Tigana (95 page)

There had been
more
of them. Four more coming to his aid. Not wizards now, a different kind of magic of the Palm, one he hadn’t even known about, didn’t understand. But it didn’t matter. They were here and on his side, if screened from his mind, and with them, with all of them bending their power to his defence, he had even been able to reach out, and forward, to assert his own strength
against
the enemy.

Who were falling back! There was glory after all under the sun, and hope, more than hope, a glittering vista of triumph spreading in the valley before him, a pathway made
smooth with the blood of his foes, leading straight from here back across the sea and home to the Tiara.

He would bless these wizards, honour them! Make them lords of unimagined power, here in this colony or in Barbadior. Wherever they wanted, whatever they chose. And thinking so, Alberico had felt his own magic flow like intoxicating wine in his veins and had sent it pouring forth against the Ygrathens and the men of the Western Palm, and his armies had laughed aloud in triumph and felt their swords to be suddenly as light as summer grass.

He heard them beginning to sing, the old battle-song of the Empire’s legions, conquering in far lands centuries ago. And they were! It was happening again. They weren’t just mercenaries; they
were
the Empire’s legions, for he was, or would be, the Empire. He could see it. It was here, it was shining before him in the blazing day.

Then Brandin of Ygrath rose and stepped to the rim of his hill. A distant figure alone under the sun in that high place. And a moment later, Alberico, who was a sorcerer himself, felt, for he could not have actually heard, the dark, absolute words of invocation that Brandin spoke, and his blood froze in his veins like ice in the dead of a winter night.

‘He cannot,’ he gasped aloud. ‘Not after so long! He cannot do this!’

But the Ygrathen was. He was reaching for all, summoning everything, every last scintilla of his magic, holding nothing back. Nothing, not even the power that had sustained the vengeance that had kept him here all these years. He was emptying himself to shape a sorcery such as had never been wielded before.

Desperately, still half disbelieving, Alberico reached out for the wizards. To tell them to brace, to be ready. Crying that there were eight of them, nine, that they could hold against this. That all they had to do was survive this moment and
Brandin would be nothing, a shell. Waste, for weeks, months, years! A hollow man with no magic in him any more.

Their minds were closed, barred against him. They were still
there
though, and defending, braced. Oh, if the horned god and the Night Queen were with him! If they were with him yet, he might still …

They were not. They were not with him.

For in that instant Alberico felt the wizards of the Palm cut loose, melting away without warning, with terrifying suddenness, to leave him naked and alone. On the hill Brandin had now levelled his hands and from them came blue-grey death, an occluding, obliterating presence in the air, foaming and boiling down across the valley towards him.

And the wizards were gone! He was alone.

Or almost gone, almost alone. One man was still linked, one of them had held with him! And then that one mind opened up to Alberico like the locked door of a dungeon springing back, letting light flood in.

The light of truth. And in that moment Alberico of Barbadior screamed aloud in terror and helpless rage, for illumination came at last and he understood, too late, how he had been undone, and by whom destroyed.

In the name of my sons I curse you forever,
said Sandre, Duke of Astibar, his remorseless image rising in Alberico’s mind like an apparition of horror from the afterworld. But he was alive. Impossibly alive, and here in Senzio on that ridge, with eyes implacable and utterly merciless. He bared his teeth in a smile that summoned the night.
In the name of my children and of Astibar, die now, forever cursed
.

Then he cut free, he too was gone, as that blue-grey death came boiling down the valley from Brandin’s hill, from his outstretched hands, with blurred, annihilating speed, and Alberico, still reeling with shock, clawing frantically upwards from his chair, was struck and enveloped and
consumed by that death, as a tidal wave of the raging, engorged sea will take a sapling in low-lying fields.

It swept him away with it and sundered his body, still screaming, from his soul, and he died. Died in that far Peninsula of the Palm two days before his Emperor passed to the gods in Barbadior, failing at last one morning to wake from a dreamless sleep.

Alberico’s army heard his last scream, and their own cries of exultation turned to panic-stricken horror; in the face of that magic from the hill the Barbadians felt a fear such as men should never have had to endure sweep over them. They could scarcely grip their swords, or flee, or even stand upright before their foes who advanced untouched, unharmed, exalted, under that dread, sun-blighting sorcery, and began to carve and hew them with hard and deadly wrath.

Everything,
thought Brandin of Ygrath, of the Western Palm, weeping helplessly on his hill as he looked down over the valley. He had been driven to this and had answered, had summoned all he had ever had to this final purpose, and it was enough. It was sufficient and nothing less would have been. There had been too much magic opposed to him, and death had been waiting for his people here.

He knew what he had been made to do, knew the price of holding nothing back. He had paid that price and was paying it now, would go on doing so with every breath he drew until he died. He had screamed Stevan’s name, aloud and in the echoing chambers of his soul, before the summoning of that power. Had known that twenty years of vengeance for that too-soon shattered life were now undone under this bronze sun.
Nothing held back
. It was over.

There had been men dying below him though, fighting under his banner, in his name, and there had been no retreat
for them from that plain. Nor for him. He could not retreat. He had been driven to this moment, like a bear to a rocky cliff by a pack of wolves, and the price was being paid now. Everywhere the price was being paid. There was butchery in the valley; a slaughter of Barbadians. His heart was crying. He was a grieving, torn thing, all the memories of love, of a father’s loss, flooding over him, another kind of tidal wave.
Stevan
.

He wept, adrift in an ocean of loss, far from any shore. He was aware, dimly, of Dianora beside him, clutching his hands between her own, but he was lost inside his pain, power gone now, the core of his being shattered into fragments, shards, a man no longer young, trying, without any hope at all, to conceive of how to shape a life that could possibly go forward from this hill.

Then the next thing happened. For he had, in fact, forgotten something. Something he alone could possibly have known.

And so time, which truly would not stop, for grief or pity or love, carried them all forward to the moment no sorcerer or wizard or piper on his ridge had foreseen.

The weight had been the weight of mountains crushing his mind. Carefully, exquisitely judged to leave him that faintest spark of self-awareness, which was where the purest torture lay. That he might always know exactly who he was and had been, and what he was being made to do, utterly unable to control himself. Pressed flat under the burden of mountains.

Which now were gone. He straightened his back, of his own will. He turned east. Of his own will. He tried to lift his head higher but could not. He understood: too many years in the same skewed, sunken position. They had broken the bones of his shoulder several times, carefully.
He knew what he looked like, what they had turned him into in that darkness long ago. He had seen himself in mirrors through the years, and in the mirrors of others’ eyes. He knew exactly what had been done to his body before they started on his mind.

That didn’t matter now. The mountains were gone. He looked out with his own sight, reached back with his own memories, could speak, if he wished to speak, with his own thoughts, his own voice, however much it had changed.

What Rhun did was draw his sword.

Of course he had a sword. He carried whatever weapon Brandin did, was given each day the clothing the King had chosen; he was the vent, the conduit, the double, the Fool.

He was more than that. He knew exactly how much more. Brandin had left him that delicately measured scrap of awareness at the very bottom of his mind, under the burying, piled-up mountains. That had been the whole point, the essence of everything; that and the secrecy, the fact that only they two knew and only they would ever know.

The men who had maimed and disfigured him had been blind, working on him in their darkness, knowing him only by the insistent probing of their hands upon his flesh, reaching through to bone. They had never learned who he was. Only Brandin knew, only Brandin and he himself, with that dim flickering of his identity so carefully left behind after everything else was gone. It had been so elegantly contrived, this answer to what he had done, this response to grief and rage. This vengeance.

No one living other than Brandin of Ygrath knew his true name and under the weight of mountains he had had no tongue to speak it himself, only a heart to cry for what was being done to him. The exquisite perfection of it, of that revenge.

But the mountains that had buried him were gone.

And on that thought, Valentin, Prince of Tigana, lifted his sword on a hill in Senzio.

His mind was his own, his memories: of a room without light, black as pitch, the voice of the Ygrathen King, weeping, telling what was being done to Tigana even as they spoke, and what would be done to him in the months and the years to come.

A mutilated body, his own features sorcerously imposed upon it, was death-wheeled in Chiara later that week then burned to ash and scattered to the winds.

In the black room the blind men began their work. He remembered trying not to scream at first. He remembered screaming. Much later Brandin came and began and ended his own part of that careful patient work. A torture of a different kind; much worse. The weight of mountains in his mind.

Late in that same year the King’s Fool from Ygrath died of a misadventure in the newly occupied Palace of Chiara. And shortly afterwards, Rhun, with his weak, blinking eyes, his deformed shoulder and slack mouth, his nearly crippled walk, was brought shambling up from his darkness into twenty years of night.

It was very bright here now, almost blindingly so in the sunlight. Brandin was just ahead of him. The girl was holding his hand.

The girl.
The girl was Saevar’s daughter.

He had known her the moment she was first brought to be presented to the King. She had changed in five years, greatly changed, and she would change much more as the years spun past, but her eyes were her father’s, exactly, and Valentin had watched Dianora grow up. When he had heard her named, that first day, as a woman from Certando, the dim, allowed spark of his mind had flickered and burned, for he knew, he
knew
what she had come to do.

Then, as the months passed and the years, he watched helplessly with his rheumy eyes from under the crush of his mountains, as the terrible interwovenness of things added love to everything else. He was bound to Brandin unimaginably and he saw what happened. More, he was made to be a part of it, by the very nature of the relationship between the Kings and the Fools of Ygrath.

It was he who first gave expression—beyond his control, he
had
no control—to what was growing in the heart of the King. Back in a time when Brandin still refused to admit even the idea of love into a soul and a life shaped by vengeance and loss it was Rhun—Valentin—who would find himself staring at Dianora, at Saevar’s dark-haired daughter, with another man’s soul in his eyes.

No more, not ever again. The long night had been rolled back. The sorcery that had bound him was gone. It was over; he stood in sunlight and could speak his true name if he chose. He took an awkward step forward and then, more carefully, another. No one noticed him though. They never noticed him. He was the Fool. Rhun. Even that name, chosen by the King. Only the two of them ever to know. Not for the world, this. The privacy of pride. He had even understood. Perhaps the most terrible thing of all: he had understood.