Till Human Voices Wake Us (26 page)

He started to slip into those memories and in a great panicking leap out of the abyss he flung magic into the room and stopped the machine with a huge spattering and stench of burning plastic.

They all stared at him as astonished as when he had said the Game had already ended.

With a huge effort he tried to swallow his surging temper but it was like trying to swallow a mountain or the sea or the sky, and all that happened was that he plunged into it.

“I have
duties
,” he said, then broke Robin’s house wards precisely in three places, added, “And
you
need to practise,” and flung himself out into weather completely willing to indulge his temper with a scattershot halo of sleet and ice pellets.

Chapter Fourteen

The New Game

The unbound winds thrashed through London, untowardly aware of his mood and magic. A small frozen core of his mind was appalled at this loss of temper but most of him simply didn’t care.

He didn’t go home, instead stomped along the river, casting it up in high sprays against the stone embankments, crashing it against the bridges. The rain drove horizontally, shoving everyone else indoors. The thick grey air was riven by milky streamers of fog and lowering clouds illuminated by cracking lightning. Thunder and hail stomped around with him.

His body felt like an ill-fitting garment. He chafed at the world around him, the shape of magic in the air bending to his will. The storm shook the buildings: he saw a cartwheeling road sign with savage pleasure in its movement.
He
felt like an ill-fitting garment.

He was, he realized when he saw the river the second time, out of control.

It was Westminster Bridge, just downstream from his house; he could see the trees on the hill. They were the only things utterly still in his vision.

Westminster Bridge, where for a thousand years there had been a ford, in the lee of the invisible island that had become his home.

Westminster Bridge was flooded.

The river seethed across its surface, pewter water lit white by lightning arcing up to meet the bridge supports, a crest in the river centred here, where usually he was safe.

One solitary pedestrian stood on the bridge, standing on its rail with perfect balance despite the storm. She was wearing a fantastic gown several yards longer than could possibly have been practical, a dress that looked like a bonfire in the rain. It streamed across the bridge around her, while her magic curved its back to the wind.

He was not in the mood to mute his bearing, and the world was listening to him. Despite the flooding when he stalked out to meet her he was perfectly dry.

The water receded in an arrow point around him. Circe stepped down into its precise centre so their heads were of a height. He realized she was holding something, a casket of blue and gold, cradling it protectively in her arms.

She smiled with a complicated expression that he, with fiery anger still filling him, couldn’t read.

“I always enjoy watching you lose your temper,” she said. “It happens so rarely. It runs so counter to your usual state, I had come to think you were incapable of feeling emotion except through your characters. But the sky tonight is full of passions that I’m sure are wholly your own. It must be a strange sensation for you.”

The wind parted before them as if they stood at the prow of a ship, the rain veering like blown glass, the river hissing across the bridge in a gunmetal sheet.

“You seem to be enjoying your temper: though I wonder if it is the unaccustomed anger that is so delicious or simply the fact that you are permitting yourself to feel strongly for once.”

The box was in the colours of Ysthar, lapis lazuli and gold and ivory panels carved into intricate roses and phoenixes of an old Astandalan style. He’d never seen it before.

The silence pulsed with electric magic straining to burst forth into fireworks or wind. He let some of it feed the wind so that he was drained enough to be able to speak, magnesium sparks along all the buildings. He pushed against its billowing weight and said, with a voice so controlled even he was a bit frightened of its coolness, “Was there a reason beyond unsolicited amateur psychology for your meeting me tonight?”

The apprehension and the amusement swirled up into a laugh. “Darling Raphael, I am no amateur.”

No, he thought, she wasn’t. That was why she had brought him so close to despair.

“I am, nevertheless, entirely at your service.” She curtseyed deeply, rose gracefully. “I brought you a gift—something of a forfeit—for winning our little game of truth and dare. I had hoped to make use of it myself, but, héla!—as we both know, I lost.”

She gestured at the box.

His power was around him as strongly as in Stonehenge, jumping from skyscraper to skyscraper in a crown of lightning.

“It is a beautiful thing,” he said, “but perhaps not the equivalent to what I wagered.”

“You have not opened it, my lord. I think you will find it a fitting reward for the daring I challenged you to. I would never have thought, when we were children, that we would one day stand here, on such a place as this, on such a night of this, and I offer you
this
of all things.”

He said, the irony in his voice so audible her eyes widened, “Indeed, our revels now are ended.”

“I challenged you to a game of daring and wit and ruthlessness, and in the end you won. Now begins the game
you
chose.”

The night was falling early down on them, his magic stealing what little sunlight could make it through the clouds. “I chose none.”

“On Wednesday you made a choice that runs counter to the grain of the universe, Lord Raphael. I challenged you to a game without choices, and you broke open its rules to choose otherwise.”

“And so you stand before me.”

“And so the new game begins. The game of truth and dare is over: now begins the game of truth and consequences. As you have obviously already begun to learn, that is a different matter entirely. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to forgive you for enmeshing me in it.”

The glittering bubble of anger in him swelled outside his shields into a silent firework explosion. He looked straight at her, spoke very quietly. “It was you who began the game, Circe. Forgive yourself first for its consequences.”

The amusement and the apprehension darkened to—what was that? Appreciation? She said: “Be careful of the strong wine. You might find more truth in the bottom of your glass than you are anticipating.”

Lightning scrabbled along the bridge, white and ozone-stinking blue, entwined with those firework crackles of his magic. “Perhaps one day you will have earned the right to give me advice, Circe, but at the moment you owe your life to me. How dare you speak so to me?”

His voice rang out sharper than even Hamlet’s, stronger than the Lord of
 
Ysthar in the assumption of his power, full of the strong wine—and it
was
strong, curse her, it was going to his head with its smooth richness.

“How
dare
I? What have I got to lose, except my life?”

“Your life belongs to me. What forfeit could possibly be in that box that would be worth the life you have given me? You challenged me in the heart of my duty and demanded the best of my life.”

“When I challenged you to the Game you were unformed as a bear cub. What would you have been had I let you alone? I have made your reputation for you! Renowned almost as a god! Powerful, respected, admired, adored: they will be singing of you until the stars fall.”

He flinched back from his immediate wish to say:
They should have been singing my songs, not about me
. The river surged about his feet in argent foam. “That was not the reputation I wanted.”

She laughed with a high exhilaration. “Nor was this the one I wanted. Then again, that is what friends are for.”

“We have not been friends since before Astandalas fell.”

“Why did you save me, then? Who else can know you as well as I? Who else knows what things you have done in the dark places of the world, what triumphs and follies, what tests of skill and wit and strength and courtesy? Who else could say to you: look at yourself! You have sown the whirlwind: reap you now your harvest. We have been enemies so long we are friends again. I am as far from you as your shadow, and as close.”

He was no longer frightened of his anger; he felt like a falcon responding to the lure and coming home. What could go worse in his life than what he had done today? He had denied Kasian and his friends to avoid the reef that the small ship of his soul could see and they could not.

Now he stood before Circe, he the Lord of
 
Ysthar; what he had chosen.

“Come alive, O Galatea,” he said, “and meet Pygmalion.”

He meant it sarcastically, but she suddenly smiled with clear delight, as clear and peaceful as she had smiled in the sunlight in that quiet moment of the end of the Game, and she said: “Yes: but we are both Pygmalion, both Galatea. Your hand is on me as much as mine on you. How dare I speak to you as I do? Because I am your creature and your creator, and you mine. I am your mortal enemy and your deepest friend and I know you better than any lover ever will.”

“Take then your consequences,” he said. “I give you a new life to make something better of than your last.”

“I have no crown to give you, but I have a robe of fire and wind and immortal longings. You chose my life as your forfeit; and it is precious to me as yours is not to you. You have chosen this, my lord, for better or for worse. You give me my life: and I can only give you what you have chosen. Truth for consequences.”

She swept a deep curtsey that he saw, even as the wind curved around them both in a frenzy of magic, was that of vanquished to victor, and presented him with the chest. He reached down slowly. She held the curtsey after he had taken it.

It was surprisingly light, all the weight feeling that it came from the box and nothing of the contents.

When he took it a small silence fell around them, as protected within the circling winds as they had been in the final duel. The whirlwind was coloured like silvered glass.

Curiosity overmastered all prudence. He ran his hand over the lid, feeling a soft movement as the enchantments on the box responded to his authority. Three ivory roses with gilded centres warmed under his fingers, turned gently. Four carved chains of lapis lazuli unfolded themselves. Without noise the lid opened.

Inside was a great pile of phoenix feathers.
 

They were not Ishaa’s: they were too richly coloured for his white phoenix. These were all colours of flame, gold running to violet and burnished ruddiness, with highlights of white as his Ishaa was white running to gold and violet shadows. Holding the casket in his right hand, suddenly feeling all the pain of his fractured shoulder, he drew it out with his left.

It was a great fall of a cape. It was the colour of sunset over the desert lands of the west, or sunrise over the eastern sea; the stark beauty of the first dawn of the summer in the countries to the back of the North Wind, or the blazon of a night falling in the tropical lands. It made Circe’s dress look like dying embers.

It was more than weightless: it floated on the air, billowing silently as if it were a cloak of candleflames that burned in gentle horizontal curves.

His anger blew out as abruptly as a candleflame. He spoke unsteadily: “This is not something that can be given.”

Circe held her curtsey, her eyes kindled in the light from the feathers. She said, “You have won it.”

Raphael looked at this cape of phoenix feathers, this glory of beauty, this thing that he realized was a relic of his first ancestor, the first lord of
 
Ysthar, the firstborn of creation. The phoenix cloak of ancient legend, made from the very feathers of the Lord Phoenix for his beloved Shargán of the Desert, when he courted her under the World Tree, in those days before the first Game Aurieleteer cast the Shadow King into the Abyss.

The Cloak of Shargán, it was called. The Veil of the Morning. In his hands it felt like the three trees of the part of his garden that was not
his
garden.

Circe said, “This is what you have chosen.”

Raphael’s words ran out of him in a great inrushing of silence, like water through a broken dam. He stood silent in a greater silence held by the frozen storm. Nothing moved: nothing but the feathers on the air. The winds were blank to him, shocked, awestruck, nearly brought into human form by the beauty of the thing he held, by its magic that went back to the first days of creation.

Only Circe had the strength to speak.

“You gave me my life. I give you my forfeit. Accept what you have done, O Lord. This is the new age of the world, and you wear its crown.”

And she dropped down to the obeisance that had once been granted to the Emperor of Astandalas alone.

If the whirlwind had spoken he could not have been more devastated.

Still clutching the box to his chest he fled home with the Veil of Shargán floating silently behind him.

Chapter Fifteen

The Long Night

He had no idea what to do with the phoenix cloak.

He had nowhere to put it. His first thought was to hang it on one of the trees by the fountain, like the golden fleece of Colchis, but it was still steadily pouring rain and once he let go of the storm he felt obscurely unclean, that he should purify himself before daring to step foot on the hill again. That left … nowhere. The cloak deserved a great temple or cathedral; not the back of an old chair in his living room.

He put it on the back of the chair and then sank to the floor trembling. His neck ached.

Everything ached, inside and out. He sat and stared at the mesmerizing shift of colours in the phoenix feathers, shivering, cradling his right side with belated protectiveness. He had no words in his thoughts, nothing except a great howling unhappiness and the pulsation of tremors.

***

Much later he realized his head was pounding.

***

Much later still he realized that the pounding was at least partially external. Someone was banging inefficiently just on the edge of his domestic protections.