Guy Kay - Tigana

This spring however his pleasures had been few and trivial in scope, and the burgeoning of new troubles made those of the winter seem like minor, ephemeral afflictions, brief flurries of snow in a night. What he was dealing with now were rivers in flood, everywhere he looked.

At the very beginning of spring a wizard was detected using his magic in the southern highlands, but the Tracker and the twenty-five men Siferval had immediately sent after him had been slaughtered in a pass by outlaws, to the last man. An act of arrogance and revolt almost impossible to believe.

And he couldn't even properly exact retribution: the villages and farms scattered through the highlands hated the outlaws as much or more than the Barbadians did. And it had been an Ember Night, with no decent man abroad to see who might have done this unprecedented deed. Siferval sent a hundred men from Fort Ortiz to hunt the brigands down. They found no trace. Only long dead campfires in the hills. It was as if the twenty-five men had been slain by ghosts: which, predictably, is what the people of the highlands were already saying. It had been an Ember Night after all, and everyone knew the dead were abroad on such nights. The dead, hungry for retribution.

"How clever of the dead to use new-fletched arrows," Siferval's written report had offered sardonically, when he sent two captains to carry the tidings north. His men had retreated quickly in whey-faced terror at the expression on Alberico's face. It was, after all, the Third Company which had allowed twenty-five of its men to be killed, and had then sent out another hundred incompetents to do no more than elicit laughter, wandering about in the hills.

It was maddening. Alberico had been forced to fight back an urge to torch the Certandan hamlet nearest to those hills, but he knew how destructive that would be in the longer run. It would undermine all the benefits of the focused restraint he'd used in the affair of the Sandreni plot. That night his eyelid began to droop again, the way it had in the early autumn.

Then, very shortly after, came the news from Quileia.

He had nourished such hopes there after the shocking fall of the Matriarchy. It was such an enormous, ripe new market for trade, an absolute harvest for the Empire. And one, most importantly, that would be brought into Barbadior's aegis by that ever vigilant guardian of the western borders of the Empire, Alberico of the Eastern Palm. So much rich hope and promise there, and so little actual prospect of difficulty. Even if this Marius, this crippled priestess-killer on his precarious throne, chose to trade west with Ygrath as well as east that was all right. Quileia was more than large enough to offer bounty both ways. For a time. Soon enough it should be possible to make the uncouth fellow see the many-faceted advantages of focusing his dealings towards Barbadior.

In the evolution of the Barbadian Empire there had emerged a number of ways, a great many time-honored ways, some subtle, some rather less so, of causing men to see things in a particular light. Alberico had a few thoughts of his own about even newer means of persuading petty monarchs to view matters usefully. He fully intended to explore them, once he was home.

Home, as Emperor. For that, after all, was the point, the point of absolutely everything. Except that the events of the spring utterly refused to cooperate.

Marius of Quileia sent a gratifyingly swift reply to Alberico's latest benevolent offer to trade. An emissary delivered it directly into the hands of Siferval in Fort Ortiz.

Unfortunately, that brief gratification had been smashed and annihilated when the letter reached Astibar, carried north this time, in recognition of its importance, by Siferval himself. Couched in unexpectedly sophisticated language it contained a message that, however politely and circuitously phrased, was flat and clear: the Quileian regretfully judged that Brandin of Ygrath was the greater, firmer power in the Palm, and as such, and being but green in his own power, he could not risk incurring the anger of the King of Ygrath by trading with Alberico, a minor lord of the Empire, much as he might want to.

It was a letter that could easily drive a man into a killing rage.

Fighting for self-control, Alberico had seen cringing apprehension in his clerks and advisors, and even a quickly veiled fear in the eyes of the captain of the Third Company. Then, when Siferval handed over the second letter, the one, he explained, that he had so cleverly arranged to extract and copy from the saddle pouch of the overly garrulous Quileian emissary, Alberico felt all control deserting him.

He had been forced to turn away, to stride alone to the windows at the back of the offices of state and draw gasping breaths of air to calm his boiling mind. He could feel the tell-tale tremor beginning again in his right eyelid; the fluttering he'd never been able to get rid of since that night he'd almost died in the Sandreni Woods. His huge hands grasping the window-ledge with a grip of iron, he struggled for the equanimity that would let him carefully weigh the implications of this intercepted message, but calm was a swiftly receding illusion and his thoughts in the morning sunlight were black and foaming like the sea in storm.

Senzio! The Quileian fool sought to link himself with those dissolute puppets in the ninth province! It was almost impossible to credit that a man, however new to the world stage, could be such an imbecile.

His back to his advisors and his captains, staring blindly out the window down upon the too bright Grand Square, Alberico abruptly began to consider how this was going to look to the wider world. To the part of the world that mattered: the Emperor, and those who had his ear, and who saw themselves as rivals to Alberico. How would the tidings be read, if Brandin of Ygrath was busily trading south, if Senzian merchants were blithely sailing past the Archipelago and down the coast beyond Tregea and the mountains to Quileian ports and all the fabled goods of that land, so long kept to themselves under the priestesses?

If the Empire alone was denied access to this new market. Denied access because Alberico of Barbadior was judged too infirm in his power here as compared to the Ygrathen in the west… Alberico felt himself beginning to sweat; a cold trickle of moisture slid down his side. There was a spasm of pain in his chest as a muscle clenched near his heart. He forced himself to breathe slowly until it passed.

From the source of so much promise it suddenly seemed as if a dagger had materialized, more sharp and deadly than any enemy of his back in Barbadior might have fashioned.

Senzio. He had been thinking and dreaming about the ninth province all through the months of ice and snow, seeking a way in his restless nights to break out, to regain control of a situation that increasingly seemed to be operating upon him, instead of he upon it, as master of his destiny.

And that had been in the winter, even before this news from beyond the mountains.

Then, shortly after, even as the first flowers began blooming in the gardens of Astibar, there was more. In the very same week word came from the west that someone had tried to kill Brandin of Ygrath.

Had tried, and failed. For one blissful night Alberico played out glorious scenarios of triumph in his sleep. Dreaming, over and over again, so keen was the pleasure, that the assassin, using a crossbow, they had learned, had succeeded in his purpose. Oh, it would have been so perfect, it would have been timed so flawlessly for him, dovetailing so neatly with his needs. It would have had to be seen as a gift, a shining upon his face, from the high gods of the Empire. The entire Peninsula of the Palm would have been his in a year, in half a year. Quileia's crippled monarch, needing the outer world so desperately, would have had to embrace whatever terms of trade Alberico then chose to offer him.