Tigana (86 page)

Alais hurried up to the table. Even before she spoke Devin felt a finger of dread touch him.

‘Catriana’s gone!’ she said, fighting to keep her voice low. Her eyes flicked from her father to Devin, then rested on Alessan.

‘What? How?’ Rovigo said sharply. ‘We would have had to see her when she came down, surely?’

‘The back stairs outside,’ Alessan said. His hands, Devin, noticed, had suddenly flattened on the tabletop. The Prince stared at Alais. ‘What else?’

The girl’s face was white. ‘She changed her clothes. I don’t understand why. She bought a black silk gown and some jewellery in the market this afternoon. I was going to ask her about it but I … I didn’t want to presume. She’s so hard to ask questions of. But they’re gone. All the things she bought.’

‘A
silk gown?
’ Alessan said incredulously, his voice rising. ‘What in Morian’s name …?’

But Devin already knew. He knew absolutely.

Alessan hadn’t been with them that morning, neither had Sandre. They had no way of understanding. A bone-deep fear dried his mouth and began hammering at his heart. He stood up, tipping over his chair, spilling his wine.

‘Oh, Catriana,’ he said. ‘Catriana,
no!
’ Stupidly, fatuously, as if she was in the room, and could still be stopped, still be kept among them, dissuaded from going out into the dark alone with her silk and jewels, with her unfathomable courage and her pride.

‘What? Devin, tell me, what is it?’ Sandre, voice like a knife. Alessan said nothing. Only turned, the grey eyes bracing for pain.

‘She’s gone to the castle,’ Devin said flatly. ‘She’s gone to kill Anghiar of Barbadior. She thinks that will start the war.’

Even as he spoke he was moving, rational thought quite gone, something deeper than that, infinitely deeper, driving him, though if she had reached the castle already there was no hope, no hope at all.

He was flying when he reached the door. Even so, Alessan was right beside him, with Rovigo only a step behind. Devin knocked someone down as they burst into the darkness. He didn’t look back.

Eanna, show grace,
he prayed silently, over and over as they raced towards the risen moons.
Goddess of Light, let it not be like this. Not like this
.

He said nothing though. He sped towards the castle in the dark, fear in his heart like a living thing, bringing the terrible knowledge of death.

Devin knew how fast he could run, had prided himself on his speed all his life. But moving as if possessed, scarcely touching the ground, Alessan was with him when they reached the Governor’s Castle. They careened around a corner side by side and came to the garden wall and there they stopped, looking upwards past the branches of a huge, spreading sejoia tree. They could hear Rovigo come up behind them, and someone else further back. They did not turn to see. They were both looking at the same thing.

There was a figure silhouetted against torchlight in one of the highest windows. A figure they knew. Wearing a long dark gown.

Devin dropped to his knees in the moonlit lane. He thought about climbing the wall, about screaming her name aloud. The sweet scent of tainflowers surrounded him. He looked at Alessan’s face, and then quickly away from what he saw there.

How did she like to play?

Mostly, she didn’t, and especially not like this. She had not been the playing kind. She had liked swimming, and walks along the beach in the mornings, mostly alone. Other walks inland into the woods, picking mushrooms or mahgoti
leaves for tea. She had liked music always, and the more since meeting Alessan. And yes, some six or seven years ago she had begun to have her own intermittent dreams of finding love and passion somewhere in the world. Not often though, and the man seldom had a face in those dreams.

There was a man’s face with her now though, and this was not a dream. Nor was it play. It was death. Entrances and endings. A candle shaping fire before it went out.

She was lying on his bed, naked to his sight and touch save for the jewellery shining at wrist and throat and ears and in her hair. Light blazed from all corners of the room. It seemed that Anghiar liked to watch his women respond to what he did.
Come on top of me,
he’d murmured in her ear.
Later,
she had replied. He had laughed, a husky sound deep in his throat, and had moved to be above her, naked as well, save for his ruffled white shirt which hung open showing the delicate blond hairs on his chest.

He was a skilful lover, a deeply experienced one. It was what let her kill him, in the end.

He lowered his head to her breasts before entering her. He took one nipple in his mouth, surprisingly gently, and began to run his tongue in circles over it.

Catriana closed her eyes for a moment. She made a sound, one she thought was right. She stretched her hands catlike above her head, moving her body sinuously under the pressure of his mouth and hands. She touched the black comb in her hair.
Red vixen
. She moaned again. His hands were on her thighs, moving upward and between, his mouth was still at her breast. She slid the comb free, pressed the catch so the blade sprang open. And then, moving without haste, as if she had all the time in the world, as if this single moment were the gathered sum of all the moments of her life, she brought her weapon down and plunged it into his throat.

Which meant that his life was over.

You could buy anything you wanted in Senzio’s weapon market. Anything at all. Including a woman’s ornament with a hidden blade. And poison on the blade. An ornament for the hair, in black, with shining jewels, one of which released the spring that freed the blade. An exquisite, deadly thing.

Crafted in Ygrath, of course. For that was central to her plan tonight.

Anghiar’s head snapped back in shock. His mouth twisted in an involuntary snarl as his eyes bulged wide in staring agony. There was blood pumping from his throat, soaking into the sheets and the pillows, covering her.

He screamed, a terrible sound. He rolled off her, off the bed, onto the carpeted floor, clutching desperately at his throat. He screamed again. There was so much blood pulsing from him. He tried to stop it, pressing his hands to the wound. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t the wound that would kill him. She watched him, heard the screaming stop, followed by a wet, bubbling sound. Anghiar of Barbadior toppled slowly over on one side, mouth still open, blood leaking from his throat onto the carpet. And then his blue eyes clouded and closed.

Catriana looked down at her hands. They were steady as stone. And so was the beat of her heart. In a moment that was all the moments in her life. Entrances and endings.

There was a furious pounding on the locked door. Frantic shouting, a panic-stricken volley of curses.

She was not yet done. They could not be allowed to take her. She knew what sorcery could do to the mind. If they had her alive they had all of her friends. They would know everything. She was under no illusions, had known there was a final step from the time she formed this plan.

They were battering against the door now. It was large and heavy, would hold a moment or two. She rose up and put on the gown again. She did not want to be naked now, she couldn’t have really said why. Bending over the bed she
took the Ygrathen weapon, that glittering agency of death, and, careful of the treated blade, laid it beside Anghiar to be quickly found. It was necessary that it be found.

There was a sharp splintering sound from the door, more shouting, a tumult of noise in the corridor. She thought about setting fire to the room—candle to blaze, it appealed to her—but no, they had to find Anghiar’s body and exactly what had killed him. She opened the casement window and stepped up on the ledge. The window was elegantly designed, easily tall enough for her to stand upright before it. She looked outwards and down for a moment. The room was over the garden, far above it. More than high enough. The scent of the sejoia trees came drifting up, and the heavy sweetness of tainflowers, and there were other night flowers whose names she did not know. Both moons had risen now, Vidomni and Ilarion watching her. She looked at them for a moment but it was to Morian she prayed, for it was towards Morian she was crossing, through the last portal of all.

She thought of her mother. Of Alessan. Of his dream that had become hers, and for which she was now to die in a land not her own. Briefly she thought of her father, knowing how much this all had to do with making redress, with the way each generation seemed to put its mark upon the next, one way or another.
Let it be enough,
she prayed then, aiming the thought like an arrow of the mind towards Morian in her Halls.

The door burst inward with a grinding crash. Half a dozen men stumbled into the room. It was time. Catriana turned back from the stars and the two moons and the garden. She looked down at the men from the window-ledge. There was a singing in her heart, a crescendo of hope and pride.

‘Death to Barbadior’s servants!’
she screamed at the top of her voice.
‘Freedom for Senzio!’
she cried, and then:
‘Long live King Brandin of the Palm!’

One man, quicker than the others, reacted, springing across the room. He was not quite quick enough, not as fast as she. She had already turned, the acid of those last, necessary words eating in her brain. She saw the moons again, Eanna’s stars, the wide, waiting darkness between them and beyond.

She leaped. Felt the night wind in her face and in her hair, saw the dark ground of the garden begin to hurtle up towards her, heard voices for an instant, and then none at all, only the loud, rushing wind. She was alone, falling. She had always been alone it seemed. Endings. A candle. Memories. A dream, a prayer of flames, that they might come. Then a last doorway, an unexpectedly gentle darkness seemed to open wide before her in the air. She closed her eyes just before she went through.

C H A P T E R   1 9

W
arm night, the fragrance of flowers. Moonlight on the trees, on the pale stones of the garden wall, on the woman standing in the high window.

Devin hears a sound to his left and quickly turns. Rovigo running up, to stop, rigid with shock as his gaze follows Alessan’s upward. Behind him now comes Sandre with Alais.

‘Help me!’
the Duke orders harshly, dropping to the cobblestones beside Devin. His expression is wild, distraught, he has a knife in his hand.

‘What?’ Devin gasps, uncomprehending. ‘What do you …?’

‘My fingers! Now! Cut them! I need the power!’ And Sandre d’Astibar slaps the hilt of the knife hard into Devin’s palm and curls his own left hand around a loose slab of stone in the street. Only his third and fourth fingers are extended. The wizard’s fingers, of binding to the Palm.

‘Sandre …’ Devin begins, stammering.

‘No words!
Cut me, Devin!
’

Devin does as he is told. Wincing, gritting his teeth against pain, against grief, he poises the sharp slim blade and brings it down on Sandre’s exposed fingers, cleaving through. He hears someone cry out. Alais, not the Duke.

But in the moment the knife cuts clean through flesh to grind against stone there is a swift and dazzling flash. Sandre’s darkened face is illuminated by a corona of white light that flares like a star about his head and dies away,
leaving them blinded for a moment in the after-image of its glow.

Alais is on the Duke’s other side, kneeling to quickly wrap a square of cloth about his bleeding hand. Sandre lifts that hand, with an effort, silent in the face of pain. Without a word spoken, Alais helps him, her fingers supporting his arm.

From high above they hear a sharp, distant crash, the sound of men shouting. Silhouetted in the tall window, Catriana becomes suddenly taut. She screams something. They are too far away to make out the words. Too terribly far. They see her turn though, to the darkness, to the night.

‘Oh, my dear, no! Not this!’
Alessan’s voice is a ragged whisper scoured up from his heart.

Too late. Far, far too late.

On his knees in the dusty road, Devin sees her fall.

Not wheeling or tumbling to death, but graceful as she has always been, a diver cleaving the night downwards. Sandre thrusts forward his maimed wizard’s hand, straining upwards. He speaks rapid words Devin cannot understand. There is a sudden weirdly distorting blur in the night, a shimmer as of unnatural heat in the air. Sandre’s hand is aimed straight at the falling woman. Devin’s heart stops for a moment, seizing at this wild, impossible hope.

Then it starts beating again, heavy as age, as death. Whatever Sandre has tried, it is not enough. He is too far, it is too hard a spell, he is too new to this power. Any of these, all, none. Catriana falls. Unstayed, unchecked, beautiful as a moonlit fantasy of a woman who can fly. Down to a broken, crumpled ending behind the garden wall.

Alais bursts into desperate sobs. Sandre covers his eyes with his good hand, his body rocking back and forth. Devin can hardly see for the tears in his eyes. High above them, in the window where she had stood, the blurred forms of men appear, looking downward into the darkness of the garden.