Guy Kay - Tigana

Brandin nodded. "This far," he echoed quietly. "I thought that might be the case. Thank you for confirming it," he added gravely.

There was a silence. "You promised me an easy death," Isolla said, holding herself very straight.

"I did," Brandin said. "I did promise you that." Dianora stopped breathing. The King looked at Isolla without expression for what seemed an unbearably long time.

"You can have no idea," he said at last, in a voice little above a whisper, "how happy I was that you had come to make music for me again."

Then he moved his right hand, in exactly the same casual gesture he would use to dismiss a servant or a petitioner.

Isolla's head exploded like an overripe fruit smashed with a hammer. Dark blood burst from her neck as her body collapsed like a sack. Dianora was standing too near; the blood of the slain woman spattered thickly on her gown and face. She stumbled backwards. A hideous illusion of reptilian creatures was coiling and twisting in the place where Isolla's head had been mashed to a formless, oozing pulp.

There was screaming everywhere and a frenzied pandemonium as the court backed away. One figure suddenly ran forward. Stumbling, almost falling in its haste, the figure jerked out a sword. Then awkwardly, with great clumsy two-handed slashes, Rhun the Fool began hacking at the dead body of the singer.

His face was weirdly distorted with rage and revulsion. Foam and mucus ran from his mouth and nose. With one savage butcher's blow he severed an arm from the woman's torso. Something dark and green and blind appeared to undulate from the stump of Isolla's shoulder, leaving a trail of glistening black slime. Behind Dianora someone gagged with horror.

"Stevan!" she heard Rhun cry brokenly. And amid nausea and chaos and terror, an overwhelming pity suddenly laid hard siege to her heart. She looked at the frantically laboring Fool, clad exactly like the King, bearing a King's sword. Spittle flew from his mouth.

"Music! Stevan! Music! Stevan!" Rhun shouted obsessively, and with each slurred, ferocious articulation of the words his slender, jeweled court sword went up and down, glinting brilliantly in the streaming light, hewing the dead body like meat. He lost his footing on the slippery floor and fell to his knees with the force of his own fury. A grey thing with eyes on waving stalks appeared to attach itself like a bloodleech to his knee.

"Music," Rhun said one last time, softly, with unexpected clarity. Then the sword slipped through his fingers and he sat in a puddle of blood beside the mutilated corpse of the singer, his balding head slewed awkwardly down and to one side, his white-and-gold court garments hopelessly soiled, weeping as though his heart was broken.

Dianora turned to Brandin. The King was motionless, standing exactly as he had been throughout, his hands relaxed at his sides. He gazed at the appalling scene in front of him with a frightening detachment.

"There is always a price," he said quietly, almost to himself, through the incessant screaming and tumult that filled the Audience Chamber. Dianora took one hesitant step towards him then, but he had already turned and, with d'Eymon quickly following, Brandin left the room through the door behind the dais.

With his departure the slithering, oleaginous creatures immediately disappeared, but not the mangled body of the singer or the pitiful, crumpled figure of the Fool. Dianora seemed to be alone near them, everyone else had surged back towards the doors. Isolla's blood felt hot where it had landed on her skin.

People were tripping and pushing each other in their frantic haste to quit the room now that the King was gone. She saw the soldiers hustling Camena di Chiara away through a side door. Other soldiers came forward with a sheet to cover Isolla's body. They had to move Rhun away to do it; he didn't seem to understand what was happening. He was still weeping, his face grotesquely screwed up like a hurt child's. Dianora moved a hand to wipe at her cheek and her fingers came away streaked with blood. The soldiers placed the sheet over the singer's body. One of them gingerly picked up the arm Rhun had severed and pushed it under the sheet as well. Dianora saw him do that. There seemed to be blood all over her face. On the very edge of losing all control she looked around for help, any kind of help.

"Come, my lady," said a desperately needed voice that was somehow by her side. "Come. Let me take you back to the saishan."

"Oh, Scelto," she whispered. "Please. Please do that, Scelto."

The news blazed through the dry tinder of the saishan setting it afire with rumor and fear. An assassination attempt from Ygrath. With Chiaran participation.

And it had very nearly succeeded.

Scelto hustled Dianora down the corridor to her rooms and with a bristling protectiveness slammed the door on the nervous, fluttering crowd that clung and hovered in the hallway like so many silk-clad moths. Murmuring continuously he undressed and washed her, and then wrapped her carefully into her warmest robe. She was shivering uncontrollably, unable to speak. He lit the fire and made her sit before it. In docile submission she drank the mahgoti tea he prepared as a sedative. Two cups of it, one after the other. Eventually the trembling stopped. She still found it difficult to speak. He made her stay in the chair before the fire. She didn't want to leave it anyway.

Her brain felt battered, numb. She seemed to be utterly incapable of marshaling any understanding, of shaping an adequate response to what had just happened.

One thought only kept driving the others away, pounding in her head like the hammer of a herald's staff on the floor. A thought so impossible, so disabling, that she tried, with all she could, through the

blinding pulse of an onrushing headache, to block it out. She couldn't. The hammering crashed through, again and again: she had saved his life.

Tigana had been a single pulsebeat away from coming back into the world. The pulsebeat of Brandin that the crossbow would have ended.

Home was a dream she'd had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea. Home was a longing, a desperate dream, a name in her dreams. And this afternoon she had done the one thing she could possibly have done to bar that name from the world, to lock it into a dream. Until all the dreams, too, died.

How was she to deal with that? How possibly cope with what it meant? She had come here to kill Brandin of Ygrath, to end his life that lost Tigana might live again. And instead…

The shivering started once more. Fussing and murmuring, Scelto built up the fire and brought yet another blanket for her knees and feet. When he saw the tears on her face he made a queer helpless sound of distress. Someone knocked loudly on her door sometime later and she heard Scelto driving them away with language she had never known him to use before.

Gradually, very slowly, she began to pull herself together. From the color of the light that gently drifted down through the high windows she knew that the afternoon would be waning towards dusk. She rubbed her cheeks and eyes with the backs of her hands. She sat up. She had to be ready when twilight came; twilight was when Brandin sent to the saishan.

She rose from her chair, pleased to find that her legs were steadier. Scelto rushed up, protesting, but when he saw her face he quickly checked himself. Without another word he led her through the inner doors and down that hallway to the baths. His ferocious glare silenced the attendants there. She had a sense that he would have struck them if they had spoken; she had never heard of him doing a single violent act. Not since he had killed a man and lost his own manhood.