Till Human Voices Wake Us (30 page)

His mind was full of the sudden stupid loss, the unnecessariness of it all, the fact that she had not called on him for help, when she fell into the mountain, into Iridathet beloved of the rainbow, there on the island of Phos. Grief blazed white in his heart, burning him breathless.

The coldness slinking through his mind soothed the flame into cool ash. “Cousin, you need not mourn. She fell, but what was fallen may be raised, what was broken made whole, what was dead brought again to life. Did you not realize you can change what happened?”

A wild despair sprang in his heart. He had loved her so much, her only of all women, her alone.

The soft voice filled his mind as the world was used to. “I will show you.”

Raphael’s magic was wild magic, touching the world without tool or intermediary, dependent on his knowledge and imagination for its effect. He had never tried to fashion it along the links of his music, never tried to force the world to sing to melodies of his choosing. It had never occurred to him to try, before that beautiful voice spun his power into his music.

As his lament transformed into a spell, his songs into enchantments that could bind as thoroughly as the chains of causation, he knew that this was what he was made for, that this was why his magic was the way it was, that this was why he alone of mortal creation could hear the song of songs.

He could make it so Eurydice had never died; he could make the whole of his world just as he wished; he could do … oh, anything. It was all there in his mind.

But in one part of his mind that was separate from the places where the shadow fell there was a golden circle in the sea, the colour of phoenix fire on the water. It was a clear and steady note, like a bell endlessly ringing warning.

It rang steadily in his mind, the sound of the alarm-bells of Astandalas ringing down the fall of the empire, the sound of his mind breaking under the serried enchantments of that other enemy who had walked in his thoughts, the sound of warning, of fear and fire and loss.

He knelt there under the shadow, and remembered those bells ringing when Astandalas fell. All he had heard for so long afterwards was the echo of those bells sounding in his ears, until at last the clean darkness had brought new music to him, and he had heard the stars whose song he had written as
The Wanderer
. Now he heard them again, the phoenix fire on the water, the warning bells ringing, holding him to his duty.

He had lost everything that last night of his old life. But he had rebuilt himself, built a new life, found love and happiness, even if they were lost now, too, there in the darkness of the island of Phos. He could do it again. He knew how.

He said, “No.”

In his astonishment the Adversary let lift his shadow. Raphael (oh, he remembered now) heard the world start up again with that music only he and his enemy could hear. Yet even as he wrestled to his feet his mind grew increasingly muddled, losing the clarity he had known in his music and his magic.

He drew one thread of power away from the golden circle and it came willingly to him through the paths of his music—but it changed those paths as it came, transformed the song of the world, made a fearsome avalanche tumble down from the mountainside as the music and the magic twisted together out of his control.

The Adversary laughed.

Raphael stretched forth his all to thrust the Enemy back. The Adversary fell, still laughing, in one crashing discord that collapsed half Iridathet into itself. Raphael threw the rest of the mountain after the shadow in a frenzy to block out that laughter and his own bilious horror. All the noise of that island’s destruction was not enough to silence it.

He was in some place where the magic protected him, trying despairingly to straighten out his mind so the melodies surging through him were not wrapped about so with magic. He could not disentangle them, for he was used to both, used to music being half his thought and magic half his activity, and his attention went in those familiar channels first. He could hold half a song in his mind, half a handful of magic in his grasp, yet still the world melted about him and fell into the Abyss. The Adversary had made it so that he could not think of music—and he thought
in
music—without his magic following the path of his thought and changing reality.

Most of Phos fell into the fissure between Ysthar and the Abyss before he could stop himself. At last he stilled his mind. He was far from his body but felt tears on his face, screams in his throat. He had no idea how long it took him to force his will into submission, when at last he did. Then he did by force what none of his attempts at skill had managed, the ripping apart of his magic and his music.

His thoughts splintered under the strain of holding them separate, for the Adversary had changed him as he rummaged through his mind. Originally he had come by them differently in time and manner—how different in manner, one the ever-burgeoning joy of innate ability, the other scarce redeemed from a violation near as bad as this—now they could not be held separate, save by the force that was cracking him as the world had cracked under his carelessness.

For that one moment his mind was split he realized he had a choice, that suddenly his path forked before him. He could choose one or the other, either his music or his magic. He had not the strength to hold them apart for long, nor any longer the will to keep them together.

He hesitated half a moment, for he loved his music beyond anything; or he thought he loved it beyond anything. Then he chose the path of his magic, for his duty lay there, and he closed his ears to song. The rest of Phos slid under the sea, blocking the fissure. There was noise, so much noise; but none of it his music.

***

He was caught in the memory, in a dim quiet place, a place of perfect stillness, as if he stood on the pivot-point of a balance. He could sense Kasian still sitting there with the wine-glass in hand and the candle beside him casting a warm illumination on half his face.

You are not the Lord Phoenix, and I am not the Shadow King
.

It wasn’t the Lord Phoenix he was afraid of becoming.

Raphael had no words at the moment to express to himself what he was feeling. Not even any quotations came to mind but for Kasian’s words.

You are not the Lord Phoenix, and I am not the Shadow King
.

The way he had learned to remember was to use physical features as placeholders for what was to be recalled. The Romans had used their grand buildings, Renaissance aristocrats their palaces and theatres. Raphael, who had more to remember than most, even blessed as he was with a good natural memory for things heard and things seen, had begun with the library of Alexandria and soon spilled out of it into the city. It had not been long, even in a city like Alexandria in its heyday, before he had begun to follow the roads of all the continent.

Twenty-two hundred years on, he could follow the paths of his memory as easily as he walked through the geography of his world. Some places were more densely criss-crossed with memories than others, of course, but most of the world was there in his mind twice over.

There were two places that weren’t. One of them was a valley in the Caucasus he had never been. In his mind it was set into the filigree of memory and knowledge like a pearl into wrought silver. He didn’t know what was there, had never even looked into it from afar but for the once when he had stood on its western ridge and peered into a well-watered valley, a green land between high mountains, with woods and meadows and lakes that winked at the sky.

It looked like his own idea of Paradise, and he had thought it would be good for there to be one thing for him to dream of, one thing always yet left to know, one place he had never been, and so he had let it be.

The second place was his own home, which held memories enough on its own. He sat there now in its embrace, with the world keeping to its fretwork beyond the bounds of his houseprotections. Sword of the Lord Phoenix before him, crown above him, cloak behind him, his brother waiting for him to decide what next to do.

As soon as he thought that, he realized he was in the place of choice. He’d been there before, when he realized what the Adversary had done to him.

He’d found himself on the shore across from Phos, looking at the debris-studded waters where the island had been. His ears rang with silence: he had never heard the sounds of things divorced from that inner music before. It was like losing a foot and all balance with it. No, it was more intimate than that. He had lost a whole sense, one passive and subtle: like suddenly being unable to taste, or smell, or feel. Like losing his magic under the
nirgal slaurigh
.

He had fled Calaïs and Gabriel, who had both tried to comfort him with words that had done nothing but hurt, fled into the wilderness and begun once again the long reconstruction of his life, blocking off who he had been stone by stone until the wall was high and strong and his mind secure within its fortress.

He had made that grim edifice beautiful in time, he’d thought; had decorated it in the course of the long siege with creation in the form of painting and even acting, with banners of formal beauty in mathematics and magic. Until Kasian came and knocked it down and left him in its ruins. Raphael had taught himself to forget: but now he remembered.

The wind was blowing from the past, and it frightened him. The Eater of Worlds was patient; he thought nothing of time. He was still there, waiting, and he would still remember Raphael, the heir of the Lord Phoenix, the only mortal ever born with the gift that the Unnamed One had had. He would remember the one who had defied him once before.

He would remember the one who was playing—had played—had played—and
won
—
and won
—the game whose rules he had set into creation. He would not have forgotten Raphael. And now Raphael, who had taught himself to forget, remembered what he had been, and had, and turned from, and lost; and why.

Don’t look back
, Gabriel had warned him—when was that? Sunday night? An age of the world ago?

You are not the Lord Phoenix, and I am not the Shadow King
.

No.

It was an age of the world ago, he realized. The Great Game Aurieleteer was over. Parallel times around the nine worlds would be measured from this date.

Don’t look back
.

Sherry, telling the story of Orpheus the musician, of his journey to the Land of the Dead, of the prohibition and the promise. Will, looking askance at him when he said that there was a conflict of duties in the tale, replying:
And what is she, his beloved? His muse?

No, he thought forlornly; just his beloved. And he had not gone after her, because he was the Lord of
 
Ysthar, and he had duties.

Don’t look back
.

But in the stories they told, the prohibition was not to look back before he reached the light. Raphael could not say he had reached the light. He was sitting in the dark between the phoenix cloak and the fire, and the wooden chest that Calaïs had salvaged for him from the ruins of Phos still stood in the corner where he had abandoned it. Never opened, never moved. No doubt Circe and the psychologists would know what to make of such an object in his living room, but he had trained himself not to see it, had forgotten it, until Kasian came and made him look anew on his house.

Don’t look back
.

It was the quiet moment of choice. Raphael was deep within himself. The desire struck him again, worse than the harbour-wave blow of Circe’s magic throwing him against the stone. He trembled with its force, wishing more than anything he dared turn his back and let the flood take him.

You are not the Lord Phoenix
.

But his duties still stood there … the sword of Ysthar, the crown, the God’s price, they were still his. He had not lost the Game. He had won.

What if he were to become the Shadow King?

No
.

The negation cracked through him like the strange desire, shuddering the magic in his house. The fire flared: but that was all. The honey wind still twirled gently in the room. Kasian still sat there, looking at his wine-glass, patient.

Don’t look back
.

From the window he could hear quite clearly the plashes from the fountains and rills hidden about the garden. Somewhere not far away the blackbird burbled a few notes, questioning the hour, then fell silent again. Again the thought came to him, that in that moment he would have given anything to play.

He had won the Game because he had refused to play by the Adversary’s rules. Yet the Game had not been with the Adversary, but with Circe.

Circe who had not been in the Abyss after all, who had not taken from her husband the powers that had broken Astandalas, who was beautiful in her magic.

She had called the new game the game of truth and consequences. Truth, which he found so hard to speak. He couldn’t find words to say anything more to his brother, who sat there very quietly, smiling into his wine-glass, patient.

Don’t look back
.

Patience never was Kasian’s strongest suit. And consequence … ? Here he was, the first person ever to sit across from Raphael in his house, the first person to see Raphael in the Lord of
 
Ysthar, the first person to name him truly since
she
had fallen into the crack in the mountainside.

How endless those bells had been, when Astandalas fell. Three days he had thought one.

Nearly a third of his life, measured by phoenix years, he had given to the Great Game Aurieleteer. Half his life to Ysthar. Five thousand years by the sun he had forced himself to play, and hated—

No, this was a place of truth. He knew that by the pause, as if he stood in the balance while the feather of Maat drifted down on the other side.

Truth was, Circe was right, and he had become something much greater than he had been by virtue of the Game. He could not say in truth that he had hated every moment of it. And consequence … ? Circe was alive, because she had made him see something of goodness even in the Game created by the Enemy.