A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Read online

  Charan fought to stay on his feet, pressed his shaking knife hand hard to the gash at his chest. He had struck the fast blood, no way to staunch the wound that should have been his sister’s, the black blade turning the blow back against himself with all the strength it had borne. The dark dweomer, he thought. But stronger even than the fear of that magic was the knowledge that the blow he had taken would have killed his sister had it struck.

  He remembered his father’s rage at the tower door. Remembered seeing that same rage too many times to count, a lifetime of anger that was his legacy. He remembered the reflection of that anger, bright in the last light of his father’s eyes when the blade left his hand.

  Jalina’s eyes were wet, her voice all but lost against the roar of water, lapping at her breast now.

  “Brother,” she called. “Some of us are fated to follow.”

  She hesitated just long enough to let Charan understand that she knew what she was doing. His utter betrayal of her was the only thing that mattered to her now, as she lunged forward to plunge the length of the gleaming blade into his heart.

  Charan felt something twist in his chest, felt his breath stolen away. He saw Jalina’s shift suddenly turn black in the shadows, a blood-flower blossoming there in time with his own pulse as she fell.

  The roar of water swallowed his scream as it swallowed her body, slipping like a stone beneath the foam. Charan felt the pain at his chest surge as he pushed forward, but then it was gone and replaced by a sharper agony that twisted from gut to heart to head, pounding now with the strength of his own blood and a fear he had never known before.

  He was blind in the surge of water and shadow as he fought to dive. He felt her, lost her. Grasped her again by the edge of her shift and hung on to seize her fiercely, fighting the current.

  He pulled his sister up from the darkness, screamed her name this time, but her empty eyes were blank. Desperate, he slung her to his shoulders, unaware of her weight as he looked to the ladderway but saw it already gone, the vents submerged where black water boiled.

  Behind him, against the last grey flare before the light from below was swallowed, he saw the faintest flicker of firelight. There, beyond the shattered ceiling where the ancient body had once hidden.

  Each slow step was agony as Charan fought his way through the freezing inflow, aware that the bitter cold staunching his bleeding was the only reason he was still on his feet. He tried to feel some sign of Jalina’s breath where her face was slumped against his, but his vision was a pounding haze, red shadow roaring in his ears. At the ragged opening where the grate had been, he felt his way along the wall as water poured past and out through the ancient drain, threatening to sweep him off his feet.

  All was darkness. Then from the passageway that had been sealed came the faint glimmer again. Charan pushed Jalina up, followed close behind her lifeless body into the narrow darkness. He didn’t remember climbing, his sister slung across his back as he pushed himself up a narrow chimney of dusty stone and cobwebs. The gleam ahead grew steadily brighter, the red flicker of firelight calling him on even as his mind slipped closer to shadow. He felt the names of all Jalina’s dead gods slip unbidden to his mind as he prayed.

  His legs were numb, feet bleeding where they gripped rough stone when he arrived at the end of the chute. The glow he followed was blazing bright now, a perfect lozenge of firelight forced through a haze of dust that billowed with his frantic breathing. A keyhole, it looked like. The bottom side of a concealed trapdoor, unlatching easily with a shoulder’s pressure from below.

  Bright braziers hung by golden chains where Charan pushed himself through. The air was a shimmer of heat haze, darkness claiming him for a moment, but then he was back. Jalina’s body sprawled alongside him where he collapsed silently to a floor of night-cold stone. He couldn’t see, couldn’t feel anything beyond where he groped with shaking fingers for the blood at his sister’s throat, found only stilled silence.

  He was in the sepulcher, he realized. His sight was shadow and the braziers’ faint golden smoke, everburning with the spellcraft of the silent priests. The great tomb of khanans on the lowest level of the castle. Its vaulted columns of white marble held up a ceiling of shimmering black stone brought here a thousand years before from the Mountains of the Moons, far eastward and overlooking the end of the world at the edge of the Great Sea of Storms. His father’s ashes would have been laid here, once. Now, they would burn an empty bier, scattered only with the signs and objects of his reign, ready to be reclaimed in the next life that all the dead gods promised.

  Charan had been here last when his mother died. Though he told himself he should have known which space was hers among the lines of narrow upright ash-vaults lining the walls to both sides, he couldn’t recall it anymore.

  From that first night he and Jalina shared, that night of dreams that had inspired the hunger of all the nights that followed, Charan remembered his own face in his sister’s mind. Remembered the longing for him that struck his heart like some god’s ghostly fist, left him limp and sweat-soaked in the darkness when he awoke.

  On that night when he walked in Jalina’s dreams, the talisman had turned to ash on his pillow, as he had been warned it would. He had squeezed those burning embers in his hand as though he might will them to reshape themselves again, tears flowing and body aching. Suddenly crippled beneath a weight he had always carried but never felt before.

  With shaking hands, he tore the blood-soaked shift from his sister’s body. He pressed hard at the jagged wound the white blade’s magic had torn at her breast, but her flesh was ice.

  On the floor beside him, the black and white steel of the twin daggers caught the flickering light.

  Charan felt his breath cut off suddenly. He stared.

  He didn’t remember slipping the weapons to his belt. Didn’t remember even seeing the gleaming white steel of the blade with which Jalina had taken her life. He must have grabbed it even as she fell, he thought. But he couldn’t have. Must have been holding it the entire time without realizing. Impossible.

  Carefully, he reached for them. First one, then the other. He felt their warmth as they slipped into his shaking hands, left and right, white and black. And without thinking, without understanding, he shifted to press the pale blade into Jalina’s unfeeling grasp.

  As it did before, the silver-white dagger began to glow. A shimmering ghost light, the mottled ice-sheen of his sister’s dead flesh.

  Charan felt a trace of faint energy thread his trembling fingers, suddenly stilled as it flowed through them and up his arm. When it reached his chest, the pain there flared again to remind him how he had forgotten it. But then it slowed. Stopped.

  Where his sister sprawled before him, he saw the jagged wound at her heart slowly close within its shroud of blood.

  Charan had felt the power of the healing magic before, the animyst-priests of his father’s court ministering to him when he shattered his leg in a childhood fall from the White Tower roof. He had seen the rites of returning only once. A captain of his father’s had been brought back from beyond the veil of death, struck down in combat but deemed too valuable to be left to that darkness. He died again less than a year later. Took his own life, the stories said, driven mad by what he had seen in that shadow before the light returned.

  Charan’s eyes were wet, breath coming ragged as he saw his sister’s fingers flinch against the cold haft of the white blade in her hand. Her skin was silk smooth, all the marks of their dark labor in the sewer washed away.

  As he watched, Jalina shuddered, convulsed once as she vomited blood and black water and her eyes opened wide. The wound at her breast was closed, the pale perfect skin sealed over without so much as a mark. She stared up, meeting Charan’s gaze where he loomed over her, trembling. He fumbled for her soaked tunic, found one corner cleaner than the rest and gently washed the slick of blood from her face and neck.

  Shaking, she raised herself up to kiss him hard, wrap herself in his arms.


  They stayed that way for a long while, and when their clothes had dried well enough in the braziers’ golden heat, they slipped back through the deep-night castle, then to the secret ways only they knew that led past the servants and to their separate chambers. The same secret ways that had taken them to the White Tower, a lifetime ago now. The ghost blade was clutched tight to Jalina’s breast, the dagger whose darkness was the endless night in Charan’s hand when their other hands reluctantly parted at last. Fingers slipping from each other, they went their separate ways without a word.

  Apart, Charan waited, watching and dozing at the high windows that opened up to the great green-garden courtyard across from his sister’s suites. First dawn touched the gleaming towers of the city, twisted the shroud of shadow to a veil of gold across the sky and the star-shining black of the bay.

  He remembered the night of shared dreams. From the dark shelter of his own slumber, he walked inside Jalina’s mind, feeling the song her thought made, seeing the bright desert dawn that was the backdrop to all her fear and youthful longing.

  He felt her dreams and the warmth of a kindling passion he had never felt before. He remembered his own face seen in her mind’s eye. Remembered what it felt like to love and be loved that way.

  He felt the hunger that had so long twisted through him finally settle and shape itself to something else. He was dreaming of Jalina, the day breaking blue and bright beneath a cloudless sky, when the frantic knock came at the door and the rest of their lives began.

  SHE HAD BEEN NAMED Szirha’mun, which was the Darkmoon in his people’s tongue. So it was that he dreamed her always watching him over nine days of blood-red shadow that were the nights of sacrifice and remembrance. Those nights when he could be himself once more.

  The grey wind was cold along a heading from the distant sea, threatening a storm but seemingly unable to make up its ageless mind when it should arrive. He was naked now save for a necklace of yellowed bones around his neck, looking every bit the monster he was. It had been a decade of exile since he was forced to forget the flesh into which he was born. Long years as the Mockery that he was now, his features pale as cloud, no color or strength to his sickly-smooth flesh.

  Ten years ago, he fled the Sorcerers’ Isle and the wild marshland that had been his clan’s home since the time before the first songs were made. Now, his mottled flesh was wracked with cold, the shivering hands stunted and deformed. Less strength in his spindled fingers than he had commanded as a child.

  His senses, too, were dulled in the Mockery’s form, but he had long grown used to that weakness. So it was that even against the hiss of wind, he heard the telltale rustle of movement in the tall grass behind him.

  He was weak and he was bent, kneeling in muck and pain throughout the long day to await the red moonrise. But the instincts of the warrior he had always been still lingered at a level deeper than the prison of his flesh. From the ground where he set them, he pulled his knives, locked his hands in a defensive stance as he scrambled back, staying low to the ground. He felt the blood loud in his misshapen ears, felt the taste of metal in his mouth that was the Mockery-body’s fear.

  It was the ninth day of those nine days of the full Darkmoon, and he was waiting for the change that would let him die. Let him pass from this world as he once was, remembered by fate as more than the monster he had become. And staring, his weak eyes saw a girl with a sword standing on the far side of the mottled clearing, curtained by the regular rhythm of grass rippled to fast-whipped waves by the wind.

  At the fore of his mind, held tight in the rage that broke and was lost within the weakness of his flesh, there was a name he had not spoken in ten long years. He had saved it for this moment of waiting, had waited to whisper it with his last breath, but the moment was ruined now. He silently cursed his weakness, cursed the child standing motionless in shimmering shadow.

  She is named Szirha’mun, which was the Darkmoon in his people’s tongue, and he watches her die.

  He lowered his hands, felt a sudden shaking twist through them as he turned the knives clumsily down. He carried no sheathe to set them in where he stood naked as the day he was born, so he locked them to the soft skin of his arms, held them there. Conscious of the pain where their edge threatened to cut him. Not caring.

  The girl was young, barely a child. The sword that she held point-down before her was the dull grey of brushed silver, its guard and grip of black leather. In his own hand, even with this stunted body, it would have been a short arming blade, suitable for close-quarter fighting and little else. Where the child clutched it, the pommel came almost to her chest, the leaf-shaped blade comically broad.

  He didn’t flinch as he stood, felt needle-points of pain shoot through bird-thin legs. Though he was naked, he felt no shame. The Mockery-body possessed no feature that would have startled a child, even one as young as this. The girl’s golden eyes were wide, but not with the fear he expected.

  “I saw you pass along the edge of the village,” she called. She spoke the trade tongue that was the common speech of the uncivilized, like him. Like those who wore the form he wore. Her voice had a reedy quality that carried an echo of the wind around her, the words coming matter-of-fact. “It was nine days ago.”

  “So? And so?”

  “I followed you.”

  “And found me. What of it?”

  “You were sneaking, so I followed you.”

  “Those who have reason to sneak are often best left alone.” He spat the metal taste from his mouth, felt a string of spittle bitterly catch the grizzled hair that clung to his misshapen chin. “Or did your parents not teach you this?”

  “My parents taught me to look after myself,” the girl said. Something changed in her voice. A faint echo of sadness shadowed the bright eyes, but still there was no fear in her. And even as he heard that sadness, he looked into those eyes and felt himself caught there. He felt the pain again, rooting deep and bitter in him as he turned away.

  The clan lord, name ever-unspoken and burned ember-bright in his memory takes her innocence in the hot blood of the Darkmoon’s night, and she is broken mind and spirit, flesh and bone.

  Crumbling shadow blurred his vision as he squeezed his eyes shut, fought back against the memory. He opened them only to take a final glance behind as he pushed himself into the screen of tall grass. She was watching him as he turned from her, looked quickly away, as if she saw the weakness that was his legacy.

  He was a sellsword now, and had been for a decade of days spent living hand to mouth. The southern deserts were his home most of that time, a place where the Mockery he was now would fit in. He knew of other lands he could have fled to, certainly. On the Sorcerers’ Isle where he was born, there dwelled countless folk who lived with the weakness that was his curse, and monsters in plenty more frightful still. But that road was closed to him now, by the pain that pushed him over the narrow sea, down through Gracia and the mountains. Away from where the voices alone would have been enough to remind him who he had been.

  He had needed new voices, new songs, new names when he took the first of the long caravan trains from the foot of the Shieldcrest, the great mountains snow-shrouded and silent as the secrets he left behind. So far north now. So far gone.

  As the months wore on, he grew more and more accustomed to the crippling heat that rose from the slate-grey sands. Accustomed but never fully accepted, the harsh air of Ajaeltha’s desert scrubland still tearing at his throat as he breathed it. But despite the hardship, he found himself in time counting the unintended blessings of this desolate land.

  When they come for her to invoke the rites, she fights them. For her audacity, for her insolence, they beat her nearly to death, but in that cunning way of hard killers who fill the narrow window between near-death and life with the memory of all the pain a body might endure. Let her linger long in the knowledge of all they do to her, body broken and mind ravaged and no way to stop for her the sight those memories make.

&n
bsp; No lakes spread here in the land of sunburned soil and scrubland. No great flow of waters tumbled, save for the trade rivers to the north, wending through their green fields. No seasonal ponds, no standing water to speak of, and all the wells of the thousand villages he passed through covered against the harsh and endless drift of sand. So it was that he could go for days, for weeks, for whole months without ever catching sight of his reflection. Whole months without being blindsided by the self-made sight that was the Mockery he had become, staring up at him from pool or still stream bank, his narrow eyes set like pale coals in a malformed head.

  He had walked a score of his weak strides into the shadows where his meager camp was set when he realized she was following. He glanced back again, saw her watching him as intently as before.

  “Are you not afraid of me?” he called. From his gear, he sought for the cloak that would wrap his unnatural form. It covered him while he slept, the softness of the Mockery’s flesh feeling the cutting edge of every chill night and storm wind. He had set it aside that morning, discarded the heap of his belongings in it. Making it easy for whoever found him to dispose of what was once his.

  “I am afraid of your outside. But I know that what is inside is good. The sword tells me.”

  He set the cloak across his slack shoulders, watched the girl for a long while. She shifted where she stood, let the blade lean back against her. Where the Darkmoon’s sanguine gleam caught it, even his weak eyes could see the razor sheen of its edge. “Be mindful of that.”

  “But it will not cut me.” She shifted again, let the blade stand centered over its own weight. He fought the revulsion of imagined pain as she drew her palm along its edge, lifted it to show him. No mark. “It protects me,” she said.

  “Some sword,” he said.