Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

in his heart, that the upraised arms were lowered slightly. That the concealing mist dissipated a very little.

He waited no longer.

‘Be gone!’ he cried again, more loudly yet, a ringing sureness in his voice now. ‘I have said I know you and I do. You are the spirit of the violators here. The presence of Ygrath in this peninsula, and of Barbadior. Both of them! You are tyranny in a land that has been free. You are the blight and the ruin in these fields. You have used your magic in the west to shape a desecration, to obliterate a name. Yours is a power of darkness and shadow under this moon, but I know you and can name you, and so all your shadows are gone!’

He looked, and even as he was speaking the words that came to him he saw that they were true! It was happening. He could see the mist drifting apart, as if taken by a wind. But even in the midst of joy something checked him: a knowledge that the victory was only here, only in this unreal place. His heart was full and empty at one and the same time. He thought of his father dying by the Deisa, of his mother, of Dianora, and Baerd’s hands went flat and rigid at his sides, even as he heard the murmurs of disbelieving hope rising at his back.

Mattio whispered something in a choked voice. Baerd knew it would be a prayer.

The Others were milling about in disarray west of the stream. Even as Baerd watched, motionless, his hands held outwards, his heart in turmoil, more of the shadows cloaking their leader lifted and spread, beginning to blow away over the brow of the hill. For one moment Baerd thought he saw the figure clearly. He thought he saw it bearded and slim, and of medium height, and he knew which of the Tyrants that one would be, which one had come from the west. And something rose within him at that sight, crashing through to the surface like a wave breaking against his soul.

‘My sword!’ he rasped. ‘Quickly!’

He reached back. Mattio placed it in his hand. In front of them the Others were starting to fall back, slowly at first, then faster, and suddenly they were running. But that didn’t even matter; that didn’t matter at all.

Baerd looked up at the figure on the hill. He saw the last of the shadows blowing away and he lifted his voice once more, crying aloud the passion of his soul:

‘Stay for me! If you are Ygrath, if you are truly the sorceror of Ygrath I want you now! Stay for me—I am coming! In the name of my home and of my father I am coming for you now! I am Baerd di Tigana bar Saevar!’

Wildly, still screaming his challenge, he splashed forward and clambered out of the stream, scrambling up the other bank. The ruined earth felt cold as ice through his wet boots. He realized that he had entered a terrain that had no real place for life, but tonight, now, with that figure before him on the hill, that didn’t matter either. It didn’t matter if he died.

The army of the Others was in flight, they were throwing down their weapons as they ran. There was no one to gainsay him. He glanced up again. The moon seemed to be setting unnaturally fast. It looked as if it was resting now, round and huge, on the very crown of the black hill. Baerd saw the figure standing there silhouetted against that green moon; the shadows were gone, almost he saw it clearly again across the dead lands between.

Then he heard a long laugh of mockery, as if in response to his crying of his name. It was the laughter of his dreams, the laughter of the soldiers in the year of the fall. Still laughing, not hurrying at all, the shadow-figure turned and stepped down from the crown of the hill and away to the west.

Baerd began to run.

‘Baerd, wait!’ he heard the woman, Carenna, cry from behind him. ‘You must not be on the wastelands when the moon goes down! Come back! We have won!’

They had won. But he had not, whatever the Walkers of the highlands might think, or say. His battle, his and Alessan’s, was no nearer resolution than it had been before tonight. Whatever he had done for the Night Walkers of Certando, this night’s victory was not his, it could not be. He knew that in his heart. And his enemy, the image of his soul’s hate, knew that as well as he and was laughing at him even now just out of sight beyond the brow of that low hill.

‘Stay for me!’ Baerd screamed again, his young, lost voice ripping through the night.

He ran, flashing over the dead earth, his heart bursting with the need for speed. He overtook stragglers among the army and he killed them as he ran, not even breaking stride. It hardly mattered, it was only for the Walkers in their war, for next year. The Others scattered north and south, away from him, from the line that led to the hill. Baerd reached the slope and went straight up, scrabbling for a foothold on the cold waste ground. Then he breasted the hill with a surge and a gasp.

And he stood upon the summit, exactly where the shadow-figure had stood, and he looked away to the west, towards all the empty valleys and ruined hills beyond, and saw nothing. There was no one there at all.

He turned quickly north and then south, his chest heaving, and saw that the army of the Others, too, seemed to have entirely melted away. He spun back to the west and then he understood.

The green moon had set.

He was alone in this wasteland under a clear, high dome of brilliant, alien stars and Tigana was no nearer to coming back than it had ever been. And