Tigana. Guy Gavriel Kay

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