Till Human Voices Wake Us (12 page)

“Raphael, what happened in those three days?”

He had no idea what Kasian was talking about. No memory fish jumped at this question, merely a puzzlement. He felt awkwardly suspended out of the river of magic that was rushing about him. “Which three days do you mean?”

“The three days between our birthday and the fall of Astandalas. I’ve always wondered what you did in them. We couldn’t find you.”

His heart dropped, like a stone into a well, or the first raindrop of the great flood. “There were three days?”

Kasian looked at him almost fondly. “Phoenix! Even you could hardly have missed noticing three days.”

Raphael fumbled his way backwards to one of the seats. It was cold stone and though uncomfortable he welcomed its durance. He’d fallen quite out of his magic. Fortunately this was inside his grounds, protected by all those circles of wards and enchantments, somewhere he couldn’t really lose control, merely set it down for a few minutes of relaxation or despair.

He concentrated even so on not losing his grasp on those new powers that had come from his night’s work. With his attention on those wild pressures, he noticed but could do nothing about the fact that the fine control over his voice slackened, timbre roughening, accent thickening, tongue stiffening. “There were n-never three days.”

“Yes, there were. We spent them looking for you.”

“I thought it w-w-was one.”

“What on earth were you doing?”

There was no delicate way he could put it. Words came to mind, one—another—another—all of them hard as the stone table and none of them pleasant. He rubbed his palms on his trousers and shivered in the soft cool air. Subtle trailers of mist draped across the lower parts of the garden; rain fell, spangling off the flagstones, pattering around him. This was not the fish of a memory cresting in a river; this was drowning.

Kasian, who was wearing his thick crimson sweater and moreover was protected by the eaves of the house, sighed, sat down, and unlatched the box to one side of the chessboard inlaid on the table top. The box was grotty with cobwebs. Raphael watched as he rubbed the gossamer between his fingers until he could flick the ball of it away. He gave Raphael the onyx, keeping the alabaster for himself.

Faint clicks as he set down each titled figure—kings, queens, bishops, knights, rooks, pawns. In one of the Tanteyr versions the game was a re-enactment of the battles of Tassakar the Magnificent, her sister Lenór Amian the Dancer, and Mirshave the fifth Lord of Ysthar against the Adversary. Kasian had always admired Tassakar the Magnificent, greatest monarch of their people, and took white when he could.

Raphael had complained a few times, when they were young, that he should get to play on the side of Lenór Amian (not knowing in those days he would one day be heir to the Lord Mirshave), but Kasian had overruled him with the idea that he shared an interest in music with the one who had been greatest before he became least.

He responded automatically to Kasian’s opening gambit. In another reading of chess each game was a reprise of the courtship of the Lord Phoenix and the Lady Shargán, the ancestors of the Tantey.
 
The legends surrounding that courtship were manifold, but white belonged to the Lord of Light and black to Shargán of the Desert, who some said was the night. A less repugnant idea than standing in for the Eater of Worlds.

 
The orderly array of pieces broke up, began to disperse and shift about the board. There was a pattern underlying the chaos, a logic Raphael could not describe. His mind was occupied looking for words with which to say—not the ineffable, but rather that dark unspeakability which in Latin was called
nefas
. There were no words but the barest ones, if he were to tell the story.

If. If. He’d never looked for words before. He wasn’t sure why he looked now, except that most of his thoughts were bound up in the high winds, and he wanted Kasian to know that there were reasons for his distance without telling him the real ones.

He moved his knight, which Kasian promptly captured. It occurred to him that Kasian was temperamental, and would seek vengeance if he thought it necessary. Kasian was very courageous, certainly, had always fought for him. Undoubtedly a great warrior, with his muscular shoulders and inherited skill. But there was no way he could stand against the ones who had broken an empire of magic to pieces, no matter how heroic he was.

No names, then, Raphael decided: nothing that would give his brother a place to aim. But the truth, yes, perhaps Kasian deserved the truth—it was all Raphael had to give him, a thin cold truth like an empty hut in a storm. He was in control again now, the initial surprise of the question lessening, the magic filling up the holes, like wind in the sky. He wanted Kasian to be sympathetic and distant, so that when tomorrow came he would mourn but not grieve. Surely he had grieved enough for him already.

“I was captured by a black wizard.”

Kasian’s voice was abstracted from Raphael’s reality, the memories far stronger. “How so?”

“I was going towards Green Square, and he seized me. He needed a—a sacrifice for a spell.”

“What did he do?”

He played out a few more moves. White and black moved around the board. Tassakar fought against the Abyss; Shargán courted the Lord Phoenix. And who was to say which pieces would survive and which be taken? Which player would win, and what the significance of that in the end? The wind was nosing around the garden with curious motions.

There would be different stories told about tomorrow than the ones the dragon told of Urm and Swallow who sank three continents, or Agrinalaine and Ghizhaur who made the Desert of Kaph, or that Robin told of the Moss Mage and the Kilkannany Cobbler who had turned a burgeoning worldlet into ice volcanoes. Raphael had promised himself that long ago: that he would lose before letting all the magic loose to wreak what it would. Half his power was bound in protective enchantments.

“He practised black magic, Kasian. What do you think he did?”

“But—on you? Or—or w-with you?”

It was strange to hear Kasian stammer, when his own voice was clear. “Both.”

“But you’re alive—forgive me but I don’t understand—”

“He was interrupted.”

There was a long silence. White advanced; black regained ground; the pile of captured pieces grew. The pattern grew no clearer to Raphael, who was trying very hard not to relive those three days he had thought in his despair one, and who was only succeeding because he had that higher pattern to hold in its place. He siphoned off his excess emotion automatically, into the cool air, the burgeoning winds, feeling his face calm even as the fog in the garden dissipated.

At last Kasian spoke. “By whom?”

“A rival wizard.” The present Lord of Eahh: Circe’s husband Tavin.

“What did he do?”

Why did he ask these sorts of questions? He could hardly want to know the details. No one could want the details. Raphael picked out a strand of the East wind, bound it to a swirl of electricity-borne fire, misplaced his rook so Kasian took his queen. “He killed the first wizard.”

“And—and you?”

Raphael moved some pieces in ways that meant nothing to him, while in the sky he felt the first approach of the North Wind sweeping down from the Arctic. “And I?”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything. I merely … was. Most of the spells to do with me were done by then, but for the final—”

“Murder.”

Raphael inclined his head politely, though none of his nightmares, when he was still sleeping long enough to dream, had ever made it clear what the last steps of that particular spell were intended to accomplish. “The half-finished spell went awry. It cracked the worlds apart and destroyed Astandalas.”

“I always heard that it had broken because someone tried to make himself emperor by summoning the Eater of Worlds.”

“That may have been part of it. Fortunately it remained unfinished.”

“
Fortunately
,” Kasian said, very quietly, and they played a few more moves.

Raphael tried to focus on how Ishaa had distracted the black wizard at the opportune moment, and not remember how Tavin had killed his father while Maugraian’s mind was yet entwined with Raphael’s, so that Raphael had lived through his death to the point he had not believed it another’s.

But Raphael had awoken at last to himself in the desolation of the new Ysthar; and Ishaa had found him. He had woken to find he had magic, magic as powerful and untamed and painful as this magic filling him from the powers he had summoned last night.

He forced his attention to the board, caught intelligence of the pattern, moved his remaining bishop.
 

Kasian looked down, hesitated, looked back up. “I don’t know what to say, Raphael.”

Raphael glanced at him with painfully real amusement breaking through the spume thrown up by the powers crashing around him. “‘You win’?”

“I—what?—I mean, I beg your pardon?”

Raphael tapped the board. “Checkmate. Come, let us go to the store.”

***

Outside the air was hazy, brisk without being cold, clouds scudding overhead on flattened bellies. The front being pushed by the North Wind hadn’t yet arrived in England. They walked through the park and stopped by the Houses of Parliament, looking over the railings at bright-jacketed policemen.

“I thought when I first saw you yesterday that that was your palace,” Kasian said, obviously moving the conversation to safer territory.

“What made you think I lived in a palace?”

Kasian chuckled. “I live in one. There didn’t seem any particular reason you couldn’t. Sherry told me last night it was the seat of the local government.” There was a slight pause, Kasian looking at some tourists taking pictures of the Burghers of Calais. Then: “She told me that you—”

He stopped. After a while Raphael said, “Yes?”

“She said that you never speak of your family.
 
Which I suppose is why you didn’t introduce me last night by my title? I wasn’t sure if it were just things are much more casual here than I’m used to. Sherry thought you were an orphan.”

“The magic folk of Ysthar are used to having secrets,” Raphael said, starting to walk to Fortnum and Mason’s.

Kasian laughed sardonically. “No, really? In Ixsaa there’s a phrase,
Jir Ystharn jaillon
. Literally it’s ‘He’s entered service with Ysthar,’ but it means, ‘He’s abandoned his name and become a new person.’—You might use it of a rogue who’s gone straight, or a good man turned thief.
 
As if, when you go to Ysthar, all your past disappears into quicksand.”

Raphael contemplated that for a moment, waiting for a break in traffic so they could cross the next street. “There are sometimes good reasons to want to abandon your past.”

Kasian glanced across at him, then at the crowds of people bustling past them. Perhaps he thought of what Raphael had just told him, for he shivered slightly and went on in a lighter tone. “They also say,
Uvai Ysthard
—‘Send it to Ysthar.’ Used of things that need to be disposed of discreetly, bodies for instance. Or my favourite,
Oll Stond’ Ystharo
. ‘Tell the Lord of
 
Ysthar.’”

After a few minutes Raphael’s curiosity got the better of him. “And what does that idiom mean?”

Kasian grinned. “‘All your secrets are safe with me.’”

“Hmph.”

“That actually sounded like an emotion. I shall have to remember that you have them.”

“Everyone has emotions,” Raphael said, and swished wind and light around him restlessly, until the breezes quivered with colour and a scent like sharp herbs, and thronged on his cheeks and in his hair.

“But you try so
hard
not to.”

This was unfortunately true. Raphael walked briskly, turning a corner. Kasian skipped to catch up with him and laughed aloud.

“Now, now, I’m just teasing you. And one of these days you are going to reply wittily, and I shall fall over with surprise. To think that my twin brother, shy, stuttering Raphael—though you don’t stutter so much now—and how is it that you don’t? Did you magic it away?”

“
No
.” Raphael bit off his vehemence with a jerk of wind.

Kasian sounded taken aback. “I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“I learned by practice. I would never use my magic for so—so—so personal and self-indulgent a thing.”

Kasian paused. “I don’t think anyone would consider it self-indulgent, Raphael. I asked because it is a great change.”

Raphael nodded curtly. (
He’s entered service with Ysthar,
indeed.) “This is the store.” He turned in immediately and saw, through the glass door, Kasian hesitating a moment to roll his eyes and shrug expressively to no one in particular before following him in. Once he did enter, however, his expression changed from forbearance to eagerness. “Ah,” he said, looking from the produce to the aisles, “this is more like it.”

He promptly loaded Raphael with more food than he usually bought in a month. Raphael was more or less content to be the porter, finding it difficult to keep his ordinary not-a-film-star not-a-great-mage manner of behaving going while at the same time continuing to weave the winds into the patterns that would cradle the world safe tomorrow. There were two ready-made quiches and a bottle of pickled onions and a box of water crackers, several bawdy puns about bananas, a fruit Raphael gathered Kasian knew from books, some disapproval of the meat (Kasian did not think it could possibly have been hung properly and was rather disturbed by the plastic-wrap), and a moment of ecstatic delight at the shelves of condiments and mustards. After that his mind wandered.

They spent so long in the store it was nearly time to go to Sherry’s when they got home. Raphael finished his morning’s work with the winds while Kasian spent some time primping and agonizing over the state of his clothing.

Then, waiting for Kasian in his study, Raphael realized it was precisely twenty-four hours until the end of the Game. He had finished all his preparations; he had only to hold the rising flood of power steady, persist through one luncheon with his friend, one afternoon with his brother, one evening of the play, one night of meditation and vigil.