“Eight years ago [Sandre and Tomasso of the Sandreni] had tried an assassination. A chef, traceable only to the Canziano family, had been placed in a country inn in [the neighbouring province of] Ferraut near the provincial border with Astibar. For over half a year idle gossip in Astibar had touted that inn as a place of growing distinction. No one remembered, afterwards, where the talking had begun; Tomasso knew very well how useful it was to plant casual rumours of this sort among his friends in the temples. The priests of Morian, in particular, were legendary for their appetites. All their appetites.

A full year from the time they had set things in motion, [the Tyrant] 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 inn in Ferraut near the Astibar border.

By the time the sun went down at the end of that bright late-summer day every person in that inn — servants, masters, stableboys, chefs, children and patrons — had had their backs, legs, arms and wrists broken and their hands cut off, before being bound, living upon hastily erected Barbadian sky-wheels to die.

The inn was razed to the ground. Taxes in the province of Ferraut were doubled for the next two years, and for a year in Astibar, Tregea and Certando. During the course of the following six months every living member of the Canziano family was found, seized, publicly tortured and burned in the Grand Square of Astibar with their severed hands stuffed in their mouths so that their screaming might not trouble Alberico or his advisers in their offices of state above the square.

In this fashion had Sandre and Tomasso d’Astibar discovered that sorcerers cannot, in fact, be poisoned.”

- Narration,
“Tigana”, p. 72-73.