They threw the body across his horse and made their way back to the Nievolene gates. They could hear the men of the First Company singing loudly from the manor-house along the curving drive. The sound carried a long way in the stillness of the wintry air. There were stars out now beside the moon; the clouds were breaking up. Baerd pulled the Barbadian off the horse and leaned him against one of the gate pillars. Alessan and Devin claimed the other dead man from where they had left him in the gully; Baerd tethered the Barbadian’s horse some distance off the road.
Some distance, but not too far. This one was meant to be found later.
Alessan touched Devin briefly on the shoulder. Using the skills Marra had taught him—it seemed several lifetimes ago—Devin picked the two elaborate locks. He was glad to be able to make a contribution. The locks were showy but not difficult. The arrogant Nievolene had not had much fear of trespassers.
Alessan and Baerd each shouldered a body and carried them through. Devin swung the gates silently shut and they entered the grounds. Not towards the manor though. They let the pale moonlight lead them over the snow to the barns.
There they found trouble. The largest barn was locked from the inside, and Baerd pointed silently, with a grimace, to a spill of torchlight that showed from under the double doors. He mimed the presence of a guard.
The three of them looked up. There was, clearly illuminated by Vidomni’s glow, a single small window open, high up on the eastern side.
Devin looked from Alessan to Baerd and then back to the Prince. He looked at the bodies of the two men already dead.
He pointed to the window and then to himself.
After a long moment Alessan nodded his head.
In silence, listening to the ragged singing from over in the manor-house, Devin climbed the outer wall of the Nievolene barn. By moonlight and by feel he deciphered hand- and footholds in the cold. When he reached the window he looked over his shoulder and saw Ilarion, just rising in the east.
He slipped through and into the upper loft. Below, a horse whickered softly and Devin caught his breath. His heart thudding, he froze where he was, listening. There was no other response. In the sudden, seductive warmth of the barn he crawled cautiously forward and looked down.
The guard was comprehensively asleep. His uniform was unbuttoned and the lantern on the floor by his side illuminated an empty flask of wine. He must have lost a dice roll, Devin thought, to have been posted so boringly on guard against nothing here among the horses and the straw.
He went down the ladder without a sound. And in the flickering light of that barn, amid the smell of hay and animals and spilled red wine Devin killed his first man, plunging his dagger into the Barbadian’s throat as the man slept. It was not the way his dreams of valiant deeds had ever had him doing this.
It took him a moment to fight back the churning nausea that followed. It’s the smell of the wine, he tried to tell himself. There was also more blood than he’d thought there would be. He wiped his blade clean before he opened the door for the other two.
‘Well done,’ Baerd said, taking in the scene. He briefly laid a hand on Devin’s shoulder.
Alessan said nothing, but by the wavering light Devin read a disquieting compassion in his eyes.
Baerd had already set about doing what they had to do.
They left the guard where he was to be burned. The informer and the soldier from the Second Company they dragged towards one of the outbuildings. Baerd studied the situation carefully for a few moments, refusing to be rushed, then he placed the two bodies in a particular way, and wedged the door in front of them convincingly shut with what Devin assumed would later appear to be a dislodged beam.
The singing from the manor had gradually been fading away. Now it had come down to a single voice drunkenly caroling a melancholy refrain about love lost long ago. Finally that voice, too, fell silent.
Which was Alessan’s cue. At his signal they simultaneously set fire to the dry straw and wood in the guarded barn and two of the adjacent outbuildings, including the one where the dead men were trapped. Then they fled. By the time they were off the property the Nievolene barns were an inferno of flame. Horses were screaming.
There was no pursuit. They hadn’t expected any. Alessan and Sandre had worked it out very carefully back in Ferraut. The charred bodies of the informer and the Second Company soldier would be found by Karalius’s men. The mercenaries of the First Company would draw the obvious conclusion.
They reclaimed their horses and headed west. They spent the night outside again in the cold taking turns on watch. It had gone very well. It seemed to have gone exactly as planned. Devin wished they’d been able to free the horses, though. Their screaming ran through his fitful dreams in the snow.
In the morning Alessan bought a cart from a farmer near the border of Ferraut and Baerd bargained with a woodcutter for a load of fresh-cut logs. They paid the new transit duty and sold the wood at the first fort across the border. They also bought some winter wool to carry to Ferraut town where they were to rejoin the others.
There was no point, Alessan said, in missing a chance at a profit. They did have responsibilities to their partners.
In fact, a disconcerting number of untoward events had ruffled the Eastern Palm in the autumn and winter that followed the unmasking of the Sandreni conspiracy. In themselves, none of them amounted to very much; collectively they unsettled and irritated Alberico of Barbadior to the point where his aides and messengers began finding their employment physically hazardous, in so far as their duties brought them into proximity with the Tyrant.
For a man noted for his composure and equanimity—even back in Barbadior when he’d been only the leader of a middle-ranking family of nobility—Alberico’s temper was shockingly close to the surface all winter long.
It had begun, his aides agreed amongst themselves, after the Sandreni traitor, Tomasso, had been found dead in the dungeons when they came to bring him to the professionals. Alberico, waiting in the room of the implements, had been terrifyingly enraged. Each of the guards—from Siferval’s Third Company—had been summarily executed. Including the new Captain of the Guard; the previous one had killed himself the night before. Siferval himself was summoned back to Astibar from Certando for a private session with his employer that left him limp and shaking for hours afterwards.
Alberico’s fury had seemed to border on the irrational. He had clearly, his aides decided, been radically unsettled by whatever had happened in the forest. Certainly he didn’t look well; there was something odd about one of his eyes, and his walk was peculiar. Then, in the days and weeks that followed, it became manifest, as the local informers for each of the three companies began to bring in their reports, that Astibar town simply did not believe—or chose not to believe—that anything had happened in the forest, that there had been any Sandreni conspiracy at all.
Certainly not with the Lords Scalvaia and Nievole, and most certainly not led by Tomasso bar Sandre. People were commenting cynically all over the city, the word came. Too many of them knew of the bone-deep hatreds that divided those three families. Too many knew the stories about Sandre’s middle son, the alleged leader of this alleged plot. He might kidnap a boy from a temple of Morian, Astibar was saying, but plot against a Tyrant? With Nievole and Scalvaia?
No, the city was simply too sophisticated to fall for that. Anyone with the slightest sense of geography or economics could see what was really going on. How, by trumping up this ‘threat’ from three of the five largest landowners in the distrada, Alberico was merely creating a sleek cover for an otherwise naked land grab.
It was only sheerest coincidence, of course, that the Sandreni estates were central, the Nievolene farms lay to the southwest along the Ferraut border, and Scalvaia’s vineyards were in the richest belt in the north where the best grapes for the blue wine were grown. An immensely convenient conspiracy, all the taverns and khav rooms agreed.
And every single conspirator was dead overni
ght, as well. Such swift justice! Such an accumulation of evidence against them! There had been an informer among the Sandreni, it was proclaimed. He was dead. Of course. Tomasso bar Sandre had led the conspiracy, they were told. He too, most unfortunately, was dead.
Led by Astibar itself all four provinces of the Eastern Palm reacted with bitter, sardonic disbelief. They may have been conquered, ground under the heavy Barbadian heel, but they had not been deprived of their intelligence or rendered blind. They knew a Tyrant’s scheming when they saw it.
Tomasso bar Sandre as a skilled, deadly plotter? Astibar, reeling under the economic impact of the confiscations, and the horror of the executions, still found itself able to mock. And then there arrived the first of the viciously funny verses from the west—from Chiara itself—written by Brandin himself some said, though rather more likely commissioned from one of the poets who hovered about that court. Verses lampooning Alberico as seeing plots hatching in every barnyard and using them as an excuse to seize fowls and vegetable gardens all over the Eastern Palm. There were also a few, not very subtle sexual innuendos thrown in for good measure.
The poems, posted on walls all over the city—and then in Tregea and Certando and Ferraut—were torn down by the Barbadians almost as fast as they went up. Unfortunately they were memorable rhymes, and people didn’t need to read or hear them more than once.
Alberico would later acknowledge to himself that he’d lost control a little. He would also admit inwardly that a great deal of his rage stemmed from a fierce indignation and the aftermath of fear.
There had been a conspiracy led by that mincing Sandreni. They had very nearly killed him in that cursed cabin in the woods.
This once, he was telling the absolute truth. There was no pretence or deception. He had every claim of justice on his side. What he didn’t have was a confession, or a witness, or any evidence at all. He’d needed his informer alive. Or Tomasso. He’d wanted Tomasso alive. His dreams that first night had been shot through with vivid images of Sandre’s son, bound and stripped and curved invitingly backwards on one of the machines.
In the aftermath of the pervert’s inexplicable death, and the unanimous word from all four provinces that no one believed a word of what had happened, Alberico had abandoned his original, carefully measured response to the plot.
The lands were seized of course, but in addition all the living members of all three families were searched out and death-wheeled in Astibar. He hadn’t expected there to be quite so many, actually, when he gave that order. The stench had been deplorable and some of the children lived an unconscionably long time on the wheels. It made it difficult to concentrate on business in the state offices above the Grand Square.
He raised taxes in Astibar and introduced, for the first time, transit duties for merchants crossing from one of his provinces to another, along the lines of the existing tariff levied for crossing from the Eastern to the Western Palm. Let them pay—literally—if they chose not to believe what had happened to him in that cabin.
He did more. Half the massive Nievolene grain harvest was promptly shipped home to Barbadior. For an action conceived in anger he considered that one to be inspired. It had pushed the price of grain down back home in the Empire, which hurt his family’s two most ancient rivals while making him exceptionally popular with the people. In so far as the people mattered in Barbadior.
At the same time, here in the Palm, Astibar was forced to bring in more grain than ever from Certando and Ferraut, and with the new duties Alberico was going to rake a healthy cut of that inflated price as well.
He could almost have slaked his anger, almost have made himself happy, watching the effects of all this ripple through, if it wasn’t that small things kept happening.
For one, his soldiers began to grow restless. With an increase in hardship came an increase in tension; more incidents of confrontation occurred. Especially in Tregea where there were always more incidents of confrontation. Under greater stress the mercenaries demanded—predictably—higher pay. Which, if he gave it to them, was going to soak up virtually everything he might gain from the confiscations and the new duties.
He sent a letter home to the Emperor. His first request in over two years. Along with a case of Astibar blue wine—from what were now his own estates in the north—he conveyed an urgent reiteration of his plea to be brought under the Imperial aegis. Which would have meant a subsidy for his mercenaries from the Treasury in Barbadior, or even Imperial troops under his command. As always, he stressed the role he alone played in blocking Ygrathen expansion in this dangerous halfway peninsula. He might have begun his career here as an independent adventurer, he conceded, with what he saw as a nice turn of phrase, but as an older, wiser man he wished to bind himself more tightly and more usefully to his Emperor than ever before.
As for wanting to be Emperor, and wanting the cloak of Imperial sanction thrown over him—however belatedly—well, such things surely did not have to be put into a letter?
He received, by way of reply, an elegant wall-hanging from the Emperor’s Palace, commendations on his loyal sentiments, and polite regret that circumstances at home precluded the granting of his request for financing. As usual. He was cordially invited to sail home to all suitable honours and leave the tiresome problems of that far land overseas to a colonial expert appointed by the Emperor.
That, too, was as usual. Turn your new territory over to the Empire. Surrender your army. Come home to a parade or two, then spend your days hunting and your money on bribes and hunting gear. Wait for the Emperor to die without naming a successor. Then knife and be knifed in the brawl to succeed him.
Alberico sent back sincerest thanks, deep regrets, and another case of wine.
Shortly thereafter, at the end of the fall, a number of men in the disgruntled, out-of-favour Third Company withdrew from service and took late-season ship for home. The commanders of the First and Second used that same week to formally present—purely coincidence of course—their new wage demands and to casually remind him of past promises of land for the mercenaries. Starting, it was suggested delicately, with their commanders.
He’d wanted to order the two of them throttled. He’d wanted to fry their greedy, wine-sodden brains with a blast of his own magic. But he couldn’t afford to do it; added to which, exercising his powers was still a process of some real strain so soon after the encounter in the woods that had nearly killed him.
The encounter that no one in this peninsula even believed had taken place.
What he had done was smile at the two commanders and confide that he had already marked off in his mind a significant portion of the newly claimed Nievolene lands for one of them. Siferval, he said, more in sorrow than in anger, had been put out of the running by the conduct of his own men, but these two … well, it would be a hard choice. He would be watching them closely over the next while and would announce his decision in due course.
How long a while, exactly, had pursued Karalius of the First.
Truly, he could have killed the man even as he stood there, helmet under his arm, eyes hypocritically lowered in a show of deference.
Oh, spring, perhaps, he’d said airily, as if such matters should not be of great moment to men of good will.
Sooner would be better, had said Grancial of the Second, softly.
Alberico had chosen to let his eyes show just a little of what he felt. There were limits.
Sooner would let whichever of us you chose have time to see to the proper handling of the land before spring planting, Grancial explained hastily. A little ruffled, as he should be.
Perhaps it is so, Alberico had said, noncommittally. I will give thought to this.
‘By the way,’ he added, as they reached the door. ‘Karalius, would you be good enough to send me that very competent young captain of yours? The one with the forked black beard. I have a special, confidential task that needs a man of his evident qualities.’ Karalius had blinked, and nodded.
It was i
mportant, very important, not to let them grow too confident, he reflected after they had gone and he’d managed to calm himself. At the same time, only a genuine fool antagonized his troops. The more so, if he had ultimate plans to lead them home. By invitation of the Emperor, preferably, but not necessarily. Not, to be sure, necessarily.
On further reflection, triggered by that line of thought, he did raise taxes in Tregea, Certando and Ferraut to match the new levels in Astibar. He also sent a courier to Siferval of the Third in the Certandan highlands, praising his recent work in keeping that province quiet.
You lashed them, then enticed them. You made them fear you, and know that their fortunes could be made if you liked them enough. It was all a matter of balance.
Unfortunately, small things continued to go wrong with the balancing of the Eastern Palm as autumn turned into winter in the unusually cold weeks that followed.
Some cursed poet in Astibar chose that dank and rainy season to begin posting a series of elegies to the dead Duke of Astibar. The Duke had died in exile, the head of a scheming family, most of whom had been executed by then. Verses lauding him were manifestly treasonous.
It was difficult though. Every single writer brought in during the first sweep of the khav rooms denied authorship, and then—with time to prepare—every writer in the second sweep claimed to have written the verses.
Some advisers suggested peremptory wheels for the lot of them, but Alberico had been giving thought to a larger issue. To the marked difference between his court and the Ygrathen’s. On Chiara, the poets vied for access to Brandin, quivering like puppies at the slightest word of praise from him. They wrote paeans of exaltation to the Tyrant and obscene, scathing attacks on Alberico at request. Here, every writer in the Eastern Palm seemed to be a potential rabble-rouser. An enemy of the state.
Alberico swallowed his anger, lauded the technical skill of the verses, and let both sets of poets go free. Not before suggesting, however, as benignly as he could manage, that he would enjoy reading verses as well-crafted on one of the many possible themes of rich satiric possibility having to do with Brandin of Ygrath. He had managed a smile. He would be very pleased to read such verses, he’d said, wondering if one of these cursed writers with their lofty airs could take a hint.