A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Read online

  He put his foot to her shoulder again, hard because only that would wake her from the dark sleep of his enchantment. She cried out in pain as she flinched, arms flailing for the moment it took for the magic to fade. She looked frantically around her as she half-rose, saw where the guards lay unmoving. She looked up, saw him standing above her.

  He held out his hand.

  Her gaze slipped down again, the guards’ breathing shallow but steady, and he had no idea whether it was relief or fear he saw in her as she extricated herself from the tangle of bodies, one desperate hand still clutching tight to her cloak.

  “How long will they…” Her whisper trailed off as she gestured to the six, seemingly afraid she might wake them. She spoke the Gracian tongue that once held all the promise of his youth, and which he used as little as possible now as a result.

  “Get clear,” he said as he unfurled the scroll he had sought and found among the books, its writing flaring as he spoke words that could not be heard and twisted one hand in the tight knot of the spellsign. Even as she scrambled away to the wall, the six bodies were suddenly wrapped in a scouring pulse of shadow that turned their flesh grey for a moment. Then they were gone.

  She stared in shock. He took a moment’s comfort from that before he spoke.

  “I expect I don’t need to ask if your father knows you were coming here tonight.”

  He paced away from her, judged the time by the chill of deep night in the air and the subtle change in the din from the street below. Only halfway to dawn, the songs fading to quieter voices through the dark transition of night to day, as he heard her frantically pace the now-empty floor behind him.

  “You didn’t…” she began. He smiled, his back to her. “You can’t…”

  “A full accounting of the things I can do would leave you amazed beyond any expectation. Who were they, and are there more behind them?”

  “What did you do to them?” she shouted. Her voice was ice behind him, but it was her movement that set him on edge, two steps toward him and the hiss of her cloak along the wall as she swept past. He turned in time to see the sword in her hand, tip already marked across a space of two paces, dead on his heart. He could see the scabbard beneath her cloak now, set low against her leg. Slow to draw, easy to hide.

  The incantation was already in his mind, set to strike her down with little more thought than it would have taken to swat a wasp. A reflex reaction built up over a lifetime of having swords drawn against him. More often than not, by people from whom he hadn’t expected it.

  He came to the Free City for the first time at the turning of autumn his fourteenth year, winding through the endless leagues of farm road and clustered villages that blossomed green and bright around the great walls under what had seemed an endless rain. Through all that long journey from her father’s house, through all the years since, he told himself he hated her.

  Until this night, this moment, he hadn’t realized how wrong he was.

  He felt the words of power die on his lips, fading in the same instant in his mind. His hands were shaking, forced to his side and balled to fists. As he often did, he reminded himself that it was a fine line between controlling the power that lived in him and being controlled by it. He still needed to work on that.

  “I see you still recall your mood when last we saw each other,” he said.

  “What did you do…?”

  “Sent them safely to finish out their slumber on the lawn of Ladryck Green. The last of the tavern traffic from the waterfront wards will have their cloaks and weapons pawned before they awake, but the mother of all headaches aside, they’ll be fine.”

  He saw that she believed him, but it didn’t quell the anger in her. He smiled as he stepped forward, raised his hand to push aside the blade and take the full embrace of that cold gaze. And as if he struck her, she stumbled back suddenly, screaming with a fear that he had never heard in her before.

  “Stay away!” Her voice carried an edge sharp as the sword looked, but the fear fought her movements as she whipped it away from him, left herself open as she held it tip to the ground, eyes down suddenly. “You can’t… You don’t understand.”

  The blade she bore was gleaming silver, a rapier forged in a style he had never seen before, and imbued with a power he felt as a faint surge on the air, the incantation of detection second nature to him, made without thinking. Dweomer lived in that steel, had flared with her movement. A powerful magic. Old. He couldn’t name the place in him where the knowledge and certainty came from, but he knew enough to trust it. A byproduct of a lifetime’s study of arcane craft.

  “Why are you here?” he asked at last, and he felt the fear in her again as her eyes found his.

  “I need your aid.”

  The perfect silver of the blade seemed to ripple where it caught the light. Her hand was shaking, and his gaze slipped past the sword to note her now with rather more interest. With the cloak thrown back, she lost none of the grace of the girl she had been when he last saw her. She was tall and she was pale, in the manner of one who had grown up in good health and plenitude but been kept for too many of those young years from the world outside. But he saw the tight knots of muscle thread her arms still, marking her also as one who made up for all that cloistered time in the company of the weapon masters of her father’s house.

  “What help would you need that your father could not buy?” he said at last. “And of all the people you might seek it from, why me?”

  “Because no coin will buy the trust I need, and my father cannot know. I need your guidance. Like all the times before.”

  He held her gaze for a long while. Searching for something there, but when realized he didn’t know what, he turned away without a word. Near what was left of the door, he checked that the foyer remained empty as he slipped on boots and a well-worn belt of scaled hide, a dagger hanging from it. He found the black cloak that hung by the bed, slipped it on as he waited for her to realize that it was up to her to speak.

  “You are not the easiest person to find,” she said.

  “That depends on how badly one wants to find me. If you need magic, there are easier places to seek it.”

  He turned back, saw her staring at the rapier where she raised it.

  “I need answers,” she said. “This blade. You must examine it, but you cannot touch it. I fear some curse in it, and I need to know the truth of what it is.”

  He felt the pulse of power again, felt it sing with a voice that was hers and not hers. A chill that he tried to ignore threaded his spine. “If you wish me to assess an artifact, you should probably be prepared for me to actually look at it,” he said.

  “Are you trained to the blade?”

  “I can clean a trout or a would-be cutpurse with equal dexterity if pressed to it,” he said. He adjusted the set of the dagger’s scabbard at his hip. “But as to a real sword, my familiarity extends to knowing which end to hold. What of it?”

  She motioned him forward. She held the blade near but not close, letting it catch the light again. The mage squinted. Stared. Running along the length of that steel, he saw the faint gleam of liquid. Not moisture on the metal, but of the metal. A dull sheen that anyone with a passing acquaintance of the alchemist’s art would recognize.

  “Quicksilver,” he said.

  She nodded, but a flicker of uncertainty crossed her face suddenly. “That is its name. Or at least what its master calls it. You know this blade?”

  “Apt, but not particularly creative.” He ignored the question as he peered closer, saw the molten flow along the delicate lines of the crossguard and down the metal mesh that wrapped the haft. At the edge of her fingers where they wrapped it tight, liquid metal pulsed like something alive.

  His expression must have betrayed a sudden alarm, for she spoke. “It is safe enough, for me at least. It is a warrior’s blade, or so it seems. Those who cannot properly wield it cannot touch it. Not without…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Dying.” He finishe
d the thought for her. He had seen quicksilver poisoning once or twice, old-school alchemists with little aptitude and less sense driven to a madness that even the animysts’ magic had trouble curing.

  “But you,” he said. “You hold it with a warrior’s hand. Sergeant of your father’s house guard by now, I should think.”

  “Lieutenant,” she said, but he heard the hesitation in her voice.

  “But no higher,” he mused. “Your father making it known he had other plans for you. The diplomatic service. A marriage of allegiance, perhaps.”

  He felt the measured weight of the words but took no comfort as he saw the blue eyes flash cold. And in his weary mind, he weighed all the uncertainty that the sudden shock of this night had wrought. Realizing suddenly that all that mattered to him was to not have to think on what it truly meant that she was here, that she had found him, that she was even seeking him in the first place.

  But he found himself wondering in the moment, despite his best intentions. How long had she searched? And in the eleven years since they last saw each other, for all the reasons he told himself she should have had to seek him, how many times had she tried and failed?

  “How did you know to find me in the city?” he said at last.

  “I asked,” she said simply. “Your comings and goings have become easier to follow of late. You’ve made a name for yourself.”

  That much was true, he thought. “Notoriety is the best coin for certain research. I use it sparingly.”

  “Still seeking your secrets,” she said. “Like when you were young. Staring into the shadow, eyes wide to capture the faint light.” He heard a bitterness in her voice, no effort made to hide it.

  Her name was one that had never needed making. Her father’s daughter, sung of by the local troubadours from the day she was born. And he found himself turning now from a question he knew he wouldn’t answer, had ignored through all the decade and more since they last saw each other. All that time when he had known where she was. He had always known where she was.

  Why, then, had he never looked for her in all those empty years?

  “The secrets I pursue now are a great deal more important that those I pursued when we last met.”

  “No doubt.”

  He felt an old antagonism rising, a subtle anger that flared suddenly at his breast like a bruise. In the time since he dwelled in the great castle on the southern coast, he thought he had set aside the heat of his youth and all the passions carried with it. Set aside anger, set aside the contempt he felt now when he thought of her father, trying to imagine him as old as he must have become. Decrepit with age, he hoped, though he knew the power of the healing that a duke’s coin would buy.

  “Where does it come from? The blade?”

  The sword wavered in her hand. He tried to focus past the distraction of her. Felt for the power again and used it to focus a quick incantation, measuring the sword’s power with a more accurate eye. Focusing on the job at hand. Research. Investigation.

  He felt her hesitate, heard the moment’s silence that gave him the answer even as she was thinking of a way to avoid saying it. “Your husband.”

  It had been that way between them, once. As youth, their thoughts intertwined to such a degree that there could be no secrets.

  “No,” she said at last. “Not yet.”

  He had been her tutor at first, only two years older than her but bluffing his way into being hired on as her father’s master of languages and lore. A stolen suit of scholar’s robes and forged credentials from the academies at Hypriot.

  “Congratulations or condolences as appropriate,” he said, and he saw the sudden flush of anger at her cheek.

  “Do not pretend this is news,” she said. “You must know.”

  “I don’t, and I mustn’t, and why should I?”

  “Because my father remains as strong as ever, and word of his affairs spreads far.”

  “My disinterest in your father’s affairs remains slightly stronger.”

  He turned for the sideboard that was the room’s only furnishing besides the well-made bed and the tall shelves stacked high with scrolls and books, dust and shadows. The books were old, all of them. Collected from various forays across the Elder Kingdoms, and once or twice beyond it. He had repaired and rebound most of them at least once, a skill of his youth that had never been lost.

  At the sideboard, he found the scattered pages he had been translating that night before finally allowing sleep to take him. Before she and six warriors burst through his door. He slipped them to his pocket, saw brandywine standing before him in a half-bottle that had been a full bottle that morning. He owned a single goblet that he filled and drained with his back turned, watching the distant flare of streetlight through the mottled glass of half-open terrace doors. The sound of the city rose from beyond again, soothing him.

  He heard her boots pace the floor behind, louder still. Part of him hoped they would strike for the door, fade to silence, but he saw her shade in the glass of the doors move for the bed instead, sitting. Watching him.

  Her father had used the magecraft of others, as did all those in power, but he had feared it more than most. As her teacher, he never tried to seek out the power in her, had never wanted to put her at risk that way, but he showed her. The mysteries of light and shadow, the glamers of image and sound. Rudimentary in their own way, young as he was then, but they were magic all the same.

  “I’ve stolen the sword.”

  He filled the goblet again. Contemplated it for a moment before he took his second draught straight from the bottle. He crossed to the bed, booted footsteps heavy on the cold floor. She took the goblet when he held it out to her, still waiting, it seemed, for a reaction, but he only shrugged in response to her gaze.

  “I’ve stolen the sword,” she said again. “From his chambers. He keeps it within reach always. Carries it as his greatest treasure.”

  “Your husband who isn’t yet.” He watched as she drank, too quickly.

  “If I am found out, it will disrupt the marriage. Or worse.”

  He nodded, thoughtful suddenly. “You’re in the city together. For the wedding,” he said. “When?”

  “Two days time.”

  He felt the shadow twist through him, felt it threaten to summon up a dozen different spells that might hold her there, might bind her to him, might twist her thought and mind in a score of subtle ways. Might let him seek within her own thought for the truth of all he was to her all those years ago. The deep truth that hid behind her lifetime spent in service to a father’s dreams.

  Instead, he only shook his head. He let the dark hair shade his face as his gaze slipped from hers.

  “Go,” he said.

  “I came to you with purpose…”

  “Your purpose. Your affair, not mine. Take the blade and go back to him.”

  “I will pay you anything…”

  “You no longer have anything I need.”

  More than he meant to say. The uncertainty in her silence told him she knew it.

  The hard pulse of profit was an ebb tide that he caught and rode for his own reasons, caring not for coin and having altogether too much of it in his purse most days. But he craved knowledge. He craved the secrets that the Free City and its thousand-thousand folk held, and the deeper secrets that even the masters of lore had forgotten, trapped in ancient tomes and weathered parchments whose hiding places had become a second home to him.

  He turned from her, tried to hide the hunger he felt for the power, for the secret that the rapier’s magic made.

  “The blade is evil,” she whispered, and the fear was in her again, playing faintly alongside that other song.

  “No magic is evil in and of itself,” he said quietly. “Magic simply speaks to a kind of ambition that takes root more easily in amoral soil.”

  “I need you to destroy it.”

  “Again, not my affair.”

  “I’ve tried. With all the power and coin at my disposal, I’ve tr
ied. Breaking, burning. Acid. Spell-fire in a flask that cost a month’s expenditures of my father’s treasury. Nothing so much as scratches it. The blade’s strength is unnatural. It is forged in some dark legend, and it will take the power of legend to break it. You are a great mage of war. Take it. Destroy it.”

  He laughed out loud, saw the anger cloud the blue eyes again until she realized he was laughing at himself, not her. “I’ve never been within a hundred leagues of real war, and should that ever change, you’d find me moving away from the front lines at a speed that would astound you.”

  “I know the things you’ve done…”

  “In the circles you travel in, you wouldn’t have heard anything of what I’ve done. Which means you’ve been asking. Why?”

  “Because you are the war-dragon,” she whispered. “Because I need you again.”

  From below, the revels of closing time were spilling from the taverns into the streets. There was no night in Yewnyr, the locals said. Dark came sure enough, but that meant nothing to the constant flow and hustle of commerce and coin that was the city’s lifeblood.

  “My father’s father wore that name and the power it represented,” he said. “A name is all it is for me.” He didn’t have to catch her eye to know she was looking to the dragon stitched in gold at the collar of the jacket. It was a sigil he wore for the attention it received, but her attention was a thing he didn’t want. Not like this.

  “In all the places I have asked, all the loremasters through whom I seek a name of one with the knowledge to help me, the name I hear is yours. As if some fate has placed our paths in alignment. My need. Your power.”

  “If it’s a curse you’re worried about, any competent sage or less competent adept can set your mind at ease.”

  “This is no hedge-wizard’s hex. I see the power that is in this blade. His moods, his manner, all of it changes when the sword is in his hand. It’s been three months since it came into his possession. Three months since I last saw the man I thought I knew.”

  “The man you love,” he said. The bottle was empty in his hand. He looked down at it with genuine curiosity, couldn’t remember having finished it. “You need to go.”