Till Human Voices Wake Us (25 page)

“But they see you, they say you are become tight as a bow. I think of our father, how he draws himself in, how if he unwinds all at once things are not good. I think of how much you are like him. When he hurts he turns inside and hurts himself most.”

Kasian shook his head again. “Raphael, you are wounding inside. This is very clear.”

Scheherezade said, “Kasian and I talked that first night, Raphael, he said he’d brought the
nirgal slaurigh
, and we thought that it was clear you were close to breaking, that you needed to calm down. And after I told that story—you were so very angry, I’ve never seen you so emotionally overwrought—and yet you closed down so completely—and that storm—I was afraid you were going to hurt yourself.”

Raphael stared at her. She deliberately lifted her gaze to his, but, as he was still contained, didn’t flinch. None of them spoke. Robin was twiddling his hand against the wall. Raphael finally decided there was nothing more to be gained from silence, dropped his pretence of dignity, though—he was grimly proud of this—not his control.

“Why the hell did you think blocking my magic was going to help
anything
? Especially if you’d realized I am the Lord of
 
Ysthar?”
 

Robin, who was the only other true magus in the room, blenched. Raphael was pleased to see he, at least, understood what it might be like to lose one of his major faculties. “The
nirgal slaurigh
actually
worked
?”

“For nearly a full day.” His voice was still savagely calm.

“It seemed a good idea,” Sherry faltered. “You—Raphael, I don’t think you realize how terrible it has been to watch you destroy yourself.”

“You needed a different mirror,” Will said.

He spat out the first word he was going to say, said instead: “What?”

“I think you’re so afraid of the mirror of vanity you’ve entirely forgotten that reason holds a mirror, too. You can’t get anywhere without self-knowledge, Dickon. And what were we supposed to think, when your life suddenly starts to open up on these great chasms you’d never told us about. On Monday you as good as tell me you’d be willing to die for your duty, then you tell me you have an enemy that apparently sends thuggees after you.”

Thuggees
? Raphael thought with distracted amazement for Will’s magpie mind.

“Your twin brother whom you’ve never mentioned.”

“All these things going on,” Robin said. “I could feel the magic shifting about us, too, the borders moving and the winds being summoned to some reckoning. It’s clear that the storm is about to hit—and what storm could that be besides the end of the Great Game Aurieleteer—Dickon, we couldn’t let you face that alone—we know it is coming, but when?”

Raphael was so angry at their deliberate efforts to break down all of his careful protections that he said, “Wednesday,” with a real desire to hurt.

Kasian felt it; his face drained as the magic had drained for Raphael, to an unbecoming beige. His words tumbled over themselves in Tanteyr. “Oh, Relly, I didn’t think it could be so soon—I gave you the
nirgal slaurigh
—I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I had no idea.”

“It is coming Wednesday?” Robin expostulated, the only word, Raphael thought through his glittering rage, that described that mixture of spittle and amazement.

“No wonder you have been on edge this week,” Sherry murmured, her face modulating into sombre realization. “No wonder you’re so prickly. We’ll not—”

“We’ll not let you kill yourself even so,” Will said stoutly.

“No!” he cried, and the windows rattled. He pulled himself into a semblance of normality. “There are some things worth dying for.”

“You may choose Agamemnon over Orpheus, but—”

Raphael’s meager shields snapped. A storm even bigger than the one on Tuesday flared behind his mind, in the whirling winds still over-excited after the end of the Game, in his tender magic. His voice broke out of his control. “Is there some c-c-conspiracy about Orpheus this w-w-week also? Stop b-bringing it up!”

His friends stared at him in a different sort of amazement, as if he had gone sideways out of the conversation, except for Kasian who was frowning deeply, brow furrowed. Robin said in honest puzzlement, “Why should we conspire about Orpheus? I played the music because it is beautiful and you need beauty in your life.”

“Because you reject your muses.”

Sherry said, “You refuse so adamantly to listen, to talk about music. It’s not healthy, Raphael, you used to be better.”

“You used to want music more than anything,” Kasian said.

Lightning clattered all along the street like a beggar knocking at doors. Raphael gripped his temper with titanic force. “Until I learned that there are things more important than what I
want
. Something you seem to be missing. I don’t think you realize I have duties that are more important than my—”

“Than your soul?” Will asked. “You wouldn’t hold me to that standard.”

Robin thumped the wall. “I didn’t know you were the Lord of
 
Ysthar until today. Or that the end of the Game was so soon!”

“Were you not going to
tell
me?”

Raphael met his brother’s gaze levelly. Kasian’s grey eyes were dark and fervent, beautiful. He’d forgotten how lovely the human eye was if you looked at it, how someone might have flecks of different colours in the iris, how the pupil widened and contracted. What he missed by always keeping his own gaze that slight bit unfocused.

He’s taken service with Ysthar
, he thought, and dropped his eyes away from Kasian’s honest shock.

“You were not,” Kasian said, his words parcelled out slowly. “You told me to stay with Gabriel while you go to meet your doom. You were not telling your friends. You were not letting them know.”

Raphael looked at them defiantly but said nothing.

Kasian’s voice rose slightly. “What if you are hurt? What if you
die
? The end of the Game is death, all the songs say so. They won’t know to mourn you.”

Robin spoke quietly. “If he loses, everyone will know.”

“They will know the Lord of
 
Ysthar lost. They won’t know what happened to
you
.”

“I’m sure Circe would have taken some pleasure in revealing all my secrets.” Some distant part of him noticed that Kasian had finally got the hang of English contractions.

“You would let
her
tell
me
? You would let me find out that way? You would do that to me? You would let me find you again—and lose you—and then be told by your killer what had happened? She—
pilaven
—she gluttons—”

“Gloats,” he corrected automatically, while his magic rose like bile.

“She
gloats
, Raphael. You would do that to me? Bad enough that she was my friend before she started looking for power. Bad enough that I lost her to that wizard of Eahh after I lost you. Bad enough to realize she whom I loved tricked the mysterious great Lord of
 
Ysthar into the Game that is bittered in death. What do you think I am made of, that you would let
her
come tell me that he who was dead by her hand was
you
? What do you think I am, that you would let me say farewell in unknowing? What do you think my heart knows?”

He said nothing. He had no words.

“What do you think would happen to me?” Robin asked. “Next week, I mean. Next Wednesday? Not even as your friend: but as a mage?”

Raphael stood forward from the wall with a violent swirl of wind that flattened their hair and blasted Robin’s drapes off their rails. He flung his power around him. The winds howled down the sky. “I think you are all assuming I
lost
,” he said ringingly. “It was
last
Wednesday.”

That silenced them. He saw them in pure outline, shock, shock transmuting into—he was watching Robin’s rising anger when Kasian said, “
Last
Wednesday?”

At the raw emotion in his voice Raphael looked at him again. His brother’s expression was shatteringly open. Raphael analyzed it habitually as he did all perfectly singular emotions, for later reconstruction in one character or another, for later presentation on his own face. This was love betrayed, as clear as the air.

… 
Love
? he thought, faltering.

Robin said, “Are you fucking crazy?”

But Raphael was still looking straight at Kasian, when Kasian swallowed hard and then with deliberate intention lifted his eyes to meet his.

Kasian’s eyes immediately began to water under the weight of power meeting them, which even the Thunder Dragon had not faced, and which for Circe had come when she was full of magic. But unlike the Thunder Dragon Kasian did not look away. His eyes widened with whatever he saw, with the shock of Raphael’s power, with shock, with Raphael’s own fury feeding his power, with the whole world coming up like the wind in the sail of his mind.

Raphael held him like that until suddenly Scheherezade spoke. Her voice shook with awe and pain and wonder and something like fear. “You really weren’t going to tell us.”

When he looked across her face appeared gilded. He regarded her blankly, then realized she’d been weeping, and with some small motion the light had caught the tears.

“No,” Kasian said violently. He walked up to Raphael with his fists balled as if to punch him. “No.”

“No what?” Raphael said, the words ripping out of him. Both Robin and Sherry stepped back at his vehemence. Kasian stood his ground. “What was I supposed to do? You came out of nowhere three days before the end of the Game and spent the whole time trying to break me.”

“You could have trusted me.”

“I
did
trust you.”

Kasian raised his hands in a gesture of anger that unfolded into a great bitter cackle of laughter. “You
trusted
me? What do you mean? You told me nothing, nothing! You didn’t say, I am the Lord of
 
Ysthar, the Game is nearly ended, I am afraid—or ready—or I might die—or I will kill Circe tomorrow or die—or I
missed
you. And if you
had
died, what then? I was left here to be—what? To have to bow to the new Lord of
 
Ysthar who has killed my twin? How do you mean, you trusted me?”

Raphael was frustrated and angry and cursed his inability with words, with emotions, with this ridiculous fury that swelled in his mind. The winds were howling. “I let you in my house.”

“Hospitality does not trust make.”

The winds were howling like the Wild Hunt. He wanted to throttle Kasian for his obtuseness. “You’re the only one. And you
drugged
me and fought me and pushed me into the river!”

“I didn’t think to push you in the river. And perchance it was a mistake but I didn’t know you were facing down the end of the Game when I gave you the
nirgal slaurigh
! All I could see was that you were killing yourself. You were burning up with your iciness. Of a certainty I was angry!”

“What did you think I was so occupied by?”

“All I was thinking was that you were my twin brother I loved and had thought dead and didn’t want to see die now that I’d found you alive. Raphael, how could you not realize this? Why are you so broken?”

The winds were howling in his mind and the shadow was boiling up. O God, he thought, the shadow. The last time he had heard the winds howl like this was—was when Phos—he had loved Phos—he writhed away in his thoughts from that shadow falling on them, no it wasn’t falling, it was upwelling.
 

Upwelling from where he had banished it in his mind, from the dark dreams and darker memories, from the places where the sun had never shone.

And what good would it do, if he explained to them exactly why he was
broken
?

The shadows were darkening, seeping not through the boundaries of Robin’s house wards but out of the suppressed abyss Raphael had been skating over so carefully this week. He had not killed Circe, and thought it might break then. He had stepped towards Kasian, and thought that was a bridge over it—but no, there was no bridge, not for this silence, not for this depth of brokenness.
 

He
was
broken, he could see that in their faces, as he stared at them trapping him in their circle.

The silence was too big. Years and years of it, hours piled on days piled on centuries piled on millennia, all crammed into this little room of black and white and grey.
 

His magic was too big, too, he was belling with it, the room was shaking with his efforts to push back that rising dark.
Why are you coming now?
he demanded of it, seeing in the catch lights glinting in Kasian’s eyes, Sherry’s, Will’s, the retreating light and his own too-bright, too-powerful, too-strong magic. He was hurting them, they were bound by his silence, they would be bound by this darkness also if he could not break it from them.

He breathed very deeply and with the most exquisite care withdrew his magic from its hold over their attentions. He had not wanted that. He felt sick to himself, sick with himself, that he had come so close to entering their private minds.
Never, never
, he whimpered to himself.

“Never what?” said Sherry, softly. “You can tell us.”

The offer hung in their air like the flame of charity, like incense, like a song. He was so deeply tempted to unburden himself on them—except—except that as he tried to bring the words to his lips and failed, once, twice—the third time he nearly said it—Robin shifted sideways and bumped into his stereo and the room was flooded again with his music.

It was not the same song: this was
The Song of the Night Before
.

It was the song he had written as he returned to Phos to be married, only to find, when he arrived, that his beloved was dead.

Dead, and, unlike his phoenix, never returning.

Fallen into a crack into the mountainside, they said. A crack that went down below the roots of the mountains, below the roots of the sea, below the roots of his world, he’d found. All the way down, in fact, to the shadow that was cast by creation standing in its own light, as Mephistopheles said in one version of
Faust
.