Tigana

His sole confidant in the painfully cautious eighteen-year quest to drive Alberico and his sorcery and his mercenaries from Astibar and the Eastern Palm. A quest that had become an obsession for both of them, even as Tomasso's public ma

It was pla

Sandre's parallel role had been to settle visibly and loudly into impotent, brooding, Triad-cursing exile, marked by querulous, blustering hunts and too much drinking of his own wine.

Tomasso had never seen his father actually drunk, and he never used his own fluting voice when they were alone at night.

Eight years ago they had tried an assassination. A chef, traceable only to the Canziano family, had been placed in a country i

A full year from the time they had set things in motion, Alberico of Barbadior had halted on his way back from the Triad Games, exactly as Sandre had said he would, to take his midday meal at a well-reputed i

By the time the sun went down at the end of that bright late-summer day every person in that i

The i

In this fashion had Sandre and Tomasso discovered that sorcerers ca

For the next six years they had done nothing but talk at night in the manor-house among the vineyards and gather what knowledge they could of Alberico himself and events to the east in Barbadior, where the Emperor was said to be growing older and more infirm with each passing year.

Tomasso began commissioning and collecting walking sticks with heads carved in the shape of the male organs of sex. It was rumored that he'd had some of his young friends model for the carvers. Sandre hunted. Gia

At which time children might die on sky-wheels. The Sandreni Palace in Astibar remained very prominently shuttered, empty and dusty. A useful, potent symbol of the fall of those who might resist the Tyrant. The superstitious claimed to see ghostly lights flickering there at night, especially on a blue-moon night, or on the spring or autumn Ember Nights when the dead were known to walk abroad.

Then one evening in the country Sandre had told Tomasso, without warning or preamble, that he proposed to die on the eve of the Festival of Vines two autumns hence. He proceeded to name the two lords who were to be his vigil-keepers, and why. That same night he and Tomasso decided that it was time to tell Taeri, the youngest son, what was afoot. He was brave, not stupid, and might be necessary for certain things. They also agreed that Gia

It wasn't, in fact, a question of who in the family could be trusted: family was, after all, family. The issue was who would be useful and it was a mark of how diminished the Sandreni had become that only two names came readily to mind.

It had been an entirely dispassionate conversation, Tomasso remembered, leading his father's bier southeast between the darkening trees that flanked the path. Their conversations had always been like that; this one had been no different. Afterwards though, he had been unable to fall asleep, the date of the Festival two years away branded into his brain. The date when his father, so precise in his pla

The date that had come now and gone, carrying with it the soul of Sandre d'Astibar to wherever the souls of such men went. Tomasso made a warding gesture to avert evil at that thought. Behind him he heard the steward order the servants to light torches. It grew colder as the darkness fell. Overhead a thin band of high clouds was tinted a somber shade of purple by the last upward-angled rays of light. The sun itself was gone, down behind the trees. Tomasso thought of souls, his father's and his own. He shivered.

The white moon, Vidomni, rose, and then, not long after, came blue Ilarion to chase her hopelessly across the sky. Both moons were nearly full. The procession could have done without torches in fact, so bright was the twi

The servants laid the bier on the trestles waiting in the center of the large front room. Candles were lit and the two fires built up at opposite ends of the room. Food, they had set up earlier that day. It was quickly uncovered on the long sideboard along with the wine. The windows were opened to air the cabin and admit the breeze.

At a nod from Tomasso the steward led the servants away. They would go on to the manor further east and return at daybreak. At vigil's end.

And so they were left alone, finally. Tomasso and the lords Nievole and Scalvaia, so carefully chosen two years before.

"Wine, my lords?" Tomasso asked. "We will have three others joining us very shortly."

He said it, deliberately, in his natural voice, dropping the artificial, fluting tone that was his trademark in Astibar. He was pleased to see both of them note the fact immediately, their glances sharpening as they turned to him.

"Who else?" growled bearded Nievole who had hated Sandre all his life. He made no comment on Tomasso's voice, nor hid Scalvaia. Such questions gave too much away, and these were men long skilled in giving away very little indeed.

"My brother Taeri and nephew Herado, one of Gia

"Who is the third?" Lord Scalvaia asked softly.

Inwardly Tomasso saluted his dead father. Then, twirling his own glass gently by the stem to release the wine's bouquet, he said, "I don't know. My father did not name him. He named the two of you to come here, and the three of us and said there would be a sixth at our council tonight."