A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (23 page)

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.