A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (25 page)

Before, from his high vantage point above Garania Hall, Raub had
watched and waited what seemed a long while to see Cass exit through the open
gate of his father’s house, his childhood home. The frenzied altercation there
was the last thing he expected, and he felt all its uncertainty rooting deep in
his mind as he slipped easily through the great canopy of branches crossing
above the high ward. He fought to clear his head, feeling a kind of shame at
his unexplained anger and the dark sorrow that had driven it.

Even before he climbed, he had seen Cass reach for the axe beneath
her cloak as she backed away from him. An instinct against the unexpected
agitation of the crowd. Sudden assault, a selectively brutal response, and a
fast exit was a tactical scenario he and she were well-versed in, making use of
it in more taverns and roadhouses over the previous two years than he cared to
remember.

In the end, she hadn’t been forced to fight her way out of the discord
he left for her. But even as he waited for her to come close enough that he
might call out, Cass turned west along the path that wound between the high
houses of Anthila’s nobles. Heading back the way the two of them had first
come, he realized. And even as he did, he understood that it was better that
way.

As he slipped through the shadows, Raub held the black-wrapped
shortsword before him. It felt strange removed from his belt. Its weight and
shape against his hip for the span of all those seasons were things he had long
grown accustomed to.

Carefully, he unspooled the black gauze that wrapped it, catching
the scent of road dust and well-oiled leather. He tossed the cloth to the tall
grass, and the blade that emerged from the rough scabbard beneath it flashed
silver in the moon’s-light, then flared even brighter with the blue light born
in the heart of its glassy steel. It was a shortsword of the Ilvani, its edge
marked with delicate glyphs that he couldn’t read. One of the ancient tongues,
out of the south. His father would have known it, but had never shared its
meaning.

Talmaraub was the name he had been born with. His father’s name,
and a thing that no one outside Anthila knew. A thing he never told Cass.

As a child, he shortened it to Talrab, which in the forest speech
of the northern Ilvani was the black-hooded hawk. This was a fist-sized raptor
that flew in flocks through the shadowed trees, as Raub and his friends had
once run. They were as fearless then as the talrab, which would attack in
swarms of a dozen to take down hare and ground squirrels six times its size,
harrying with beak and claw and sheer perseverance.

Raub felt his blood beating fast at his neck, in his chest. He
cursed himself for his weakness, not for the first time.

He felt the weight of the blade in his hand. He remembered the
first night he held it.

He remembered the pledge he made then, to leave that blade in his
father’s dead heart.

With a care born of the fear that had dogged him for long years,
he used the sword’s light to make his way along winding paths. Dark arches of
branch and moon’s-shadow twisted overhead, and where the sun creeper shone, it
showed the spirit markers woven of living branches into the shapes of ancient
Ilvani glyphs. He saw the open biers of bleached bone, whose flesh with each
passing day had been consumed and rendered back to the world that spawned it.

When he turned his back on Cass, Raub had kept climbing. Up beyond
the highest tier of noble’s houses that had once been his world, to ascend to
the last tiers whose black-stained staircases wound up to the silent porches of
the dead. Bone and ash were the paths he walked on now. Bone and dust were the
dirt and loam from which the flowers of the necropolis bloomed in vivid hues
through all seasons, drawing warmth and nourishment from the lives laid to rest
here.

This custom was the reason the Ilvani kept their traditions of
death a closely guarded secret. Not for the forest folk were the ways of burial
or burning, sending the dead to the dark or the fire. The Ilvani way was the
sense of connection to the life of the wood. The Ilvani way was the eternal
transition of seasons, and the ceremonies that marked the point at which life
ended by setting down the future’s roots.

At each wrong turn and wild-grown dead end, Raub used the
shortsword to hack away at screens of creeper and saplings, its touch barely
felt as it sliced wood and vine as though cutting through water. Beyond the
last of those screens, pale in the moon’s-light, he found the spirit markers he
sought.

The Ilvani way was thilanatir. The ghostsong. A ritual of binding
that connected all the truths of a person’s life, and by which the spirits of
the dead would be joined to the memories of the living in a magic older than
the fallen Empire of the Lothelecan, older than all Ilvani lore. A magic older
than time.

To make the ghostsong, friends and family, fathers and daughters,
mothers and sons would sing of the deeds done in life by the dead, drawing
forth the spirit of those who had passed on. Memory, the Ilvani said, was the
manifestation of the spirit in flesh. And so by the singing of the ghostsong,
those left behind would seal away a fragment of the fallen within themselves.

Even before he fled his people and his life, Raub hadn’t believed
it. Not exactly. Still, he understood the greater truth of the timeless ritual,
which was that the spirit possessed its own force, its own presence beyond the
body by which it was confined. And so it was that for six years, he had vowed
that this ghostsong would be his final gift to the father he had tried and
failed to kill.

His mother’s spirit marker was all but gone now, but he saw his father’s
set beside it in a copse whose walls were a shower of blood-red heart-vine. He
was a child the first time he stood here, when his mother’s woven bier had held
her body for ten cycles of the Clearmoon’s rites. He was an outlaw the last
time he saw that bier, vines and creepers long ago grown over to consume the
mortal shell that had borne his mother’s grace and beauty, and to return that
shell to the spirit-vault of earth and sky.

The night he fled, he named himself Raubynar, which meant the
wandering hawk. Part of the name he had worn in childhood. Part of the name of
a friend from that childhood who was dead now, and whose life Raub felt burning
deeper into his memory each time he heard that new name spoken aloud.

Tonight, he would sing the ghostsong. He would add his voice to
the chorus that told the stories that were the only things remaining now of his
father’s life. But the story he sung would be the one his father never told. A
story that no one else would tell. His voice would be raised against the
silence of the bier to curse his father’s memory and spirit with the truth that
only the exiled son knew.

Raub felt something cold twist through him as he stepped close.
His father’s body was already enclosed by its cocoon of vines, glowing faintly
white with the magic by which the rites progressed. He remembered his mother’s
rites, all the days of silent mourning that led to the procession that had
placed her here. The bier had been set with her body and its burial robes, dark
to match her exotic complexion. Her rings were there, and the diadem she wore
that was the gold of her eyes. These things that were closest to her were part
of the rite of remembrance, and would be reclaimed in the final rites as the
body crumbled. Taken by family who would bid farewell to the spirit of the
dead, and who would turn away from their sorrow at last.

The darkness to Raub’s features that had long set him apart from
his people’s fairness was his mother’s. She was a wanderer, who sung him
childhood stories of her travels through a dozen exotic lands. She had dwelt in
all the Ilvanrand, she said, breaking nobles’ hearts in each of those high
courts of the forest Ilvani. But then she saw the Yewnwood and felt it claim
her own heart.

Raub was never closer to her than when she was dying, and she had
made him understand how the most significant artifacts of each life were
central to the Ilvani rites.

An artisan’s tools will be laid in his lifeless hands as he
passes from flesh to dust
, she said.
A ranger’s bow, a hunter’s rope, a
warrior’s blade. All the essence of life is bound up in the connection between
life and the world. The things we do, the things we touch, become the memories
of our actions. Impressions are imprinted on the world to create the
world-memory that endures, and which will be our story when we are gone.

He felt his mother’s presence around him now as a dark haze of
memory. And as he had been on the last night he came to this place, fleeing one
step ahead of his father’s forces and the order to bring him down dead or
alive, Raub was grateful that his mother and her grace had passed before she
could see what his father would become.

The shroud of glowing leaves within which the bier closed itself
off was sacrosanct. It was the mark and sign of all the magic of this place,
and of all the history and tradition upheld by a thousand generations of the
dead consumed here.

With all the potency of that tradition pounding in his heart,
Raub stepped up to his father’s bier. He drove the shortsword down with all the
strength of the rage that was in him, the decaying skull shattering beneath its
point. He recoiled and hit again, head to foot, digging in with his heels as he
slashed broadly in a single blinding-fast motion. Shroud and bier and body were
hacked in two before him, this last vestige of his father’s life little more
than dry grass before the scythe.

With savage fury, Raub dismembered his father’s corpse with the
sword that was the dead man’s badge of office, and whose enduring history his
father had tainted with a lifetime of lies.

Valaendar was the ancestral blade of the rulers of
Anthil
a,
whose realm was the forest frontier for five days’ ride to north and south.
Under the Human sphere’s thousand-year Imperial rule of the surrounding Elder
Kingdoms, the black shortsword was little more than an heirloom. A remembrance
of past glory, and of Ilvani empires against which the fifteen hundred years of
the Lothelecan was the short-lived rise and fall of all other Human dominions.

The magic of the Ilvani was the magic of the unseen world, and by
that magic did the necropolis reclaim the spirit of life and return it to mana
once more. Body and bone, flesh and jewel, steel and stone were laid atop the
bier for ten full cycles of the Clearmoon. And for each facet of the lost life
that belonged to the dead, those who survived them would sing the ghostsong.

In the aftermath of Empire’s fall four decades past, the
blade Valaendar had become more than a symbol. By the time his father was
elected seneschal in the year of Raub’s birth, the power of the black
shortsword had been restored by careful study and spellcraft. The old
magic that would have been prohibited under the Empire, or so his father railed
at every opportunity.

“Destiny denied,”
he called it, but it
would be long years before Raub understood how the black blade’s true destiny
had been corrupted by his father’s ambition.

That night six years past, they sought to seize that power. Raub
and the four who pledged their lives alongside him, then lost those lives because
he hadn’t realized how far his father’s
malignant power had spread.
Extending in ways that even the kin-faithful who worshiped the history of
Valaendar would never understand.

As the black sword flashed in his hand, Raub froze.

He stepped back suddenly, staring at the grim destruction before
him. The wind had slackened, his breathing the only sound.

Where he had hacked through the rotting remains on the bier, he
saw his father’s blackened hands. He recognized the golden ring by which his
mother had been betrothed and the silver band that marked her death. Yet those
hands had clutched only each other, crossed and clasped across the now-sundered
chest whose wrappings were already turned to dust by the magic of this place.

Other artifacts were spread there. Scrolls of office and symbols
of faith and friendship that Raub cast aside now as he tore apart the last of
the funeral wrappings. He looked beneath and around the bier for the gleaming
longblade that should have been there. The single memory he had come in hope of
redeeming.

He raised the black shortsword again. He hacked through the
tatters of remaining vines in a half-dozen places before he kicked the cloven
bier over with a shriek of rage that was swallowed by the night.

Since the day he fled, Raub had yearned for this moment. For long
years, he dreamed of seizing the bright blade whose magic was set in silver and
white fire. A warrior’s backsword that was his father’s, and had been his
grandfather’s, and that had been carried by countless generations of his family
before that. This was the sword his father’s treachery denied him. The blade
whose nobility and destiny his father abandoned, claiming instead the rank and
rule of the black shortsword as he willingly corrupted Valaendar’s name and
purpose.

Had Raub been there to sing the ghostsong for his father, the ancestral
blade would have lain within the bier for the mourning cycles of the Clearmoon,
then been claimed by him. The Ilvani reverence for death and tradition meant
that it could have been taken only by one who was heir to its legacy, but Raub
was last of his line. Had anyone stolen it from this place, the protective
magic of the bier would have told him so.

He clawed at the ground, hoping in vain that what he sought might
simply have fallen somehow, but there was no mistake. His father’s sword was
gone.

Faint where the wind rose, he thought he heard the song of the
moon-lit clearing.