Till Human Voices Wake Us (28 page)

The silence stretched out, not a companionable silence as his house was for him usually, not friendly, not with that roaring cataract of magic in the form of the phoenix cloak beside him, judging him. In Egypt they used to say that the heart of the dead was weighed against the feather of Maat, truth, and if it balanced the soul was saved, and if the balance fell the crocodile ate it.

The Tanteyr story was that one’s
satall
, the mysterious bird who came on the naming-day, left at death, carried one’s soul across the Sea of Stars to the tree where the Lord Phoenix sat in judgment. And there it was weighed, the soul against one of his feathers, the Abyss at his feet. If the soul was judged worthy, the
satall
carried it to the hatching grounds of Paradise, brooded over it until it could be born again into the new life on the other side of the world.

The soul was weighed against one of
these
feathers. One of the feathers of the Lord Phoenix, which he had woven into
this
phoenix cloak, which the legends said had cloaked Shargán when she sat on Kasian’s throne as first queen of the Tantey, and which after her death she had spread across the nine worlds, the veil of light, promise of morning. It looked the size of a human cloak, at the moment, as those trees in his garden looked like trees, the water of the fountain like water.

Tanteyr legends weren’t very clear on what happened to people (the vast majority of people, after all) who did not have visible
satallir
; but Shargán of the Desert had had no
satall
of her own, and Raphael had to believe that the One Above had not made his creation to be damned. He had to believe that, despite everything that had happened in the long years of the Game, in his tenure of
 
Ysthar which was said to be under the rule of the Prince of Darkness. How he had flinched the first time he had heard that said aloud.

“They say the rules of the Game are written into the fabric of things,” Robin said at last. “My father told me once that they were older than him, and he is almost as old as Arvath itself. You cannot just
break
them. Five simple rules, he said. Simpler than you would think for a complex game. But one of them is that the Game ends with death.”

Raphael walked over to the fireplace and leaned his head on the mantel. He spoke without turning back. “One of them is that there is nothing to be held above the rules of the Game but those things necessary for the continuance of the universe.
Nothing
, do you understand?”

The coals flared below him into fire, a hot and hungry flame like dragonfire, not the ordinary friendly wood blaze. Magic was crowding into the room again, suffocating in its intensity, in a
desire
he didn’t understand, couldn’t name to himself.

“And yet you broke them.” Kasian’s voice was calm, judicial, his kingly voice, Raphael thought. A judge’s voice, awaiting the defense.

“I don’t have a defense,” he said, “except she looked at the sun and smiled, and I thought: how can I? How can this be right? How could I look on you with that on my hands?” His voice trailed down unbidden by him. Without it on his hands, he wasn’t looking on them at all.

Apropos of nothing Raphael could see, Robin asked, “Did you know Orpheus?” A pause, while Raphael tried to think how to answer that. His head was throbbing again, in waves. Every seventh one monstrous. Or was it every ninth? Robin went on, his voice curious, “Did you love him?”

“I was him.”

And there: he had said it. He kept his head bowed to the fire, letting it twine about his hands, kneading the flames until they turned colours, red to orange to yellow to green.

Kasian said, “Raphael, rejecting your music because your beloved died is a good story but a terrible way to live. You must stop mourning her. It’s too easy to … wallow.”

“Why do you keep saying it’s easier?” he asked, voice cracking. “Do you know what it’s like, to always have to turn away, to always have to choose duty over inclination, to always have more duties to do—always?
Always
.”

He stopped, panting. Kasian said again, “The Game is over. You don’t have to keep playing it.”

“I still have all my responsibilities.” The phoenix cloak weighed heavy in his mind, in the room. He would never balance that.

“You are not a god! You don’t have to pretend to be one. You are the seventh Lord of Ysthar, not the first. You are a mage, powerful, but not divine. You don’t have to hold yourself to that standard.”

“You don’t hold me to that standard,” Robin said, echoing Will. “Though you’re right, I do need to practise. You broke my wards as if they were spun sugar. Again I ask you, Lord: will you teach me?”

Raphael scrubbed at his face and leaned forehead against hands against mantelpiece. Sword of the Lord Phoenix before him, cloak behind him, twin brother and best friend standing at his shoulders. He should feel protected, surrounded by care. Instead he felt totally inadequate. And still the shadow was waiting. Always.

Kasian murmured something he didn’t catch. He did hear Robin’s response: “No, I doubt that would work. He’ll keep wriggling out of it. As Will said, he’s determined to see himself as living in a tragedy, not a history. Tragedies end in doom no matter how well intentioned you are.”

Was that true? Was that how he lived?

“Yes,” said Robin, “I’m afraid it is. Which, now that I come to think of it, means a great deal for my future. Am I doomed to a life of misery? I ask myself, contemplating the variousgreat magi I know. My father is a reasonably happy man, but would I be content doing nothing but wenching, drinking, and forest magic? No; I spent my youth in Fairyland. There is more to life than hunting.
 

“But then again, there is more to life than honey. My mother, as I said, sends a tithe to hell, but even if she got power by giving over her name she certainly didn’t win happiness. Not exactly what I want out of life, either. I have always wondered about the Lord of
 
Ysthar; I thought he was far too devoted to his work for sanity even before I knew it was you. Now it’s clear that if you decide not to go the obvious power-and-glory route in favour of an honourable anonymity, you just get stuck with a depressing amount of work.”

Raphael found his heart lifting a tiny bit from Robin’s tone. He was about to turn to answer when there came a sudden jarring intrusion in the form of a mobile phone ringing shrilly. He had to ride out the waves of pain as he jerked in reaction.

Robin sighed melodramatically, shifted into English. “See, the rule holds good. A certain degree of anonymity, and people text you at midnight to complain—well, that the cast party has gotten rather out of hand, it appears. I don’t suppose you want to come to the theatre with me to tell them off?”

Raphael shook his head, did turn, in time to see Robin’s wry grin. “I’ll leave you to your fraught silences and your brother’s ox-headed attempts to call you out of them, then. Oh! That reminds me, Scheherezade had a message for you: ‘For an extremely intelligent man, you can be unbelievably stupid at times.’—These are her words, you understand, not mine. She most vehemently added: ‘There is always another story when one finishes.’”

He paused, then when Raphael said nothing, said, “Good night, my lord,” and bowed as befit the Crown Prince of Fairyland to the Lord of
 
Ysthar. Raphael hastily bowed back and nearly collapsed.

Kasian caught him and pushed him down on the nearest seat, which meant he leaned back and found his head cradled by the phoenix cloak. It smelled intensely of roses and fire. “I shouldn’t be touching this,” he said, but didn’t move his head from the comforting burn. He could feel it, if little else but his body. Robin hesitated, then saw Kasian’s expression (which Raphael could not) and without further words walked out with a jaunty step belying the ruffled magic around him.

When they heard the door close Kasian said, “Why not?”

“It’s sacrilegious.”

His brother squatted down to pour the wine into their glasses. The bottle was on the floor, not the end table. Raphael frowned at it as the pain receded to an ignorable level. “I don’t think so,
sha óm
. For anyone else, perhaps, but not you, not now.”

He took the glass stupidly. “Now?”

“Your injuries come from the end of the Great Game Aurieleteer.”

“Not all of them,” he murmured.

“Drink your wine. No, don’t sip it—quaff it.”

He did so numbly, felt the strong wine radiate out into his body more quickly than the
nirgal slaurigh
. He rather wanted
nirgal slaurigh
just then, snowfall, quiet, silence, instead of this pounding hurt. Kasian refilled his glass, and when he sipped it this time merely smiled. Though the
slaurigh
hadn’t done anything but make him more aware of his bruises.

“Thank you,” Raphael said finally. “I’m sorry I am not good company.”

Kasian chuckled and eased himself up onto the chesterfield. “That depends on your definition of ‘good’. You’ve been infuriating company, certainly, but hardly dull, which I suspect is what you mean. Melodramatic, volatile, blowing hot and cold, full of enigmatic secrets and sudden flashes of power—but never boring. Not
bad
company, to be sure. And I must say I appreciate your taste in friends. I’m a little jealous.”

He could only answer the last part with his dry heart. “Jealous?”

“I haven’t any so dear to me they would stand up to a great mage in high temper. I’m not sure how many of them would stand for five hours of a stormy winter’s night trying to break into a friend’s house, either, on the say-so of a relative stranger. Especially not the Lord of
 
Ysthar’s house, and not by magic.”

He spoke lightly, but Raphael could see that there was a painful truth behind his tone. Something stirred in him, and this time he was too tired not to let it unfurl into words. “You did miss me.”

Kasian didn’t answer for a moment, turning his glass in his hand so the firelight caught it in a topaz glow. “Is it really so difficult to say what you feel? At first I thought it was because you no longer felt anything … five thousand years, I thought. What an impossibly long time to live through. It would harden anybody, seeing that much time go by. Having some power, but not enough. It’s never enough.”

He was a king: he understood. Raphael could hear it in his voice. He sipped his own wine a little desperately, not sure what he was trying to block out, not sure where the ache he felt was coming from. There was a warm glow from the phoenix cloak in his senses. It was just too warm for comfort.

“I thought at first that was the problem. Da can be like that … and you are very like him, you know.
 
You were crippled, and I wondered if it was—power has its price. We’ve been taught that our whole lives. Power always has its price.”

Raphael’s gaze lifted up to the sword. Kasian followed his glance, said, “Yes … the sword of the Lord Phoenix, Adonai Adamai of the stories. Duty.” He chuckled dryly. “And there is always more to be done, isn’t there? Duty can cripple the soul, if you’re not careful.”

He fell silent, poured more wine, leaned forward to fill Raphael’s cup. Raphael thought of Circe telling him to beware the strong wine, that it would go to his head. He shook his head, not wanting to think about her.

“You shake your head, but it’s true. I thought you’d hardened yourself, until you realized about the
nirgal slaurigh
, and I saw your face for a moment, the despair. Oh, just for an instant, you caught yourself so quickly. It was terrible how quickly you hid it.—I saw that it wasn’t
strength
of emotion you were lacking. Then I saw your performance in the play. I didn’t understand all the words, but the range of expression you had was harrowing. There had to be something else at work, I thought.”

Wednesday night’s performance was a complete blank to him except for that hazy moment where Will had helped him.

“That was after the end of the Game, wasn’t it? I didn’t think—couldn’t think—you would go to the final duel without telling anyone … without telling
me
 … or imagine you’d go to a
play
afterwards. You went to perform the night of the end of the Game. Duty again, I suppose. And out of it came that storm of art. It was beautiful. And terrible, when I thought of how cold you are the rest of the time. What were you hiding? What injuries done to yourself? How much had you lost without me?”

Raphael realized he had come to the end of his wine. He thought that he should stop drinking before he became drunk (although as a rule it took a great deal to make him drunk), but he didn’t stop Kasian pouring him another glass. They sat companionably silent but for the soft movements of the liquid in their glasses, the fire nuzzling at the wood.

Raphael leaned back into the fire-and-roses embrace of the phoenix cloak. A soft honey-coloured wind came in from the French doors, twining around him, bringing with it the sound of a blackbird in the garden. The bird kept stopping, starting again. Kasian dipped his finger in the candle nearest him and rubbed the wax thoughtfully with his thumb.

In that moment, Raphael would have given absolutely anything to play.

The desire cracked through him so sharply he caught his breath, as if he’d fallen and knocked the air out of himself. He held himself still, waiting for the impulse to pass. Fade it did. But before he moved he had the curious sensation that he was holding still in another place, an important one.

He had held still for the wind booming across London in the night before Kasian came, and broken instinct against reasoned duty. He had held still for Circe in the sunlight, and broken the ancient grip of the rules of the Game against his thin tremulous hope that there was something more important than necessity.

In this still silent place he realized that he was once again facing the question the shadow had posed him, that day on the island of Phos when the sun did not rise.

***

He had been born able to hear the song of creation, played such that trees walked to hear him and the winds knew his name.