A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (9 page)

She was the knight whose skull had lain here for uncounted years,
twined now by dead vines and wind-touched grass. She was the acolyte that had
died within sight of her peoples’ dream, was the spirit of life reborn and hope
rekindled, and of a future that dwelt in her as a dark memory she could not
name.

She tried to tear the cloak but its strength was beyond her. She
felt the strength of spellcraft in its weave, keeping it whole against the
passage of time. In the end, it took the sword itself to cut it, the cloth
snapped taut and drawn against the razor edge of grey steel standing immobile
in its cradle of stone.

She wrapped the haft in the shorter piece of cloak, twisting it
tight in three layers before she would draw it forth from the ground. Careful
not to let any part of it touch her flesh, just as they had all been taught. As
he had been taught, she realized. The other mind in hers, all the fear that had
been someone else’s once, guiding her now in a way she didn’t understand but
could not ignore.

It took the better part of the day for her to slowly wrench the
grey blade free of the grasp of ancient stone. She stood it before her
carefully when she was done, only half a head taller than the sword at its full
height. She weighed in her mind the difficulty of carrying it, measured out the
effort of finding shelter, finding clothing, finding sustenance as she dragged
it in secret across the distance home. A journey she would make because there
was no one else to make it.

With the larger piece of cloak, she wrapped herself against the
chill that advanced with the setting sun. She would set out in search of a more
sheltered space, the open ridges too exposed to spend the night before the
first day of that long march.

She heard the whisper again. But when she turned, she saw only
the stooped and twisted trunks, the time-bent limbs of the ageless oak above,
its black leaves spreading to cover all the bluff like a shroud. She thought
she felt eyes on her, felt a timeless touch thread through her like the
incessant stitching of a silver needle. She heard the voice of the wind, heard
the hiss that carried a black storm of dead leaves to the air as she turned
away.

THEY WERE FOUND IN THE MIDST of their tryst by the Khanan
Irnash’an
himself, the steel-bound door of the abandoned White Tower
gallery breaking beneath his shoulder like it might have been a courtesan’s
cork-paneled closet. The voice of the High Emperor of all Ajaeltha when he saw
them was a scream of purest rage. He held the scepter of his reign in hand,
hefted like a mace with all the strength and fury that had conquered the
uprisings of three governors before the two of them were even born.

Jalina screamed, clutching the sweat-stained satin sheet to her
as she scrambled back on the cushioned pallet, eyes downcast from instinctive
deference as much as fear. Charan met the aging sovereign’s gaze as the scepter
swung high. He hit the floor rolling, naked flesh slamming against cold stone
as the mass of gilt-edged steel and razor-sharp gems hissed past his head, a
finger’s breadth from killing him.

Across the ancient line of statues set in an uneven colonnade to
both sides of the door, his clothing was scattered as an unseemly web. Cloak
and leggings, shirt and linens. The stone faces were ancient courtiers and
forgotten sovereigns, all of them staring blankly. Banished here to dust and
silence, far from the white marble of the khanan’s great halls.

Jalina would be safe enough, Charan knew as he scrambled to his
feet, feeling the ancient warrior twisting behind him but not daring to look.
He understood that the second blow would come for him, just as he knew that it
would hit with certainty, no room to maneuver in the narrow confines of the
cluttered chamber. Snatching at his leggings and belt, Charan grabbed up his
knife, the scabbard left exposed as it always was. Force of habit. He spun as
he hurled it with no thought, felt the momentum of his movement twist through
his arm like the crack of a teamster’s whip.

He was planning only to distract the khanan, hoping to divert
that follow-up killing stroke to his shoulder or side rather than his skull.
What he might do to prevent the next blow was a matter he was still frantically
thinking on when the scepter lurched from callused hands.

The khanan clutched at the knife where a hand’s-length of damask
steel had buried itself hilt-deep in his chest. He hit the floor with a soft
thud and the gasp of his last breath. All was silent after that.

Neither of them spoke for a long while. Charan fought to slow his
breathing, realized numbly that the continued quiet meant the khanan had made
his careful way up the tower stairs alone. He slipped to the buckled door,
closed it carefully against its shattered frame.

“You killed him,” Jalina whispered at last. The ash-brown eyes
were wide, set within their frame of auburn hair. Her hands were shaking, fingers
reflexively forming the death-sign before her.

“A knife in the heart will do that.”

Charan stood over the corpse, turned from her so she wouldn’t see
the wonder as he stared. It wasn’t the first body he had seen. Not even the
first whose death was nominally his responsibility, but it was the first to
have fallen by his own hand. He half-expected to feel something. Fear, perhaps.
The weight of hubris, the dread of vague doom. Some guilt or misgiving.

Instead, his mind was empty. As he looked down absently, he saw
his sex still standing rigid, unhooded where it reached for the empty air
before him. He tasted metal in his mouth, dull copper like the stippled blood
rising in the khanan’s dead eyes.

“He is the khanan and your father,” Jalina whispered, hoarse. “Is
that all you have to say?”

Charan smiled bitterly. A hand absently ran through the black
hair shrouding his face, pushed it back to hang to his shoulders. He turned to
his sister with a flash of black eyes that were reflected in her own cold gaze.

“Gods save the empress,” he said.

He saw Jalina flush, a rush of crimson rage that made her eyes
flash brighter. It twisted from face to neck, pushed down to spread across her
breasts as she stood regally, wrapping the sheet around herself. “We bring him
back,” she said.

“He’s dead,” Charan responded idly. “There’s a degree of permanence
involved.”

“I mean bring him to the priests, fool. Impose the rites of
return while the spirit still lingers…”

“When the spirit returns, the memory comes with it. Bring him
back to recall how I put a blade in his heart? I think not.” Charan stooped to
lift the diadem from his father’s brow, felt the flesh already cooling beneath
it. He pulled his shirt from a statue of the great-grandfather who named the
empire that his sister had just inherited, dropped it to shroud the face and
its sightless eyes.

There was less blood around the knife than he imagined there
would be. He absently tossed the crown over his shoulder, turned to see Jalina
snatch it by instinct before it hit her. By a less well-practiced instinct, she
recoiled from it like it might have been a serpent, sending it to the ground
with the dull thud of its golden weight.

“I thought you might like to try it on,” Charan said evenly.

“It fits your ambition best.” His sister’s voice was ice, the
full mouth set in an imposing blank line.

He only shrugged. “Should have thought on that before you clawed
your way from mother’s womb ahead of me.”

He saw her look away, close her eyes and mark the death-sign
again in response to the mention of their mother. The maker’s cross, both hands
scribing the air before her. The circle of the sun above, the quick intersection
of the sword below.

Charan scowled. “No matter how often you wave your hands to your
gods, she stays just as dead.”

Jalina dropped the sheet as she stood, slunk to the window ledge where
she had carefully folded her own clothing. She stood in silence a while. “I
want neither the crown nor the throne,” she said at last. “I’ll refuse both.
Take them and be happy for the first time in your life.”

Charan’s dark eye followed the curve of her back as she fastened
her underskirts, the faint gleam of lantern light showing the wetness at her
thighs and in the dark tangle of her sex. He felt the ache in his loins thicken.
“Our first purpose here will make us both happier by far,” he said carefully.
“For a time, at least.”

He saw the shudder of revulsion slip through his sister. As from
a sudden shock of cold water, his tumescence waned.

“You stopped needing to prove your depravity to me long ago.” Jalina’s
hair showed whorls of sun-brightened copper in the light as she tied it back,
tightened a belt of spun sheen-silver to fasten her shift. This she adjusted to
the courtly style, the globes of her breasts revealed from the wide-cut
sleeves.

“My so-called depravity has had no shortness of call from you
these
past years.” But his sister was silent as she slipped her knife in its scabbard
to her thigh, adjusted a patterned skirt of blue and yellow silk over it.

Charan turned from her in anger, tripped over something. At his
feet, their father’s body. He stared at it like it a thing suddenly and somehow
forgotten. “We need to think,” he said.

“Match our stories up.” Jalina’s voice was a child’s suddenly.
Charan heard it as he dressed with his back to her, saw a vision of her in his
mind suddenly at age twelve, their mother dead that summer. In her chamber in
the White Tower of the Empress, in the scant time before the priests arrived
and the body was whisked away, both he and his sister had seen the marks of his
father’s hands at her throat.

When the spirit returns, the memory comes with it.

Charan remembered the brown eyes wet with tears, his sister’s
hand in his as the sepulcher stones were sealed in a haze of blue-white fire.
An eldritch consumption, the healers called it. Beyond their skill to pull her
back from the darkness. The people had believed them, because it was easier
that way.

“We can say we found him,” Jalina whispered. “Throw a concubine
or two to the councilors. A crime of passion.”

“No.”

“Assassination, then. Lure a guard here, make it look as though…”

“No,” Charan said carefully. “No story. Anything we do, any involvement
with the body, no matter how fleeting, makes us suspect.”

“Then what…”

“We dispose of it.”

In the sigh that followed a sullen silence, Charan knew that
Jalina had already realized there was no other way forward. She needed Charan
to be the first to voice it, though. As always, he thought.

“A place no one will ever go.” He prodded the body with his foot,
felt it unyielding but with no stiffness of the blood yet. The last of his own
stiffness had finally faded.

“They won’t believe we know nothing of this.”

“They will when we show our surprise. Show our uncertainty along
with everyone else at the khanan’s disappearance…”

“You’re as big a fool as he was. The councilors will look to us…”

“They won’t dare. The hint of murder puts the empire in their
hands, yes. But an unexplained disappearance creates a constitutional crisis
that threatens the council’s hold on power. Let them come up with the idea of
covering for it. They’ll invite the two of us to rule as regents in father’s
place. Tell the people he’s gone in secret to the temples at Terhetu, or
leading a warband to the Dragonspires.”

He looked back quickly, saw her force the quiet smile from her
lips. Her eyes were ice where she watched him. Dry, suddenly. He hadn’t seen
her wipe the tears away.

“What do we do?” she said.

The castle was dark, the corridor lanterns shrouded, but the
light of the near-full Clearmoon at the windows was a bright guide as they made
their way slowly from the White Tower, down to the distant kitchens far below.
The first leg down the endless winding stairs was the hardest, both of them
staggering. They had stripped the body, using the robes to staunch the slow
flow of blood. Then they wrapped their father in the silk sheets, Charan taking
him by the shoulders, descending backwards to watch Jalina struggle as she
gripped his feet and followed. The scepter, Charan had lashed tight to his
father’s waist with the jeweled belt he wore, its bone-crushing weight a
scarcely noticed addition to their father’s well-muscled bulk.

They moved in a regular pattern, setting the corpse down so that
Charan could scout ahead, listening with held breath and pulsing heart for the
telltale sound of footsteps. It was late enough that there was little chance of
them being seen in the side corridors and wall-passages they moved along, but
he had no great desire to explain his presence. Or, more inevitably, to make
more murder against whatever courier or wayward servant they happened across.

As disturbing as that thought was, he knew with unasked certainty
that he would do the deed without hesitation if it came to it. One death on his
hands and he was still shaking. He would have expected that to make the next
harder.

Through the wide-open windows, the heat of day was finally past,
broken by the dark breeze of the bay. Moon’s-light gleamed silver on the water,
gold on the towers and minarets of Sasaerin, jewel of Ajaeltha. The city’s
sloping peaks of clustered spires rose across from them as he and Jalina
descended, working from the castle’s upper tiers to the servants’ levels below.

Luck or fate was on their side, it seemed. Charan could hear
slaves in the kitchen along the final stretch of darkened corridor, but the cutting
room adjacent was empty. He caught the familiar steel tang of sanguine air as
he thrust open the damp-swollen door, saw a half-dozen yearling buffalo dressed
and hanging in the darkness. He was much younger the last time he had any
reason to pass this way, but a quick inspection showed that the wide black
grate at the center of the stained stone floor still hadn’t been repaired in
all the time since.

When they had dragged their father’s body inside, Charan pushed
the door shut, kicked a wedge of splintered bone from the detritus of the floor
into place along its foot to jam it. He leaned across a dark-stained table,
needed to rest his aching back a moment. Across from him, Jalina limped as she
paced, staring around her.

“You’re a fool,” she said at last, as he knew she would.

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

“You think they won’t search for him here? Or were you planning
to cut and dress him for feast and hope no one notices?”

Charan moved past her to drop to his knees. He gripped the stinking
grate, ignored the heady slime of blood and offal that clung to its corroded
bars as he shifted it from practiced memory. A particular twist, a specific
positioning that would disengage it from the stones that surrounded them. He
felt it come loose, lifted it carefully. Below, the mouth of a narrow well
opened up to darkness.

The khanan’s stiffening legs were forced into that darkness only
with effort, but Charan needed to use the steel and gold scepter to shatter the
bones of his father’s splayed arms and wide-set shoulders. A half-dozen blows
forced the torso into the space of the drain, the broken arms up in a dark
gesture of surrender as Charan pushed down with his foot. He kicked a
half-dozen times to force the mangled corpse through, watching as it slipped
away finally with a sickening lurch.