The darkness to Raub’s features that had long set him apart from his people’s fairness was his mother’s. She was a wanderer, who sung him childhood stories of her travels through a dozen exotic lands. She had dwelt in all the Ilvanrand, she said, breaking nobles’ hearts in each of those high courts of the forest Ilvani. But then she saw the Yewnwood and felt it claim her own heart.
Raub was never closer to her than when she was dying, and she had made him understand how the most significant artifacts of each life were central to the Ilvani rites.
An artisan’s tools will be laid in his lifeless hands as he passes from flesh to dust, she said. A ranger’s bow, a hunter’s rope, a warrior’s blade. All the essence of life is bound up in the connection between life and the world. The things we do, the things we touch, become the memories of our actions. Impressions are imprinted on the world to create the world-memory that endures, and which will be our story when we are gone.
He felt his mother’s presence around him now as a dark haze of memory. And as he had been on the last night he came to this place, fleeing one step ahead of his father’s forces and the order to bring him down dead or alive, Raub was grateful that his mother and her grace had passed before she could see what his father would become.
The shroud of glowing leaves within which the bier closed itself off was sacrosanct. It was the mark and sign of all the magic of this place, and of all the history and tradition upheld by a thousand generations of the dead consumed here.
With all the potency of that tradition pounding in his heart, Raub stepped up to his father’s bier. He drove the shortsword down with all the strength of the rage that was in him, the decaying skull shattering beneath its point. He recoiled and hit again, head to foot, digging in with his heels as he slashed broadly in a single blinding-fast motion. Shroud and bier and body were hacked in two before him, this last vestige of his father’s life little more than dry grass before the scythe.
With savage fury, Raub dismembered his father’s corpse with the sword that was the dead man’s badge of office, and whose enduring history his father had tainted with a lifetime of lies.
Valaendar was the ancestral blade of the rulers of Anthila, whose realm was the forest frontier for five days’ ride to north and south. Under the Human sphere’s thousand-year Imperial rule of the surrounding Elder Kingdoms, the black shortsword was little more than an heirloom. A remembrance of past glory, and of Ilvani empires against which the fifteen hundred years of the Lothelecan was the short-lived rise and fall of all other Human dominions.
The magic of the Ilvani was the magic of the unseen world, and by that magic did the necropolis reclaim the spirit of life and return it to mana once more. Body and bone, flesh and jewel, steel and stone were laid atop the bier for ten full cycles of the Clearmoon. And for each facet of the lost life that belonged to the dead, those who survived them would sing the ghostsong.
In the aftermath of Empire’s fall four decades past, the blade Valaendar had become more than a symbol. By the time his father was elected seneschal in the year of Raub’s birth, the power of the black shortsword had been restored by careful study and spellcraft. The old magic that would have been prohibited under the Empire, or so his father railed at every opportunity.
“Destiny denied,” he called it, but it would be long years before Raub understood how the black blade’s true destiny had been corrupted by his father’s ambition.
That night six years past, they sought to seize that power. Raub and the four who pledged their lives alongside him, then lost those lives because he hadn’t realized how far his father’s malignant power had spread. Extending in ways that even the kin-faithful who worshiped the history of Valaendar would never understand.
As the black sword flashed in his hand, Raub froze.
He stepped back suddenly, staring at the grim destruction before him. The wind had slackened, his breathing the only sound.
Where he had hacked through the rotting remains on the bier, he saw his father’s blackened hands. He recognized the golden ring by which his mother had been betrothed and the silver band that marked her death. Yet those hands had clutched only each other, crossed and clasped across the now-sundered chest whose wrappings were already turned to dust by the magic of this place.
Other artifacts were spread there. Scrolls of office and symbols of faith and friendship that Raub cast aside now as he tore apart the last of the funeral wrappings. He looked beneath and around the bier for the gleaming longblade that should have been there. The single memory he had come in hope of redeeming.
He raised the black shortsword again. He hacked through the tatters of remaining vines in a half-dozen places before he kicked the cloven bier over with a shriek of rage that was swallowed by the night.
Since the day he fled, Raub had yearned for this moment. For long years, he dreamed of seizing the bright blade whose magic was set in silver and white fire. A warrior’s backsword that was his father’s, and had been his grandfather’s, and that had been carried by countless generations of his family before that. This was the sword his father’s treachery denied him. The blade whose nobility and destiny his father abandoned, claiming instead the rank and rule of the black shortsword as he willingly corrupted Valaendar’s name and purpose.
Had Raub been there to sing the ghostsong for his father, the ancestral blade would have lain within the bier for the mourning cycles of the Clearmoon, then been claimed by him. The Ilvani reverence for death and tradition meant that it could have been taken only by one who was heir to its legacy, but Raub was last of his line. Had anyone stolen it from this place, the protective magic of the bier would have told him so.
He clawed at the ground, hoping in vain that what he sought might simply have fallen somehow, but there was no mistake. His father’s sword was gone.
Faint where the wind rose, he thought he heard the song of the moon-lit clearing.
Through the shadows came the faint echo of lyre strings, and the voice that sang in its unknown tongue.
He was wrong, Raub thought suddenly. And in the space of a heartbeat, he felt himself caught and crushed by the sudden onslaught of despair that told him he had failed. Failed in his duty, failed in his revenge, because all the hunger that fed that revenge was built on lies.
His head was pounding, throat dry. He couldn’t catch his breath, unable to understand how it had all changed so quickly, how the essential piece of his vengeance had been taken from him. Did his father lose the ancestral blade? Destroy it? Cast it aside as he cast aside his son, as he cast aside his family’s honor in the name of the corrupt power he had wielded through the black shortsword instead?
The memory of the silver pool in the moon-lit copse caught in his mind suddenly, his eyes burning with a rush of tears. The faces he had seen in that pool twisted around him.
Through the screen of leaves that surrounded his parents’ biers, he saw the ghost watching him.
Raub felt all the breath leave him as if he’d been caught by a horse’s kick. He had the black shortsword and his own emerald-hilted longsword in hand. He couldn’t remember drawing the second blade as he stumbled back. He saw the young face as he had last seen it, six years before. The silver hair was long and tied back in the manner of one just past the rites of second-naming. The gold-violet eyes glimmered like the stars that shone through the translucent cast of that face.
They were five who had known each other since their first-naming. They strove in secret against dark forces, and had listened as Raub told them they were heroes, all of them.
Four had died to prove how wrong he was.
“Tajomynar…” he whispered, and he heard all the fear, all the pain of years twist through that name.
A sigh like the last breeze of summer passed between those pale lips, and Raub heard the sound twist to a whisper of fear that formed words meant only for him. A flare of white light surged and spread like the sudden coming of dawn. His hand came up to shield his eyes.
Should have kept flying, Hawk…
He felt something strike him hard across the back of the head. In the sanguine haze of his sight came ruddy laughter, bright against a looming darkness. He felt a song slip through him that was the unsung dirge of everything he had ever lost, and then he heard no more.
• • •
In the end, it was easier than it should have been, but that only made Cass all the more wary. A canny foe and a sloppy foe could surprise you just as quickly, she had learned long ago. The only difference was in their intent, but intent meant nothing once the trap was sprung.
She was nowhere near Raub’s equal at moving above the ground, but she had no choice this time. She followed the directions the girl gave her easily enough, to a high hedge-wall three tiers above the market and at the center of the forest-home. There, the council terrace of Anthila occupied a tier of its own, a broad expanse of garden and sheltered hall connected by wide bridges to the adjoining terraces.
Cass’s unfamiliarity with the tangled routes that traversed the forest-home’s islands of floor and the spaces between them had slowed her at first. But because she moved slowly, she began to note a flow of figures moving in the same direction she was. Subtle at first, groups of two of three pacing slowly where she waited in the shadows for them to pass. But then those groups met other groups, all moving inward and upward, seemingly following the same directions the girl had given her.
The figures were all Ilvani, moving with the sure step and silence of dark purpose. Most wore cloaks against the chill night air, but on the few that didn’t, she saw the silk and subtle goldsmithing of a noble’s livery. She stayed well back, shadowing them with the intentionally careless gait that would let her change direction easily if they turned to her.
She got close enough more than once to catch their eyes. The same detached gaze, the blank stare of the marketplace, was in all of them as they hurried on.
By the time she reached the last bridge, she was well back of the final figures to slip out across the well-lit span of rope and shadow. Unlike in the noble’s enclave, no barrier walls surrounded the great hall of the forest-home, a combination public forum, theater, and council chamber by the way the girl Pheánei described it.
In the play of the Clearmoon through the wind-twisted trees, the seat of power in Anthila was a huge expanse of garden set with paths and courtyards of white tile. The hall itself was a broad web of gently sculpted wicker, set high upon a second terrace suspended by five great ropes from the spread of primal branches above. Cool light blazed within, a flight of grey steps rising to dark portals of polished wood. These seemed more about ceremony than security, however, set as they were within their screen walls.
The four rangers who stood in pairs on opposite ends of the bridge were the hall’s only visible defense. From the shadows, Cass watched them for a time. She noted the same blank stare in them as in all the rest, but knew that having to rush the bridge to get to them would erase it quickly enough.
She went around and over them instead, scaling the walls of an estate on the adjacent tier and making her way through the shadows of its overgrown garden. At the edge of that garden, she found herself on a close-cropped common fronted by a half-dozen smaller terraced apartments. Steering clear of the lights that flickered beyond their walls of woven branches and white wicker, she slipped into the trees, climbing, then clambering carefully across a natural ladder of foliage that led her through the darkness and to her destination.
She went slowly, timing her movement with the rising of the wind that would screen any sound. Beyond the bridge and out of sight of the guards there, she saw a second rank of six sentries tending a fire on the great hall grounds. Her senses were sharp, every nerve on edge. The Ilvani held a lax attitude toward security, she knew, but not without good reason. Fighting side by side with Raub, she had witnessed more than once the combat prowess that the Yewnwood taught.
She dropped before her grip on the perch of branches could grow any more tenuous. The ranger guards were on their feet before she hit, the closest of them hurling two long knives in greeting. Cass spun the Reaper in front of her to cut the missiles cleanly in two an arm’s length from her face, hafts and blades ricocheting loudly where they struck the tiled ground to either side.
The axe was a weapon whose very appearance frequently guaranteed that Cass wouldn’t have to use it, which suited her well enough. In the center of the blade where she held it up now in warning, a death’s-head skull grinned. Its gleaming image was embossed there by dweomer, brilliant white and edged in dark lines that clung to it like living shadow. The spellcraft that created that dead face saw it shift with the viewer’s movement, its dark gaze burning into the eyes of the guards as they charged.
It wasn’t much of a fight as fights go. When it was done, Cass paused to check the strength of the blood at the guards’ throats. Two of them were dead despite her best effort. The rest she left inert but alive. It was a risk, she knew, but she had little stomach for execution when justice wasn’t involved.
She didn’t know how much time she had before they awoke, but she suspected it wouldn’t be enough. As she slung the axe back to her belt, she felt its wordless voice calling to her. The confrontation at Garania Hall had made it anxious for blood, but Cass didn’t share the weapon’s hunger. Not yet.
Four people were alive in the shadows behind her as she climbed the stairs, because it was easy enough to leave them that way. From childhood, Cassatra had been trained to a path of bloodless combat, the way of the refuge that was the only home she had ever known. Those instincts had stayed with her despite the long years since she turned her back on that path. Long years since she set out on another path whose destination still eluded her.
The doors were unlocked, a tumult of voices beyond covering her entrance as she slipped inside the wide white hall. The great ropes that supported the tier platform ended at its edges in thick wooden bolts, the wicker above them arcing out like filled sails. At the center of the space, a flight of stairs curved up to a second platform some ten strides across, a dais slung from a lighter web of rope that met the main supports high above.
Arched wooden rails lined the ceiling, tapestries hanging there between wall-mounted evenlamps. Rich dioramas detailed the forest and the faces of Ilvani that Cass guessed were heroes of Raub’s folk, or leaders, or both. The face closest to her was a more-than-life-sized rendering of an older Ilvani male, silvering hair swept back and woven in the old style. He wore dark robes that concealed his hands but showed the hilt of an Ilvani longblade at his belt. His face was fair, but in the figure’s bark-brown eyes, she saw Raub’s dark gaze staring back at her.
The lower tier was strewn with cushions that might have served to sit ten score people in the wide-open meeting space. Only a quarter of that number were present here now, mostly nobles, a handful of guards spaced around them. All were standing, circling close to the raised dais platform where an unfamiliar shape stood darkly framed by the light.
Cass saw what it was. She felt her fingers tighten on the Reaper’s haft.
“You are welcome to Anthila, stranger.”
Over the noise of the crowd, the voice called out in Ilvani from the shadows of the high platform. Its tone was light, but Cass felt a trace of fear across the back of her neck as the words twisted through her. She focused, found the strength to shake them off. The telltale tapping of the white-and-silver walking stick preceded the silver-haired bard as she limped slowly out from the shadows.
All around the chamber, the voices of the assembled Ilvani trailed to silence. Fifty sets of eyes turned on Cass as she shifted through them, the nobles she had followed staring with a look that showed no surprise. Not that they expected her, she knew. They just hadn’t been told yet what to think.
Cass wrapped her cloak tight around her as she ascended the stairs, the Reaper out of sight, warm in her hand. Halessi, seneschal of Anthila, was in the same white cloak she had worn in the marketplace, but a diadem of
gold was set upon the silver hair now. The mark of the seneschal’s office, Cass guessed. Hanging from a belt of pale grey dwyrsilver that cinched a tan tunic inlaid with twisting vines of yellow and green, she wore the black shortsword that had been Raub’s burden for so long.
“As you can see, this a private meeting of the council of the forest-home,” Halessi said as she gestured to the impassive faces to all sides. “However, you are as much a witness as any of us to the events that will transpire here tonight. More so, perhaps.” The thin lips pursed to a cold smile as the gold and violet eyes flicked back to the dark shape behind her.
Raub.
Cass was close enough now to see that he was alive, the fear dimming that she had felt and focused past with her first glimpse of him from the doorway. Beneath an arch of wooden beams descending from the ropes of the ceiling, he was hanging by his wrists from a set of braided leather thongs. The seamless crafting of the scaffold was clearly Ilvani, but it had an intentionally rough quality to it that spoke to its purpose.
His eyes were shut, his breathing shallow. His bow, the dirk he always carried, the emerald-hilted longsword claimed from the darkness under Myrnan were nowhere in sight.
“We have not been formally introduced,” Halessi said.
“When you’re short on time, ceremony is the first thing to go.”
With a smile, the bard limped across the pale white floor. “The creature of impulse seeks always the superiority of the moment. Perhaps at the cost of failure in the long term.”
A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Page 21