Guy Kay - Tigana

And the Empire? His, a year after all of that, at the very worst.

With such an unchallenged power base here, he would not have even needed to wait for the ailing Emperor to finally die. He could have sailed home with his armies as the champion and the hero of the people. Having first showered them with grain, with gold, with freely flowing wine from the Palm, and all the newly rediscovered wealth of Quileia.

It would have been glorious. For that one night Alberico let himself dream, smiling in his sleep. Then he woke, and came down the stairs again to the offices of state and found all three of his captains waiting, grim-faced. A new messenger was there with them. From the west again, a single day after the first, with news that smashed twenty years of balancing into tiny, sharp-edged fragments that would never again be reassembled as they had been.

Brandin had abdicated in Ygrath and named himself King of the Western Palm.

On Chiara, the messenger reported, trembling at his lord's visage, they had begun celebrating within hours of the announcement.

"And the Ygrathens?" Karalius of the First asked sharply, though he had no real right to speak.

"Most will go home," the messenger said. "If they stay they must become citizens, only equal citizens, of the new kingdom."

"You say they will go home," Alberico said, his gaze flat and heavy, masking the feverish churning of his emotions. "Do you know this, have you been told this, or do you only guess it to be so?"

The messenger turned grey, stammering some reply about logic and obvious consequences and what anyone could predict…

"Have this man's tongue cut out then have him killed," Alberico said. "I don't care how. Feed him to the animals. My messengers bring me the news they learn. I draw what conclusions are to be drawn."

The messenger fainted dead away, toppling sideways to the floor. It could be seen that he had soiled himself. Grancial of the Second Company signaled quickly for two men to carry him out.

Alberico didn't bother to watch. In a way he was glad the man had spoken as fatuously as he had. He had needed an excuse to kill just then.

He gestured with two fingers, and his steward hastily ushered everyone out of the room but the three captains. Not that any of the lesser officials seemed inclined to linger at that particular moment. Which was as it should be. He didn't trust any of them very much.

He didn't entirely trust his captains either, but he needed them, and they needed him, and he had been careful to keep them at odds and on edge with each other. It was a workable arrangement. Or it had been, until now.

But now was what mattered, and Brandin had just thrown the peninsula into chaos. Not that the Palm actually mattered, not in itself. It was a gateway, a stepping-stone. He had moved out of Barbadior as a young man, in order to rise in the world and return as a leader in his prime, and there was no point, no point at all to twenty years of exile if he could not sail home in triumph. In more than triumph. In mastery.

He turned his back on the captains and went to the window, surreptitiously massaging his eye. He waited, to see who would speak first, and what he would say. There was a fear growing within him that he was at pains to hide. Nothing was falling right, none of his caution and discretion seemed to have borne the fruit it should.

Karalius said, very softly from behind him, "My lord, there is opportunity here. There is great opportunity."

Which is exactly what he was afraid the man would say. Afraid, because he knew it was true and because it meant moving again, and quickly, committing himself to dangerous, decisive action. But action here and not in the Empire, not back home, where he had been readying himself to return. War far away in this savage, obdurate peninsula where he could lose all, a lifetime's sowing, in striving for a conquest he hardly cared about.

"We had best go carefully," Grancial said quickly. More to oppose Karalius than anything else, Alberico knew. But he noted that we.

He turned and fixed the Second Company captain with a wintry glance. "I will indeed do nothing without thought," he said, placing clear emphasis on the first word. Grancial flicked his eyes away. Siferval smiled beneath his curling blond moustaches.

Karalius did not. His expression remained sober and thoughtful. He was the best of the three, Alberico knew. Also the most dangerous, for the two things went hand in hand in such a man. Alberico moved around behind his huge oak desk and sat down again. He looked up at the First Company leader and waited.

Karalius said again, "There is opportunity now. There will be turmoil in the west, disruption, Ygrathens sailing home. Shall I tell you what I think?" His pale skin was flushed with a growing excitement. Alberico understood that: the man saw chances of his own, land and wealth for himself.

It would be a mistake to let Karalius unfold too much. He would end up thinking the planning was his. Alberico said, "I know exactly what you think, to the very words you would speak. Be silent. I know everything that will be happening in the west except one thing: we don't yet know how many of the Ygrathen army will stay. My guess is that most will leave, rather than be lowered to the level of people they have had mastery over all these years. They did not come here to become inconsequential figures in the Palm."

"Neither," said Siferval pointedly, "did we."

Alberico suppressed his anger yet again. It seemed he had been forced to do that so much of late with these three. But they had their own purposes, their own long drawn-out plans, and wealth and fame were at the heart of them. As they had to be for all ambitious men in the Empire: toward what else should an ambitious man aspire?

"I am aware of that," he said, as calmly as he could.

"Then what do we do?" Grancial asked. A real question, not a challenge. Grancial was the weakest and the most loyal, because of that weakness, of the three.

Alberico looked up. At Karalius, not at Grancial.

"You gather my armies," he said deliberately, though his pulse was racing very fast. This was dangerous and might be final, every instinct within him told him that. But he also knew that time and the gods had thrown a glittering gem down toward him from the heavens, and if he did not move it would fall away.

"You gather my armies in all four provinces and take them north. I want them massed together as soon as possible."

"Where?" Karalius's eyes were almost shining with anticipation.

"Ferraut, of course. On the northern border with Senzio." Senzio, he was thinking. The ninth. The jewel. The battleground.

"How long will it take you?" he asked the three of them.

"Five weeks, no more," Grancial said quickly.

"Four," said Siferval, smiling.

"The First Company," said Karalius, "will be on the border three weeks from now. Count on it."

"I will," said Alberico. And dismissed them.

He sat alone at his desk for a long time after, toying with a paperweight, thinking upon all sides of this, over and around and about. But however he looked upon it all the pieces seemed to slide into place. There was power to be grasped here, and triumph, he could almost see that shimmering jewel falling through the air, over water, over land, into his reaching hand.

He was acting. Shaping events himself, not being impacted upon. His enemy would be vulnerable, enormously so, until this new chaos settled in the west. Quileia's choice could be forced and be no choice at all. The Empire could be made to see, on the eve of his final journey home, just what his sorcery and his armies could do. The time was offering a jewel, truly, falling from the heavens, waiting to be clasped. To be set upon his brow.