He heard them beginning to sing, the old battle-song of the Empire’s legions, conquering in far lands centuries ago. And they were! It was happening again. They weren’t just mercenaries; they were the Empire’s legions, for he was, or would be, the Empire. He could see it. It was here, it was shining before him in the blazing day.
Then Brandin of Ygrath rose and stepped to the rim of his hill. A distant figure alone under the sun in that high place. And a moment later, Alberico, who was a sorcerer himself, felt, for he could not have actually heard, the dark, absolute words of invocation that Brandin spoke, and his blood froze in his veins like ice in the dead of a winter night.
‘He cannot,’ he gasped aloud. ‘Not after so long! He cannot do this!’
But the Ygrathen was. He was reaching for all, summoning everything, every last scintilla of his magic, holding nothing back. Nothing, not even the power that had sustained the vengeance that had kept him here all these years. He was emptying himself to shape a sorcery such as had never been wielded before.
Desperately, still half disbelieving, Alberico reached out for the wizards. To tell them to brace, to be ready. Crying that there were eight of them, nine, that they could hold against this. That all they had to do was survive this moment and Brandin would be nothing, a shell. Waste, for weeks, months, years! A hollow man with no magic in him any more.
Their minds were closed, barred against him. They were still there though, and defending, braced. Oh, if the horned god and the Night Queen were with him! If they were with him yet, he might still . . .
They were not. They were not with him.
For in that instant Alberico felt the wizards of the Palm cut loose, melting away without warning, with terrifying suddenness, to leave him naked and alone. On the hill Brandin had now levelled his hands and from them came blue-grey death, an occluding, obliterating presence in the air, foaming and boiling down across the valley towards him.
And the wizards were gone! He was alone.
Or almost gone, almost alone. One man was still linked, one of them had held with him! And then that one mind opened up to Alberico like the locked door of a dungeon springing back, letting light flood in.
The light of truth. And in that moment Alberico of Barbadior screamed aloud in terror and helpless rage, for illumination came at last and he understood, too late, how he had been undone, and by whom destroyed.
In the name of my sons I curse you forever, said Sandre, Duke of Astibar, his remorseless image rising in Alberico’s mind like an apparition of horror from the afterworld. But he was alive. Impossibly alive, and here in Senzio on that ridge, with eyes implacable and utterly merciless. He bared his teeth in a smile that summoned the night. In the name of my children and of Astibar, die now, forever cursed.
Then he cut free, he too was gone, as that blue-grey death came boiling down the valley from Brandin’s hill, from his outstretched hands, with blurred, annihilating speed, and Alberico, still reeling with shock, clawing frantically upwards from his chair, was struck and enveloped and consumed by that death, as a tidal wave of the raging, engorged sea will take a sapling in low-lying fields.
It swept him away with it and sundered his body, still screaming, from his soul, and he died. Died in that far Peninsula of the Palm two days before his Emperor passed to the gods in Barbadior, failing at last one morning to wake from a dreamless sleep.
Alberico’s army heard his last scream, and their own cries of exultation turned to panic-stricken horror; in the face of that magic from the hill the Barbadians felt a fear such as men should never have had to endure sweep over them. They could scarcely grip their swords, or flee, or even stand upright before their foes who advanced untouched, unharmed, exalted, under that dread, sunblighting sorcery, and began to carve and hew them with hard and deadly wrath.
Everything, thought Brandin of Ygrath, of the Western Palm, weeping helplessly on his hill as he looked down over the valley. He had been driven to this and had answered, had summoned all he had ever had to this final purpose, and it was enough. It was sufficient and nothing less would have been. There had been too much magic opposed to him, and death had been waiting for his people here.
He knew what he had been made to do, knew the price of holding nothing back. He had paid that price and was paying it now, would go on doing so with every breath he drew until he died. He had screamed Stevan’s name, aloud and in the echoing chambers of his soul, before the summoning of that power. Had known that twenty years of vengeance for that too-soon shattered life were now undone under this bronze sun. Nothing held back. It was over.
There had been men dying below him though, fighting under his banner, in his name, and there had been no retreat for them from that plain. Nor for him. He could not retreat. He had been driven to this moment, like a bear to a rocky cliff by a pack of wolves, and the price was being paid now. Everywhere the price was being paid. There was butchery in the valley; a slaughter of Barbadians. His heart was crying. He was a grieving, torn thing, all the memories of love, of a father’s loss, flooding over him, another kind of tidal wave. Stevan.
He wept, adrift in an ocean of
