A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Read online

  In her own heart, she felt a conviction that nothing ever could change.

  She thought about her own reasons, the real reasons she wouldn’t speak of. A thing she had never shared with Raub, never shared with anyone. The reason that was the absence of any reason in the end.

  When a person has little enough to live for, she thought darkly, the decisions become easy.

  • • •

  The terraces of the forest-home showed no sign of ending. As they climbed the grey stairs, Cass began to make out ever more distant lights. Faint where they flashed through sudden breaks in the tree-canopy, then gone again. She ate as they walked, guessing by the sureness of his step that Raub knew where he was going. However, it took a serious effort to commit to memory the twisting route of terrace paths and smaller stairways that saw the noise and light of the market fall away behind them. All around, the Ilvani of Anthila were making their way along the same stairs and terraced paths, drifting slowly, voices quiet where they paid no mind to the visitors in their midst.

  Between the terraces, rope bridges radiated out like the anchoring arms of a spider’s web. These were little more than lattices of thin cord, set with wooden tiles and flanked by braided stays that served as railing and guy-line to either side. Raub crossed each bridge with practiced ease, Cass a little more cautious as she followed. In the empty space between terraces, she saw the wood spread above and below them. Not just the branches of the great trees rising from the forest floor below, but trees grafted to those branches as living pillars.

  By their look, the lower tiers they passed through were laborers’ domiciles, possessed of the Ilvani grace in their architecture but consistent in their simplicity. The dwellings of the Ilvani had an almost ephemeral quality, with walls of tightly woven wicker set on frames of loomed branches and bark. Behind those wicker screens, lights glowed to cast ghostly shadows through the haze of leaves, the bright green of new buds showing through darker green and shed gold. A yellow-shadowed carpet crunched beneath their feet as they passed through the high branches, sudden flurries of leaves falling like slow rain whenever the wind picked up.

  They passed from the working wards onto wide paths flanking better-appointed apartments, and as they made their way ever higher, Cass felt Raub’s silence grow more oppressive. A nagging uncertainty was growing in her, and she glanced back over her shoulder more than once. She saw no eyes on them, though, and as they continued to climb, the number of people they passed slowly waned. In the end, they were alone along the wood-tiled paths of a multileveled bower, staggered white walls rising in the distance to either side.

  They had traveled more distance horizontally than vertically, but even so, Cass found herself having to guess how high they were. Beneath them, the tiers and terraces of the forest home were a widening web, crossing and recrossing each other, so that one would have been challenged to find a place to fall straight through to the ground. The night air was cooler now, the light of the lower tiers dimmed to a golden shadow that limned each terrace’s edge. But in its place came the light of the Clearmoon, filtered through the screen of leaves, and telling Cass that they drew near to the very tops of the trees.

  The apartments in the upper tiers were gated in a way unseen in the wards below. Beyond barriers of vine-woven branches, thickly latticed, their wicker walls were set with windows of colored glass that shimmered with the light of evenlamps and flickering fires. More than once, Cass saw the figures of guards standing at attention before gates of ironwood, delicately sculpted and firmly barred.

  No one was in sight at the narrow gate before which Raub finally stopped. The barrier wall into which it was set was too thickly latticed to see through, heavy with vines and gently curved to follow the path that twisted between similar gates, other residences, on its opposite sides. Beyond the wall, higher tiers were anchored with rope stays to the topmost branches of the great tree they stood upon. Its apex was hung with a single lamp, blazing like a star in a winter sky.

  “We need to climb,” Raub said, and before Cass could respond, he was at the wall, easily scaling the rough ladder its branches made. She scanned the wide path to both sides, but they were alone. Shifting carefully through the shadows, she followed Raub up, watched him swing across and over to the other side.

  Then she saw the sign at the gate. Faint at first, then suddenly bright beneath moon’s-light that flared as leaves shimmered with the rising wind. A single-edged longblade in the Ilvani style, wreathed in flame. Gleaming for a moment, then gone again.

  Beyond the wall stood a garden on three levels. Wide stairs wound around massive branch-pillars, their bark rubbed smooth and gleaming gold. The great terraces stood open to the air, their walls of wicker and rope furled to show the house they once made, standing empty and dark now. Raub stood in the middle of that first shadowed space, the flora there overgrown and unkempt.

  Here and there, self-supporting walls of latticed branches hedged in overgrown paths. A dozen strides away, a huge elm stood dead within a low rise of earth. Thick branches rose to almost touch the screen of leaves sweeping down from the great trees above, its twisted roots digging deep into the floor of the terrace like black claws. Cloistered beds of flowers in a dozen varieties Cass had never seen before hissed as their spent seed heads twisted in the wind.

  “Welcome home,” she said at last, and there was a measure of sadness in her voice that she hadn’t intended. If Raub heard it, he gave no sign.

  He pushed the hood back for the first time since their arrival. From within his cloak, he pulled a flask Cass recognized. Ice wine from the winter vineyards north of Hypriot, subtly potent and most often sold by the vial. She watched Raub drink deep, shook her head when he offered the flask to her.

  “It’s beautiful here,” Cass said, because there was nothing else to say. Raub turned from her, pacing toward the shadow of the dead elm. Beneath the tree, a faint trickle of water sounded from a neglected fountain. Its wide pool of delicately carved wood was overflowing with rotting leaves, sending a narrow stream to the ground below. “So why did you leave?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” At his belt, Raub’s hand had slipped to the black-shrouded shortsword. His knuckles were white, Cass saw.

  “Then why come back?”

  “That matters less.”

  “A destination turns travel into a journey, you said.” In her mind, she felt for something else to add, found only silence.

  “Why did you come?”

  Once, on that long road to the Sorcerers’ Isle, she asked him about the black blade. She had seen it, of course. Always carried, never drawn.

  “It was my father’s,” he told her then, and Cass had taken it for an heirloom. A thing to be worn but not used. That changed when she saw him with it that night on the ship that carried them back to the mainland.

  Alone in the cabin they shared, he must have thought her asleep, carefully unsheathing the bare blade in the faint light of the Clearmoon slanting through the porthole window. Even from the corner of her eye, she saw the edge the shortsword carried. Judging by the well-stained leather of the haft, it had seen much use. Except for the Ilvani glyphs along its length, the sword bore no adornment, but in the manner of the oldest dweomer, its glassy steel glowed a sickly blue in the shadows.

  In the garden, Cass felt a chill. Old ghosts, she thought, flitting through the shadows of the windblown leaves. But even as she made to speak, Raub wheeled on her with a start. Both hands went to her cloak as he pulled her back toward the fountain, dragged her down with him as he dropped to his knees.

  “Do you hear it?” he hissed, and in a heartbeat, Cass saw a change come over him, the dark eyes burning in the haze of moon’s-light. With a chill, she registered the look on his face as the same she had seen in the market tier before. The same uncertainty rooting deep and sudden in him, creating a confusion she could feel.

  “Hear what?”

  And even as she spoke, Cass caught the faint echo of singing coming soft on
the night air. A woman’s voice, the language unknown. It drifted through the stillness for a moment, quickly swallowed by the wind.

  In that brief echo, Raub heard the same music that had woken him in the night, a ghostly cry from forgotten dreams. Each way he moved, he heard it louder, felt it twisting in his pounding heart like a knife. His hands were at Cass’s cloak again, both of them still kneeling. And as she set her own hands on top of his, she felt a great darkness, felt all the bitter spite of wine and anger focused as tightly on her as a hunter’s arrow.

  “This shame is my burden,” Raub said with sudden anger.

  There was an edge in his voice that Cass had only rarely heard. She responded, cautious. “If it was a burden you could carry on your own, you wouldn’t have brought me along.”

  “I did not ask you…”

  “Yes, you did. You might not know it, but you did. You can hide behind your silence, behind your secrecy, whatever it is that keeps Anthila something you never talked about by day, yet can’t wait to confess in drink and darkness. But you didn’t want to take this road alone, and so here I am.”

  Raub released his hold on her, pushing back in his anger as he lurched to his feet. He paced a wide circle through the dead grass. Calmly, Cass rose to follow.

  “We carry our own pasts easily enough.” She checked the uncertainty in her own voice, forced herself to speak evenly. “But none of us are made to carry the lives of others. Your father,” she said, but even as she did, she heard the words choked off. She felt light-headed suddenly. The weight of her own secrets pressed down with a too-familiar pressure, breaking through the veneer of quiet resolve.

  She heard the song again. Steel strings this time, and the voice ringing out pure and high, quavering in a gentle play of sound that slowly formed itself into words in no language Cass had ever heard. She looked for some sign of recognition in Raub, but he seemed beyond listening where he stumbled, turning back to her suddenly.

  “The Ilvani live by codes. Honor and principle, strength and speed, bow and blade. Ways of life passed down to each new generation. The Ilvani know their histories back five hundred lifetimes. This knowledge is beyond you.”

  “I didn’t mean…” Cass began, but Raub was pressing her now, his voice harsh.

  “The Ilvani invented sorcery, but that greatest art was muddied and tamed by Human hands. For the thousand years that Empire bound and bent the Elder Kingdoms beneath its banner, the Yewnwood Ilvani never capitulated, never took up the Human flag. But in matters of magic, we held to Imperial rule by the threat of war. Thirty millennia is the record of our culture. Ten thousand generations of power that capitulated to upstart Human dominion in the end.”

  Cass felt despair suddenly, her strength breaking as she tried to fight it. Raub’s eyes were a dull fire, burning black. A father gone, a lifetime lost. Something twisted in her gut, knife-sharp.

  “My sixteenth year,” Raub whispered, “I called four friends to my side.” Cass heard the dangerous tone of his voice, felt a deepening anguish there. “And with stealth and sword and the bravado of youth, we challenged a tyrant in full view of the people, with the thought that our example would inspire them to rise against his darkness. You cannot understand.”

  The song was louder now, the wind carrying it from the tier below or adjacent, Cass couldn’t tell anymore. “Then help me understand,” she said. “As a friend.”

  In the time since they met, she and the brooding warrior had developed an easy familiarity between them. In following Raub from Yewnyr both times, Cass understood with a sudden and unexplained clarity that she had followed a deeper urge to push past what they were and into territory unfamiliar. But as she saw that truth, she further understood that she didn’t yet know the name of that urge, or why it had spoken to her that first time two years before. She didn’t know why it spoke to her a week before today, when she awoke before dawn and met him at the Free City’s Thirty-League Gate.

  “My friends are dead,” Raub whispered. “I killed them all…”

  The pain in those words hung in the empty space between them. The wind was blowing hard now, a shroud of golden leaves shimmering dead in the moon’s-light. The terrace rocked gently like the deck of a great ship, its foundation limbs shifting beneath their feet.

  Cass searched for words, but none came. Raub was silent for a long while. When he finally spoke, his voice carried a weariness beyond any darkness they had walked through. Greater than the self-destruction by which he once hoped to burn that darkness away.

  “Our road together is done, I think.”

  He turned from her without a word, the hood pulled up as he tossed a bag to her feet. She knew it was coin by its sound as it hit. “For whatever debts I owe you,” he said, and the insult struck with a force stronger than any blow.

  He didn’t look back, Cassatra staring in stark disbelief. She felt an anger close her voice off, felt a wordless challenge rising in the shadow of that anger. But before she could move, a voice rang out from the darkness behind her.

  “You killed them!”

  The words were Ilvani, dark and raw as the face they issued from. The gate they had climbed over was open now, an aging matron there. Her hair was the white of new snow, her features shadowed by the light of soft-flaring evenlamps in the hands of the figures behind her.

  Cass hadn’t heard them approach. She hadn’t heard the gate open beyond the screen of green walls, but she slipped behind one of those walls now. It was impossible to get a full count of the bodies that swarmed in that light, but it was a number she didn’t like. They were surging forward now, silent as death except for the hiss of their footsteps through the leaf-littered terrace floor. All their focus was on Raub, Cass watching for any sign that she’d been spotted as they pushed past her shadowed shelter. As she crouched low, her hand made its way instinctively to the Reaper at her belt.

  With the words, Raub stumbled back as if he’d been struck, a fear in him that Cass had never seen before. He wrapped the cloak tight around himself, fumbling to keep his weapons and the black-shrouded shortsword from sight as the crowd circled, the aged woman stepping close.

  “You, boy!” she hissed through cold tears. “You think these lost years can make difference enough to hide you from the kin of those whose blood you spilled?” With a speed that belied her age, she shot her hand forth, tore the hood from Raub’s head. “Talrab, you called yourself, but you were Thrasus Talmaraub and your father’s son!”

  Cass shifted back quietly, still unseen. But though she waited for Raub to speak, he tried simply to slip past the old woman, only to find his way blocked by the crowd suddenly pushing forward. Surrounding him as if in response to some unseen signal.

  In his eyes, Cass saw a sorrow that cut her as sharp as any knife.

  “Your sire lies in shadow now and you despoil his honor by returning as a thief in the night! His line broken by your betrayal! No son to sing thilanatir!”

  Cass’s understanding of Ilvani was good, but the last was a word she didn’t know. Ghost’s song, she translated it as, but she didn’t know its meaning.

  “You cannot touch him now!” The woman’s voice was a sibilant hiss, a lifetime’s rage twisted through it. “You cannot claim their memories as you claimed their lives in the name of dark ambition!”

  With sudden force, Raub pushed his way past the wall of figures closest to him, knocking three to the ground as he leaped to the fountain. There was a frenzy of movement as the crowd surged inward, the flash of more than one blade seen in the chaos. Raub went over them, hit a low branch of the dead elm, and was climbing before they could reach him. The Clearmoon’s light caught him, slanting through the faint screen of higher branches above.

  Cass was on her feet, shifting carefully to keep him in view as she melted back into the deep shadows. From the topmost branch of the elm, Raub jumped for empty air, snagged the lowest of the greater overhanging branches, and was climbing fast. His cloak billowed around him like the wings of a ha
wk in flight.

  She saw him stop. She saw him seek her out beyond the edge of the chaos, the crowd raging below. The woman’s voice was joined by a dozen others, screaming the same name, unfamiliar to Cass.

  “Talmaraub! You killed them! They followed you and your vain dream and found only death in the end!”

  From his high perch, Raub met Cass’s gaze for just a moment, then he was gone into the trees. He vanished to the shadows ahead of a knife flashing harmlessly past, a half-dozen figures attempting to follow his ascent. They would never catch him, Cass knew. She had seen Raub climb before, a sureness to his movement above ground that she didn’t share.

  In the midst of the chaos, against the wailing of the woman’s voice for six years’ grieving and a son lost, Cass realized that the distant music was gone.

  As suddenly as it began, it was done. The white-haired woman was on her knees, her wailing voice reaching Cass with a knife-edge sting that told her its pain was all too real. But in the movements of those who comforted the woman, those who had moved against Raub, she saw a strange slowness.

  All the rage of a moment before had been drained from them suddenly, as if a tap was turned off. Cass saw anger flicker to uncertainty, then to indifferent sorrow as the members of the erstwhile mob stared at each other, uncertain as to what they should do, where they should go.

  Their words were real enough, Cass piecing together a half-dozen conversations within earshot. A half-dozen versions of the story of what had happened six years before.

  The bravos who thought to climb after Raub were already returning, one of them dropping to the ground a dozen strides from where she stood. Without hesitation, Cass stepped out from the shadows, walked calmly toward him. He was a smith to judge by the black of his hands and the tight ropes of muscle wrapping his arms. The hunting blade in his hand was one of the long knives of the forest Ilvani, weighted for throwing and as deadly as a wyvern’s sting.