‘Gentlemen!’ Tomasso fluted expertly, wringing his hands. ‘What is it? What brings you here, to interrupt a vigil?’ He was careful to sound petulant, not angry.
The mercenaries didn’t even deign to look at him, let alone reply. Two of them quickly went to check the bedrooms and a third seized the ladder and ran up it to examine the half-loft where the young singer had been hiding. Other soldiers, Tomasso registered apprehensively, were taking up positions outside each of the windows. There was a great deal of noise outside among the horses, and a confusion of torches.
Tomasso abruptly stamped his foot in frustration. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ he shrilled as the soldiers continued to ignore him. ‘Tell me! I shall protest directly to your lord. We have Alberico’s express permission to conduct this vigil and the burial tomorrow. I have it in writing under his seal!’ He addressed the Barbadian captain standing by the door.
Again it was as if he hadn’t even spoken so completely did they disregard him. Four more soldiers came in and spread out to the edges of the room, their expressions blank and dangerous.
‘This is intolerable!’ Tomasso whined, staying in character, his hands writhing about each other. ‘I shall ride immediately to Alberico! I shall demand that you all be shipped straight back to your wretched hovels in Barbadior!’
‘That will not be necessary,’ said a burly, hooded figure in the doorway.
He stepped forward and threw back the hood. ‘You may make your childish demand of me right here,’ said Alberico of Barbadior, Tyrant of Astibar, Tregea, Ferraut and Certando.
Tomasso’s hands flew to his throat even as he dropped to his knees. The others, too, knelt immediately, even old Scalvaia with his game leg. A black mind-cloak of numbing fear threatened to descend over Tomasso, trammelling all speech and thought.
‘My lord,’ he stammered, ‘I did not … I could … we could not know!’
Alberico was silent, gazing blankly down upon him. Tomasso fought to master his terror and bewilderment. ‘You are most welcome here,’ he bleated, rising carefully, ‘most welcome, most honoured lord. You do us too much honour with your presence at my father’s rites.’
‘I do,’ said Alberico bluntly. Tomasso received the full weight of a heavy scrutiny from the small eyes, close-set and unblinking deep, in the folds of the sorcerer’s large face. Alberico’s bald skull gleamed in the firelight. He drew his hands from the pockets of his robe. ‘I would have wine,’ he demanded, gesturing with a meaty palm.
‘But of course, of course.’
Tomasso stumbled to obey, intimidated as always by the sheer, bulky physicality of Alberico and his Barbadians. They hated him, he knew, and all his kind, over and above everything else these conquerors felt about the people of the Eastern Palm whose world they now ruled. Whenever he faced Alberico, Tomasso was overwhelmingly conscious that the Tyrant could crack his bones with bare hands and not think twice about having done so.
It was not a comforting line of thought. Only eighteen years of carefully schooling his body to shield his mind kept his hands steady as they carried a full glass ceremoniously over to Alberico. The soldiers eyed his every movement. Nievole was back by the larger fire, Taeri and Herado together by the small one. Scalvaia stood, braced upon his cane, beside the chair in which he’d been sitting.
It was time, Tomasso judged, to sound more confident, less guilty. ‘You will forgive me, my lord, for my ill-judged words to your soldiers. Not knowing you were here I could only guess they were acting in ignorance of your wishes.’
‘My wishes change,’ Alberico said in his heavy, unchanging voice. ‘They are likely to know of those changes before you, bar Sandre.’
‘Of course, my lord. But of course. They—’
‘I wanted,’ said Alberico of Barbadior, ‘to look upon the coffin of your father. To look, and to laugh.’ He showed no trace of an inclination towards amusement.
Tomasso’s blood felt suddenly icy in his veins.
Alberico stepped past him and stood massively over the remains of the Duke. ‘This,’ he said flatly, ‘is the body of a vain, wretched, fatuous old man who decreed the hour of his own death to no purpose. No purpose at all. Is it not amusing?’
He did laugh then—three short, harsh barks of sound that were more truly frightening than anything Tomasso had ever heard in his life. How had he known?
‘Will you not laugh with me? You three Sandreni? Nievole? My poor, crippled, impotent Lord Scalvaia? Is it not diverting to think how all of you have been brought here and doomed by senile foolishness? By an old man who lived too long to understand how the labyrinthine twistings of his own time could be so easily smashed through with a fist today.’
His clenched hand crashed heavily down on the wooden coffin lid, splintering the carved Sandreni arms. With a faint sound of distress Scalvaia sank back into his chair.
‘My lord,’ Tomasso gulped, gesticulating. ‘What can you possibly mean? What are you—’
He got no further than that. Wheeling savagely Alberico slapped him meatily across the face with an open hand. Tomasso staggered backwards, blood spattering from his ripped mouth.
‘You will use your natural voice, son of a fool,’ the sorcerer said, the words more terrifying because spoken in the same flat tone as before. ‘Will it at least amuse you to know how easy this was? To learn how long Herado bar Gianno has been reporting to me?’
And with those words the night came down.
The full black cloak of anguish and raw terror Tomasso had been fighting desperately to hold back. Oh, my father, he thought, stricken to his soul that it should have been by family that they were now undone. By family. Family!
Several things happened then in an extremely short span of time.
‘My lord!’ Herado cried out in high-pitched dismay. ‘You promised! You said they would not know! You told me—’
It was all he said. It is difficult to expostulate with a dagger embedded in your throat.
‘The Sandreni deal with the scrapings of dirt under their own fingernails,’ said his uncle Taeri, who had drawn the blade from the back of his boot. Even as he spoke, Taeri pulled his dagger free of Herado and smoothly, part of one continuous motion, sheathed it in his own heart.
‘One less Sandreni for your sky-wheels, Barbadian!’ he taunted, gasping. ‘Triad send a plague to eat the flesh from your bones.’ He dropped to his knees. His hands were on the dagger haft; blood was spilling over them. His eyes sought Tomasso’s. ‘Farewell, brother,’ he whispered. ‘Morian grant our shadows know each other in her Halls.’
Something was clenched around Tomasso’s heart, squeezing and squeezing, as he watched his brother die. Two of the guards, trained to ward a very different sort of blow at their lord, stepped forward and flipped Taeri over on his back with the toes of their boots.
‘Fools!’ spat Alberico, visibly upset for the first time. ‘I needed him alive. I wanted both of them alive!’ The soldiers blanched at the fury written in his features.
Then the focus of the room went elsewhere entirely.
With an animal roar of mingled rage and pain Nievole d’Astibar, a very big man himself, linked his two hands like a hammer or the head of a mace and swung them full into the face of the soldier nearest to him. The blow smashed bones like splintering wood. Blood spurted as the man screamed and crumpled heavily back against the coffin.
Still roaring, Nievole grappled for his victim’s sword.
He actually had it out and was turning to do battle when four arrows took him in the throat and chest. His face went dully slack for an instant, then his eyes widened and his mouth relaxed into a macabre smile of triumph as he slipped to the floor.
And then, just then, with all eyes on fallen Nievole, Lord Scalvaia did the one thing no one had dared to do. Slumped deep in his chair, so motionless they had almost forgotten him, the aged patrician raised his cane with a steady hand, pointed it straight at Alberico’s face, and squeezed the spring catch hidden in the handle.
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Sorcerers cannot, indeed, be poisoned—a minor protective art, one that most of them master in their youth. On the other hand, they most certainly can be slain, by arrow or blade, or any of the other instruments of violent death—which is why such things were forbidden within a decreed radius of wherever Alberico might be.
There is also a well-known truth about men and their gods—whether of the Triad in the Palm, or the varying pantheon worshipped in Barbadior, whether of mother goddess or dying and reviving god or lord of wheeling stars or single awesome Power above all of these in some rumoured prime world far off amid the drifts of space.
It is the simple truth that mortal man cannot understand why the gods shape events as they do. Why some men and women are cut off in fullest flower while others live to dwindle into shadows of themselves. Why virtue must sometimes be trampled and evil flourish amid the beauty of a country garden. Why chance, sheer random chance, plays such an overwhelming role in the running of the life lines and the fate lines of men.
It was chance that saved Alberico of Barbadior then, in a moment that had his name half spelled-out for death. His guards were intent upon the fallen men and on the taut, bleeding form of Tomasso. No one had spared a glance for the crippled lord in his chair.
It was only the fact—mercilessly random—that that evening’s Captain of the Guard happened to have moved into the cabin on Scalvaia’s side of the room that changed the course of history in the Peninsula of the Palm and beyond. By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.
Alberico, turning in a white rage to snap an order at his captain, saw the cane come up and Scalvaia’s finger jerk upon the handle. Had he been facing straight ahead or turning the other way he would have died of a sharpened projectile bursting into his brain.
It was towards Scalvaia that he turned though, and he was the mightiest wielder of magic, save one, in the Palm in that hour. Even so, what he did—the only single thing he could do—took all the power he had and very nearly more than he could command. There was no time for the spoken spell, the focusing gesture. The bolt that was his ending had already been loosed.
Alberico released his hold upon his body.
Watching in terror and disbelief, Tomasso saw the lethal bolt whip through a blurred oozing of matter and air where Alberico’s head had been. The bolt smashed harmlessly into the wall above a window.
And in that same scintilla of time, knowing that an instant later would be an instant too late—that his body could be unknit forever, his soul, neither living nor dead, left to howl impotently in the waste that lay in ambush for those who dared essay such magic—Alberico summoned the lineaments of his form back to himself.
It was a near thing.
He had a droop to his right eyelid from that day on, and his physical strength was never again what it had been. When he was tired, ever after, his right foot would have a tendency to splay outward as if retracing the strange release of that momentary magic. He would limp then, much as Scalvaia had done.
Through eyes that fought to focus properly, Alberico of Barbadior saw Scalvaia’s silver-maned head fly across the room to bounce, with a sickening sound, on the rush-strewn floor—decapitated by the belated sword of the Captain of the Guard. The deadly cane, crafted of stones and metals Alberico did not recognize, clattered loudly to the ground. The air seemed thick and viscous to the sorcerer, unnaturally dense. He was conscious of a loose, rattling sound to his breathing and a spasmodic trembling at the back of his knees.
It was another moment, etched in the rigid, stunned silence of the other men in the room, before he trusted himself to even try to speak.
‘You are dung,’ he said, thickly, coarsely, to the ashen captain. ‘You are less than that. You are filth and crawling slime. You will kill yourself. Now!’ He spoke as if there were sliding soil clogging and spilling from his mouth. With an effort he swallowed his saliva.
Ferociously straining to make his eyes work properly he watched as the blurry form of his captain bowed jerkily and, reversing his sword, severed his own jugular with a swift, jagged slash. Alberico felt a froth of rage foaming and boiling through his mind. He fought to will an end to a palsied tremor in his left hand. He could not.
There were a great many dead men in the room and he very nearly had been one of them. He didn’t even entirely feel as if he lived—his body seemed to have reassembled itself in not quite the same way as before. He rubbed with weak fingers at the drooping eyelid. He felt ill, nauseous. The air was hard to breathe. He needed to be outside, away from this suddenly stifling lodge of his enemies.
Nothing had come to pass as he’d expected. There was only one single element left of his original design for the evening. One thing that might yet offer a kind of pleasure, that might redeem a little of what had gone so desperately awry.
He turned, slowly, to look at Sandre’s son. At the lover of boys. He dragged his mouth upwards into a smile, unaware of how hideous he looked.
‘Bring him,’ he said thickly to his soldiers. ‘Bind him and bring him. There are things we can do with this one before we allow him to die. Things appropriate to what he was.’
His vision was still not working properly, but he saw one of his mercenaries smile. Tomasso bar Sandre closed his eyes. There was blood on his face and clothing. There would be more before they were done.
Alberico put up his hood and limped from the room. Behind him the soldiers lifted up the body of the dead captain and supported the man whose face had been broken by Nievole.
They had to help the Tyrant mount his horse, which he found humiliating, but he began to feel better during the torchlit ride back to Astibar. He was utterly devoid of magic though. Even through the dulled sensations of his altered, reassembled body he could feel the void where his power should be. It would be at least two weeks, probably more, before it all came back. If it all came back. What he had done in the flashing of that instant in the lodge had drained more from him than any act of magic ever had in his life.
He was alive though, and he had just shattered the three most dangerous families left in the Eastern Palm. Even more, he had the middle Sandreni son here now as evidence, public proof of the conspiracy for the days to come. The pervert who was said to relish pain. Alberico allowed himself a tiny smile within the recesses of his hood.
It was all going to be done by law, and openly, as had been his practice almost from the day he’d taken power here. No unrest born of arbitrary exercise of might would be permitted to rear its dangerous head. They might hate him, of course they would hate him, but not one citizen of his four provinces would be able to doubt the justice or deny the legitimacy of his response to this Sandreni plot.
Or miss the point of how comprehensive that response was about to be.
With the prudent caution that was the truest wellspring of his character, Alberico of Barbadior began thinking through his actions of the next hours and days. The high gods of the Empire knew this far peninsula was a place of constant danger and needed stern governing, but the gods, who were not blind, could see that he knew how to give it what was needful. And it was growing more and more possible that the Emperor’s advisers back home, who were no more sightless than the gods, would see the same things.
And the Emperor was old.
Alberico withdrew his thoughts from these familiar, too seductive channels. He made himself focus on detail again; detail was everything in matters such as this. The neat steps of his planning clicked into place like beads on a djarra string as he rode. Drily, precisely, he assembled the orders he would give. The only commands that caused him an inward flicker of emotion were the ones concerning Tomasso bar Sandre. These, at least, did not have to be made public and they would not be. Only the confession and its revealing details needed to be known outside his palace walls. Whatever took place in certain rooms underground could be extremely private indeed. He surprised himself a little with the anticipation he felt.
At one point he remembered that he’d
wanted the hunting lodge torched when they left. Smoothly he adjusted his thinking on that. Let the lesser Sandreni and their servants find the dead when they came at dawn. Let them wonder and fear. The doubt would only last a little while.
Then he would cause everything to be made extremely clear.
C H A P T E R 5
‘Oh, Morian,’ Allessan whispered, wistful regret infusing his voice. ‘I could have sent him to your judgement even now. A child could have put an arrow in his eye from here.’
Not this child, Devin thought ruefully, gauging the distance and the light from where they were hidden among the trees north of the ribbon of road the Barbadians had just ridden along. He looked with even more respect than before at Alessan and the crossbow he’d picked up from a cache they’d looped past on the way here.
‘She will claim him when she is ready,’ Baerd said prosaically. ‘And you are the one who has spent his life saying that it will be to no good if either one of them dies too soon.’
Alessan grunted. ‘Did I shoot?’ he asked pointedly.
Baerd’s teeth flashed briefly in the moonlight. ‘I would have stopped you in any case.’
Alessan swore succinctly. Then, a moment later, relaxed into quiet amusement. The two men had a manner with each other that spoke to long familiarity. Catriana, Devin saw, had not smiled. Certainly not at him. On the other hand, he reminded himself, he was supposed to be the one who was angry. The present circumstances made it a little hard though. He felt anxious and proud and excited, all at once.
He was also the only one of the four of them who hadn’t noticed Tomasso, bound at wrist and ankle to his horse.
‘We’d better check the lodge,’ Baerd said as the transient mood slipped away. ‘Then I think we will have to travel very fast. Sandre’s son will name you and the boy.’
‘We had better have a talk about the boy first,’ Catriana said in a tone that made it suddenly very easy for Devin to reclaim his anger.