A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Read online

  “It speaks to him…”

  He watched the bottle slip from his hand short of the sideboard where he meant to set it down. It spun slowly, his mind holding the progression of its flight as a blur of motion, so that he saw the point of impact where the glass struck the stone tile of the floor.

  “Do you believe in fate?” she had asked him the last time they spoke.

  Glass was chaos controlled, the alchemists said. Solid matter possessed of no shape within, yearning to flow but trapped in its brittle state. Like life itself, caught in one aspect as the frozen moment of a single point in time. He saw the fragile potential of the bottle’s construction shiver and reshape itself as it struck the floor, and with the force of that reshaping, the moment was unmade to shards that spread with a crash that made her jump.

  She stared. “You know this blade?” she asked again. Her voice was a bare whisper, but he said nothing in return. Only stared at the rapier, watching light flow like liquid along the strong of the blade. He felt for its power again, felt the familiarity in the song that power made, harsh in his ears now. So that he almost missed the faint creak from the foyer behind him.

  There, someone was shifting, trying to still the movement of a stubbed boot. The sound of shattering glass when the bottle fell had startled whoever was in the process of slipping through the broken outside door, unheard. Her eyes as she turned to follow his thoughtful gaze were wide with sudden fear, telling him she had no knowledge that she was followed not once but twice. Told him she knew who it was.

  “He’ll kill you,” she whispered. She had the sword in its scabbard, vanished beneath her cloak again. “Go. Please.”

  “Of course,” he said as he took her hand.

  A shout from outside sounded like Take them both! Whoever’s voice it was knew that any secrecy to their approach was gone now. Whoever’s voice it was, he saw in her eyes the pain it carried, sharp as her stolen blade.

  Footsteps erupted, loud. A dozen of them by the sound of it, waiting for the cover of the last dark to get close. He was already moving, though, pulling her through the opposite doorway before she could react, then past the tall shelves whose shadows cloaked them as they slipped across to the terrace.

  He felt her weight but not the strength that he knew was in her if she wanted it. Too afraid to fight him, he thought. Already caught up in the betrayal and the scandal that this night would bring to her, to her father, to this faceless betrothed that she loved enough to steal the sword that was destroying him.

  He kicked through the half-open doors, heard the cry of voices at the foyer, but it was already too late.

  Around a porch of dark marble set with low railings, the city was a blaze of flickering lantern light and the eternal golden glow of evenlamps, shimmering beneath the haze of smoke-fires as an inverse sunrise below a dark sea. She was breathing hard as she skidded in his wake, trying to stop herself. He seized her hands in response, pulled her close to him as he threw her arms across his shoulders, his own arms tight around her waist. He expected her to pull away, but she was unyielding against him, her body pressed close to his, fitted tight as though it had been carved to match him.

  Without realizing he was going to do it, he kissed her. Her lips were warm beneath his, parted as her breathing slowed.

  “Hold on,” he said.

  He saw the first figures smash through the glass doors behind them as they took to the air. They wore the same uniform as the others, the hammer and ivy badge in tawny red. He felt her hands lock behind his neck as she stiffened in fear, the sudden twist of momentum taking them as he willed the power woven into the black cloak to hurl them up and over the edge of darkness, the chill night air sharp, washing across them like the surge from the back of a fast horse as they flew.

  He turned back once to see the armored figure at the terrace’s edge. He was tall, red-haired and close-bearded in the manner of so much Vanyr nobility. He wore the armor of a knight of those western provinces in black and ice-blue, a wine-dark cloak wrapped tight across broad shoulders, legs set wide, eyes impassive as his guards stood in silence behind him, all watching.

  Where the mage’s arms held her tight, he slipped a hand to her belt. He unhooked it with a quick flick of his fingers. By the time she recognized the movement, tried in vain to stop him, the scabbard had slipped from her and was gone, spinning like a falling leaf in black and silver as it dropped to the terrace below. The guards shouted out alarm, leaping back. The tall noble stepped up to the railing, caught the falling blade with one hand.

  He smiled as they soared. He judged the angle between them and the eyes below them, willed the spellpower of the cloak that spread like wings around him now to carry them higher.

  The Free City unfurled below as a storm of light and shadow. The bright blazing core, edged by the spiderweb curve of its great walls. The dark lines of the great streets, cutting a patchwork swath through color and noise that was a song sung in harmony with the cry of the wind. The black serpent-form of the river, twisting in from west to east and festooned with the glimmering lights of uncounted ships carrying trade and dreams from across five kingdoms. The vast shadow of the great greens. Villages beyond the walls, dark lines of farm road edged in flickering firelight.

  He held himself there, her body tight against his where she turned to stare in wonder, suspended dark against the bright crescent of the Clearmoon for an endless moment before the high haze took them away.

  After a time, they descended to the darkness of the Rose Heath, a well of green shadow spreading out in the storm of light. The wide paths and endless lawn of the great park were never empty even beneath the pale fingers of dawn, but he made sure that no eyes marked them as they descended to the shifting shadows of an alder copse that marked the confluence of two great paths. Broad shapes of marble rose around them, private mausoleums like the countless others that spread as white waves across the green. The breeze was warm where it touched the grass, but the sudden stillness that followed their fast flight sent a chill through him.

  Their feet touched ground together. They stood a while, arms around each other, her hands still tight at his neck. He felt them trembling, looked down upon her pale face. Afraid. But behind the fear was something else. As quickly as he tried to dismiss the thought, it clung to him. She was warm against him. In her eyes was a look he had all but forgotten, driven from him with the memory of the pain her father made.

  He thought of all the things he might say, all the things he had failed to say in the years before the silence.

  He asked her instead, “What does it say to him? This blade?”

  “Does it matter now?” He heard her fight to find the sudden contempt in the words. A choice made, the moment broken like her fingers broke from him, pulled free as she stepped away.

  He only shrugged. “Where was it found?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She paced away, stalked through the half-light toward the brighter shadow of a marble monument a dozen strides away. Silent and cold. The sight of it slowed her.

  “A tomb,” she said. She gazed up at the edifice of white stone that rose before her, first in a long line of tombs set together in a block that curved away across the shadow of the green. “Somewhere in the north country. He had the troubadours paid to claim he slew the undead that carried it, but I heard it was easier than that…”

  Her voice trailed off, but as he glanced up, he realized it was his own look that stopped her cold. He saw her shock, felt the darkness that suddenly flared in him reflected in her own eyes.

  “You do know this blade,” she said bitterly. “You know it and you sent it back to him.”

  He was silent a moment. “I know one like it. Or did. A friend carried it. It was lost, or so I heard.”

  “What happened to this friend who carried it?”

  “Madness,” he said. “Or so I heard.”

  She struck him, the back of her hand hitting as hard as any blow he had ever taken. He felt the pain spike in hi
s jaw as he stumbled back, watched her turn on her heel, race off with light steps toward the distant light that marked the road and the city beyond.

  He thought about letting her go. Another tapestry-piece of memory to fold in with that first kiss, the last night he saw her, the beating at her father’s hand that nearly killed him. He had managed to free himself from bonds and gag that day, then summoned up the spellpower that saw rage and lightning coiled in his hands where they found her father’s throat. The duke still bore the imprint of the young mage’s fingers across his neck, or so he had heard. A mark of arcane power that no life-magic would heal.

  “You came to me for aid and guidance,” he called out to her retreating back. “I’ll give you both. All things are destroyed in the end, but only fate decides when that end comes.”

  She stopped. Turned back slowly. Her shadowed look said she wouldn’t walk to him, so he went to her instead. Slowly.

  “A blade of worth, of power, has a destiny,” he said as he stopped, close enough to see the blue eyes gleam daylight bright in the darkness. “I don’t know if it’s your lord’s destiny to wield this blade, nor do you, just as neither of us can know whether his doing so will taint his mind to evil. All you can do is judge whether your fate is part of that.”

  “You know this because you did the same for your friend?” He heard the edge in her voice, fighting tears.

  “I know it because I didn’t. Because I made the same choice then that you had made already tonight, to leave him to the fate he chose. You only came to me for the strength to carry it through.”

  She was silent a long while. When she finally spoke, he heard the strength return.

  “It decides its own course,” she said. “As will he.”

  A wind had risen from the north, carrying with it the hint of rose hedges and the last mown grass of the season from the distant gates. And in that shroud of scent, he was back in the summer gardens of her father’s house, watching her dance beneath the ancient stone arch strung with grape and white creeper and the weathered Ilvani runes he taught her to read.

  “Like fate,” he said.

  “Like love.”

  He felt light-headed suddenly, felt the wind shift and strengthen as if it might be seeking him. Then as with all his dreams, it was suddenly done.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said quietly, and there was a dread expectation in the words that he could hear.

  “You do,” he said. “Choose your course. Walk away.”

  “And where shall I walk to?”

  An unwritten ending lay hidden in the question, twisting through the twilight space between the words like a serpent threading wind-whipped grass. She had come to him that night, had sought him out for fate-only-knew how long. Had pursued him through the distance of the dream they once shared, and he felt the sudden sting of that dream as he always did. Felt the protective shroud of shadow break against the pellucid frames of memory that would let all the pain back in.

  “Your path is yours,” he said. “I could never choose it for you.”

  She turned away then. Wouldn’t meet his gaze. She made as if to speak but he was quicker.

  “Goodbye,” was all he said.

  He soared up and beyond her, quickly lost to the shroud of darkness in the west that drank the last of the night sky beyond the edge of the green. From the far side of that darkness, he watched as she ran to the gate at the broad stroke of the Iresand Road, saw her flag down one of the plentiful coach cabs returning from their last runs to the nobles’ houses in the wards of the mountainside ridge.

  He followed her for a short while from the air, soaring in shadow as she and her cab made their way toward the twisting switchback avenues leading up into that bright night, a brilliant crown upon the city’s towering head that was the herald of the rising sun. Then he turned his eyes to the darker sky and swept away.

  For three days, he brooded, waiting. He took new rooms in Chrian Heath above a grudge-worn apothecary who he favored for her ability to not ask questions. He estimated what the red knight would have paid the landlord in Urorfidith to report any word of seeing him return, then offered up triple that for his silence, delivered by a rickshaw driver he used for that sort of business. When the burly runner returned with the personal effects and the books the mage needed from those he left behind, he brought news as well.

  The red knight, her bethrothed, was dead.

  The mage sought out confirmation, found it quickly enough by way of a private club called the Chalice, where the guard captains drank and his connections and coin could buy the ear of the serving girls. Across the Free City, the tale was spreading quickly, along with the related but less memorable gossip of how the engagement between this Vanyr knight and the daughter of a Gracian duke had been suddenly broken off by the lady herself only that day. The morning the mage left her.

  Her Vanyr lord did not take it well. When the lady and her entourage made to abandon the city ahead of word of the scandal, he followed with a force of house guards in dun and rust-red. It was said that ten died that night, but details from the survivors were strangely inconsistent in describing those moments of madness.

  The lady was said to be in hiding, and in mourning. He confirmed that twice more, held the knowledge in his heart for a long while.

  He spent more of the coin he didn’t need on information, seeking it out among those who had been there, guards and drivers and other witnesses. At the end of two more days, he found himself drinking with a young guard of the watch whose very first patrol in uniform had taken him into the thick of the fray that night, and who had nearly paid the price.

  The quicksilver blade was gone, he heard. This shaken guard had seen it, sure enough. He named it without prompting, cursing the sword as he recounted the red knight dropping two men with the barest of blood-scratches from its gleaming bite. But those two were the only ones who died at the knight’s hand, the young guard swore. Two more were killed by the knight’s captain at arms, who seized the blade when his master finally fell, and who had seemingly been claimed by an even darker madness, laying into the city guards and his own fellows with the same murderous rage.

  The young guard had seen the red knight cut down by the lady herself, defending others from his frenzied attack. A warrior’s form to her movement but tears in her eyes, he said.

  The knight’s man fell to archers. The young guard had known the Yewnyr captain who shakingly snatched the blade up then, but could only watch in horror as a raw recruit who fought alongside him put a dirk in the captain’s back and seized the rapier anew. That guard had fallen in turn, dropped by one of a gang of street bravos drawn by screams and steel to the fray. The bravos fled, just as the young guard was put down by an errant blade from one of the red knight’s remaining warriors, no longer sure who they were fighting for. Two more were dead before it was done, but what happened to the blade in the end, none could say.

  The mage returned to his rooms near dawn, but did not sleep. From his pocket where he had placed it, where he had avoided thinking on it ever since, he pulled the pages he had been translating the night she burst through his door. He saw the quicksilver blade sketched there in lines of faded ink whose age he couldn’t guess at, a timeless facsimile that matched his memory now. The words that spoke of its dark legends were in one of the ancient Ilvani tongues slow to even his mind, but he could read them well enough.

  Salinomelar, the Ilvani had called it. ‘Quicksilver’ was the closest approximation he was able to make, carefully extracting the name’s full meaning from the ancient parchments where they spoke of the unmatched speed of the blade and the poison of its bite and the madness it inflicted on those who chose to wield it.

  She would have been in her father’s house by now. With the connections the mage had, with the reputation he had forged over the long years since the night he fled with the clothes on his back and a death warrant in his name, he knew a dozen, a hundred different ways he could have gotten a message to her.r />
  “Do you believe in fate?” she had asked him the last time they spoke, and he told her yes. Even then, though, he hadn’t believed it. The words simply part of the compact forged by the ardor and innocence of youth.

  If she had been there to ask him now, he wasn’t sure what he might say.

  HE WAS DEEP IN THE DARK of forgotten dreams when the song called him back. Raubynar blinked as the darkness shifted into focus, the fire dying across from him. He judged the time by the movement of the Clearmoon, alone in the sky. A quarter of the night, perhaps, since he closed his eyes. The fading wind was from the west, the familiar scent of the still-distant Yewnwood faint and complex where it pulled at his memory. The black branches of the budding cypress above were faint scar lines against a star-streaked sky.

  He stood and stretched, feeling the song fade to nothing as dreams will do. He felt an unfamiliar slowness to his thoughts, an exhaustion threading through him that he couldn’t explain. He thought he had heard the faint echo of a lyre, notes spilling through the shadows that pulled at his unwaking mind. There was a voice as well. Words that melted away the more he tried to remember them.

  Across from him, Cassatra was sleeping, curled tight within the black pool of her cloak. Raub had assumed she would take a watch while he slipped into the half-sleep of the Ilvani, but it was clear she thought there was nothing on this back road worth watching for.

  As he paced the clearing’s edge, gathering deadfall to toss to the embers, Raub reflected that she was most likely right. Wolves and wild cats prowled the woods in early spring, seeking to fill the long hunger of winter, but the fire would warn them off. Brigands were rare but not unheard of this far off the trade roads, though Raub pitied anyone who tried to wake Cass from a sound sleep at the end of a blade.

  From the most distant darkness, he heard the music again.

  As far as they were from any settlement, he knew the unnatural essence of that sound even before a faint shiver up his spine warned him to be wary. Closer to the wagon camps to the east, some traveler making late-night song to ward off the spirits of the shadows would have been fitting. Here, in the isolated shelter of the cypress wood, not even insects sang at night. The Ilvani of the Yewnwood seldom roamed this far afield, the stunted groves of the scrublands shunned by them. The wall of the great forest was the edge of their world, its great roof of green and gold the only sky most of them had ever known.