Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

So many different griefs and shapes of pain seemed to be warring for pre-eminence within Dianora. Behind the King she could see d’Eymon; his face was a sickly grey. He met her eyes for only an instant then quickly looked away. Later she might think of ways to use this sudden ascendancy over him but right now she felt only pity for the man. He would offer to resign tonight, she knew. Offer, probably, to kill himself after the old fashion. Brandin would refuse, but after this nothing would be quite the same.

For a great many reasons.

Brandin said, ‘I think you have told me what I had need to know.’

‘The Chiaran acted alone,’ Isolla volunteered unexpectedly. She gestured at Camena, in the bone-cracking grip of the soldiers behind her. ‘He joined us when he visited Ygrath two years ago. Our purposes appeared to march together this far.’

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 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 labouring 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, jewelled 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 rumour 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