A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Read online

  As disturbing as that thought was, he knew with unasked certainty that he would do the deed without hesitation if it came to it. One death on his hands and he was still shaking. He would have expected that to make the next harder.

  Through the wide-open windows, the heat of day was finally past, broken by the dark breeze of the bay. Moon’s-light gleamed silver on the water, gold on the towers and minarets of Sasaerin, jewel of Ajaeltha. The city’s sloping peaks of clustered spires rose across from them as he and Jalina descended, working from the castle’s upper tiers to the servants’ levels below.

  Luck or fate was on their side, it seemed. Charan could hear slaves in the kitchen along the final stretch of darkened corridor, but the cutting room adjacent was empty. He caught the familiar steel tang of sanguine air as he thrust open the damp-swollen door, saw a half-dozen yearling buffalo dressed and hanging in the darkness. He was much younger the last time he had any reason to pass this way, but a quick inspection showed that the wide black grate at the center of the stained stone floor still hadn’t been repaired in all the time since.

  When they had dragged their father’s body inside, Charan pushed the door shut, kicked a wedge of splintered bone from the detritus of the floor into place along its foot to jam it. He leaned across a dark-stained table, needed to rest his aching back a moment. Across from him, Jalina limped as she paced, staring around her.

  “You’re a fool,” she said at last, as he knew she would.

  “I’ll take that under advisement.”

  “You think they won’t search for him here? Or were you planning to cut and dress him for feast and hope no one notices?”

  Charan moved past her to drop to his knees. He gripped the stinking grate, ignored the heady slime of blood and offal that clung to its corroded bars as he shifted it from practiced memory. A particular twist, a specific positioning that would disengage it from the stones that surrounded them. He felt it come loose, lifted it carefully. Below, the mouth of a narrow well opened up to darkness.

  The khanan’s stiffening legs were forced into that darkness only with effort, but Charan needed to use the steel and gold scepter to shatter the bones of his father’s splayed arms and wide-set shoulders. A half-dozen blows forced the torso into the space of the drain, the broken arms up in a dark gesture of surrender as Charan pushed down with his foot. He kicked a half-dozen times to force the mangled corpse through, watching as it slipped away finally with a sickening lurch.

  He dropped the scepter after it, heard the faint echo a moment later as both it and the body hit water below.

  “The sewers?” Jalina said from behind. “They’ll search every sewer and tunnel within a league of the castle to find him.

  “If you insist on telling me things I already know, put them to a tune at least.” With a flourish, Charan stood back, beckoning her toward the open sluice drain. The day’s wash water was still slick on the stones, dripping at the edges like a rank rain.

  “You’re mad,” she said.

  “And a fool, apparently, and proud of both. Get in.”

  “I will not…”

  “You will,” Charan said, “whether you climb or whether I drop you.” Smiling, he advanced on his sister as one moved on a disobedient dog, saw her flinch despite her own best effort. “This isn’t done yet, but when it is, you’ll have an empire to rule. The scent of blood is the first thing you need to get used to.”

  He held her ashen gaze, felt the depth of the anger there. Anger and something else, but he had no time to try to read it.

  Not fear, he knew. Of all his sister’s moods, that alone was the one he would always recognize.

  Jalina turned away. She stepped to the mouth of the black well.

  “There’s a ladder,” Charan said, more softly. “The smell is worse above. Hold your breath to the bottom, you’ll be fine.”

  The narrow chute was roughly chiseled, a wide drain descending what might have been the length of two dozen paces. As his sister lowered herself, Charan saw her find the ladder, its rungs inexplicably extending a hand’s-breadth from ancient stone with no sign of support. Steel cylinders descended the length of the shaft, thin as a finger and impossibly strong, hung there and protected from corrosion by the unseen strength of spellcraft. He had stolen them from his father’s arcane armories on a whim when he was a boy, even before he had any idea what use he might eventually put them to.

  She needed both hands to cling carefully as she descended. Charan went one-handed, the other holding an evenlamp he had taken from the corridor along the way, its eternal cold flame casting the glow of an unnatural sunrise across the stones. He slid the grate back into place from below as he made his way down.

  The air was cloyingly damp, Charan’s light shimmering on water below them. He heard Jalina jump to wet stone as she reached the bottom, her footsteps loud but steady. He was behind her a moment later. Their father’s shrouded body lay in a shallow puddle of black water. Charan stepped over it carefully.

  The ceiling was barely tall enough for him to stand beneath, vaulted stone holding the weight of ground and castle above, slick with moisture and the sheen of black mold. True to his word, the air within the sewer passage was clean, scoured by the salt tang of the sea. The broad tunnel was of finished stone but had no entrance, no exit, no doors. The well they had just descended opened up as a rough chute in the arched ceiling. Midway along the walls, a dozen vents opened up to darkness, each as wide across as a child’s shoulders.

  On the wall beneath the ladderway, a larger grate opened up, as wide to the eye as the drain in the cutting room above. Charan stepped close to it, Jalina staring, her expression unreadable. “You’ve been here before?”

  Charan ignored her. “Look here,” he said instead.

  The bars of the slime-slick grate were set at cross-angles a hand’s-width apart. Beyond them, a shadowed tunnel of cracked and blackened brick opened up, a grated aqueduct whose mouth dripped water in an intermittent rhythm. A distant pulsing roar echoed from the darkness.

  “It connects to the harbor, beyond the deep docks,” Charan said. “Seawater flows in at high tide to clean out this and all the other sewer traps beneath the castle. As the tide turns, it empties again. We remove the grate. We ensure the body can’t be identified.” He felt his hand absently stray to his knife, forced it away. “Let the sea take what we leave of him. Consign him to the depths.”

  The grate was black sea-iron, strong as crucible steel but untouched by rust. The stones around it were weaker, however, their mortar eaten away by age and the salt-rot of the sea. Charan pulled a chunk free with little effort, tossed it to the black water where his father’s body lay.

  “Tear a stone wall down with our bare hands?” In Jalina’s voice, he heard a familiar disdain that told him she had secretly appraised and approved of the plan. “We’ll be here a week,” she said. “They’ll be looking for him and us before we’re halfway finished.”

  Charan smiled as he suddenly grabbed for the wall, pulled himself up as the jet of water he had heard approaching broke through the bars. He watched it crash across their father, breaking along the stone floor to make Jalina scramble back. It pooled in a slick haze, ankle deep now. The inflow returned to a trickle, steady against the distant howl of the surf.

  Charan set the evenlamp on an outcropping near the ceiling. “Then we’ll need to work more quickly than that,” he said.

  They labored together wordlessly, side by side in the wet gloom, knives hacking at the crumbling mortar that held twisted bars to weathered stone. At intervals, Charan struck the grate hard with his father’s scepter, gold plating and gems worth a rogue’s fortune torn away with each echoing blow. Jalina glanced above her each time he hit, but he knew from experience that no sound would make its way up the dark well to the castle above.

  His shoulders were already aching, but he wouldn’t let Jalina see it. He watched her as he worked because she was refusing to meet his gaze, focused wholly on the digging. Sh
e paused only when one end of her knife’s guard snapped off at her attempt to use it as a lever. The death-sign she made at regular intervals didn’t slow her down. One hand working, the other with fingers twisting to ward off the fear that he knew her father’s body was inspiring in her. She would whisper names each time, a faint trace of movement at her pale lips. Benedictions and the names of deities long dead.

  “The gods have already had their say in the matter of the khanan’s life,” Charan said quietly. “What do you hope they add to it now?”

  Jalina’s eyes narrowed as she redoubled her attack against the ruined wall. “Mock my faith all you wish.”

  “I don’t mock your faith. I’m thinking I should embrace it. Seek the guidance of sun and moons as did the khanans of old.” He twisted his knife, feeling for and carefully avoiding its breaking point as he dug his way into crumbling stone.

  The fear had been in Jalina when their mother died. Charan felt it that day when her hand found his at the edge of the funeral bier. He felt it that night when he drew her to him for the first time, yielding when he pressed his mouth to hers. He felt it as he led her through silence and shadow up to the White Tower that had been their mother’s court, empty since the week of mourning, its servants feted and drugged and burned still living with their empress-consort on the pyre.

  “The khanans of old Ajelast were masters of sun and moons.” Jalina took the bait, as he knew she would. “The god-emperors captured the magics of the heavens, and with it built a world the likes of which will never be seen again.”

  Twenty centuries before, Ajelast had been built on the bones of the great empire of Nesana before it died out in fits of corruption and bloody magical war long ago in its homeland across the sea. In an age where the secrets of magic were long divided between the power of life and the power of mana, the animys and the arcane, it was the hierophants of Nesana who had married and perfected those disparate sorceries. Those same hierophants had later been the power behind the ancient empire of Eria that first bound the lands of the western Leagin as one.

  “Your precious Empire cast down that faith and made all Ajaeltha slaves to others’ ambition,” Jalina said, defiant. “Even as they stole the power that was once ours. Those who revere the Lothelecan are the dogs never knowing any life but the search for scraps at their masters’ feet.”

  With one final thrust, the last mortar holding in the left side of the grate fell away beneath Charan’s knife. His father’s blood still clung to the grooves of the blade, he saw. “The khanans of old Ajelast married blood to blood. Brother to sister.”

  A darkness fell across Jalina’s face like a mask. She turned all her attention to the keystone at the upper corner of the grate that had loosened but would not yet move. He stepped in behind her, slipped his hand in to grasp it. She flinched as he pressed against her.

  “It is not for anyone else to tell us what we can and cannot do. Not anymore.” Charan’s voice was a faint echo over the shadowed rasp of stone on stone. “I do not claim to know the will of heavens or earth or what gods live above or below our own lives. I only know what I believe in, and what I believe in is you.”

  “It’s over, Charan.”

  There was a resounding crack as the crumbling keystone came loose, a shower of dust and mortar rubble following it. The slow flow of water was disrupted for a moment as the grate lurched. Charan was suddenly very cold.

  Jalina threaded herself through his arms and away while he stood unmoving. He watched the stone fall absently from his hand to strike black water.

  “We walk this path together,” he said, but his voice trailed off against the dripping hiss of the shattered duct. He fought to speak, but his sister’s words filled his mind and drove all else out.

  He had expected those words, but not here. Had known from the first that this moment would come one day. Jalina pushed along the wall as splashing footsteps, turned back toward him. The brown eyes burned with contempt. The taste of metal came to his mouth again.

  “We walk together,” he said. “Now more than ever. We pledged oaths…”

  “We were children then,” Jalina said, and Charan once more heard the child she had been thread through the words. An echo in her voice that cut him. “Children’s oaths mean nothing. Set the past behind you, brother.”

  “We are bound,” he said. He sheathed his dulled knife to seize the bars, pulled with all the strength his rising anger gave him so that he wouldn’t have to look at her. He heard stone and brick give way, felt the muscles knot across his back and shoulders as the bent and ruined grate shifted in his grasp. “Now more than ever. We…”

  “There is no we. Not anymore.”

  With a rumbling echo of steel and stone, the grate came loose, and the response Charan would have made to his sister was choked off behind that sound and the certainty he heard in her. An argument, he would have expected, could have dealt with. A carefully crafted distraction, his sister jockeying as she so often did for any subtle advantage in the eternal tension that hung between them.

  She had sensed the fear in him. Seeing deeper into him, perhaps, than even he was capable of. Using that fear just as he should have expected she would.

  He dropped the grate to the pool of the floor, heard its drowned echo ring out. “Father only just cold, and already you speak with his voice,” he said evenly. “He has no say in what we do anymore…”

  “What we did,” she said, all stress on the past. “What we did, what we were, is why he died.”

  He felt it then. Saw it like a mirror held up to his own uncertainty. She was testing him, he realized. The fear he had learned to recognize twisted through her words, hiding a truth he could almost see. A thing he could extract and claim if he was careful, as he had been so many times before.

  The evenlamp on its shelf shed its light behind him. He moved slowly, Jalina wrapped within his shadow. A hand on her shoulder made her flinch. Then slipping across, rising to her cheek.

  “If your gods do exist, it was their hand that guided my blade today. They have brought you here. Placed you at the apex of the power that was promised you the day you were born. They have made you their agent in Ajaeltha now, and placed me here at your side.”

  Charan didn’t see the arch of the ceiling shudder and split above his head until he felt Jalina’s hands on his arm.

  With a strength he had never suspected in her, his sister pulled him off his feet, dragging him backward land atop her across the floor as the age-weakened vault collapsed on the spot where he had been standing. The noise was an echoing roar in the narrow confines of the sewer’s stone walls, a blast of stale air slamming past to blind him with grit and black mold.

  When he could open his eyes, the chamber was silent once more. The evenlamp had fallen when Jalina saved him, its light shimmering now where it was half-submerged in the ebb and flow of black water. The scepter and the grate were both gone, buried beneath a jumbled fall of shattered brick and rubble rising knee high. A pall of ash-grey dust hung over it, twisting like storm clouds in the uneven gloom.

  “My thanks,” Charan said awkwardly. He felt his sister push him away as he stood.

  Jalina moved back to crouch against the wall, eyes closed and breathing hard. He stepped toward her, touched her shoulder. She didn’t flinch this time, but when he put his hand to her waist, she shrugged him off, turned so she could slip past him.

  Charan saw the ashen eyes widen, flicking past his gaze to something behind him. The fear he recognized again. He crouched low as he spun by instinct, knife in hand.

  At the corner of the haphazard mound of rubble, half-buried and barely visible beneath the fall of stones and shattered brick, a body sprawled.

  Charan scooped up the evenlamp, brought it to bear on the apex of the collapsed wall. Through a shattered fissure, he saw darkness opening up above the narrow confines of the sewer chamber. A rising passageway of worked stone, closed off from the trap at some point in the past. Or perhaps an ancient sublevel, be
neath which the sewers had been extended when the foundations of the castle were first laid.

  “Who is it?” Jalina was at his side, her fingers trembling as they made the death-sign. Despite himself, Charan fought the hope that those fingers would seek his when they were done, watching as his sister’s hand went to her breast instead, clenched tightly there.

  The mummified form was the black of weathered silver, wrapped in a torn shroud of rotted cloak and twisted ropes of cobweb. “Dead,” Charan answered.

  “I can see what it is. I asked who.”

  “Death makes all the answers the same.”

  It wasn’t the sight of death that his sister feared, Charan knew. It was the spirits of the past. The superstitions of children and old men were the foundations on which the faith of her once-dead gods was built. Their church had been resurrected a generation before in the aftermath of the distant Empire’s fall, and while he heard the liturgy as often and as endlessly as she, it had never amounted to any more than any other folk tale in his mind. He had thought his sister of the same mind, once.

  When their mother died, Jalina had changed.

  “Imperial Ajelasti,” Charan said softly as he bent close to the body. Jalina gave him a quizzical look. “Judging by the age of him.”

  Ajelast, whose ancient empire was the foundation on which Ajaeltha was raised, had been the most bitterly contended of the lands destined to become the Elder Kingdoms. Long after Nesana was only a memory, Ajelast stayed strong. First of the Elder Kingdoms to fight the encroach of Empire. Last to fall to the Lothelecan’s iron embrace, or so the official histories said. More accurate accounts told less flattering tales of the complicity of Ajelast’s last free khanans in the Empire’s final assault against the independence of the east.

  However, all tales spoke consistently in describing how Ajelast rose in the aftermath of the fall of Empire as Ajaeltha. A new empire forged in blood and steel by their father’s grandfather. A strength for rule in their line that Charan saw in his sister in each waking moment, but which for some reason he had never warmed to himself.