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‘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.
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 well-spring 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.
Chapter V
‘Oh, Morian,’ Alessan 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.
‘The boy?’ he repeated, raising his eyebrows. ‘I think you have evidence to the contrary.’ He let his gaze rest coldly on hers, and was rewarded to see her flush and turn away.
Briefly rewarded.
‘Unworthy, Devin,’ Alessan said. ‘I hope not to hear that note from you again. Catriana violated all I know of her nature in doing what she did this morning. If you are intelligent enough to have come here you will be more than intelligent enough to now understand why she did it. You might suspend your own pride long enough to think about how she is feeling.’
It was mildly said, but Devin felt as if he had just been punched in the stomach. Swallowing awkwardly, he looked from Alessan back to Catriana, but her gaze was fixed on the stars, away from and above them all. Finally, shamed, he looked down at the darkened forest floor. He felt fourteen years old again.
‘I don’t particularly appreciate that, Alessan,’ he heard Catriana saying coldly. ‘I fight my own wars. You know it.’
‘Not to mention,’ Baerd added casually, ‘the dazzling inappropriateness of your chastising anyone alive for having too much pride.’
Alessan chose to ignore that. To Catriana he said, ‘Bright star of Eanna, do you think I don’t know how you can fight? This is different though. What happened this morning cannot be allowed to matter. I can’t have this becoming a battle between you if Devin is to be one of us.’
‘If he what?’ Catriana wheeled on him. ‘Are you mad? Is it the music? Because he can sing? Why should someone from Asoli possibly be—’
‘Hold peace!’ Alessan said sharply. Catriana fell abruptly silent.
Not having any good idea where to look or what to feel, Devin continued to simulate an intense interest in the loamy forest soil beneath his feet. His mind and heart were whirling with confusion.
Alessan’s voice was gentler when he resumed. ‘Catriana, what happened this morning was not his fault either. You are not to blame him. You did what you felt you had to do and it did not succeed. He cannot be blamed or cursed for following you as innocently as he did. If you must, curse me for not stopping him as he went through the door. I could have.’
‘Why didn’t you then?’ Baerd asked.
Devin remembered Alessan looking at him as he’d paused in the archway of that inner door that had seemed a gateway to a land of dreaming.
‘Yes, why?’ he asked awkwardly, looking up. ‘Why did you let me follow?’
The moonlight was purely blue now. Vidomni was over west behind the tops of the trees. Only Ilarion was overhead among the stars, making the night strange with her shining. Ghostlight, the country folk called it when the blue moon rode alone.
Alessan had the light behind him so his eyes were hidden. For a moment the only sounds were the night noises of the forest: rustle of leaf in breeze, of grass, the dry crackle of the woodland floor, quick flap of wings to a branch near by. Somewhere north of them a small animal cried out and another answered it.
Alessan said: ‘Because I knew the tune his father taught him as a child and I know who his father is and he isn’t from Asoli. Catriana, my dear, it isn’t just the music, whatever you may think of my own weaknesses. He is one of us, my darling. Baerd, will you test him?’
On the most conscious, rational level, Devin understood almost none of this. None the less he felt himself beginning to grow cold even as Alessan spoke. He had a swooping sense, like the descent of a hunting bird, that he had come to where Morian’s portal had led him, here in the shadows of this wood under the waxing blue moon.
Nor was he made easier when he turned to Baerd and saw the stricken look on the face of the other man. Even by the distorting moonlight he could see how pale Baerd had become.
‘Alessan . . .’ Baerd began, his voice roughened.
‘You are dearer to me than anyone alive,’ Alessan said, calm and grave. ‘You have been more than a brother to me. I would not hurt you for the world, and especially not in this. Never in this. I would not ask unless I was sure. Test him, Baerd.’
Still Baerd hesitated, which made Devin’s own anxiety grow; he understood less and less of what was happening. Only that it seemed to matter to the others, a great deal.
For a long moment no one moved. Finally Baerd, walking carefully, as if holding tightly to control of himself, took Devin by the arm and led him a dozen steps further into the wood to a small clearing among a circle of trees.
Neatly he lowered himself to sit cross-legged on the ground. After a moment’s hesitation Devin did the same. There was nothing he could do but follow the leads he was being given; he had no idea where they were going. Not on the road I’m on, he remembered Catriana saying in the palace that morning. He linked his hands together to keep them steady; he felt cold, and it had little to do with the chill of night.
He heard Alessan and Catriana following them but he didn’t look back. For the moment what was important was the enormous thing—whatever it was—that he could see building in Baerd’s eyes. The blond-haired man had appeared so effortlessly competent until this moment and now, absurdly, he seemed to have become terribly fragile. Someone who could be shattered with unsettling ease. Abruptly, and for the second time in that long day, Devin felt as if he were crossing over into a country of dream, leaving behind the simple, defined boundaries of the daylight world.
And in this mood, under the blue light of Ilarion, he heard Baerd begin the tale, so that it came to him that first time like a spell, something woven in words out of the lost spaces of his childhood. Which is what, in the end, it was.
‘In the year Alberico took Astibar,’ said Baerd, ‘while the provinces of Tregea and Certando were each preparing to fight him alone, and before Ferraut had fallen, Brandin, King of Ygrath, came to this peninsula from the west. He sailed his fleet into the Great Harbour of Chiara and he took the Island. He took it easily, for the Grand Duke killed himself, seeing how many ships had come from Ygrath. This much I suspect that you know.’
His voice was low. Devin found himself leaning forward, straining to hear. A trialla was singing sweetly, sadly, from a branch behind him. Alessan and Catriana made no sound at all. Baerd went on.
‘In that year the Peninsula of the Palm became a battleground in an enormous balancing game between Ygrath and the Empire of Barbadior. Neither thought it could afford to give the other free rein here, halfway between the two of them. Which is one of the reasons Brandin came. The other reason, as we learned afterwards, had to do with his younger, most-beloved son, Stevan. Brandin of Ygrath sought to carve out a second realm for his child to rule. What he found was something else.’
The trialla was still singing. Baerd paused to listen, as if finding in its liquescent voice, gentler even than the nightingale’s, an echo to something in his own.
‘The Chiarans, attempting to rally a resistance in the mountains, were massacred on the slopes of Sangarios. Brandin took Asoli province soon after, and word of his power ran before him. He was very strong in his sorcery, even stronger than Alberico, and though he had fewer soldiers than the Barbadians in the east, his were more completely loyal and better trained. For where Alberico was only a wealthy, ambitious minor lord of the Empire using hired mercenaries, Brandin ruled Ygrath and his were the picked soldiers of that realm. They moved south through Corte almost effortlessly, defeating each province’s army one by one, for none of us acted together in that year. Or after, naturally.’ Baerd’s voice wasn’t quite detached enough for the irony he was trying for.
‘From Corte, Brandin himself turned east with the smaller part of his army to meet Alberico in Ferraut and pin him down there. He sent Stevan south to take the last free province in the west and then cross over to join him in Ferraut to meet the Barbadians in the battle that I think they all expected would shape the fate of the Palm.
‘It was a mistake, though he could not really have known it then, eighteen years ago. Newly landed here, ignorant of the natures of the different provinces in this peninsula. I suppose he wanted Stevan to have a taste of leadership on his own. He gave him most of the army and his best commanders, relying on his own sorcery to hold Alberico until the others joined him.’
Baerd paused for a moment, his blue eyes focused inward. When he resumed, there was a new timbre to his voice; it seemed to Devin to be carrying many different things, all of them old, and all of them sorrowful.
‘At the line of the River Deisa,’ Baerd said, ‘a little more than halfway between Certando and the sea at Corte, Stevan was met by the bitterest resistance either of the invading armies was to find in the Palm. Led by their Prince—for in their pride they had always named their ruler so—the people of that last province in the west met the Ygrathens and held them, and beat them back from the river with heavy losses on both sides.
‘And Prince Valentin of that province . . . the province you know as Lower Corte, slew Stevan of Ygrath, Brandin’s beloved son, on the bank of the river at sunset after a bitter day of death.’
Devin could almost taste the keenness of old grief in the words. He saw Baerd glance over for the first time to where Alessan was standing. Neither man spoke. Devin never took his own eyes away from Baerd. He concentrated as if his life depended on his doing so, treating each word spoken as if it were a jewelled mosaic piece to be set into the memory that was his own pride.
And right about then it seemed to Devin that a distant bell began to toll in some recess of his mind. Ringing a warning. As might a village bell in a temple of Adaon, summoning farmers urgently back from the fields. A far bell heard, faint but clear, from over morning fields of waving yellow grain.
‘Brandin knew what had happened immediately through his sorcery,’ Baerd said, his voice like the rasp of a file. ‘He swept back south and west, leaving Alberico a free hand in Ferraut and Certando. He came down with the full weight of his sorcery and his army and with the rage of a father whose son has been slain, and he met the remnant of his last foes where they had waited for him by the Deisa.’
Once more Baerd looked over at Alessan. His face was bleak, ghostly in the moonlight. He said:
‘Brandin annihilated them. He smashed them to pieces without mercy or respite. Drove them helplessly before him back into their own country south of the Deisa and he burned every field and village through which he passed. He took no prisoners. He had women slain in that first march, and children, which was not a thing he’d done anywhere else. But nowhere else had his own child died. So many souls crossed over to Morian for the sake of the soul of Stevan of Ygrath. His father overran that province in blood and fire. Before the summer was out he had levelled all the glorious towers of the city in the foothills of the mountains— the one now called Stevanien. On the coast he smashed to rubble and sand the walls and the harbour barriers of the royal city by the sea. And in the battle by the river he took the Prince who had slain his son and later that year had him tortured and mutilated and killed in Chiara.’
Baerd’s voice was a dry whisper now under the starlight and the light of the single moon. And with it there was still that bell warning of sorrows yet to come, tolling in Devin’s mind, louder now. Baerd said:
‘Brandin of Ygrath did something more than all of this. He gathered his magic, the sorcerous power that he had, and he laid down a spell upon that land such as had never even been conceived before. And with that spell he . . . tore its name away. He stripped that name utterly from the minds of every man and woman who had not been born in that province. It was his deepest curse, his ultimate revenge. He made it as if we had never been. Our deeds, our history, our very name. And then he called us Lower Corte, after the bitterest of our ancient enemies among the provinces.’
Behind him now Devin heard a sound and realized that Catriana was weeping. Baerd said, ‘Brandin made it come to pass that no one living could hear and then remember the name of that land, or of its royal city by the sea or even of that high, golden place of towers on the old road from the mountains. He broke us and he ravaged us. He killed a generation, and then he stripped away our name.’
And those last words were not whispered or rasped into the autumn dark of Astibar. They were hurled forth as a denunciation, an indictment, to the trees and the night and stars—the stars that had watched this thing come to pass.
