Guy Kay - Tigana

"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.