e would limp then, much as Scalvaia had done.
Through eyes that fought to focus properly, Alberico of Barbadior saw Scalvaia's silver-maned head fly across the room to bounce, with a sickening sound, on the rush-strewn floor, decapitated by the belated sword of the Captain of the Guard. The deadly cane, crafted of stones and metals Alberico did not recognize, clattered loudly to the ground. The air seemed thick and viscous to the sorcerer, unnaturally dense. He was conscious of a loose, rattling sound to his breathing and a spasmodic trembling at the back of his knees.
It was another moment, etched in the rigid, stunned silence of the other men in the room, before he trusted himself to even try to speak.
"You are dung," he said, thickly, coarsely, to the ashen captain. "You are less than that. You are filth and crawling slime. You will kill yourself. Now!" He spoke as if there were sliding soil clogging and spilling from his mouth. With an effort he swallowed his saliva.
Ferociously straining to make his eyes work properly he watched as the blurry form of his captain bowed jerkily and, reversing his sword, severed his own jugular with a swift, jagged slash. Alberico felt a froth of rage foaming and boiling through his mind. He fought to will an end to a palsied tremor in his left hand. He could not.
There were a great many dead men in the room and he very nearly had been one of them. He didn't even entirely feel as if he lived, his body seemed to have reassembled itself in not quite the same way as before. He rubbed with weak fingers at the drooping eyelid. He felt ill, nauseous. The air was hard to breathe. He needed to be outside, away from this suddenly stifling lodge of his enemies.
Nothing had come to pass as he'd expected. There was only one single element left of his original design for the evening. One thing that might yet offer a kind of pleasure, that might redeem a little of what had gone so desperately awry.
He turned, slowly, to look at Sandre's son. At the lover of boys. He dragged his mouth upwards into a smile, unaware of how hideous he looked.
"Bring him," he said thickly to his soldiers. "Bind him and bring him. There are things we can do with this one before we allow him to die. Things appropriate to what he was."
His vision was still not working properly, but he saw one of his mercenaries smile. Tomasso bar Sandre closed his eyes. There was blood on his face and clothing. There would be more before they were done.
Alberico put up his hood and limped from the room. Behind him the soldiers lifted up the body of the dead captain and supported the man whose face had been broken by Nievole.
They had to help the Tyrant mount his horse, which he found humiliating, but he began to feel better during the torchlit ride back to Astibar. He was utterly devoid of magic though. Even through the dulled sensations of his altered, reassembled body he could feel the void where his power should be. It would be at least two weeks, probably more, before it all came back. If it all came back. What he had done in the flashing of that instant in the lodge had drained more from him than any act of magic ever had in his life.-_-!思-_-!兔-_-!文-_-!檔-_-!共-_-!享-_-!與-_-!在-_-!線-_-!閱-_-!讀-_-!
He was alive though, and he had just shattered the three most dangerous families left in the Eastern Palm. Even more, he had the middle Sandreni son here now as evidence, public proof of the conspiracy for the days to come. The pervert who was said to relish pain. Alberico allowed himself a tiny smile within the recesses of his hood.
It was all going to be done by law, and openly, as had been his practice almost from the day he'd taken power here. No unrest born of arbitrary exercise of might would be permitted to rear its dangerous head. They might hate him, of course they would hate him, but not one citizen of his four provinces would be able to doubt the justice or deny the legitimacy of his response to this Sandreni plot.
Or miss the point of how comprehensive that response was about to be.
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