"Tigana" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

Chapter 4

ESCORTING HIS FATHER'S BIER OUT 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 labored 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 into 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 rumors 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 rumored 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 somber 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 onto 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 center 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.

And so they were left alone, finally. Tomasso and the lords Nievole and Scalvaia, so carefully chosen two years before.

"Wine, my lords?" Tomasso asked. "We will have three others joining us very shortly."

He said it, deliberately, in his natural voice, dropping the artificial, fluting tone that was his trademark in Astibar. He was pleased to see both of them note the fact immediately, their glances sharpening as they turned to him.

"Who else?" growled bearded Nievole who had hated Sandre all his life. He made no comment on Tomasso's voice, nor hid Scalvaia. Such questions gave too much away, and these were men long skilled in giving away very little indeed.

"My brother Taeri and nephew Herado, one of Gianno's by-blows, and much the cleverest." He spoke casually, uncorking two bottles of Sandreni red reserve as he spoke. He poured and handed them each a glass, waiting to see who would break the small silence his father had said would follow. Scalvaia would ask, Sandre had said.

"Who is the third?" Lord Scalvaia asked softly.

Inwardly Tomasso saluted his dead father. Then, twirling his own glass gently by the stem to release the wine's bouquet, he said, "I don't know. My father did not name him. He named the two of you to come here, and the three of us and said there would be a sixth at our council tonight."

That word too had been carefully chosen.

"Council?" elegant Scalvaia echoed. "It appears that I have been misinformed. I was naively of the impression that this was a vigil." Nievole's dark eyes glowered above his beard. Both men stared at Tomasso.

"A little more than that," said Taeri as he entered the room, Herado behind him.

Tomasso was pleased to see them both dressed with appropriate sobriety, and to note that, for all the suavely flippant timing of Taeri's entrance, his expression was profoundly serious.

"You will know my brother," Tomasso murmured, moving to pour two more glasses for the new arrivals. "You may not have met Herado, Gianno's son."

The boy bowed and kept silent, as was proper. Tomasso carried the drinks over to his brother and nephew.

The stillness lasted a moment longer, then Scalvaia sank down into a chair, stretching his bad leg out in front of him. He lifted his cane and pointed it at Tomasso. The tip did not waver.

"I asked you a question," he said coldly, in the famous, beautiful voice. "Why do you call this a council, Tomasso bar Sandre? Why have we been brought here under false pretenses?"

Tomasso stopped playing with his wine. They had come to the moment at last. He looked from Scalvaia over to burly Nievole.

"The two of you," he said soberly, "were considered by my father to be the last lords of any real power left in Astibar. Two winters past he decided, and informed me, that he intended to die on the eve of this Festival. At a time when Alberico would not be able to refuse him full rites of burial, which rites include a vigil such as this. At a time when you would both be in Astibar, which would allow me to name you his vigil-keepers."

He paused in the measured, deliberate recitation and let his glance linger on each of them. "My father did this so that we might come together without suspicion, or interruption, or risk of being detected, to set in motion certain plans for the overthrow of Alberico who rules in Astibar."

He was watching closely, but Sandre had chosen well. Neither of the two men to whom he spoke betrayed surprise or dismay by so much as a flicker of a muscle.

Slowly Scalvaia lowered his cane and laid it down on the table by his chair. The stick was of onyx and machial, Tomasso found himself noticing. Strange how the mind worked at moments such as this.

"Do you know," said bluff Nievole from by the larger fire, "do you know that this thought had actually crossed my mind when I tried to hazard why your Triad-cursed father, ah, forgive me, old habits die hard…” His smile was wolfish, rather than apologetic, and it did not reach his narrowed eyes. "…Why Duke Sandre would name me to hold vigil for him. He must have known how many times I tried to hasten these mourning rites along in the days when he ruled."

Tomasso smiled in return, just as thinly. "He was certain you would wonder," he said politely to the man he was almost sure had paid for the cup of wine that had killed his mother. "He was also quite certain you would agree to come, being one of the last of a dying breed in Astibar. Indeed, in the whole of the Palm."

Bearded Nievole raised his glass. "You flatter well, bar Sandre. And I must say I do prefer your voice as it is now, without all the dips and flutters and wristy things that normally go with it."

Scalvaia looked amused. Taeri laughed aloud. Herado was carefully watchful. Tomasso liked him very much: though not, as he'd had to assure his father in one diverting conversation, in his own particular fashion.

"I prefer this voice as well," he said to the two lords. "You will both have been deducing in the last few minutes, being who and what you are, why I have conducted certain aspects of my life in certain well-known ways. There are advantages to being seen as aimlessly degenerate."

"There are," Scalvaia agreed blandly, "if you have a purpose that is served by such a misconception. You named a name a moment ago, and intimated we might all be rendered happier in our hearts were the bearer of that name dead or gone. We will leave aside for the moment what possibilities might follow such a dramatic eventuality."

His gaze was quite unreadable; Tomasso had been warned it would be. He said nothing. Taeri shifted uneasily but blessedly kept quiet, as instructed. He walked over and took one of the other chairs on the far side of the bier.

Scalvaia went on, "We cannot be unaware that by saying what you have said you have put yourselves completely in our hands, or so it might initially appear. At the same time, I do surmise that were we, in fact, to rise and begin to ride back towards Astibar carrying word of treachery we would join your father among the dead before we left these woods."

It was casually stated, a minor fact to be confirmed before moving on to more important issues.

Tomasso shook his head. "Hardly," he lied. "You do us honor by your presence and are entirely free to leave. Indeed, we will escort you if you wish, for the path is deceptive in darkness. My father did suggest that I might wish to point out that although you could readily have us wristed and death-wheeled after torture, it is exceedingly likely, approaching a certainty, that Alberico would then see compelling cause to do the same to both of you, for having been considered likely accomplices of ours. You will remember what happened to the Canziano after that unfortunate incident in Ferraut some years ago?"

There was a smoothly graceful silence acknowledging all of this.

It was broken by Nievole. "That was Sandre's doing, wasn't it?" he growled from by his fire. "Not the Canziano at all!"

"It was our doing," Tomasso agreed calmly. "We learned a great deal, I must say."

"So," Scalvaia murmured drily, "did the Canziano. Your father always hated Fabro bar Canzian."

"They could not have been said to be on the best of terms," Tomasso said blandly. "Though I must say that if you focus on that aspect of things I fear you might miss the point."

"The point you prefer us to take," Nievole amended pointedly.

Unexpectedly, Scalvaia came to Tomasso's aid. "Not fair, my lord," he said to Nievole. "If we can accept anything as true in this room and these times it is that Sandre's hatred and his desire had moved beyond old wars and rivalries. His target was Alberico."

His icy blue eyes held Neivole's for a long moment, and finally the bigger man nodded. Scalvaia shifted in his chair wincing at a pain in his afflicted leg.

"Very well," he said to Tomasso. "You have now told us why we are here and have made clear your father's purpose and your own. For my own part I will make a confession. I will confess, in the spirit of truth that a death vigil should inspire, that being ruled by a coarse, vicious, overbearing minor lord from Barbadior brings little joy to my aged heart. I am with you. If you have a plan I would like to hear it. On my oath and honor I will keep faith with the Sandreni in this."

Tomasso shivered at the invocation of the ancient words. "Your oath and honor are sureties beyond measure," he said, and meant it.

"They are indeed, bar Sandre," said Nievole, taking a heavy step forward from the fire. "And I will dare to say that the word of the Nievolene has never been valued at lesser coin. The dearest wish of my heart is for the Barbadian to lie dead and cut to pieces, Triad willing, by my own blade. I too am with you, by my oath and honor."

"Such terribly splendid words!" said an amused voice from the window opposite the door.

Five faces, four white with shock and the bearded one flushing red, whipped around. The speaker stood outside the open window, elbows resting on the ledge, chin in his hands. He eyed them with a mild scrutiny, his face shadowed by the wood of the window frame.

"I have never yet," he said, "known gallant phrases from however august a lineage to succeed in ousting a tyrant. In the Palm or anywhere else." With an economical motion he hoisted himself upwards, swung his feet into the room and sat comfortably perched on the ledge. "On the other hand," he added, "agreeing on a cause does make a starting point, I will concede that much."

"You are the sixth of whom my father spoke?" Tomasso asked warily.

The man did look familiar now that he was in the light. He was dressed for the forest not the city, in two shades of grey with a black sheepskin vest over his shirt, and breeches tucked into worn black riding boots. There was a knife at his belt, without ornament.

"I heard you mention that," the fellow said. "I actually hope I'm not, because if I am the implications are unsettling, to say the least. The fact is, I never spoke to your father in my life. If he knew of my activities and somehow expected me to find out about this meeting and be here… well, I would be somewhat flattered by his confidence but rather more disturbed that he would have known so much about me. On the other hand," he said for a second time, "it is Sandre d'Astibar we're talking about, and I do seem to make six here, don't I?" He bowed, without any visible irony, towards the bier on its trestles.

"You are, then, also in league against Alberico?" Nievole's eyes were watchful.

"I am not," said the man in the window quite bluntly. "Alberico means nothing to me. Except as a tool. A wedge to open a door of my own."

"And what is it lies behind that door?" Scalvaia asked from deep in his armchair.

But in that moment Tomasso remembered.

"I know you!" he said abruptly. "I saw you this morning. You are the Tregean shepherd who played the pipes in the mourning rites!" Taeri snapped his fingers as the recognition came home to him as well.

"I played the pipes, yes," the man on the window-ledge said, quite unruffled. "But I am not a shepherd nor from Tregea. It has suited my purposes to play a role, many different roles, in fact, for a great many years. Tomasso bar Sandre ought to appreciate that." He grinned.

Tomasso did not return the smile. "Perhaps then, under the circumstances, you might favor us by saying who you really are." He said it as politely as the situation seemed to warrant. "My father might have known but we do not."

"Nor, I'm afraid, shall you learn just yet," the other said. He paused. "Though I will say that were I to swear a vow of my own on the honor of my family it would carry a weight that would eclipse both such oaths sworn here tonight."

It was matter-of-factly said, which made the arrogance greater, not less.

To forestall Nievole's predictable burst of anger Tomasso said quickly, "You will not deny us some information surely, even if you choose to shield your name. You said Alberico is a tool for you. A tool for what, Alessan not-of-Tregea?" He was pleased to find that he remembered the name Menico di Ferraut had mentioned yesterday. "What is your own purpose? What brings you to this lodge?"

The other's face, lean and curiously hollowed with cheekbones in sharp relief, grew still, almost masklike. And into the waiting silence that ensued he said:

"I want Brandin. I want Brandin of Ygrath dead more than I want my soul's immortality beyond the last portal of Morian."

There was a silence again, broken only by the crackle of the autumn fires on the two hearths. It seemed to Tomasso as if the chill of winter had come into the room with that speech.

Then: "Such terribly splendid words!" murmured Scalvaia lazily, shattering the mood. He drew a shout of laughter from Nievole and Taeri, both. Scalvaia himself did not smile.

The man on the window-ledge acknowledged the thrust with the briefest nod of his head. He said, "This is not, my lord, a subject about which I permit frivolity. If we are to work together it will be necessary for you to remember that."

"You, I am forced to say, are an overly proud young man," replied Scalvaia sharply. "It might be appropriate for you to remember to whom you speak."

The other visibly bit back his first retort. "Pride is a family failing," he said finally. "I have not escaped it, I'm afraid. But I am indeed mindful of who you are. And the Sandreni and my lord Nievole. It is why I am here. I have made it my business to be aware of dissidence throughout the Palm for many years. At times I have encouraged it, discreetly. This evening marks the first instance in which I have come myself to a gathering such as this."

"But you have already told us that Alberico is nothing to you." Tomasso inwardly cursed his father for not having better prepared him for this very peculiar sixth figure.

"Nothing in himself," the other corrected. "Will you allow me?" Without waiting for a reply he lifted himself down from the ledge and walked over to the wine.

"Please," said Tomasso, belatedly.

The man poured himself a generous glass of the vintage red. He drained it, and poured another. Only then did he turn back to address the five of them. Herado's eyes, watching him, were enormous.

"Two facts," the man called Alessan said crisply. "Learn them if you are serious about freedom in the Palm. One: if you oust or slay Alberico you will have Brandin upon you within three months. Two: if Brandin is ousted or slain Alberico will rule this peninsula within that same period of time."

He stopped. His eyes, grey, Tomasso noticed now, moved from one to the other of them, challenging. No one spoke. Scalvaia toyed with the handle of his cane.

"These two things must be understood," the stranger went on in the same tone. "Neither I in my own pursuit, nor you in yours, can afford to lose sight of them. They are the core truths of the Palm in our time. The two sorcerers from overseas are their own balance of power and the only balance of power in the peninsula right now, however different things might have been eighteen years ago. Today only the power of one keeps the magic of the other from being wielded as it was when they conquered us. If we take them then we must take them both, or make them bring down each other."

"How?" Taeri asked, too eagerly.

The lean face under the prematurely silvering dark hair turned to him and smiled briefly. "Patience, Taeri bar Sandre. I have a number of things yet to tell you about carelessness before deciding if our paths are to join. And I say this with infinite respect for the dead man who seems, remarkably enough, to have drawn us here. I'm afraid you are going to have to agree to submit yourselves to my guidance or we can do nothing together at all."

"The Scalvaiane have submitted themselves willingly to nothing and no one in living memory or recorded history," that vulpine lord said, the texture of velvet in his voice. "I am not readily of a mind to become the first to do so."

"Would you prefer," the other said, "to have your plans and your life and the long glory of your line snuffed out like candles on the Ember Days because of sheer sloppiness in your preparations?"

"You had better explain yourself," Tomasso said icily.

"I intend to. Who was it who chose a double-moon night at double moonrise to meet?" Alessan retorted, his voice suddenly cutting like a blade. "Why are no rear guards posted along the forest path to warn you if someone approaches, as I just did? Why were no servants left here this afternoon to guard this cabin? Have you even the faintest awareness of how dead the five of you would be, severed hands stuffed into your throats, were I not who I am?"

"My father… Sandre… said that Alberico would not have us followed," Tomasso stammered furiously. "He was absolutely certain of that."

"And he is likely to have been absolutely right. But you cannot let your focus be so narrow. Your father, I am sorry to have to say it, was alone with his obsession for too long. He was too intent upon Alberico. It shows in everything you have done these past two days. What of the idly curious or the greedy? The petty informer who might decide to follow you just to see what happened here? Just to have a story to tell in the tavern tomorrow? Did you, or your father, give even half a thought to such things? Or to those who might have learned where you planned to come and arranged to be here before you?"

There was a hostile silence. A log on the smaller fire settled with a crack and a shower of sparks. Herado jumped involuntarily at the sound.

"Will it interest you to know," the man called Alessan went on, more gently, "that my people have been guarding the approaches to this cabin since you arrived? Or that I've had someone in here since mid-afternoon keeping an eye on the servants setting up, and who might follow them?"

"What?" Taeri exclaimed. "In here! In our hunting lodge!"

"For your protection and my own," the other man said, finishing his second glass of wine. He glanced upwards to the shadows of the half-loft above, where the extra pallets were stored.

"I think that should do it, my friend," he called, pitching his voice to carry. "You've earned a glass of wine after so long dry-throated among the dust. You may as well come down now, Devin."

It had actually been very easy.

Menico, purse jingling with more money than he had ever earned from a single performance in his life, had graciously passed their concert at the wine-merchant's house over to Burnet di Corte. Burnet, who needed the work, was pleased; the wine-merchant, angry at first, was quickly mollified upon learning what Menico's hitherto unfinalized tariff would now have been in the aftermath of the sensation they'd caused that morning.

So, in the event, Devin and the rest of the company had been given the rest of the day and evening off. Menico counted out for everyone an immediate bonus of five astins and benevolently waved them away to the various delights of the Festival. He didn't even offer his usual warning lecture.

Already, just past noon, there were wine-stands on every corner, more than one at the busier squares. Each vineyard in Astibar province, and even some from farther afield in Ferraut or Senzio, had its vintages from previous years available as harbingers of what this year's grapes would offer. Merchants looking to buy in quantity were sampling judiciously, early revelers rather less so.

Fruit vendors were also in abundance, with figs and melons and the enormous grapes of the season displayed beside vast wheels of white cheeses from Tregea or bricks of red ones from northern Certando. Over by the market the din was deafening as the people of the city and its distrada canvassed the offerings of this year's itinerant tradesmen. Overhead the banners of the noble houses and of the larger wine estates flapped brightly in the autumn breeze as Devin strode purposefully towards what he'd just been told was the most fashionable khav room in Astibar.

There were benefits to fame. He was recognized at the doorway, his arrival excitedly announced, and in a matter of moments he found himself at the dark wooden bar of The Paelion nursing a mug of hot khav laced with flambardion, no awkward questions asked about anyone's age, thank you very much.

It was the work of half an hour to find out what he needed to know about Sandre d'Astibar. His questions seemed entirely natural, coming from the tenor who had just sung the Duke's funeral lament. Devin learned about Sandre's long rule, his feuds, his bitter exile, and his sad decline in the last few years into a blustering, drunken hunter of small game, a wraith compared to what he once had been.

In that last context, rather more specifically, Devin asked about where the Duke had liked to hunt. They told him. They told him where his favorite hunting lodge had been. He changed the subject to wine.

It was easy. He was a hero of the hour and The Paelion liked heroes, for an hour. They let him go eventually: he pleaded an artist's strained sensitivity after the morning's endeavors. With the benefit of hindsight he now attached a deal more importance than he had at the time to glimpsing Alessan di Tregea at a booth full of painters and poets. They were laughing about some wager concerning certain verses of condolence that had not yet arrived from Chiara. He and Alessan had saluted each other in an elaborately showy, performers' fashion that delighted the packed room.

Back at the inn, Devin had fended off the most ardent of the group who had walked him home and went upstairs alone. He had waited in his room, chafing, for an hour to be sure the last of them had gone. Having changed into a dark-brown tunic and breeches, he put on a cap to hide his hair and a woolen overshirt against the coming chill of evening. Then he made his way unnoticed through the now teeming crowds in the streets over to the eastern gate of the city.

And out, among several empty wagons, goods all sold, being ridden back to the distrada by sober, prudent farmers who preferred to reload and return in the morning instead of celebrating all night in town spending what they'd just earned.

Devin hitched a ride on a cart part of the way, commiserating with the driver on the taxes and the poor rates being paid that year for lamb's wool. Eventually he jumped off, feigning youthful exuberance and ran a mile or so along the road to the east.

At one point he saw, with a grin of recognition, a temple of Adaon on the right. Just past it, as promised, was the delicately rendered image of a ship on the roadside gate of a modest country house. Rovigo's home, what Devin could see of it, set well back from the road among cypress and olive trees, looked comfortable and cared for.

A day ago, a different person, he would have stopped. But something had happened to him that morning within the dusty spaces of the Sandreni Palace. He kept going.

A half mile further on he found what he was looking for. He made sure he was alone and then quickly cut to his right, south into the woods, away from the main road that led to the east coast and Ardin town on the sea.

It was quiet in the forest and cooler where the branches and the many-colored leaves dappled the sunlight. There was a path winding through the trees and Devin began to follow it, towards the hunting lodge of the Sandreni. From here on he redoubled his caution. On the road he was simply a walker in the autumn countryside; here he was a trespasser with no excuse at all for being where he was.

Unless pride and the strange, dreamlike events of the morning just past could be called adequate excuses. Devin rather doubted it. At the same time, it remained to be seen whether he or a certain manipulative red-headed personage was going to dictate the shape and flow of this day and those to come. If she were under the impression that he was so easy to dupe, a helpless, youthful slave to his passions, blinded and deafened to anything else by the so-gracious offer of her body, well it was for this afternoon and this evening to show how wrong an arrogant girl could be.

What else the evening might reveal, Devin didn't know; he hadn't allowed himself to slow down long enough to consider the question.

There was no one there when he came to the lodge, though he lay silently among the trees for a long time to be certain. The front door was chained but Marra had been very good with such devices and had taught him a thing or two. He picked the lock with the buckle of his belt, went inside, opened a window, and climbed out to relock the chain. Then he slipped back in through the window, closed it, and took a look around.

There was little option, really. The two bedchambers at the back would be dangerous and not very useful if he wanted to hear. Devin balanced himself on the broad arm of a heavy wooden chair and, jumping, managed to make it up to the half-loft on his second attempt.

Nursing a shin bruised in the process he took a pillow from one of the pallets stored up there and proceeded to wedge himself into the remotest, darkest corner he could find, behind two beds and the stuffed head of an antlered corbin stag. By lying on his left side, eye to a chink in the floorboards, he had an almost complete view of the room below.

He tried to guide himself towards a mood of calm and patience. Unfortunately, he soon became irrationally conscious of the fact that the glassy eye of the corbin was glitteringly fixed upon him. Under the circumstances it made him nervous. Eventually he got up, turned the chestnut head to one side and settled in to his hiding-place again.

And right about then, as the grimly purposeful activities of the day gave way to a time when he could do nothing but wait, Devin began to be afraid.

He was under no real illusions: he was a dead man if they found him here. The secrecy and tension in Tomasso bar Sandre's words and manner that morning made that clear enough. Even without what Catriana had done in her own effort to overhear those words, and then to prevent him from doing so. For the first time Devin began to contemplate where the rash momentum of his wounded pride had carried him.

When the servants came half an hour later to prepare the room they gave him some very bad moments. Bad enough, in fact, to make him briefly wish that he was back home in Asoli guiding a plow behind a pair of stolid water buffaloes. They were fine creatures, water buffaloes, patient, uncomplaining. They plowed fields for you, and their milk made cheese. There was even something to be said for the predictable grey skies of Asoli in autumn and the equally predictable people. None of their girls, for example, were as irritatingly superior as Catriana d'Astibar who had got him into this. Nor would any Asolini servant, Devin was quite certain, ever have volunteered, as one Triad-blighted fool below was doing even now, to bring down a pallet from the half-loft in case one of the vigil-keeping lords should grow weary.

"Goch, don't be more of a fool than you absolutely must be!" the steward snapped officiously in reply. "They are here to keep a waking watch all night, a pallet in the room is an insult to them both. Be grateful you aren't dependent on your brain to feed your belly, Goch!"

Devin fervently seconded the sentiments of the insult and wished the steward a long and lucrative existence. For the tenth time since the Sandreni servants had entered the lower room he cursed Catriana, and for the twentieth time, himself. The ratio seemed about right.

Finally the servants left; heading back for Astibar to bear the Duke's body here. The steward's instructions were painstakingly explicit. With idiots like Goch around, Devin thought spitefully, they had to be.

From where he lay, Devin could see the daylight gradually waning towards dusk. He found himself softly humming his old cradle song. He made himself stop.

His mind turned back to the morning. To the long walk through empty, dusty rooms of the palace. To the hidden closet at the end. The sudden silken feel of Catriana when her gown had drifted above her hips. He made himself stop that too.

It grew steadily darker. The first owl called, not far away. Devin had grown up in the country; it was a familiar sound. He heard some forest animal rooting in the underbrush at the edge of the clearing. Once in a while a gusting of the wind would set the leaves to rustling.

Then, abruptly, there came a shining of white light through one of the drawn window curtains and Devin knew that Vidomni was high enough to look down upon this clearing amid the tall trees of the wood, which meant that blue Ilarion would be rising even now. Which meant it would not be very much longer.

It wasn't. There was a wavering of torchlight and the sound of voices. The lock clinked, rattled, and the door swung open. The steward led in eight men carrying a bier. Eye glued to his crack in the floor, breathing shallowly, Devin saw them lay it down. Tomasso came in with the two lords whose names and lineage Devin had learned in The Paelion.

The servants uncovered and laid out the food and then they left, Goch stumbling on the threshold and banging his shoulder pleasingly on the doorpost. The steward, last to go, shrugged a discreet apology, bowed, and closed the door behind him.

"Wine, my lords?" said Tomasso d'Astibar in the voice Devin had heard from the secret closet. "We will have three others joining us very shortly."

And from then on they had said what they said and Devin heard what he heard, and so gradually became aware of the magnitude of what he had stumbled upon, the peril he was in.

Then Alessan appeared at the window opposite the door.

Devin couldn't, in fact, see that window but he knew the voice immediately and it was with disbelief bordering on stupefaction that he heard Menico's recruit of a fortnight ago deny being from Tregea at all and then name Brandin, King of Ygrath as the everlasting target of his soul's hate.

Rash, Devin certainly was, and he would not have denied that he carried more than his own due share of impulsive foolishness, but he had not ever been less than quick, or clever. In Asoli, small boys had to be.

So by the time Alessan named him, and invited him to come down, Devin's racing mind had put two more pieces of the puzzle together and he adroitly took the path offered him.

"All quiet, since mid-afternoon," he called out, extricating himself from his corner and stepping past the corbin's antlers to the edge of the half-loft. "Only the servants were here, but they didn't do much of a job when they chained the door, the lock was easy to pick. Two thieves and the Emperor of Barbadior could have been up here without seeing each other or anyone down there being the wiser."

He said it as coolly as he could. Then he lowered himself, with a deliberately showy flip, to the ground. He registered the looks on the faces of five of the men there, all of whom most certainly recognized him, but his concentration, and his satisfaction, lay in the brief smile of approval he received from Alessan.

For the moment his apprehension was gone, replaced by something entirely different. Alessan had claimed him, given him legitimacy here. He was clearly linked to the man who was controlling events in the room. And the events were on a scale that spanned the Palm. Devin had to fight hard to control his growing excitement.

Tomasso went over to the sideboard and smoothly poured a glass of wine for him. Devin was impressed with the composure of the man. He was also aware, from the exaggerated courtesy and the undeniable sparkle in bar Sandre's accentuated eyes, that although the fluting voice might be faked, Tomasso, in certain matters and propensities, was still very much what he was said to be. Devin accepted the glass, careful not to let their fingers touch.

"I wonder now," drawled Lord Scalvaia in his magnificent voice, "are we to be treated to a recital here while we pass our vigil? There does seem to be a quantity of musicians here tonight."

Devin said nothing, but following Alessan's example did not smile.

"Shall I name you a provincial grower of grapes, my lord?" There was real anger in Alessan's voice. "And call Nievole a grain-farmer from the southwestern distrada? What we do outside these walls has little to do with why we are here, save in two ways only."

He held up a long finger. "One: as musicians we have an excuse to cross back and forth across the Palm, which offers advantages I need not belabor." A second finger shot up beside the first. "Two: music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of detail. The sort of precision, my lords, that would have precluded the carelessness that has marked tonight. If Sandre d'Astibar were alive I would discuss it with him, and I might defer to his experience and his long striving."

He paused, looking from one to another of them, then said, much more softly: "I might, but I might not. It is a vanished tune, that one, never to be sung. As matters stand I can only say again that if we are to work together I must ask you to accept my lead."

He spoke this last directly to Scalvaia who still lounged, elegant and expressionless, in his deep chair. It was Nievole who answered, though, blunt and direct.

"I am not in the habit of delaying my judgment of men. I think you mean what you say and that you are more versed in these things than we are. I accept. I will follow your lead. With a single condition."

"Which is?"

"That you tell us your name."

Devin, watching with rapacious intensity, anxious not to miss a word or a nuance, saw Alessan's eyes close for an instant, as if to hold back something that might otherwise have shown through them. The others waited through the short silence.

Then Alessan shook his head. "It is a fair condition, my lord. Under the circumstances it is entirely fair. I can only pray you will not hold me to it though. It is a grief, I cannot tell you how much of a grief it is, but I am unable to accede."

For the first time he appeared to be reaching for words, choosing them carefully. "Names are power, as you know. As the two tyrant-sorcerers from overseas most certainly know. And as I have been made to know in the bitterest ways there are. My lord, you will learn my name in the moment of our triumph if it comes, and not before. I will say that this is imposed upon me; it is not a choice freely made. You may call me Alessan, which is common enough here in the Palm and happens to be truly the name my mother gave me. Will you be gracious enough to let that suffice you, my lord, or must we now part ways?"

The last question was asked in a tone bereft of the arrogance that had infused the man's bearing and speech from the moment of his arrival.

Just as Devin's earlier fear had given way to excitement, so now did excitement surrender to something else, something he could not yet identify. He stared at Alessan. The man seemed younger than before, somehow, unable to prevent this almost naked showing of his need.

Nievole cleared his throat loudly, as if to dispel an aura, a resonance of something that seemed to have entered the room like the mingled light of the two moons outside. Another owl hooted from the clearing. Nievole opened his mouth to reply to Alessan.

They never knew what he would have said, or Scalvaia.

Afterwards, on nights when sleep eluded him and he watched one or both moons sweep the sky or counted the stars in Eanna's Diadem in a moonless dark, Devin would let his clear memory of that moment carry him back, trying, for reasons he would have found difficult to explain, to imagine what the two lords would have done or said had all their briefly tangled fate lines run differently from that lodge.

He could guess, analyze, play out scenarios in his mind, but he would never know. It was a night-time truth that became a queer, private sorrow for him amid all that came after. A symbol, a displacement of regret. A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once, until Morian called the soul away and Eanna's lights were lost. We can never truly know the path we have not walked.

The paths that each of the men in that lodge were to walk, through their own private portals to endings near or far were laid down by the owl that cried a second time, very clearly, just as Nievole began to speak.

Alessan flung up his hand. "Trouble!" he said sharply. Then: "Baerd?"

The door banged open. Devin saw a large man, his very long, pale-yellow hair held back by a leather band across his brow. There was another leather thong about his throat. He wore a vest and leggings cut in the fashion of the southern highlands. His eyes, even by firelight, gleamed a dazzling blue. He carried a drawn sword.

Which was punishable by death this close to Astibar.

"Let's go!" the man said urgently. "You and the boy. The others belong here, the youngest son and the grandson have easy explanations. Get rid of the extra glasses."

"What is it?" Tomasso d'Astibar asked quickly, his eyes wide.

"Twenty horsemen on the forest path. Continue your vigil and be as calm as you can, we won't be far away. We'll return after. Alessan, come on!"

The tone of his voice pulled Devin halfway to the door. Alessan was lingering though, his eyes for some reason locked on those of Tomasso, and that look, what was exchanged in it, became another one of the things that Devin never forgot, or fully understood.

For a long moment, a very long moment, it seemed to Devin, with twenty horsemen riding through the forest and a drawn sword in the room, no one spoke. Then:

"It seems we will have to continue this extremely interesting discussion at a later hour," Tomasso bar Sandre murmured, with genuinely impressive composure. "Will you take a last glass before you go, in my father's name?"

Alessan smiled then, a full, open smile. He shook his head though. "I hope to have a chance to do so later," he said. "I will drink to your father gladly, but I have a habit I don't think even you can satisfy in the time we have."

Tomasso's mouth quirked wryly. "I've satisfied a number of habits in my day. Do tell me yours."

The reply was quiet, Devin had to strain to hear.

"My third glass of a night is blue," Alessan said. "The third glass I drink is always of blue wine. In memory of something lost. Lest on any single night I forget what it is I am alive to do."

"Not forever lost, I hope," said Tomasso, equally softly.

"Not forever, I have sworn, upon my soul and my father's soul wherever it has gone."

"Then there will be blue wine when next we drink after tonight," said Tomasso, "if it is at all in my power to provide it. And I will drink it with you to our fathers' souls."

"Alessan!" snapped the yellow-haired man named Baerd, "In Adaon's name, I said twenty horsemen! Will you come?"

"I will," said Alessan. He hurled his wineglass and Devin's through the nearest window into the darkness. "Triad guard you all," he said to the five in the room. Then he and Devin followed Baerd into the moonlit shadows of the clearing.

With Devin in the middle they ran swiftly around to the side of the cabin farthest from the path that led to the main road. They didn't go far. His pulse pounding furiously, Devin dropped to the ground when the other two men did so. Peering cautiously out from under a cluster of dark-green serrano bushes they could see the lodge. Firelight showed through the open windows.

A moment later Devin's heart lurched like a ship caught by a wave across its bows, as a twig cracked just behind him.

"Twenty-two riders," a voice said. The speaker dropped neatly to the ground on Baerd's other side. "The one in the middle of them is hooded."

Devin looked over. And by the mingled light of the two moons saw Catriana d'Astibar.

"Hooded?" Alessan repeated, on a sharply taken breath. "You are certain?"

"Of course I am," said Catriana. "Why? What does it mean?"

"Eanna be gracious to us all," Alessan murmured, not answering.

"I wouldn't be counting on it now," the man named Baerd said grimly. "I think we should leave this place. They will search."

For a moment Alessan looked as if he would demur, but just then they heard a jingling of many riders from the path on the other side of the lodge.

Without another word spoken the four of them rose and silently moved away.

"This evening," murmured Scalvaia, "grows more eventful by the moment."

Tomasso was grateful for the elegant lord's equanimity. It helped steady his own nerves. He looked over at his brother; Taeri seemed all right. Herado was white-faced, however. Tomasso winked at the boy. "Have another drink, nephew. You look infinitely prettier with color in your cheeks. There is nothing to fear. We are here doing exactly what we have permission to be doing."

They heard the horses. Herado went over to the sideboard, filled a glass and drained it at a gulp. Just as he put the goblet down the door crashed loudly open, banging into the wall beside it, and four enormous, fully-armed Barbadian soldiers strode in, making the lodge seem suddenly small.

"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, trammeling 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 honored lord. You do us too much honor 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 toward 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.

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 worshiped 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 rumored 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 toward 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.