Till Human Voices Wake Us (24 page)

Then Kasian was there.

With his arrival the thorns toppled out of the air and lay innocently on the floor as shadows cast from a dim light, the broken sword-blades the cracks between floorboards. Kasian was ordinary, gloriously ordinary: he did not stand on the edge of imaginary darkness: he turned on the light.

“Raphael,” he said imperiously, “come here.”

Ishaa spread her wings and the fire fell down soft as snowflakes.

He would have gone to him, but he looked down, and there at his feet fell the one shadow Kasian could not banish. The Abyss gaped there still, and if he were to fall he would fall for a long time before he reached the bottom.

If the old stories were even true, and there was a bottom. A place where the world tree had its roots: though it was said that its roots ran into poisoned waters now, for the Adversary inhabited those dark places. He did not want to see the Adversary again.

“Raphael,” Kasian said again, “please. It’s time to go home.”

Ishaa called out. Her voice was too beautiful for him to bear, and he stumbled back a step. Her voice was in harmony with the high stars, whose song he had once known. In the dangerous high places there had been concord once. He had locked away that thought and concentrated on the balance of opposites. One and one, and not two.

“Raphael, it’s safe. Won’t you trust me?”

Trust? he thought. The word Kasian used for
you
,
fhira
, was the tenderest and most intimate word for family relations and friendships, one only to be used with one’s best-beloved. What had he called Kasian?
thayen
, a word for a stranger. A positive word for a stranger, but still … Tanteyr had forty words for
you
, each one with a different connotation.
Fhira
had the divine
fhenn
as the first sound.

Ishaa blazed into a new sun. Fire beat against his face as light reached across the abyss to touch him, a bridge across a hidden river. Trust. Whom else should he trust but his brother, his friend, his king?

He closed his eyes and stepped out.

***

He fell, and he shattered on the impact.

Chapter Thirteen

Mirror, Mirror

The next morning Kasian and he walked to Robin’s house through milky air, an atmosphere that suited how Raphael felt quite admirably. Mist lay over the city, barely stirring even as they passed through it.

He’d not remembered the invitation to go for brunch until Kasian reminded him. He’d slept fitfully and woken with his head feeling as mist-stuffed as the city, a slow and painful rising. Kasian had wanted them to go in a taxi again but Raphael had felt in desperate need of fresh air. It didn’t help as much as he’d hoped.

There were few people about on the roads Raphael chose, or at least he did not notice much but that the daffodils in Belgravia’s garden squares bent damply. They passed a church with a small line of people filing in. Their expressions were grave, the church dark, the cross visible through the door muffled with black crepe. A sombre bell turned the air clammy on his skin. He tried not to listen to its tolling, with little result.

Robin owned a tall townhouse northwest of Victoria Station with four or five storeys. To those who did not know his history he pretended that the ground floor flat was the one in which he lived; Raphael was one of those who knew that Zebulun the Prussian dwarf on the first floor was his friend’s servant, and that was where he really dwelled. (The second floor was now Will’s, and the rest held Robin’s ample wardrobes and the other servants he’d brought from Fairyland, who did not usually make much of an appearance anywhere else.)

Upstairs the rooms were appointed as one might expect for the Prince of Fairyland—which meant, essentially, that the furnishings looked as if one’s entrance had interrupted a private costume party they were holding—but downstairs the effect was one of monochromatic perfection. A shell-grey carpet, white velvet armchairs and sofa, side tables in steel and frosted glass, the only colours two narrow rectangles of blue and yellow in a painting by Mondrian. The other wall held a canvas panel painted in graduated shades of grey. Raphael hated that charcoal panel. He’d often wished to break in one night and replace it with a large painting of the Birth of Venus or the Day of Judgment.

Zebulun answered the bell with a bow and led them down the hall to the lower flat. The smell of curry wafted out; Raphael’s stomach rumbled. Kasian grinned at him.

 
Raphael managed to return the smile as they reached the living room door. Zebulun threw it open and announced, “The Lord Raphael and the Lord Kasian his brother.” Raphael didn’t have much of a chance to consider this, for he walked three paces into the room and stopped dead. The air was full of his music.

He stood on a sea-shore at night, a sandy shore glowing silver and grey, black and white water lapping quietly against it. All colours were leached out of the land, which was flat here to the horizon, featureless in the night. It was not the land that mattered, in the nights that had come before civilization; here all attention was on the sky. It extended in the full majesty of creation above him to the horizon, and for a while that was the song of it, the sky with the stars wheeling above him.

Then that receded to the continuo part and the singing began, a glorious alto voice that was deep and full and rich as the night. She sang the parts of the wandering stars, while the orchestra played the sphere of the fixed stars; sang the tracery of the celestial bodies. The Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and far Saturn, that ancient and medieval view of the cosmos upwards and out, and upwards and in.

He could have drawn the map of the sky from the song, even though he was more practised in modern astronomy than ancient now; could have plotted out the courses of the seven planets against the slow wheel of the fixed stars, and, beyond them, the steady circle of the
primum mobile
, the first moved.
 

He could hear the whisper of harmonies through the sound of the music and knew what it represented, the sustained note to which the rest were only harmonics, beyond even the
primum mobile
, at the heart of the cosmos. When one arrived at the farthest reaches of creation one found the centre of all: the Empyrean, the first mover, the dwelling-place of God.

There was the sub-lunar sphere of the elements, glowing darkly brilliant, and there was the sky, full of music.

The alto voice stole under the violins and rose with the viola, the deeper strings broke forth like Leviathan from the deep, a chorus broke into the ranks of the fixed stars—the music swelled tremendously beyond him and he was suddenly adrift in the skies where had once found himself, leaping in sure faith that the winds would hold him from the highest peaks of the mountains, when there was no light below him but what came reflecting back from the luminous celestial bodies.

Before the stars had been set again into constellations, before their names were given to mortals or to gods, before he spoke to anyone but his soul, before all that he had sung this song alone by the sea, alone by the sand, alone under the sky—but then it was a living sky, radiant with song.

The music rang on endlessly in his mind. Every time he tried to capture his attention the music and the memory of music rose up in wave after wave as if they came from the sea beyond the world’s end. There was a blanket of memories and dreams between him and the rest of creation, muffling like snow in the winter. Music and memories and dreams.

Finally the song came to an end. Morning drew a veil of light across the riotous glory of the night, and the sky dressed itself in its sober raiment of blue. Raphael collected himself with a fierce disregard for his various and multifold aches.

Robin hit stop or pause or something on his stereo and turned beaming to them. “St Clair West playing ‘The Wanderer’, by the incomparable Orpheus. To get us in the mood for revolutions—and revelations.”

“Mostly revelations, I think,” said Scheherezade.

Raphael stared at them, saw that Sherry was there and Will, Robin and Kasian. His friends were standing in a semicircle around him, edging him slightly away from the door.
 

He forced himself to speak in his normal cool manner, though his tone was caustic. “I thought we were having lunch?”

“There is that,” Robin acknowledged. “But there is another reason for my invitation. Scheherezade?”

She took a step forward, her hair sliding off her shoulder. It was loose today, shining, healthy, beautiful. He thought of how he had seen her last without the eyes of his magic, so she looked far more ordinary; but she was beautiful in all guises. “We have been talking—James—Raphael—”

Apart from Zebulun’s announcement, that was the first time any of his friends had spoken his name. He was strangely thrilled by its sound on her lips, naming him. But he found himself taking a step back. Will stepped sideways so that he was before the door, closing the circle.

“Raphael, we have been worried. You haven’t been yourself lately.”

“Snappish,” Robin added.

Will shut the door. “Puzzlingly short-tempered.”

“Erratically tempered,” she continued. “We thought—we thought—you cannot go on like this.”

“So what then?” he interrupted. “You have been hounding me on purpose? Why? Why—why entrammel me?”

“Entrammel,” Will murmured, tasting the word, irritatingly so Raphael thought.

Robin stepped too close to him. Raphael backed up. “What would you do, to see a friend hell-bent on destroying himself? Oh, I know: you would tell him off and nurse him through his hangovers and recovery, and teach him there are no excuses for bad behaviour, whatever reason there might be.”

“Or if you met someone frightened of her shadow, what would you do? Remind her of the sun? Remind her she is real, that her life touches others, that she is not alone?”

“Or if you met someone like a ghost in the future, what gifts of practical advice and spiritual comfort would you not give? You’ve always told me the unspeakable line or the idiotic phrasing. Should we not help you in turn?”

Raphael delayed before speaking, something in him creaking under the strain of not saying what he thought. He ground out, “I don’t need help.”

“That you do,” said Kasian. “You are most like Da, thinking yourself alone is enough for all tasks. But he had his friends, you yours. He learned. You—Raphael,
sha óm
, this week you have been winter, summer, stormcloud, thunder to me.”

After a brief pause, during which Raphael tried to swallow, Kasian shook his head sadly.

At the condescending gesture Raphael’s temper flared up out of his control at last. “I invited you into my house and you
poisoned
me!”

“I came to find you! I thought you were captive of the Lord of Ysthar, that is why I had the
nirgal slaurigh
, strong enough to bind even the lord of a world, even the Lord of
 
Ysthar who is greatest of magi. For an hour or perhaps two, they said.
Even
the Lord of Ysthar. They made it strongest.”

“Why did you give it to me, then?”

“Ay,
idirin
!” He laughed mockingly. “Did you not need to be calmed? Were you not calling the winds and the fire in that storm that came from nowhere after the story of Orpheus? All your eyes and voice so cold, your house full of magic. You would not tell me your secrets, but sure it was you were held captive by the Lord of
 
Ysthar.”

“I told you,” Will murmured. “Always choosing duty over conscience, for it is easier.”

“It is not
easier
.”
 

“Isn’t it?”

Kasian reached forward as if to take his shoulders. Raphael retreated another step. He hit the wall audibly, the pain gilding the room with incongruous sparkles. Kasian let his hands drop.

“It is easier for you. I place the phoenix feather beneath my head, I pray for news of my brother, I dream directions. This way, that way, this time, that turn, until I arrive beside the river and stand there frightened and thinking I shall see the Lord of
 
Ysthar, that I must convince him to release my brother. And then! Who comes out of the fold in the wind but you!”

Raphael clenched his magic tight. His head was throbbing.

“I am surprised, I am delighted, I think: he is alive! He is to be sure some assistant to the Lord, but he does not look like a slave, he is not bound. Inside we go, you take me inside the fabled garden, inside the secret house, and it is yours. A mystery. But I look, I see things you do not tell me. The sword of the Lord Phoenix upon the hearth stone, the grief in your eyes, the locked chest. I hear the things your friends say and do not say about the Lord of
 
Ysthar, I think of the stories I have heard myself, I ask Scheherezade of whom I have heard tell, she tells me her story of the Lord of
 
Ysthar in the desert with his phoenix.”

Sherry smiled tremulously. “He asked me what I thought, Ja—Raphael. It made so much sense when I thought of you being the lord magus—everything except we’d never seen you do any such magic. But we have been watching you run yourself ragged. Or not ragged … you don’t show tears. Edged.”

“Honed,” said Will.

“So you thought this was the best time to confront me?” His voice was still caustic. He bit his tongue.

Robin spread his hands. “It’s been happening for years, this
honing
. It wasn’t until Will came back last year that I realized, that Sherry and I realized, how bad it had gotten. He pointed out all these things that we hadn’t noticed because they’d happened so slowly. But you had grown so private, we only watched at first … until Kasian came.”

“And I watch, I wait,” Kasian said, “I wait to see if you will tell me. Nothing. You say nothing. You are not happy, it is most clear. You tell me these are your closest friends. They say they did not know this.”

That was one of the most unpleasant things Raphael had ever heard anyone say about his real self. For they were talking about him. This was no role, none of it was. He pressed himself against the smooth solidity of the wall, jaw tight and throbbing painfully.