Sanctuary

by Lynn Abbey

  Damn Arizak for getting drunk and falling off his horse!

  “Come,” Molin said with unfeigned weariness. “An old man needs to get moving if he’s going to see his own bed before midnight.”

  Molin set the pace, which was slower than he would have liked—another concession to age. He relied on a staff for all but the shortest walks. The wood was gnarled and blackened and older than Molin. He’d found it in a palace storeroom and had no idea to whom it had once belonged. Probably a prince or priest of the Ilsigi; they rarely went anywhere without some symbol of authority clutched in their hands. Molin had made a few improvements. He’d burnt down the shaft and hidden Sanctuary’s Savankh—the scepter with which an Imperial prince-governor ruled an Imperial city—in the tunnel. As an instrument of justice, a Savankh drew the truth out of a man, will he or nil he. The Savankh had transferred its power to the staff, but Molin, like the princes and governors before him, was immune to its sorcerous power.

  In competent hands, the blackwood staff was a serviceable weapon, and, despite their years, Molin’s hands were competent. He’d gotten his war-name, Torchholder, in part because of a willingness to use whatever object lay closest to hand when he fought. His strength had ebbed a couple decades earlier and his balance was going, too, but his instincts remained sharp, and the Savankh wasn’t the only trick hidden beneath the staff’s amber finial.

  But it was a staff, a plain ordinary staff, that Molin needed as the road widened, and the iron-reinforced Prince’s Gate loomed ahead. He’d been thinking with his heart, not his head, when he’d decided to return to Sanctuary. Night travel was harder on the eyes and every other part of a man’s body. At the very least, he should have insisted on a pony cart; he’d given up riding not long after his seventy-fifth birthday.

  “They’re drunk again,” Atredan grumbled, and pointed up at the guard-porch atop the gate, where no men could be seen keeping watch.

  “Pull the cord anyway.”

  Atredan reached into shadow and hauled on a thick rope. A bell clanged within the tower. Molin, who remained in moonlight, watched for movement on the roof or any of the tower’s barred windows. He saw none.

  There were other ways into the city, ways that didn’t involve visiting the west gate on the opposite side of the town. A three-foot-wide breach lurked behind rubble a mere thousand paces to the north. Molin would have preferred the gate, for obvious reasons, but he knew the path to the breach and had used it only a few months back to trap a smuggler who’d overreached herself.

  Ever the master and merchant of knowledge, Molin would give Atredan the opportunity to lead him to the breach, to see if the younger man knew the path. The youth gave no indication he knew the path—though surely he knew that Sanctuary’s walls were not a solid, impenetrable ring. He tugged continuously on the rope, setting up a din within the tower.

  At length, a small, firelit opening appeared in the wall.

  “‘S’locked,” the guard said in the coarse Ilsigi dialect that passed for Sanctuary’s common language, a dialect almost everyone referred to as Wrigglie.

  Molin’s native language was the pure, elegant, and nuanced Rankene of the Imperial court at its height. He spoke a handful of other languages as well, but he dreamt, sometimes, in Wrigglie, and suffered a headache every time. Wrigglie was a rapid-flowing speech, punctuated with silences—as though invisible hands had suddenly squeezed the speaker’s throat. At its root, it was the language of the Ilsig Kingdom some two hundred years earlier, but it had matured—or rotted—far from that root.

  “We know it’s locked, pork-sucker,” Atredan countered, demonstrating a grasp of Wrigglie street insults, if not diplomacy. “Open it and let us in.”

  “‘S’locked until sunrise. Come back at sunrise.”

  “We’re here now, and we have affairs at the palace. The palace, do you hear that, pork-sucker? Open the damned gate.”

  The nameless guard and the cadet heir exchanged insults until Molin hissed, in Rankene, “Flatter him, for mercy’s sake, or we’ll be standing out here until the sun has indeed risen.”

  “Flatter him?” Atredan exploded, also in Rankene. “The man is stinking drunk! Flatter him yourself, Lord Torchholder. I don’t stoop that low.”

  “Lord Torch?” the guard inquired. More of Sanctuary’s swarthy natives understood Rankene than could—or would—speak it, and, anyway, names remained the same, regardless of language.

  Molin stepped into the torchlight beside Atredan. “It is I,” he confessed.

  “Come with another army, eh?” The guard laughed heartily at his own joke. His breath was sour enough to light a fire at four paces.

  Molin Torchholder had never intended to become heroically famous in Sanctuary. He had never intended to save the city from itself, either. But he’d done both when he’d led a hundred mounted Irrune warriors through a conveniently unlocked gate and put an end to the Dyareelan reign of religious terror. In gratitude, every unwashed survivor counted Molin Torchholder among his closest friends.

  On occasion, gratitude could be useful. “No army, this time,” Molin said with better Ilsigi pronunciation and grammar than the guard had used. “I’ve been out lighting bonfires at Land’s End, and now I just want to sleep in my own bed.”

  “Bonfires, eh? You could’ve done your lighting right here, Lord Torch, never mind them folk at Land’s End. Them Irrunes, they been lighting fires since they got here yesterday.” The guard whistled through absent teeth. “Burggit’s done pulled everyone in close, leavin’ me here by my lonesome with orders not to budge the gate ’til sunup. ’Git’s not taking chances the Dragon’ll light something wrong. Only thing worse’n a loose fire is a dead Dragon, eh?” Once again, the guard rewarded his humor with aromatic laughter.

  Crude as the analysis was, it was also correct. “Good man, you say you know who I am. If the Dragon’s setting Sanctuary ablaze, I need to get to the palace. Unbar the gate for me and my companion.”

  “‘Taint just the Dragon, Lord Torch. All them Irrune been setting fires, same as if they been riding Lord Serripines’ tail. ’Git had the name for it, but it’s passed clean from my ears.”

  Silently Molin berated himself for growing old and forgetful. The year he’d spent among the Irrune—the year before he’d led them to Sanctuary’s gate—they’d heaped up huge mounds of straw and set them afire, saying their divine ancestor had entered the world through similar flames. Irrunaga’s birthday was a movable feast. The bonfires Molin had watched had been lit beneath the first full moon after the autumn equinox, a full month before the Rankan Foundation festival—that year.

  This year? Molin did the calculations. (Any priest worth his prayers knew the sky calendars as well as he knew the civil ones.) This year, the moon overhead this very night was the first full moon since autumn equinox had passed.

  He begrudged the coincidence and the inconvenience, then, with a second thought, reconsidered the coincidence. The Irrune were as raw and rowdy a nation as ever galloped out of the eastern heartland. Their superstitions put Sanctuary’s Wrigglie-speaking mongrels to shame, and their language was so primitive that they’d borrowed words left and right to describe their new homeland, yet they looked Rankan; and the Rankan myth said that before there’d been a Rankan Empire or even a Rankan kingdom, there had been a band of horse-riding warriors from the east.

  If he’d been a full-blooded Rankan, Molin might have been appalled to think that the likes of Arizak and his kin were distant cousins, but he wasn’t full-blooded anything except tired.

  “Open the gate, good man,” he pled with the guard. “Which are your barracks? I’ll see that Burggit knows I’m the one who countered his orders.”

  The guard resisted. “Them Irrune—The streets ain’t safe, Lord Torch, and you—pardon me—ain’t no youngster to skip from trouble. No, no—trouble finds you, Lord Torch, and ’s’my head will roll twice over for forgettin’ my orders and for lettin’ trouble find the Lord Torch.”

  �
�I have an escort.” Molin indicated Atredan, who needed no encouragement to scowl and draw his sword.

  The guard made one more protest, then relented. Moments later, to the clank of metal and the scrape of wood, the smaller of the two heavy doors cracked open. Atredan slipped through first. Molin followed.

  “Don’t forget,” the guard called after them. “Tell Burggit ‘twas on your orders, Lord Torch, that Leaner Vurben opened the gate. ’Tweren’t no thought of Leaner Vurben’s, ’twas your orders, Lord Torch.” The clatter of the closing gate drowned out anything else Vurben might have said.

  “Did you hear that? The brazen cur,” Atredan complained. “You’re not thinking of running this Burggit to ground, are you? Let the man suffer.”

  “For what? I did countermand his orders. Common men expect protection from their officers.”

  “That man presumed to give you an order! He gave orders to an Imperial lord. He spoke to you as though you were another Wrigglie pud. He should be made an example of. Forget this Buggit; go to Captain Eraldus—he knows who puts food on his damn plate. He’ll take care of that Vurben fellow.”

  Molin sighed quietly. He was a lord, and he enjoyed his privileges, but he wasn’t an aristocrat. “I’ve found it useful, over the many long years of my life, to keep my word when I can. Oddly enough, if you honor the small things, the big ones are less significant. It took me years to learn that lesson.”

  “But a common Wrigglie pud! Who cares if you keep your word to him?”

  Molin didn’t bother to answer. When he’d given the orders to expand Sanctuary’s walls, he’d imagined a plaza here between the old wall and the new—a place where visitors could be scrutinized from front and back, and cut down with impunity, when necessary. As with so many of his plans for Sanctuary, the final result bore little resemblance to his original vision. Instead of an empty plaza, there was the Tween, a relatively peaceful quarter populated largely by smugglers and hostlers.

  The Tween’s main street—such as it was—connected the new gate to the old gate, once called the Gate of Gold, but an empty arch these last fifteen years. Past the arch, the Wideway opened up between Sanctuary’s wharves and its warehouses. Midway down the Wideway, the Processional branched north to the unbreached walls of the palace, which had hosted as many rulers as the great god Savankala had had mortal mistresses.

  Both the Wideway and the Processional were lit by public lanterns—an Irrune innovation that spoke well of Nadalya, Arizak’s second wife, who’d initiated it. There were torches, too, stowed in old barrels here in the Tween and at other intersections. It was said, though not in their hearing, that the Irrune feared the shadows and sounds of Sanctuary at night. Neither the torches nor the lanterns were necessary on a full-moon night, but, as Molin had learned, people took note of the small ways in which their rulers kept faith with them.

  Molin took a stride in the Wideway direction. An unexpected shiver shook his spine, and he stopped. As a boy he’d been taught to equate such moments with his god’s presence. The prayer of welcome and acceptance came reflexively to his tongue and waited for his mouth to open, but Molin swallowed instead. There was still a god bearing Vashanka’s name and attributes somewhere, maybe within the Rankan Empire, maybe sulking somewhere in Sanctuary—immortals faded, but they never quite died. Molin Torchholder dutifully dedicated his rituals and daily prayers to his hidden god; but when a cold finger touched him, the erstwhile priest looked in a different direction.

  The gods alone—all the Rankan gods, not just Vashanka—knew how Molin’s life might have gone if his priestly teachers had guessed the nature of the talent he’d inherited from his temple-slave mother. Most likely, he’d have had no life at all. Indeed, Molin, in his role as a Rankan priest, would never have allowed himself to be born if he’d had the opportunity to take his mother’s measure.

  Of all the sorceries known to the world, witchcraft was the darkest, the most mysterious, and the one favored by the Empire’s northern enemies. Officially, witchcraft did not exist in the Empire. There was prayer, which directly invoked divine power, and there was magic, which—according to priests, if not magicians—used spells for indirect invocations to the same gods. Witches, in the Rankan scheme, were witless mages who’d surrendered their souls to gods so foul and evil that mortal tongues could not pronounce their names.

  Rankan priests, especially the warrior-priests of Vashanka’s hierarchy, were adept at piercing a witch’s deception. The fate of a witch in the bowels of a Rankan temple was necessarily bleak: interrogation by torture and punitive mutilation, followed, inevitably, by a gruesome execution. In light of that fate, it was not surprising that a northern witch usually chose suicide over capture. But Molin’s mentors in Vashanka’s hierarchy had failed to detect the taint of witchcraft in a nubile, northern slave and, having failed to detect her heresy, taught her to dance. At a decennial Commemoration of the Ten-Slaying wherein Vashanka had freed his divine father, Savankala, from his siblings’ treachery, they’d given her to Vashanka’s lucky, wealthy avatar for a night of feasting, music, and ritual rape.

  Molin had never met the woman who birthed him. She’d died, he’d been told, moments before his birth, taken up in his divine father’s arms. He’d known that for the lie that it was before he’d turned six, but he’d never worried about his bony face, his black hair, or his pale skin—so unlike the golden features of the Rankan aristocracy, so similar to Ranke’s enemies. Molin had never wondered at all until he found himself in Sanctuary and face-to-face with powers that Vashanka would not—or could not—vanquish.

  Molin won the battle against those powers one dark Sanctuary night. He lost both his god and his faith after the victory, but the talent for witchcraft lingered. He denied it publicly, of course, and there was no north-witch mentor to whom he could turn for training. But he practiced diligently, exploring his limits and gradually expanding them, so that when the great nerves in his body shivered he understood that witchcraft had given him a message.

  Gripping his blackwood staff, Molin spun right, toward the Tween’s tangled streets.

  “This way.”

  “The Wideway’s safer,” Atredan insisted.

  “The wharves are never safer after sundown, and neither is the Processional, if the Dragon’s men are celebrating.” Molin was confident, but not entirely honest. Witchcraft—his witchcraft—did not deal in precise premonitions. He’d felt danger when he’d looked down the Wideway, no more, no less. The rest was his own logic, his own decision. “We’ll take the Stairs.”

  “The Stairs will take us up into the Hill. I’d sooner swim the sewers of Sanctuary than get lost in the Hill!”

  “Nonsense. Once we’ve climbed the Stairs, we’ll be at the end of Old Pyrtanis Street, nowhere near the Hill. From there it’s an easy walk along the Promise to the Gods’ Gate behind the palace. You’re not afraid of a few whores or empty temples, are you Lord Larris? See me to the Gods’ Gate, Lord Larris, and I’ll show you a way through the kitchens to your prince’s door and the fastest way between the palace and the Street of Red Lanterns … We never could have the whores traipsing up the Processional you know—Or has your brother already shown you the postern trap?”

  Molin asked his last question with the sweetness of a cat about to pounce. It was unlikely that elder-brother Vion Serripines knew about the trap, ten times unlikely that Vion had told Atredan, and ten times again unlikely that Atredan could resist a gift his brother had never received.

  “I’ve heard about that passage,” Atredan lied unconvincingly. “Not from Vion. Vion doesn’t know. Vion wouldn’t go anywhere where the hem of his robe might get dirty. Vion’s no better than our lord father.”

  Molin led the way without commenting on the young man’s assessment of his kinfolk. Every time he took the Stairs, it seemed they were both steeper and less even. He was breathing hard when they cleared the wall and entered into the old city.

  Pyrtanis Street was paved with tidy cobblestones, recalling
the day when its part of the city had been home to its most prestigious artisans—jewelers, goldsmiths, and their ilk—and not a few of its aristocrats. The shape-shifting mage, Enas Yorl, had dwelt on Pyrtanis Street as well. The jewelers and aristocrats had fled Sanctuary at the first sign of trouble; their fine houses were among the first to burn when plague had threatened the town. Some said the shape-shifter never left, that he still haunted the town, but any man could claim to be Enas Yorl; the man never showed the same face twice to the world.

  What was plain for any eye to see on Pyrtanis Street was that the corner where Yorl’s basilisk-guarded mansion had once stood was empty, even of weeds—as if the stones were simply elsewhere, like their owner, and might reappear at any moment.

  Nothing in Sanctuary went to waste. One season’s rubble was next year’s construction, and if the new hard-laboring residents were less exalted than their predecessors, they were also less likely to abandon their homes at the first hint of trouble. Whatever havoc the Dragon and his cronies might be raising in other parts of Sanctuary, they had sense enough to stay off Pyrtanis Street.

  “We could do with a torch or lantern,” Atredan said when they’d come far enough to see the emptiness of the Promise of Heaven and the dark wall of the palace beyond it.

  “Nonsense, the way is clear, and moon’s brighter than any torch.”

  Atredan balked. “This place is haunted. We should go the other way, Lord Torchholder.”

  “The Hand’s been gone for ten long years,” Molin countered. “Nothing passes here now except a few whores on their way home to the Hill. You’re not afraid of a few whores?”