A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Read online

  Even under the rule of the Lothelecan, the Ajelasti made sport of assassination like no people before or since. Military history had been Charan’s single point of interest in his lessons as a child, forgoing languages, astronomy, natural history, literature and all else in favor of the endless recitation of organized bloodshed that his father’s military advisors held in seemingly endless supply. Wars they themselves had seen, political uprisings before their time, endlessly talked of and analyzed. Tales of generals and the nobles who ruled them murdered in more glorious and disturbing ways than Charan would have thought possible.

  His father had always spoken proudly of his son’s predilection for the bloody politics of history. He found himself wondering now if the khanan’s opinion had changed in the last few moments of his life.

  Their father’s spirit was still locked within his already rotting flesh. Or so it was reckoned by the beliefs of the temple, and by the magic of the priests that could have enervated that dead flesh to life with the ancient rites. For people such as his sister, those rites proved the renewed presence of the once-dead gods. Banished by Empire and lost to the faithless but never truly gone, the priests said. For Charan, however, the rites did the opposite, and he was always quick to point out that the priests’ magic functioned just as well under the Empire’s godless ochlocracy as it did now.

  “Captain or castellan,” Charan said idly. “Or a queen’s consort, or a king’s lover. Killed and sealed up behind stone. Or sealed alive, more likely. Open up the old tunnels beneath any castle, you’ll find more like him.”

  Charan saw his sister make the death-sign again. He let her hear him laugh. “You spend your life afraid of shadows, you soon fear the sun and moons that shed them.”

  “I make the mortal warding for you,” she said calmly. “Not for me.”

  Charan felt a flush of heat rise at his chest, twisting up to his cheeks. In his sister’s voice, there was a sudden edge that he had heard before and learned to fear. Something had changed in the two dozen words that just passed between them, and he had no idea what it was.

  “Do I look afraid, sister?”

  “The dead cast their shadows even in the absence of light,” Jalina said, not answering. Her face was pale in the glow of the evenlamp, not meeting Charan’s dark gaze. The water at the ruined duct was a steady rain now, dripping in an uneven curtain against the stones. “He’s been here all along, turning this place to a tomb. You let the dead witness your corruption, their spirit becomes a part of that corruption, tainting it further. Tainting you. You should be afraid.”

  He understood then. He cursed himself silently, even as he angrily conceded Jalina credit for this thing she had hidden, blindsiding him expertly. His focus on getting their father through the castle, down into his makeshift sewer tomb kept his thoughts scattered. He should have seen it. Would have seen it under any other circumstances.

  He laughed in an attempt to cover for the slip, knew that it was already too late. “So my soul is tainted, is it?”

  “Brother, your soul was tainted from the moment of your birth.”

  At the grate above, Jalina had told him she wouldn’t descend, her revulsion all too real. But she hadn’t bothered asking about their dark destination. Hadn’t needed to, Charan realized now, because she already knew where they were going.

  “Your darkness brought you to this place from the time you were nine years old,” she said simply. “It made you bring a long line of serving girls with you, each discarded with silver in hand when you were done with them. When they had finished pretending they were me.”

  The words carried themselves with an ease that made Charan knew she had waited years to speak them. He only smiled in return, tried desperately to judge her true tone, her mood. Something was happening. A plan whose foundations had been laid long ago. Disrupted now by the death of their father, he guessed. Put into motion early. Or was the khanan’s death merely the catalyst? A moment of disaster long waited for, in whose aftermath Jalina would act?

  He went for the feint by instinct, summoned up a suitable degree of chagrin that he could pretend was a response to her discovering his secret.

  “If only I had known all those years how much the pretending would pale against the reality of you.” He stepped close, the sound of his breathing loud even over the hiss of water as Jalina watched. A shiver threaded through her. He moved his head down to kiss the nape of her neck beneath the tightly drawn auburn hair.

  He felt her push back against him, too quickly. He lost track of what happened next.

  Steel flashed as she spun away from him, his own knife in his hand somehow. They locked guards at the first strike, then Jalina was fading back, footsteps splashing clumsily as her blade slashed past Charan’s neck. He slid to let it miss him, parried the next blow, returned with one of his own that she caught and twisted past, behind him suddenly.

  Where Jalina crouched, her eyes were bright with the fear he recognized. “I knew it would end this way,” she whispered.

  Charan’s hand was shaking, the battered blade of his knife weaving points of bright fire in the half-light. He tried to trace back the two dozen heartbeats just past, but his sight, his mind and memory were the same blur of red.

  He had drawn on her, he thought. But he wouldn’t have. Couldn’t have. The evenlamp was in the water behind him. He had dropped it in expectation, needing to free his other hand for balance. Impossible. He shook his head, saw his sister flinch in expectation of another strike.

  The feeling he was forever afraid to name rooted deep in his chest. He felt the scent and the sight of her overwhelm his memory.

  He felt the pain that her words made, felt the fear in her that was the knowledge that her brother had tried to kill her rather than lose her. The knowledge that he would try again. He felt the weight of the knife in his hand.

  At the conduit they had torn free of ceiling and wall, a surge of black water exploded as shadow and white foam. The sea-channel had tipped past the aqueduct’s unseen halfway point and was flowing steady now, pressing in with a steady hiss of salt air and the distant moaning of the pounding surf beyond the harbor’s breakwater stones.

  Charan felt for the hot shard of anger at his breast, cooled it with slow breathing. He lowered his knife as much as he dared without compromising his ability to parry, wasn’t sure the notched and blunted blade could even withstand the force of an attack.

  “You are the one they will watch,” he called, voice as clear as he could make it. “Jalina, whose beauty and grace will redefine an empire in mourning. While all the while, I will be your right hand, silent and invisible and devoted to your bidding. It was fate that brought you first from mother’s womb, because you are the one who can lead. Some of us are fated to follow.”

  Jalina tried to laugh, voice ringing out like a cascade of silver over the dank echo of water on stone. With sudden dread, Charan realized why. He cursed himself for the slowness of his wit. His father’s murder had rattled him. His father’s death. He corrected himself absently, felt the weight of it press down on him all the same.

  “You’ve spoken those words before,” his sister said.

  Charan felt the memory of the White Tower twist through him, hot wires beneath his skin. He shook his head but kept his silence.

  “Do you think often on that night?” she whispered. “Does the memory come unbidden? And knowing now that it ends, do you feel sorry for yourself, brother?” Her voice was twisted through with a honeyed sweetness that brought the taste of bile to his throat. “Cut off from your carnal sanctuary? Denied this forbidden tryst?”

  “It was more than that,” Charan said, and he felt his tongue suddenly turn to lead even as the words were formed.

  “Whatever you thought it was, Charan, you were wrong.”

  She struck with the speed of a brush-viper, too fast to see. Charan managed to twist away in the barest nick of time, felt her knife’s broken guard tear his tunic and the flesh beneath. And in the sudden
blossom of that pain, his only thought was that he would never know whether her renewed fury was a sign that she believed his words. Or the final proof that she didn’t.

  The flash of blades between them was a steel-grey rain as they fought across the shadows of the rapidly flooding chamber. All the effort and eager practice of two childhoods lost to the training floor of their father’s war-masters showed now in the grim set of Charan’s mouth, in the smoldering light of his sister’s eyes. They hit fast, unforgiving, a succession of killing strokes turned wide by the narrowest of margins. Both their blades dulled by stone but hitting hard enough to punch through skin and bone if they hit, Charan knew. Brother and sister striking like the twin serpents they truly were.

  Charan had no illusion about having the speed that would be necessary to disarm his sister, just as he was sure she harbored no vain hope that she might wear him down. A terrible passion twisted between them now that replaced the stolen emotion of the time just passed, of the months before, of the five breathless years since they had first taken each other in the silent aftermath of their mother’s ash-rites.

  All their lives, mother and father had been the twin poles around which so much turned. With their mother’s death, they had found a measure of peace within each other.

  With their father’s death, they had found something else, it seemed.

  But even as he thought it, Charan fought to recognize this rage, this sudden and inescapable fury that twisted between them now with each pass of the blade. A new emptiness, he thought. A space between them that he had never felt before. But in feeling it now, he wondered whether it was a thing that had always been there, hidden by choice and the sweet darkness that cloaked them both, night after long night.

  He was breathing hard, heard the roaring in his ears that was more than just the pounding of his blood. His feet were numb, water calf-deep now where the inflow churned it to black foam.

  For all the late-childhood trysts that brought him here, Charan had never lingered belowground to watch the high tide cleanse the trap and the sewer channels beyond. He had no idea how long it would take for the water to fill the chamber, but he could guess that the end was coming quickly.

  Jalina glanced to one side, avoiding the worst of the spray. Time enough for Charan to move. He drove hard for her heart, couldn’t risk pulling the punch of the killing stroke, but even still, he caught her knife instead as it flashed up to parry, impossibly fast. He screamed as he forced his hand around, felt hers twist against it, sliding to catch her knife with his guard and snap it. The shattered blade caught him above the eye as it flashed past, a spray of red blinding him. He lost his footing for the moment it took Jalina to spin in the haze of water, up to her knees now, one leg out and coming up to connect a kick that nearly broke his jaw.

  He blacked out for a moment. Fought his way back to consciousness even as his own knife dropped from his hand to hit the water with a dead-black splash. Jalina was there, dropping to hands and knees with a shout of triumph, but the blade was already beyond her reach in the dark water. Charan stumbled through the fast-flowing surge of the sea, tried to grab his sister, but she was rolling away from him, wet silk like oil against her lean body as sharpened fingernails raked his face.

  He swung at her, missed beneath her subtle movement as she spun again and drove her fist into his side, just missing the tight knot of nerves that would have dropped him. They shifted past each other, clumsy and freezing in the rising water as they attacked hand to hand, neither managing to land a blow, their moves too familiar. From the long years of training, from the shorter time of the dark trysts in the White Tower’s empty halls, each of their bodies was a map that the other knew too well.

  Their father’s corpse was floating, a slick of blood spreading across the oily blackness of the thrashing tide. The evenlamp was underwater, its golden light cut to a rippling silver sheen across dark walls. Even in the grim shadows that the body threw to the ceiling, Charan could see that the ladderway was all but gone beneath the roar of dark water at the inflow, no way to even get close enough to climb it now. Before the inflow, the ancient corpse had been torn apart by pressure, blasted to a shadow-swirling storm of bone and rotting cloth.

  And in that ancient figure’s fractured hands, previously unseen where the shroud of dust and cobwebs had hidden them, a pair of bare-bladed daggers gleamed in the evenlamp’s faint glow.

  As one, they moved. Charan got there first, only to have Jalina drive the full force of her fist into the side of his neck as his focus drifted from her for just a moment. He saw a haze of red, felt the cold as he hit the water, but then something warm was in his hand and he was up, thrashing side to side to clear wet hair from his eyes.

  His sister stood across from him, brown eyes unblinking, a dagger in her hand to match the one in his. Razor-edged stilettos, each set with a wickedly clawed blood-edge that looked as if it might saw through bone with enough force behind it. Their twisted guards were shaped to suggest the flow of water, each set with a diamond at its heart, but one gleaming black, the other brilliant white.

  In Jalina’s hand, the metal of the dagger was the blue-white of the hottest forge fire, glowing now as if it was fresh-struck in her living grasp. The blade that Charan held tight was black steel that seemed to mark the emptiness between them, unwavering in his hand despite the pain and the blood-dark haze still hanging at the edge of his sight.

  The water was at his groin now, his legs numb as the two of them held there, an arm’s breadth apart. Both ready to move with the final strike that would spell the end.

  Charan felt a strength surge through him then. He felt all the rage, all the uncertainty that had been set in his heart, all of it focused and made sharper. He felt the weight of his father’s death leave him, felt the pain of his sister’s love torn away like a shroud of leaves on the wind. He felt nothing, felt everything. Felt alive. Jalina’s eyes blazed, her teeth set in a hissing smile that told him she felt it, too.

  Charan felt something touch him, felt a bond he couldn’t explain stretch out across that empty space of longing and laughter and pain. Something stronger even than the forbidden thirst of the blood and the mind that had brought them to the tower earlier that night, then brought them to this black-water tomb.

  When he was nine years old, he had slipped into the Red Tower of courtly magic by dark to steal two talismans from a young vizier just graduated from the apprentice’s suites. Charan knew the relics would be missed, of course, but he had already planted rumors of a taste for gambling and the temple virgins in the vizier’s name. After a well-placed bribe to the castellan’s office saw the young mage arrested, Charan had made a point of not paying attention to his particularly unpleasant fate.

  For almost a year, he waited for a night of full Darkmoon rising blood-red with no light of Clearmoon in the sky, as the crumbling scroll that accompanied the pieces in their leather case had bade him. When the time came, he drugged the servants outside his sister’s rooms, stole into Jalina’s bedchamber. He slipped one of the frail star-silver pieces beneath her pillow.

  Then all that endless night, as he had longed to do since he was old enough to remember thought itself, Charan slipped inside his sister’s dreams.

  A sudden rush of understanding swept through his mind with the force of the sea, surging toward his waist.

  In his hand, along his arm, in his ear and mind and only for him, the black blade sang.

  Power threaded through him, touching and amplifying the power of the white blade as its own song rose. It was a thing beyond words, beyond thought. A power he and his sister shared suddenly, a nexus of energy that threaded through them. Their bodies turned to silk, scoured by the warm desert wind.

  The haze that was all that remained of the broken body was a faint outline beneath the water, but even as his gaze flicked there, Charan was moving suddenly, faster than thought. He sensed a blur of blades, felt twin arcs of white and shadow slash between them as he and Jalina struck, parr
ied, a fast strike caught and spun off a crossguard, the return seeking flesh and striking empty air, again and again.

  His vision sharpened in the darkness, a warmth flooding through him. But even as it did, he heard his own voice harsh in his head. Fool, he called himself, and a chill twisted through him, helped him focus. Smarter men than he had felt their lives cut short by the dark dweomer of a cursed blade. Relics left for the finding by those their fell magic had already killed.

  He felt the passage of time slow around him. Felt a wholeness that filled his mind and forced out all thought but the memory of that perfect connection he had once felt between his sister and himself.

  He saw Jalina start as if she sensed his thought. He heard her voice, but in the haze of shadow that suddenly shrouded his sight, his mind, he couldn’t be sure whether she spoke, or whether it was her very act of thought tracing through him, or whether he dreamed it in the end.

  “Whatever you thought it was, you were wrong.”

  He parried, spun the black blade through a feint as a blur of shadow, struck hard as he slipped beneath Jalina’s return strike. He felt the flesh and bone of her breast yield with the softness of sand. But even as it did, pain like white-hot fire flared at his own chest, and a blade that wasn’t there shattered his collarbone and drenched his freezing-wet shirt with a gout of hot blood.

  As he had tried and failed to do ever since that dark night, Charan remembered. As he tried to do each time he pulled the shadow over the two of them, slipping into the wordless space where they were one, he felt that wonder of touching his sister’s mind.

  Charan screamed, scrambling back as his blade pulled free from Jalina. His hand was locked to the haft by searing pain, teeth set against it. His sister’s pale face was a mask of fear as she fought her way back through the flood, clutching at the jagged rent in her tunic to reveal no blood there, the pale skin unbroken.