A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (19 page)

“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 finished 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
tried. 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.”

“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.