[P] the babble of the dead (summer)

[Raziel]

R A Z I E L

S

o, as usual, Raziel had been right. 

In many ways he felt relieved that it was over. The pacing, the waiting, the nameless feeling licking his heels like a maddened bitch.

Worst of all the godawful insomnia that had spilled his teeth into his skin leaving two-dozen wounds he could only partly hide from Yamuna. If he hears that nail-on-chalk laugh one more time, he knows it will be her last.

After all, this was her fault. Her grandson. Her blind naivety. Apparently it didn't matter that he had called for her audience twice in two days (a frighteningly unusual occurrence) nor that she had been too-goddamn-high in both meetings to even remotely digest the warnings he wished to deliver. For a split second he had considered ramming that wretched opium pipe down her fat bloated gullet and watching her choke. Perhaps he might have gone through with it if her son hadn't been there. 

Yusef was always there. Unmarried and unnaturally attached to Yamuna, Yusef was perhaps an even larger thorn in Raziel's side than his detestable mother. He tries to be reasonable: would they not say the same about he and Raoul, if indeed his brother had lived? Raziel sneers as he walks: he does not want to be reasonable, not after last night. 

Sometimes he wonders how different things would be if he hadn't renounced his birthright that cold October morning, mere days after the revolution. Would they still be a prominent family in the circuit of aristocratic Solterra? Would they be wealthier? Would he have exiled his intolerable family and retained Saudager for himself alone?

What if -- a fruitless phrase, his mother had always said. It still surprised him how many things she'd gotten right. 

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Watching Gahenna trotting in front, nose to the ground (tracking, tracking, tracking) as she swings keenly across the prairie, Raziel replays the events of last night over in his head for what must be the sixtieth time. I won't translate the painstaking detail in which he has catalogued the incident: they are irrelevant to anyone but himself. What matters is this:

The sound of his hound's war-cry. How violently he woke from that gingerly-stolen sleep. The clattering of heirlooms as they fell from hungry, startled hands. The look of defeat-come-horror on the thief's face as man and hound loomed in the doorway of his brother's bedchamber. Afterward, Raziel thinks, fleetingly, of how young and slat-ribbed thin the boy had been. Even as a stranger, he'd recognised those eyes: he had seen them before. In the gladiator corrals, at the slave auctions, in Saudagar's kitchen. Hollow, desperate. He has other thoughts too, many in fact, and none of them are kind.

Now he can think only of Raoul's spyglass. Taken from him just as his brother had been. Untouched for five years, it had lain on the breast of Raoul's pillow as though he had but gone for a walk and forgotten to bring it along. Such dreamfulness is ugly and distorted and as dangerous as it is untrue: for the second twin of Saudagar was never seen without that gold glinting thing. Until he died.

Gahenna whines from the pith of her chest as at last they breach the fringes of Denocte's capitol. The earth seems to quiver under their feet, feeling for what they have come; it has drank enough blood of innocents and felons alike to know, in the end, the both taste the same.

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