Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

his own spun webs. You were right in everything you said before about carelessness. It has cost me three sons tonight. Within a month, less probably, the Sandreni will be no more.’

The voice was dry and dispassionate, objectively damning, devoid of self-pity. The tone of a judge in some dark hall of final adjudication.

‘What happened?’ Alessan asked quietly.

‘The boy was a traitor.’ Flat, uninflected, final.

‘Oh, my lord,’ Baerd exclaimed. ‘Family?’

‘My grandson. Gianno’s boy.’

‘Then his soul is cursed,’ Baerd said, quiet and fierce. ‘He is in Morian’s custody now, and she will know how to deal with him. May he be trammelled in darkness until the end of time.’

The old man seemed not to have even heard. ‘Taeri killed him,’ he murmured, wonderingly. ‘I had not thought he was brave enough, or so quick. Then he stabbed himself, to deny them the pleasure or whatever they might have learned of him. I had not thought he was so brave,’ he repeated absently.

Through the thick shadows Devin looked at the two bodies by the smaller fire. Uncle and nephew lay so close to each other they seemed almost intertwined on the far side of the coffin. The empty coffin.

‘You said you waited for us,’ Alessan murmured. ‘Will you tell me why?’

‘For the same reason you came back.’ Sandre moved for the first time, stiffly making his way to the larger fire. He seized a small log and threw it on the guttering flame. A shower of sparks flew up. He nursed it, poking with the iron until a tongue of flame licked free of the ash bed.

The Duke turned and now Devin could see his white hair and beard, and the bony hollows of his cheeks. His eyes were set deep in their sockets, but they gleamed with a cold defiance.

‘I am here,’ Sandre said, ‘and you are here because it goes on. It goes on whatever happens, whoever dies. While there is breath to be drawn and a heart with which to hate. My quest and your own. Until we die they go on.’

‘You were listening, then,’ said Alessan. ‘From in the coffin. You heard what I said?’

‘The drug had worn off by sundown. I was awake before we reached the lodge. I heard everything you said and a great deal of what you chose not to say,’ the Duke replied, straightening, a chilly hauteur in his voice. ‘I heard what you named yourself, and what you chose not to tell them. But I know who you are.’

He took a step towards Alessan. He raised a gnarled hand and pointed it straight at him.

‘I know exactly who you are, Alessan bar Valentin, Prince of Tigana!’

It was too much. Devin’s brain simply gave up trying to understand. Too many pieces of information were coming at him from too many different directions, contradicting each other ferociously. He felt dizzy, overwhelmed. He was in a room where only a little while ago he had stood among a number of men. Now four of them were dead, with a more brutal violence than he had ever thought to come upon. At the same time, the one man he’d known to be dead—the man whose mourning rites he had sung that very morning—was the only man of Astibar left alive in this lodge.

If he was of Astibar!

For if he was, how could he have just spoken the name of Tigana, given what Devin had just learned in the wood? How could he have known that Alessan was—and this, too, Devin fought to assimilate—a Prince? The son of that Valentin who had slain Stevan of Ygrath and so brought Brandin’s vengeance down upon them all.

Devin simply stopped trying to put it all together. He set himself to listen and look—to absorb as much as he could into the memory that had never failed him yet— and to let understanding come after, when he had time to think.

So resolved, he heard Alessan say, after a blank silence more than long enough to reveal the degree of his own surprise and wonder: ‘Now I understand. Finally I understand. My lord, I thought you always a giant among men. From the first time I saw you at my first Triad Games twenty-three years ago. You are even more than I took you for. How did you stay alive? How have you hidden it from the two of them all these years?’

‘Hidden what?’ It was Catriana, her voice so angry and bewildered it immediately made Devin feel better: he wasn’t the only one desperately treading water here.

‘He is a wizard,’ Baerd said flatly.

There was another silence. Then, ‘The wizards of the Palm are immune to spells not directed specifically at them,’ Alessan added. ‘This is true of all magic-users, wherever they come from, however they find access to their power. For this reason, among others, Brandin and Alberico have been hunting down and killing wizards since they came to this peninsula.’

‘And they have been succeeding because being a wizard has—alas!—nothing to do with wisdom or even simple common sense,’ Sandre d’Astibar said in a corrosive voice. He turned and jabbed viciously at the fire with the iron poker. The blaze caught fully this time and roared into red light.

‘I survived,’ said the Duke, ‘simply because no one knew. It involved nothing more complex than that. I used my power perhaps five times in all the years of my reign— and always cloaked under someone else’s magic. And I have done nothing with magic, not a flicker, since the sorcerers arrived. I didn’t even use it to feign my death. Their power is stronger than ours. Far stronger. It was clear from the time each of them came. Magic was never as much a part of the Palm as it was elsewhere. We knew this. All the wizards knew this. You would have thought they would apply their brains to that knowledge, would you not? What good is a finding spell, or a fledgling mental arrow if it leads one straight to