wrapped tight across broad shoulders, legs set
wide, eyes impassive as his guards stood in silence behind him, all watching.

Where the mage’s arms held her tight, he slipped a hand to her
belt. He unhooked it with a quick flick of his fingers. By the time she recognized
the movement, tried in vain to stop him, the scabbard had slipped from her and
was gone, spinning like a falling leaf in black and silver as it dropped to the
terrace below. The guards shouted out alarm, leaping back. The tall noble
stepped up to the railing, caught the falling blade with one hand.

He smiled as they soared. He judged the angle between them and
the eyes below them, willed the spellpower of the cloak that spread like wings
around him now to carry them higher.

The Free City unfurled below as a storm of light and shadow. The
bright blazing core, edged by the spiderweb curve of its great walls. The dark
lines of the great streets, cutting a patchwork swath through color and noise
that was a song sung in harmony with the cry of the wind. The black
serpent-form of the river, twisting in from west to east and festooned with the
glimmering lights of uncounted ships carrying trade and dreams from across five
kingdoms. The vast shadow of the great greens. Villages beyond the walls, dark
lines of farm road edged in flickering firelight.

He held himself there, her body tight against his where she
turned to stare in wonder, suspended dark against the bright crescent of the
Clearmoon for an endless moment before the high haze took them away.

After a time, they descended to the darkness of the Rose Heath, a
well of green shadow spreading out in the storm of light. The wide paths and
endless lawn of the great park were never empty even beneath the pale fingers
of dawn, but he made sure that no eyes marked them as they descended to the
shifting shadows of an alder copse that marked the confluence of two great
paths. Broad shapes of marble rose around them, private mausoleums like the
countless others that spread as white waves across the green. The breeze was
warm where it touched the grass, but the sudden stillness that followed their
fast flight sent a chill through him.

Their feet touched ground together. They stood a while, arms
around each other, her hands still tight at his neck. He felt them trembling,
looked down upon her pale face. Afraid. But behind the fear was something else.
As quickly as he tried to dismiss the thought, it clung to him. She was warm
against him. In her eyes was a look he had all but forgotten, driven from him
with the memory of the pain her father made.

He thought of all the things he might say, all the things he had
failed to say in the years before the silence.

He asked her instead, “What does it say to him? This blade?”

“Does it matter now?” He heard her fight to find the sudden
contempt in the words. A choice made, the moment broken like her fingers broke
from him, pulled free as she stepped away.

He only shrugged. “Where was it found?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She paced away, stalked through the
half-light toward the brighter shadow of a marble monument a dozen strides
away. Silent and cold. The sight of it slowed her.

“A tomb,” she said. She gazed up at the edifice of white stone
that rose before her, first in a long line of tombs set together in a block
that curved away across the shadow of the green. “Somewhere in the north
country. He had the troubadours paid to claim he slew the undead that carried
it, but I heard it was easier than that…”

Her voice trailed off, but as he glanced up, he realized it was
his own look that stopped her cold. He saw her shock, felt the darkness that suddenly
flared in him reflected in her own eyes.

“You do know this blade,” she said bitterly. “You know it and you
sent it back to him.”

He was silent a moment. “I know one like it. Or did. A friend carried
it. It was lost, or so I heard.”

“What happened to this friend who carried it?”

“Madness,” he said. “Or so I heard.”

She struck him, the back of her hand hitting as hard as any blow
he had ever taken. He felt the pain spike in his jaw as he stumbled back,
watched her turn on her heel, race off with light steps toward the distant
light that marked the road and the city beyond.

He thought about letting her go. Another tapestry-piece of memory
to fold in with that first kiss, the last night he saw her, the beating at her
father’s hand that nearly killed him. He had managed to free himself from bonds
and gag that day, then summoned up the spellpower that saw rage and lightning
coiled in his hands where they found her father’s throat. The duke still bore
the imprint of the young mage’s fingers across his neck, or so he had heard. A
mark of arcane power that no life-magic would heal.

“You came to me for aid and guidance,” he called out to her retreating
back. “I’ll give you both. All things are destroyed in the end, but only fate
decides when that end comes.”

She stopped. Turned back slowly. Her shadowed look said she
wouldn’t walk to him, so he went to her instead. Slowly.

“A blade of worth, of power, has a destiny,” he said as he
stopped, close enough to see the blue eyes gleam daylight bright in the
darkness. “I don’t know if it’s your lord’s destiny to wield this blade, nor do
you, just as neither of us can know whether his doing so will taint his mind to
evil. All you can do is judge whether your fate is part of that.”

“You know this because you did the same for your friend?” He
heard the edge in her voice, fighting tears.

“I know it because I didn’t. Because I made the same choice then
that you had made already tonight, to leave him to the fate he chose. You only
came to me for the strength to carry it through.”

She was silent a long while. When she finally spoke, he heard the
strength return.

“It decides its own course,” she said. “As will he.”

A wind had risen from the north, carrying with it the hint of
rose hedges and the last mown grass of the season from the distant gates. And
in that shroud of scent, he was back in the summer gardens of her father’s
house, watching her dance beneath the ancient stone arch strung with grape and
white creeper and the weathered Ilvani runes he taught her to read.

“Like fate,” he said.

“Like love.”

He felt light-headed suddenly, felt the wind shift and strengthen
as if it might be seeking him. Then as with all his dreams, it was suddenly
done.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said quietly, and there was a
dread expectation in the words that he could hear.

“You do,” he said. “Choose your course. Walk away.”

“And where shall I walk to?”

An unwritten ending lay hidden in the question, twisting through
the twilight space between the words like a serpent threading wind-whipped
grass. She had come to him that night, had sought him out for fate-only-knew
how long. Had pursued him through the distance of the dream they once shared,
and he felt the sudden sting of that dream as he always did. Felt the
protective shroud of shadow break against the pellucid frames of memory that
would let all the pain back in.

“Your path is yours,” he said. “I could never choose it for you.”

She turned away then. Wouldn’t meet his gaze. She made as if to
speak but he was quicker.

“Goodbye,” was all he said.

He soared up and beyond her, quickly lost to the shroud of darkness
in the west that drank the last of the night sky beyond the edge of the green.
From the far side of that darkness, he watched as she ran to the gate at the
broad stroke of the Iresand Road, saw her flag down one of the plentiful coach
cabs returning from their last runs to the nobles’ houses in the wards of the
mountainside ridge.

He followed her for a short while from the air, soaring in shadow
as she and her cab made their way toward the twisting switchback avenues
leading up into that bright night, a brilliant crown upon the city’s towering
head that was the herald of the rising sun. Then he turned his eyes to the
darker sky and swept away.

For three days, he brooded, waiting. He took new rooms in Chrian
Heath above a grudge-worn apothecary who he favored for her ability to not ask
questions. He estimated what the red knight would have paid the landlord in
Urorfidith to report any word of seeing him return, then offered up triple that
for his silence, delivered by a rickshaw driver he used for that sort of
business. When the burly runner returned with the personal effects and the
books the mage needed from those he left behind, he brought news as well.

The red knight, her bethrothed, was dead.

The mage sought out confirmation, found it quickly enough by way
of a private club called the Chalice, where the guard captains drank and his
connections and coin could buy the ear of the serving girls. Across the Free
City, the tale was spreading quickly, along with the related but less memorable
gossip of how the engagement between this Vanyr knight and the daughter of a
Gracian duke had been suddenly broken off by the lady herself only that day.
The morning the mage left her.

Her Vanyr lord did not take it well. When the lady and her entourage
made to abandon the city ahead of word of the scandal, he followed with a force
of house guards in dun and rust-red. It was said that ten died that night, but
details from the survivors were strangely inconsistent in describing those
moments of madness.

The lady was said to be in hiding, and in mourning. He confirmed
that twice more, held the knowledge in his heart for a long while.

He spent more of the coin he didn’t need on information, seeking
it out among those who had been there, guards and drivers and other witnesses.
At the end of two more days, he found himself drinking with a young guard of
the watch whose very first patrol in uniform had taken him into the thick of
the fray that night, and who had nearly paid the price.

The quicksilver blade was gone, he heard. This shaken guard had
seen it, sure enough. He named it without prompting, cursing the sword as he
recounted the red knight dropping two men with the barest of blood-scratches
from its gleaming bite. But those two were the only ones who died at the
knight’s hand, the young guard swore. Two more were killed by the knight’s
captain at arms, who seized the blade when his master finally fell, and who had
seemingly been claimed by an even darker madness, laying into the city guards
and his own fellows with the same murderous rage.

The young guard had seen the red knight cut down by the lady herself,
defending others from his frenzied attack. A warrior’s form to her movement but
tears in her eyes, he said.

The knight’s man fell to archers. The young guard had known the
Yewnyr captain who shakingly snatched the blade up then, but could only watch
in horror as a raw recruit who fought alongside him put a dirk in the captain’s
back and seized the rapier anew. That guard had fallen in turn, dropped by one
of a gang of street bravos drawn by screams and steel to the fray. The bravos
fled, just as the young guard was put down by an errant blade from one of the
red knight’s remaining warriors, no longer sure who they were fighting for. Two
more were dead before it was done, but what happened to the blade in the end,
none could say.

The mage returned to his rooms near dawn, but did not sleep. From
his pocket where he had placed it, where he had avoided thinking on it ever
since, he pulled the pages he had been translating the night she burst through
his door. He saw the quicksilver blade sketched there in lines of faded ink
whose age he couldn’t guess at, a timeless facsimile that matched his memory
now. The words that spoke of its dark legends were in one of the ancient Ilvani
tongues slow to even his mind, but he could read them well enough.

Salinomelar,
the Ilvani had called it. ‘Quicksilver’ was
the closest approximation he was able to make, carefully extracting the name’s
full meaning from the ancient parchments where they spoke of the unmatched
speed of the blade and the poison of its bite and the madness it inflicted on
those who chose to wield it.

She would have been in her father’s house by now. With the connections
the mage had, with the reputation he had forged over the long years since the
night he fled with the clothes on his back and a death warrant in his name, he
knew a dozen, a hundred different ways he could have gotten a message to her.

“Do you believe in fate?”
she had asked him the last time
they spoke, and he told her yes. Even then, though, he hadn’t believed it. The
words simply part of the compact forged by the ardor and innocence of youth.

If she had been there to ask him now, he wasn’t sure what he
might say.

HE WAS DEEP IN THE DARK of forgotten dreams when the song
called him back. Raubynar blinked as the darkness shifted into focus, the fire
dying across from him. He judged the time by the movement of the Clearmoon,
alone in the sky. A quarter of the night, perhaps, since he closed his eyes.
The fading wind was from the west, the familiar scent of the still-distant
Yewnwood faint and complex where it pulled at his memory. The black branches of
the budding cypress above were faint scar lines against a star-streaked sky.

He stood and stretched, feeling the song fade to nothing as
dreams will do. He felt an unfamiliar slowness to his thoughts, an exhaustion
threading through him that he couldn’t explain. He thought he had heard the
faint echo of a lyre, notes spilling through the shadows that pulled at his
unwaking mind. There was a voice as well. Words that melted away the more he
tried to remember them.

Across from him, Cassatra was sleeping, curled tight within the
black pool of her cloak. Raub had assumed she would take a watch while he
slipped into the half-sleep of the Ilvani, but it was clear she thought there
was nothing on this back road worth watching for.

As he paced the clearing’s edge, gathering deadfall to toss to
the embers, Raub reflected that she was most likely right. Wolves and wild cats
prowled the woods in early spring, seeking to fill the long hunger of winter,
but the fire would warn them off. Brigands were rare but not unheard of this
far off the trade roads, though Raub pitied anyone who tried to wake Cass from
a sound sleep at the end of a blade.

From the most distant darkness, he heard the music again.

As far as they were from any settlement, he knew the unnatural essence
of that sound even before a faint shiver up his spine warned him to be wary.
Closer to the wagon camps to the east, some traveler making late-night song to
ward off the spirits of the shadows would have been fitting. Here, in the
isolated shelter of the cypress wood, not even insects sang at night. The
Ilvani of the Yewnwood seldom roamed this far afield, the stunted groves of the
scrublands shunned by them. The wall of the great forest was the edge of their
world, its great roof of green and gold the only sky most of them had ever
known.

It was the same faint song that had woken him, drifting nearer
where the wind twisted through the shimmering grove. A woman’s voice sounded
out faintly, the lyre shifting within it as silver light through green leaves.
But within that light, he sensed a shadow. He felt the voice seek his ear with
words he didn’t understand, sharp-edged like the notes that carried from steel
strings.

Raub was drifting through the woods suddenly, couldn’t remember
stepping away from the fire. He was in leather still, a well-scarred jerkin and
leggings caked with the dust of the road. Through the screen of cypress and
witchwillow saplings growing low, he padded barefoot, not sure what unknown
summons he was following until he slowed to gauge the shifting of the wind
through the leaves. From ahead came a gleam of light. The music was louder.
Closer.

He circled the bright clearing three times, made sure he was
alone before he stepped out from the shadows. The Clearmoon rode at zenith, its
near-full light catching the silver spread of wolf-foil and whitegrass above an
uneven mat of lifeless carpet vine. Gnarled branches threw a haze of shadows
across day-bright ground. But brighter even than the gleaming leaves was the
pool that spread in the hollow beneath a rotting cypress stump. No more than a
stride across, its surface was smooth silver, unnaturally calm beneath the
trace of breeze that twisted past him.

Only when his hands strayed absently to his waist did Raub
realize that his weapons were back at the camp. The emerald-hilted longsword
and the Ilvani dirk were still sitting where he had slung them off at the
fireside. He still carried a third blade at his belt, as he always did. A
leaf-edged shortsword, its distinctive shape marking it as the Ilvani style
where it hung from a leather thong. But as always, scabbard and hilt alike were
shrouded in black cloth and road dust. No way to draw it even if he wanted to.

Raub felt a pinprick chill twist up his spine. Afraid not of what
might lie beyond the forest wall, but wary of whatever power in the song could
have inspired him to follow it weaponless, seeking blindly in the dark.

In his mind, the voice he didn’t understand unfurled in a gentle
arpeggio, stepped tones as vivid as the colors of a loom, impossibly perfect.
It was a lament, slow and ethereal. The lyre slowed to an intermittent echo of
single-string chimes, lifting the voice to greater heights of sorrow.

Raub was on his knees at the pool’s edge, couldn’t remember
stumbling the half-dozen steps across the silver glade. The scent of rot was
heavy, filling his lungs so that he had to fight to breathe. Around him, the
glade was shifting, the Clearmoon’s light spreading now like ripples on water.
The cypress stump was a dark altar, shot through by the movement of finger-long
black borer beetles that had reduced the wood to a shell. Silver leaves hissed
past on the wind that somehow still raised no ripple on the pool itself. He
felt himself pulled forward, tried to fight a desire he couldn’t explain.

Despite every urge to look away, he stared deep into that silver
water and saw the faces of the friends he had killed…

“Couldn’t sleep?”

As if his head had suddenly torn free of some smothering gauze,
Raub felt cool air fill his lungs. The light was bright around him as he rose
slowly from the pool’s edge, not bothering to turn toward the familiar voice.
He felt his mind clear, felt the breeze trace across his back, his tunic soaked
in sweat.

The music was gone, no hint that it had ever been there. Just the
faint echo of despair still twisting in his memory. At his feet, the black
water of the pool was streaked with scum and a chaotic cloud of ripples
spreading at the touch of the wind.

“Thought I heard something,” Raub said at last.

He turned back to see Cassatra in the shadows, her crossbow
nocked with a black quarrel, three more slung below the barrel and ready to be
set. She had left her cloak at the camp, crouching barelegged in a knee-length
shift of dark homespun that swallowed the moon’s-light. Her look of calm
contemplation told Raub she was worried. On her belt, she carried the handaxe
the loremasters of Myrnan had called the Reaper, swinging gently within its
sheath.

“You’re half a league from the camp,” she said. “What could you
hear at that range? And if you could hear something at that range, why wouldn’t
you be moving away from it?”

“A voice,” Raubynar said quietly. He shook his head. “Just the
wind.” Cass stood slowly, turned to take in the clearing, the tree line beyond.
“I couldn’t sleep. Don’t worry about it.”

From behind him came a hiss. A stand of witchwillow shifted, a
dark shape rising to the air. Raub heard Cass’s crossbow sing as he wheeled,
fast enough to see her shoot twice. The first shot was gone into shadow. The
second took the brush grouse cleanly, shrieking as it fell clumsily from the
air and back to the bracken below.

Cass had a third bolt fitted and nocked as she turned to appraise
the silence. Raub only shrugged.

“Breakfast is served,” he said. Cass gave him a withering look.

He found the grouse easily, was carefully pulling Cass’s bolt
free when she called him. He heard a familiar hardness in her voice, approached
to find her kneeling. He saw the flattened spread of whitegrass beneath a
thicket of scrub that marked the bird’s roosting place. Cass was kneeling two
strides away, however, the grass there bent and broken in a telltale pattern.

“Something flushed the bird,” she said quietly.

Raub stepped closer, carefully ran his fingers across the spread
of flattened grass. Footprints, perhaps. Cass’s first shot hadn’t been aimed at
the bird at all.

“You thought you heard something?” she said.

At the edge of his vision, he caught a sudden glimpse of white
flame and bright steel. His father’s longblade. He had seen it.

In a brief flicker of memory, from the instant before Cass’s
voice called him away from it, Raub remembered the faces in the silver pool. He
watched them shift to smoke, burn away to nothing in his mind.

He felt his hand stray to the black-wrapped shortsword at his
hip.

“Raubynar?”

He blinked. The sky was lighter now, dawn coming.

“Just the wind,” he said.

• • •

The rebuilt fire was banked to coals by the time Raub
cleaned and dressed the bird. He watched in silence as it cooked, Cass
pointedly ignoring him as she ate nuts and dried fruit from a drawstring bag.
The sun had risen, clouds copper-stained to the east.

“You still haven’t told me where we’re going,” she said at one
point.

Raub pulled the grouse from its makeshift wooden spit, broke the
charred body carefully, and began to eat. “We were moving south, last time I
checked. The large yellow thing that hangs in the sky by day is the sun. You
can tell direction by it, or so they say.”

Cass smiled as she flicked an almond at him, sending it past his
ear with a force he could feel. Though they sparred only rarely, the two of
them were of a pair when it came to strength and speed. Raub was taller than
Cass by only a hand’s breadth, his darkness matching hers. They had been taken
as kin more than once by folk who failed to note the Ilvani set of his ears
beneath the rough-cut hair, the pale gleam like starlight in his eyes.

“We’ve been traveling south since we left the Free City,” Cass
said, “down a succession of cart tracks and hunter’s trails that keep getting
fewer and farther between. Yet somehow you manage to pick out a route from them
like you know where they all lead.”

She had the close, dark curls and the olive complexion common on
the Gracian coast, but where she came from was something Cass had never spoken
of. Barely two years since she and Raub met, that reserve was still the trait
they most strongly shared. A kind of silent familiarity between them that made
their time together seem longer.

“Don’t confuse the ability to not get lost with having a destination,”
he said.

“All travel has a destination.”

“All journeys have a destination. More aptly, a destination turns
travel into a journey.”

“And what’s this, then?”

When they had first arrived back on the mainland from the Sorcerers’
Isle of Myrnan, Cass and Raub spent almost a month in the Highport. First, down
on the docks that were the city’s lifeblood. Then moving higher from the water
toward the white-terraced hills. In bars and brothels spanning the widest range
of class and culture, Highport cost Raub what would once have been the fortune
of a lifetime. Through an endless dance of drink and baser pleasures, he
watched indifferently as it all slipped away.

Cassatra had followed him at first. But though her tastes were
more subtly refined, it was the more immediate loss of her patience that saw
her abandon Raub in pursuit of her own business. On their initial journey to
Myrnan, in each Gracian city and town they passed through, that business was
the same. Quiet meetings with loremasters in the nobles’ districts. Quieter meetings
with scouts and bounty hunters in roadhouses and dark taverns. Cass was
searching for something she had never spoken of, and so Raub had never asked.

She came back to find him in the end, dragging him out of the
drunken haze of a month’s debauchery to a monastery perched among the green
vineyards north of the city. These hills were still called Hypriot, the city’s
original name in Gracian long before “Highport” had been culled off by the
rougher Imperial tongue.

The next morning, awaking with his senses more or less functioning,
Raub found that the fortune he had lost made barely a dent in the fortune that
plagued him still. The cold weight of platinum coin struck and minted a
thousand years before. The glint of Dwarf-cut gems that were the legacy of that
month the two of them spent beneath distant Myrnan.

The ruins of that dread Sorcerers’ Isle left those who survived
them wealthy.

Raub and Cass had survived.

“Where are we going?” she asked again as they walked. She wore
leggings now beneath the shift but still walked barefoot, a kind of quiet ease
in her pace. Beneath that ease, however, Raub heard the edge in her voice that
told him she wasn’t going to ask again.

He had worked his way slowly through the fragile bones of the
grouse, cracking the last of them now to suck the marrow before he tossed them
to the grass. The day was golden, sun climbing bright across the open scrubland
that spread between the cypress groves and the mountains beyond. The trail he
took them on met a wider cart road not far beyond their camp, heading straight
for the great forest and with tracks along it fresh the day before in both
directions.