Till Human Voices Wake Us (4 page)

“In three days, too, my lord, you shall come to judgment.”

“‘It is certain because it is impossible?’” Tertullian, he thought, taken entirely out of context. His voice sounded bored even to him. The years it had taken to reach this pinnacle of self-presentation, where he could stand folded up into an anonymous package, all himself neatly wrapped up in brown paper and string.

“You can hardly collect yourself enough to speak, let alone care. You might so easily do whatever you wanted—” She paused; he waited politely; she continued, smiling: “If only you wanted to.”

He wondered if Circe were nervous, awaiting the end of the Game. All the moves were finished, all the preparations made; once the remaining borders were closed tomorrow he had nothing left to do but gird himself for that choice awaiting them on Wednesday, when one of them would die, or the world fall, in a blaze of magic. Or it might be both, as the old Ysthar and its lord had died when Astandalas was broken under black magic, or in the final crises of the Games whose stories the dragons knew.

Circe’s husband the Lord of Eahh had been responsible for the fall of Astandalas, together with his father, who had then been lord of that world. Had Circe taken on their dark powers, in this her last journey back to Eahh before the end of the Game? Raphael regarded her carefully, but her concealments were almost as good as his own, and he did not want to try breaking them prematurely.

Noticing his glance she smiled at him like the statues of Bast in Egypt. He found himself almost afraid of her, the way she stood there with the magic of other worlds curled around her, red and white like a Tudor rose, her shadow falling on his shadowy clothes. She had a thorn to accompany the flower, a sword in a scabbard of woven gold, with a dark jewel in its pommel whose facets seemed strangely to reflect only the dragonfire lingering in the corners of the cave.

His voice was perhaps drier than usual. “‘All things change, and we change with them.’”

“Have you changed so much that you’ve forgotten how to feel? In the beginning you might have shattered the world with your passion. Now?” Her laughter filled the wavering circle of light between the border and the dragon. “Now you might as well be carved from ice, my lord. Surely you cannot say you care now as you thought you did in the beginning?”

Of course he did not think the same way now, on a wet Sunday night in early twenty-first-century London, as he had long ago when he was young, that dry sunny afternoon near Uruk-the-Sheepfold, when Gilgamesh was king. How could anyone with any pretensions to humanity?

Many things came to mind, quotations from half a hundred writers in a dozen languages; but there he was under England’s soil, and English writers came most readily: John Donne. “‘The sea is as deep in a calm, as in a storm.’”

And with what he knew was a consummate display of
sprezzatura
—he had spent so many years of the Game learning that difficult art—he closed the border behind her in a swirling act of apparently simple magic.

Circe’s smile quirked with something very close to admiration. Raphael made a courteous gesture for her to go before him towards the tunnel that led ultimately above the surface again. It came out in the South Downs halfway to Canterbury, but he doubted they would keep each other company half so far. She nodded gravely and picked up her skirts again, paced softly beside him. The dragon watched them go with his eyes half-lidded, head perfectly still but long body coiling and uncoiling and coiling again over the skittering treasures.

“My dear Raphael.”

He was fully in character as the Lord of Ysthar, who comported himself with even more aplomb than did James Inelu the film star, and so all he did outwardly was turn his head and, after a quietly condemning pause, say, “Heloise.”

Many years ago, before Phos fell into the sea (the thought came to him immediately on that thought, that of course, it had not
fallen
into the sea, he had thrown it, in an act of magic that had impressed even the Thunder Dragon; in an act of magic that had been as terrible a choice as Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter); many years ago, before the Game had begun, even before Astandalas fell in a fountain of black magic, Raphael and Heloise had been friends. They had never spoken since of those days, not since they became the Lord of
 
Ysthar and Circe of Aiaia.

“My dear Raphael,” she said again, purring her words, “surely you have not forgotten yourself?”

He could hear the dragon’s rasping movements reshaping his hoard. He lit a soft light around them, pale gold like beeswax candlelight. “I?” he said, quietly. “It was you who began this game of ours.”

“Aye, for the crown of
 
Ysthar of the Magic, where the lost boys go.”

The lost boys, he thought. The ones who didn’t want to grow up. He had wanted to grow up … before the Game, the Great Game Aurieleteer, which changed everything under its relentless thrust and counter-thrust, as brutal as this mortar-and-pestle dark.
 

He dreaded what would come at its end. Five thousand years their game had lasted—he had inadvertently held back the world in its courses so that he would not have to stand there on Wednesday afternoon in Stonehenge awaiting the blows received. Or given.

Yet here he was, three days before the end of the world, and it would be the end of the world, because he could not see how to save it. Or was it better he died than that it broke … except what would she do, who had sought power in such dark places? Was she looking to finish what had begun with the fall of Astandalas? How could he not fight, what would he not give up, to prevent that? He did not have to sacrifice his daughter—he had no family to have to choose between—and his life and his death were both his own to give.

“Oh yes,” she said, “I know you care for people, Raphael. You have quite a reputation for caring for strangers. You do know what I mean by strangers, don’t you? The people you don’t have to share things with, like love or hatred. Of course you do. You are the mysterious Lord of
 
Ysthar, whose name no one knows, who is kind to guests. Certainly he is kind to guests.”

He tried to be; he remembered well what it was like, to be lost and alone and need friends. No—he would not think of that. He let his glance slide onto the stones before them, lit only by his magic; they were far from the hidden border now. He saw broken pieces of ancient masonry feathered grey with powdered time.
The Wasteland
jumped into his mind.

And I will show you something different from either
 

Your shadow at morning striding behind you,
 

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

He did not say it aloud.

“Kind, indeed, but possibly a little strange, no? Why else would he be so insistently reclusive? There must be something there, they say. Something … some dark secret, perhaps.”

Had she never understood how much he hated being the centre of attention? Being
stared
at? The dark was thundering down upon him, stealing all the oxygen out of the air.

“And then people whisper about the island that was destroyed, utterly destroyed, one day when the Lord of Ysthar lost his temper.”

He straightened his coat. She followed the movement and laughed, her laughter dashing itself to pieces around his feet like their too-solid shadows in the magelight. “I gave you absinthe once, in Paris before the Great War. You—O, Raphael, my dear, lovely Raphael—you have drunk of Lethe on your own. You have looked on the Abyss, into the face of hell itself, and you broke there.”

Which way I turn is hell
, his traitorous facility for quotation said to him;
myself am hell
.

“I say to such people—you wouldn’t have heard them, it’s not the sort of thing they would say here, not here on Ysthar, not when nobody is quite sure who you are. I know you’ve never travelled beyond your borders. Very commendable of you; none of the other lord magi are quite so utterly devoted to their jobs as you. They’re forever travelling to visit one another, discuss the latest gossip or developments—though when kings and great lords gossip it’s really politics, isn’t it? Or professional development, if you want to be terribly modern about it.”

The shadows were thickening behind them. Idly he thought how much he disliked being underground. They came to a cross passageway, where a dank wind blew strongly past them. Circe stopped and turned to look at him full in the face with a radiant expression composed mostly of pity. He dropped his eyes out of habit; he did not look people in the eyes, not he with his magic. Her hand was resting not quite casually on her sword hilt.

“I say to such people—the doubters and detractors, I mean—I say that they don’t know anything about the circumstances. Nor do I, to be sure, since we don’t talk about that sort of thing. Yet I do know
you
, Raphael.”

She smiled at him with a smile that could have made iron weep. He let it break around him the way the light broke around him, casting off splinters and sparks as it hit him. He had not forgotten that she, too, was an actor.

“I know you haven’t had the easiest time of it,” she murmured invitingly, as if to confession. “How could you? So unbelievably amazing at magic. The lord magus of a world, famous in song and story, simply bursting at the seams with—how can I put it? The slang works best—with
awesomeness
. My dear Raphael, don’t blush.”

He wasn’t blushing. He just remembered what that felt like, when his face lit on fire like sunburn. He had not allowed that part of his self anywhere near the surface of his skin for many years now.

“The thing is, you are truly incredible. It doesn’t matter that your family couldn’t care less about you and don’t even know that you’re alive. You have made your own way, beholden to no one. I wanted to let you know that I admire you for that, before the end of the Game. Indeed, my darling, I must say it: I salute you.”

She swept him a graceful curtsey that would have been more appropriate before the Emperor of Astandalas, who in the days of the empire had outranked even the lords of the nine worlds. Yet Astandalas had fallen in a blaze of magic and he—he had survived.

He responded with as ordinary a tone as he could contrive, but when he spoke the words were strange on his tongue. “‘You may perhaps have forgotten that it was not I who began our contest, nor I who broke off our friendship, nor I who stand to profit from victory. What I am because of it is no concern of yours, though I quite see that it may be to you.’”

He gathered together his power for a moment, bowed with the utmost of politeness, and smiled as serenely as he could manage. “Good night, Heloise. I shall see you on Wednesday.”

She held her peace, merely curtseying, but her eyes blazed gold as Roman coins, as the hoard they had finally left behind, as the dragon’s. He did not recognize the emotion. She let her magelight brighten and then fade, took three steps backwards into the cross tunnel’s velvet blackness. He held himself ready, but she simply folded space and disappeared in a shower of violet-gold magic.

He stood a few minutes listening to the mute darkness of the underground. It remained empty and silent around him, all the shadow courts keeping themselves far away from the dragon.

He could still feel the proximity of Eahh, a queasiness in his senses. The air contracted around him dankly, something rotten billowing out of the passage in the wake of Circe’s translocation. He shuddered and made use of the same convenience, which he normally considered somewhat unsporting, folding space around an arch of the tunnel so that going through it he found himself at his gate.

He hesitated there a moment, waiting despite his near-invisibility for a series of taxis to go past him—some late-night session at the Houses of Parliament, he supposed—watching the way the water droplets drifted sideways in the street lights, more than mist and less than rain. The human noises were soothing after that echoing cavern. He found he was reluctant to go inside.

It was absurd to fear what might lie waiting for him, absurd and the result of Heloise’s—
Circe’s
—unsettling words. There would be no one there. No one but he had ever entered his house, and few into the garden, those very few who finished the quest for the water of life or the golden apples of the Hesperides.

Few even knew it existed; passers-by found only a smooth lawn broken by a monument and a sculpture in the park between the Houses of Parliament and Lambeth Bridge. When it had been an island in the river they had not found even that, merely an odd bit of turbulence, an eddy or two. Of those who had heard of it very few indeed knew where it was. He had heard rumours of a location somewhere between Zanzibar and Samarkand.

Big Ben tolled the second hour of the morning. A comfortingly familiar sound, though it had taken him months to grow accustomed to it when the clock tower was new. That was years ago, now, the bells steadily accumulating their measures of time, if time were truly a thing that could be measured with bell-rings. He knew philosophers who said that time was fundamental to the composition of the universe, others who said it was the measure of the soul.

Some said that a soul might attain to a certain age by its own secret processes of maturation. Slow or quick one never knew: one could age in a night, live a thousand years and still be young. These hours hummed and jangled along the railing, fitful sparks of magnesium-fire white. He had no idea how old he truly was. He glowered at the wrought-iron gate to his house, which in a fit of youthful pride he’d shaped into the emblem of Ysthar, a phoenix sitting in a rose tree.

There was a soft step behind him and he turned away from his threshold. Wrapped in a greatcoat and walking somewhat like a heron came the solemn figure of the God’s messenger.

“Lord Gabriel,” Raphael said, bowing. The world shuddered momently, the borders between Ysthar and the other worlds shifting. Despite it being partly his own doing he nearly lost his balance at the motion, half his magic yet bound in those borders. He lifted his head, almost to listen, to the heavy humid air, to a wind that rose up then in tattered streamers.