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A moment later they heard the door on the far side of the room click open.
‘Oh, Morian,’ Catriana groaned, from the heart. ‘Oh, Devin, why are you here?’
Addressed thusly, Devin found himself quite incapable of framing an adequate response. For one thing, he still couldn’t say why he’d followed her; for another, the closet where they were hiding was only marginally large enough for the two of them, and he became increasingly aware of the fact that Catriana’s perfume was filling the tiny space with a heady, unsettling scent.
If he had been half in a dream a moment ago he abruptly found himself wide awake and in dangerous proximity to a woman he had seriously desired for the past two weeks.
Catriana seemed to arrive, belatedly, at the same sort of awareness; he heard her make a small sound in a register somewhat different from before. Devin closed his eyes, even though it was pitch-black in the hidden closet. He could feel her breath tickling his forehead, and he was conscious of the fact that by moving his hands only a very little he could encircle her waist.
He held himself carefully motionless, tilting back from her as best he could, his own breathing deliberately shallow. He felt more than sufficiently a fool for having created this ridiculous situation—he wasn’t about to compound his rapidly growing catalogue of sins by making a grope for her in the darkness.
Catriana’s robe rustled gently as she shifted position. Her thigh brushed his. Devin drew a ragged breath, which caused him to inhale more of her scent than was entirely good for him, given his virtuous resolutions.
‘Sorry,’ he whispered, though she was the one who’d moved. He felt beads of perspiration on his brow. To distract himself he tried to focus on the sounds from outside. Behind him the shuffling of feet and a steady, diffused murmur made it clear that people were still filing past Sandre’s bier.
To his left, in the room they’d just fled, three voices could be distinguished. One was, curiously, almost recognizable.
‘I had the servants posted with the body across the way—it gives us a moment before the others come.’
‘Did you notice the coins on his eyes?’ a much younger voice asked, crossing to the outer wall where the laden tables were. ‘Very amusing.’
‘Of course I noticed,’ the first man replied acerbically. Where had Devin heard that tone? And recently. ‘Who do you think spent an evening scrounging up two astins from twenty years ago? Who do you think arranged for all of this?’
The third voice was heard, laughing softly. ‘And a fine table of food it is,’ he said lightly.
‘That is not what I meant!’
Laughter. ‘I know it isn’t, but it’s a fine table all the same.’
‘Taeri, this is not a time for jests, particularly bad ones. We only have a moment before the family arrives. Listen to me carefully. Only the three of us know what is happening.’
‘It is only us, then?’ the young voice queried. ‘No one else? Not even my father?’
‘Not Gianno, and you know why. I said only us. Hold questions and listen, pup!’
Just then Devin d’Asoli felt his pulse accelerate in a quite unmistakable way. Partly because of what he was hearing, but rather more specifically because Catriana had just shifted her weight again, with a quiet sigh, and Devin became incredulously aware that her body was now pressed directly against his own and that one of her long arms had somehow slipped around his neck.
‘Do you know,’ she whispered, almost soundlessly, mouth close to his ear, ‘I rather like the thought of this all of a sudden. Could you be very quiet?’ The very tip of her tongue, for just an instant, touched the lobe of his ear.
Devin’s mouth went bone dry even as his sex leaped to full, painful erection within his blue-silver hose. Outside he could hear that voice he almost knew beginning a terse explanation of something involving pall-bearers and a hunting lodge, but the voice and its explanations had abruptly been rendered definitively trivial.
What was not trivial, what was in fact of the vastest importance imaginable was the undeniable fact that Catriana’s lips were busy at his neck and ear, and that even as his hands moved—as of their own imperative accord—to touch her eyelids and throat and then drift downward to the dreamt-of swell of her breasts, her own fingers were nimble among the drawstrings at his waist, setting him free.
‘Oh, Triad!’ he heard himself moan as her cool fingers stroked him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before that you liked it dangerous?’ He twisted his head sharply and their lips met fiercely for the first time. He began gathering the folds of her gown up about her hips.
She settled back on a ledge against the wall behind her to make it easier for him, her own breath now rapid and shallow as well.
‘There will be six of us,’ Devin heard from the room outside. ‘By second moonrise I want you to be . . .’
Catriana’s hands suddenly tightened in his hair, almost painfully, and at that moment the last folds of her robe rode free of her hips and Devin’s fingers slipped in among her undergarments and found the portal he’d been longing for.
She made a small unexpected sound and went rigid for just a second, before becoming extremely soft in his arms. His fingers gently stroked the deepest folds of her flesh. She drew an awkward, reaching breath, then shifted again, very slightly and guided Devin into her. She gasped, her teeth sinking hard into his shoulder. For a moment, lost in astonished pleasure and sharp pain, Devin was motionless, holding her close to him, murmuring almost soundlessly, not knowing what he was saying.
‘Enough! The others are here,’ the third voice outside rasped crisply.
‘Even so,’ said the first. ‘Remember then, you two come your own ways from town—not together!—to join us tonight. Whatever you do be sure you are not followed or we are dead.’
There was a brief silence. Then the door on the farthest side of the room opened and Devin, beginning now to thrust slowly, silently into Catriana, finally recognized the voice he’d been hearing.
For the same speaker continued talking, but now he assumed the delicate, remembered, intonations of the day before.
‘At last!’ fluted Tomasso d’Astibar bar Sandre. ‘We feared dreadfully that you’d all contrived to lose yourselves in these dusty recesses, never to be found again!’
‘No such luck, brother,’ a voice growled in reply. ‘Though after eighteen years it wouldn’t have been surprising. I need two glasses of wine very badly. Sitting still for that kind of music all morning is cursed thirsty work.’
In the closet Devin and Catriana clung to each other, sharing a breathless laughter. Then a newer urgency came over Devin, and it seemed to him it was in her as well, and there was suddenly nothing in the peninsula that mattered half so much as the gradually accelerating rhythm of the movements they made together.
Devin felt her fingernails splay outwards on his back. Feeling his climax gathering he cupped his hands beneath her; she lifted her legs and wrapped them around him. A moment later her teeth sank into his shoulder a second time and in that moment he felt himself explode, silently, into her.
For an unmeasured, enervated space of time they remained like that, their clothing damp where it had been crushed against skin. To Devin the voices from the two rooms outside seemed to come from infinitely far away. From other worlds entirely. He really didn’t want to move at all.
At length however, Catriana carefully lowered her legs to the ground to bear her own weight. He traced her cheekbones with a finger in the blackness.
Behind him the lords and merchants of Astibar were still shuffling past the body of the Duke so many had hated and some few had loved. To Devin’s left the younger generation of the Sandreni ate and drank, toasting an end to exile. Devin, wrapped close with Catriana, still sheathed within her warmth, could not have hoped to find words to say what he was feeling.
Suddenly she seized one of his tracing fingers and bit it, hard. He winced, because it hurt. She didn’t say anything though.
AFTER THE SANDRENI LEFT, Catriana found the latch and they slipped out into the room again. Quickly they reorganized their clothes. Pausing only long enough to seize a chicken-wing apiece, they hastily retraced their path back through the rooms leading to the stairway. They met three liveried servants coming the other way and Devin, feeling exceptionally alert and alive now, claimed Catriana’s fingers and winked at the servants as they passed.
She withdrew her hand a moment later.
He glanced over. ‘What’s wrong?’
She shrugged. ‘I’d as soon it wasn’t proclaimed throughout the Sandreni Palace and beyond,’ she murmured, looking straight ahead.
Devin lifted his eyebrows. ‘What would you rather they thought about us being upstairs? I just gave them the obvious, boring explanation. They won’t even bother to talk about it. This sort of thing happens all the time.’
‘Not to me,’ said Catriana quietly.
‘I didn’t mean it that way!’ Devin protested, taken aback. But unfortunately they were going down the stairs by then, and so it was with a quite unexpected sense of estrangement that he paused to let her re-enter the room before him.
More than a little confused, he took his place behind Menico as they prepared to go back out into the courtyard.
He had only a minor supporting role in the first two hymns and so he found his thoughts wandering back over the scene just played out upstairs. Back, and then back again, with the memory that seemed to be his birthright focusing like a beam of sunlight upon one detail then another, illuminating and revealing what he had missed the first time around.
And so it was that by the time it was his own turn to step forward to end and crown the mourning rites, seeing the three clergy leaning forward expectantly, noting how Tomasso struck a pose of rapt attentiveness, Devin was able to give the ‘Lament for Adaon’ an undivided soul, for he was confused no longer, but quite decided in what he was going to do.
He began softly in the middle range with the two syrenyae, building and shaping the ancient story of the god. Then, when the pipes of Alessan came in, Devin let his voice leap upward in response to them, as though in flight from mountain glen to crag to chasm brink.
He sang the dying of the god with a voice made pure in the cauldron of his own heart and he pitched the notes to rise above that courtyard and beyond it, out among the streets and squares of high-walled Astibar.
High walls he intended to pass beyond that night— beyond, and then following a trail he would find, into a wood where lay a hunting lodge. A lodge where pall-bearers were to carry the body of the Duke, and where a number of men—six, the clear voice of his memory reminded him—were to gather in a meeting that Catriana d’Astibar had just done the very best she could short of murder to prevent him learning about. He strove to turn the acrid taste of that knowledge into grief for Adaon, to let it guide and infuse the path of the ‘Lament’.
Better for both of us, he remembered her saying, and he could recapture in his mind the regret and the unexpected softness in her voice. But a certain kind of pride at Devin’s age is perhaps stronger than at any other age of mortal man, and he had already decided, before even he began to sing, here in this crowded courtyard among the great of Astibar, that he was going to be the judge of what was better, not her.
So Devin sang the rending of the god at the hands of the women, and he gave that dying on the Tregean mountain slope all he had to give it, making his voice an arrow arching outwards to seek the heart of everyone who heard.
He let Adaon fall from the high cliff, he heard the sound of the pipes recede and fall and he let his grieving voice spiral downward with the god into Casadel as the song came to its end.
And so too, that morning, did a part of Devin’s life. For when a portal of Morian’s has been crossed there is, as everyone knows, never a turning back.
Chapter IV
Escorting his father’s bier out of the eastern gate in the hour before sunset, Tomasso bar Sandre settled his horse to an easy walk and allowed his mind to drift for the first time in forty-eight intensely stressful hours.
The road was quiet. Normally it would have been clogged at this hour with people returning to the distrada before curfew locked the city gates. Normally sundown cleared the streets of Astibar of all save the patrolling Barbadian mercenaries and those reckless enough to defy them in search of women or wine or other diversions of the dark.
This was not a normal time, however. Tonight and for the next two nights there would be no curfew in Astibar. With the grapes gathered and the distrada’s harvest a triumphant one, the Festival of Vines would see singing and dancing and things wilder than those in the streets for all three nights. For these three nights in the year Astibar tried to pretend it was sensuous, decadent Senzio. No Duke in the old days—and not even dour Alberico now—had been foolish enough to rouse the people unnecessarily by denying them this ancient release from the sober round of the year.
Tomasso glanced back at his city. The setting sun was red among thin clouds behind the temple-domes and the towers, bathing Astibar in an eerily beautiful glow. A breeze had come up and there was a bite to it. Tomasso thought about putting on his gloves and decided against it: he would have had to remove some of his rings and he quite liked the look of his gems in this elusive, transitory light. Autumn was very definitely upon them, with the Ember Days approaching fast. It would not be long, a matter of days, before the first frost touched those last few precious grapes that had been left on chosen vines to become—if all fell rightly—the icy clear blue wine that was the pride of Astibar.
Behind him the eight servants plodded stolidly along the road, bearing the bier and the simple coffin—bare wood save for the Ducal crest above—of Tomasso’s father. On either side of them the two vigil-keepers rode in grim silence. Which was not surprising, given the nature of their errand and the complex, many-generationed hatreds that twisted between those two men.
Those three men, Tomasso corrected himself. It was three, if one chose to count the dead man who had so carefully planned all of this, down to the detail of who should ride on which side of his bier, who before and who behind. Not to mention the rather more surprising detail of exactly which two lords of the province of Astibar should be asked to be his escorts to the hunting lodge for the night-long vigil and from there to the Sandreni Crypt at dawn. Or, to put the matter rather more to the point, the real point: which two lords could and should be entrusted with what they were to learn during the vigil in the forest that night.
At that thought Tomasso felt a nudge of apprehension within his rib-cage. He quelled it, as he had taught himself to do over the years—unbelievable how many years—of discussing such matters with his father.
But now Sandre was dead and he was acting alone, and the night they had laboured towards was almost upon them with this crimson waning of light. Tomasso, two years past his fortieth naming day, knew that were he not careful he could easily feel like a child again.
The twelve-year-old child he had been, for example, when Sandre, Duke of Astibar, had found him naked in the straw of the stables with the sixteen-year-old son of the chief groom.
His lover had been executed of course, though discreetly, to keep the matter quiet. Tomasso had been whipped by his father for three days running, the lash meticulously rediscovering the closing wounds each morning. His mother had been forbidden to come to him. No one had come to him.
One of his father’s very few mistakes, Tomasso reflected, thinking back thirty years in autumn twilight. From those three days he knew he could date his own particular taste for the whip in love-making. It was one of what he liked to call his felicities.
Though Sandre had never punished him that way again. Nor in any other direct manner. When it became clear—past the point of nursing any hope of discretion— that Tomasso’s preferences were, to put it mildly, not going to be changed or subdued, the Duke simply ceased to acknowledge the existence of his middle son.
For more than ten years they went on that way, Sandre patiently trying to train Gianno to succeed him, and spending scarcely less time with young Taeri— making it clear to everyone that his youngest son was next in line to his eldest. For over a decade Tomasso simply did not exist within the walls of the Sandreni Palace.
Though he most certainly did elsewhere in Astibar and in a number of the other provinces as well. For reasons that were achingly clear to him now, Tomasso had set out through the course of those years to eclipse the memories of all the dissolute nobility that Astibar still told shocked tales about, even though some of them had been dead four hundred years.
He supposed that he had, to a certain degree, succeeded.
Certainly the ‘raid’ on the temple of Morian that Ember Night in spring so long ago was likely to linger a while yet as the nadir or the paradigm (all came down— or up—to perspective, as he’d been fond of saying then) of sacrilegious debauchery.
The raid hadn’t had any impact on his relationship with the Duke. There was no relationship to impact upon ever since that morning in the straw when Sandre had returned from his ride a destined hour too soon. He and his father simply contrived not to speak to or even acknowledge each other, whether at family dinners or formal state functions. If Tomasso learned something he thought Sandre should know—which was often enough, given the circles in which he moved and the chronic danger of their times—he told his mother at one of their weekly breakfasts together and she made sure his father heard. Tomasso also knew she made equally sure Sandre was aware of the source of the tidings. Not that it mattered, really.
She had died, drinking poisoned wine meant for her husband, in the final year of the Duke’s reign, still working, to the last morning of her life, towards a reconciliation between Sandre and their middle child.
Greater romantics than were either the father or the son might have allowed themselves to think that, as the Sandreni family pulled tightly together in the bloody, retaliatory aftermath of that poisoning, she had achieved her wistful hope by dying.
Both men knew it was not so.
In fact, it was only the coming of Alberico from the Empire of Barbadior, with his will-sapping sorcery and the brutal efficiency of his conquering mercenaries, that brought Tomasso and Sandre to a certain very late-night talk during the Duke’s second year of exile. It was Alberico’s invasion and one further thing: the monumental, irredeemable, inescapable stupidity of Gianno d’Astibar bar Sandre, titular heir to the shattered fortunes of their family.
And to these two things there had slowly been added a third bitter truth for the proud, exiled Duke. It had gradually become more and more obvious, past all denial, that whatever of his own character and gifts had been manifested in the next generation, whatever of his subtlety and perception, his ability to cloak his thoughts and discern the minds of others, whatever of such skills he had passed on to his sons, had gone, all of it, to the middle child. To Tomasso.
Who liked boys, and would leave no heir himself, nor ever a name to be spoken, let alone with pride, in Astibar or anywhere else in the Palm.
In the deepest inward place where he performed the complex act of dealing with his feelings for his father, Tomasso had always acknowledged—even back then, and very certainly now on this last evening road Sandre would travel—that one of the truest measures of the Duke’s stature as a ruler of men had emerged on that winter night so long ago. The night he broke a decade’s stony silence and spoke to his middle son and made him his confidant.
His sole confidant in the painfully cautious eighteen-year quest to drive Alberico and his sorcery and his mercenaries from Astibar and the Eastern Palm. A quest that had become an obsession for both of them, even as Tomasso’s public manner became more and more eccentric and decayed, his voice and gait a parody—a self-parody, in fact—of the mincing, lisping lover of boys.
It was planned, all of it, in late-night talks with his father on their estate outside the city walls.
Sandre’s parallel role had been to settle visibly and loudly in to impotent, brooding, Triad-cursing exile, marked by querulous, blustering hunts and too much drinking of his own wine.
Tomasso had never seen his father actually drunk, and he never used his own fluting voice when they were alone at night.
Eight years ago they had tried an assassination. A chef, traceable only to the Canziano family, had been placed in a country inn in Ferraut near the provincial border with Astibar. For over half a year idle gossip in Astibar had touted that inn as a place of growing distinction. No one remembered, afterwards, where the talk had begun: Tomasso knew very well how useful it was to plant casual rumours of this sort among his friends in the temples. The priests of Morian, in particular, were legendary for their appetites. All their appetites.
A full year from the time they had set things in motion, Alberico of Barbadior had halted on his way back from the Triad Games—exactly as Sandre had said he would—to take his midday meal at a well-reputed inn in Ferraut near the Astibar border.
By the time the sun went down at the end of that bright late-summer day every person in that inn— servants, masters, stable-boys, chefs, children and patrons—had had their backs, legs, arms and wrists broken and their hands cut off, before being bound, living, upon hastily erected Barbadian sky-wheels to die.
The inn was razed to the ground. Taxes in the province of Ferraut were doubled for the next two years, and for a year in Astibar, Tregea and Certando. During the course of the following six months every living member of the Canziano family was found, seized, publicly tortured and burned in the Grand Square of Astibar with their severed hands stuffed in their mouths so that the screaming might not trouble Alberico or his advisers in their offices of state above the square.
In this fashion had Sandre and Tomasso discovered that sorcerers cannot, in fact, be poisoned.
For the next six years they had done nothing but talk at night in the manor-house among the vineyards and gather what knowledge they could of Alberico himself and events to the east in Barbadior, where the Emperor was said to be growing older and more infirm with each passing year.
Tomasso began commissioning and collecting walking sticks with heads carved in the shape of the male organs of sex. It was rumoured that he’d had some of his young friends model for the carvers. Sandre hunted. Gianno, the heir, consolidated a burgeoning reputation as a genial, uncomplicated seducer of women and breeder of children, legitimate and illegitimate. The younger Sandreni were allowed to maintain modest homes in the city as part of Alberico’s overall policy to be as discreet a ruler as possible—except when danger or civil unrest threatened him.
At which time children might die on sky-wheels. The Sandreni Palace in Astibar remained very prominently shuttered, empty and dusty. A useful, potent symbol of the fall of those who might resist the Tyrant. The superstitious claimed to see ghostly lights flickering there at night, especially on a blue-moon night, or on the spring or autumn Ember Nights when the dead were known to walk abroad.
Then one evening in the country Sandre had told Tomasso, without warning or preamble, that he proposed to die on the eve of the Festival of Vines two autumns hence. He proceeded to name the two lords who were to be his vigil-keepers, and why. That same night he and Tomasso decided that it was time to tell Taeri, the youngest son, what was afoot. He was brave, not stupid, and might be necessary for certain things. They also agreed that Gianno had somehow sired one likely son, albeit illegitimate, and that Herado—twenty-one by then and showing encouraging signs of spirit and ambition—was their best hope of having the younger generation share in the unrest Sandre hoped to create just after the time of his dying.
It wasn’t, in fact, a question of who in the family could be trusted: family was, after all, family. The issue was who would be useful and it was a mark of how diminished the Sandreni had become that only two names came readily to mind.
It had been an entirely dispassionate conversation, Tomasso remembered, leading his father’s bier southeast between the darkening trees that flanked the path. Their conversations had always been like that; this one had been no different. Afterwards though, he had been unable to fall asleep, the date of the Festival two years away branded into his brain. The date when his father, so precise in his planning, so judicious, had decided he would die so as to give Tomasso a chance to try again, a different way.
The date that had come now and gone, carrying with it the soul of Sandre d’Astibar to wherever the souls of such men went. Tomasso made a warding gesture to avert evil at that thought. Behind him he heard the steward order the servants to light torches. It grew colder as the darkness fell. Overhead a thin band of high clouds was tinted a sombre shade of purple by the last upward-angled rays of light. The sun itself was gone, down behind the trees. Tomasso thought of souls, his father’s and his own. He shivered.
The white moon, Vidomni, rose, and then, not long after, came blue Ilarion to chase her hopelessly across the sky. Both moons were nearly full. The procession could have done without torches in fact, so bright was the twinned moonlight, but torchlight suited the task and his mood, and so Tomasso let them burn as the company cut off the road on to the familiar winding path through the Sandreni Woods, to come at length to the simple hunting lodge his father had loved.
The servants laid the bier on the trestles waiting in the centre of the large front room. Candles were lit and the two fires built up at opposite ends of the room. Food, they had set up earlier that day. It was quickly uncovered on the long sideboard along with the wine. The windows were opened to air the cabin and admit the breeze.
At a nod from Tomasso the steward led the servants away. They would go on to the manor further east and return at daybreak. At vigil’s end.
