by Lynn Abbey
Shame weighed on Molin’s shoulders. His chin sank to his breastbone. His hand fell to his side. He stared, seeing nothing but failure and his feet until he blinked and saw himself.
If there were rules to witchcraft—predictable consequences to repeated actions—Molin Torchholder had never learned them. He certainly couldn’t account for what lay on the cobblestone—a corpse wearing his face, the face he’d worn yesterday at Land’s End—save for the shattered jaw and devastated nose. Its hands were his, too, gnarled and mottled with age, but unmarked by blood-colored tattoos.
When the street awakened, as it surely would now that the eastern sky was gold and crimson, they’d find two corpses on the street—a youth with Rankan features, wealthy clothes, and a single wound; and Arizak’s longtime advisor, brutally beaten and stripped to his loincloth. Arizak would be outraged, Lord Serripines of Land’s End, too. Lord Serripines would insist that Arizak search the city inside out for the murderer; and Arizak would comply … and proclaim a hero’s funeral. The Irrune chief had promised as much many, many times, and he was a man of his word.
What would Strangle make of that? Would he come to see the pyre, hiding his telltale hands? Could a decrepit and crippled old man sniff out the villain and expose him before his ruined body failed completely?
The man who had been Molin Torchholder had to try. It was better to be dead on the streets of Sanctuary than hobble before Arizak to admit his carelessness and his failures.
Chapter Two
More asleep than awake, Cauvin lay on his back thinking about gray.
Grabar’s stoneyard, where Cauvin lived and worked, had begun to fill with daytime noise. The cow wanted milking. The chickens and goats squabbled over whatever slops Mina had thrown out the kitchen door at the start of breakfast. The dog barked itself silly at the yard’s Pyrtanis Street gate. But when Cauvin set himself to thinking about fog and twilight a few household animals didn’t stand a chance.
As a boy, Cauvin had mastered gray because his life had depended on it. Don’t think, the Hand would say as they’d taught him the lessons they wanted him to learn. Stop thinking. Nobody wants to know what you think about anything. And don’t ask questions, either. You’re just another lazy pud. Almighty lazy and sheep-shite stupid. Dyareela didn’t make you for thinking; She made you for listening and doing what you’re told—exactly what you’re told, and when you’re told to do it. Maybe someday—if you don’t die of dumb first-the Mother of Chaos will visit you and you’ll hear Her voice. Until then, you belong to the Hands of Chaos so you froggin’ sure stop thinking, stop asking questions, and DO WHAT YOU’RE TOLD.
Cauvin did what he was told, and he didn’t ask questions. He’d seen what the Hand did to disobedient orphans. But he couldn’t stop thinking, so he’d made himself think about fog and twilight. The Hand didn’t seem to notice; neither did Grabar—not that Grabar was anything like the Hand. Grabar was a good-enough man whose worst crime had been seizing an opportunity to turn a sheep-shite orphan into a fake son. If Grabar had Cauvin working stone each day until his shoulders ached, it was honest work with hot food afterward and a place to call his own in the loft above the work shed.
Froggin’ sure he argued with his foster parents, but everybody argued. In ten years Grabar had never raised a fist to Cauvin, nor he to Grabar, not even in the early months when Cauvin hadn’t known one kind of stone from another. Cauvin hadn’t needed the gray since he’d come to the stoneyard—except late at night when he got to remembering life before. Then, when his froggin’ memories were sore and throbbing, Cauvin dove so deeply into fog and twilight that it was almost like being dead—except that last night he’d had a dream.
Cauvin could count all the dreams he remembered. That’s how few there’d been in the twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, years he’d been going to sleep at night and waking up the next morning. He wasn’t complaining. What would a sheep-shite idiot like him dream about, anyway? The past? It was bad enough he froggin’ remembered his froggin’ past. If he’d dreamt about it, too, the way memories got twisted up in dreams, then froggin’ sure he’d have drowned himself the way Jess did.
Or Pendy.
Pendy had slit her own throat. Just picked up a knife one morning after she’d been dreaming and damn near sliced her own head off.
Froggin’ sure Cauvin didn’t want to wind up like Pendy.
Froggin’ sure Cauvin didn’t want to have any more dreams like the one he’d just awoken from.
In Cauvin’s dream, the Hand was back on the streets of Sanctuary. They were looking at everybody through Her eyes—through Dyareela’s eyes, the Mother of Chaos. They were looking for someone to kill, someone to make Her happy.
Looking for loose children.
The Mother of Chaos loved children.
In his dream, Cauvin had hidden himself in gray fog and twilight. He’d been the self he was now, full-grown and not the child he’d been when the Hand had caught him. He’d remembered what the Hand had taught him about fighting and about hiding when fighting wouldn’t be enough. In his dream, Cauvin would have been safe from the Hand, except that his father had been looking for him, too.
Cauvin had a father. Everybody had a father. You couldn’t crawl out of your froggin’ mother’s belly without your father had put you there first, but Cauvin had never met the man who’d fathered him. Froggin’ sure, he could scarcely remember his mother; still, he could have understood if she’d appeared in his dream. But—no—it was his gods-all-be-damned father wandering through the froggin’ fog and twilight, shouting “Where’s my son? I need a son! Give me a son!”
Worse, Cauvin’s sheep-shite sire was leading the Hand through the fog like it wasn’t there. Leading them straight to Cauvin, who’d outgrown the need for even Grabar’s fathering years ago.
Thank the gods-damned gods, he’d woken up before push came to shove. That froggin’ dream had been different. Not that Cauvin had had a lot of experience with dreams, but last night’s had felt like a warning: Hey, pud, we’re back, and we’re looking for you.
The dream had been more exhausting than a sleepless night. Cauvin lay on his back with his arms and legs feeling heavier than all the stone in Grabar’s yard. He’d feel better if he could drag himself down to the well and stick his head in a bucket of autumnchilled water but, so far, he couldn’t let go of the froggin’ dream. The Hand was all that had ever frightened him. The thought that they could return to Sanctuary turned Cauvin’s blood into the thick, green sludge that clogged the stoneyard well in summer. He hated sliding down the rope and sending bucket upon froggin’ putrid bucket up to the surface until what was left merely stank rather than froggin’ crawled. The work always left him gut-sick for a week afterward, and that was froggin’ sure how he felt with a rotten, Bloody Hand dream throbbing in his head.
The Hand would find him easy enough, if they were truly back in Sanctuary and looking. They’d taken too many orphans. When Arizak and his Irrune warriors stormed the palace, the Bloody Hand wound up making martyrs of themselves in battle and of the orphans afterward, making sure that the Mother of Chaos got every froggin’ drop of blood they’d ever promised her. Better death at the edge of a knife than an angry Mother of Chaos.
It was pure frog-swallowing luck that Cauvin hadn’t gotten himself sacrificed with the rest of the orphans the night after the palace fell. Before the fighting had stopped, he’d been prodded into a bare room to face the men who’d beaten the Hand. When a gray-haired man with an Imperial accent had asked him what it had been like to live in the pits for a decade, he’d told them the gods-all-be-damned truth about the killing and the cruelty and hiding in the gray to keep himself from becoming the enemy he both hated and feared.
Honesty had gotten him bolted up alone in a windowless room. He’d been sheep-shite terrified that She’d find him that very night, but the Hand had kept Her busy drinking blood in the pits so She’d missed him, like She’d missed Jess, Pendy, and everyone else whose answers had convinced
the gray-haired man—Lord Torchholder, according to Grabar; he hadn’t given his name to a sheep-shite orphan—to lock them up alone, like Cauvin.
Of course, the Mother of Chaos had froggin’ sure gotten Jess and Pendy in Her own good time, and She’d gotten them through their dreams. Cauvin had felt safer because he didn’t dream. He’d have prayed that he never dreamt again, if he’d believed that any god in Sanctuary gave a froggin’ damn about him. The gods of Sanctuary froggin’ sure didn’t give a damn to anyone who didn’t lay down a padpol or two when he prayed. Better yet, a silver shaboozh.
Froggin’ gods, froggin’ priests, and froggin’ town.
Maybe it was time to leave. There wasn’t anything binding Cauvin to the stoneyard. Whatever Grabar had paid to get him out of that room in the palace, he’d more than sweated off the debt, and now that Grabar and Mina had a son of their own—a real son, not a bought son like him—it was froggin’ sure that he wasn’t going to inherit the yard, no matter how many times Grabar said otherwise. Grabar would be moldering at the bottom of a grave when the time came for inheriting, and Mina wasn’t going to give Cauvin anything she could keep for her flesh-and-blood son.
Leorin never missed an opportunity to remind Cauvin of Mina’s hostility.
Leorin.
He and Leorin had been paired up for-froggin’-ever. A few years older than Cauvin, Leorin had taught him the tricks of life on the streets after his mother died. When their luck had run out and the Hand had claimed them both, they stuck together in the pits. They weren’t separated until a year or so before the Irrune came to Sanctuary. Cauvin had thought Leorin had died after a night with the Hand the orphans called the Whip.
Froggin’ sure, death was the best that could happen to anyone after a night with the Whip.
Froggin’ sure Cauvin hadn’t seen Leorin after the Whip had her, and froggin’ sure the Irrune hadn’t dragged her before Lord Torchholder. Probably just as well. There was no guessing what Leorin would have told the Torch if he’d asked her the same froggin’ questions he’d asked Cauvin. Leorin hated the Hand, but it was a different sort of hate, colder, and just shy of jealous.
Cauvin had damn near forgotten Leorin when their paths had crossed while he was delivering stone in the Maze two years before. Froggin’ sure, she’d made the moves on him; then again, Leorin was a dreamer, like Jess and Pendy. She needed someone to hold her when the screaming started.
Leorin had a room for herself above the Maze tavern where she worked. Cauvin would stay with her a few nights each week, eyes wide-open and wedged into a corner, waiting for her dream-self to rise through her body. There wasn’t anything the dream-self could say or do that shocked Cauvin; he’d been wide-awake in the pits. He’d just keep her from hurting herself while she dreamt, then hold her while she cried afterward.
Leorin had wanted to jump the broom after the first night they spent together. Cauvin was the one who didn’t want to take chances. No sheep-shite way he was chancing a son until he had a better idea what he was going to make of his life, or it of him. Leorin had laughed. She’d said she’d been taking chances for years—with the Whip and countless others—and never caught a bastard.
The others—the countless others—hurt Cauvin’s pride, but that was Leorin: sharp as a knife and hard as stone unless you knew—as Cauvin knew—what the pits had been like. If Cauvin said he was ready to light out of Sanctuary on the East Ridge Road, Leorin would follow.
Her face floated through the gray: a Rankan beauty with dark hazel eyes and sleek, gold hair as long as her arms and coiled like summer vines. A man was no froggin’ man if he didn’t want her, but Cauvin was the man she wanted. It was getting harder and harder not to take chances.
Cauvin was imagining the feel of Leorin’s breasts beneath his fingertips when his bed shook from below and a voice that was not at all Leorin’s bellowed—
“You up there! Cauvin! Get your bones down here before I have to come up there and move them for you. The sun’s been up an hour and you’re no Irrune prince to lie in your bed all morning!”
Grabar’s threat—empty though it was—was enough to get Cauvin moving. He shivered into breeches, boots, and a heavy, homespun shirt, washed in the yard, and hurried through the back door of the kitchen, where Mina cooked their meals.
“Watch your feet!” Mina snapped, as Cauvin opened the door to warmth and breakfast. “Don’t you come trailing dirt and straw in here—”
Cauvin leaned against the doorjamb and scuffed his boots with a broom.
“And close that door! This is a respectable house, not some damned barn!”
“Froggin’ sure good morning to you,” Cauvin replied in the same tone. He shoved the door and let it slam shut. He and Mina were alone together—a circumstance they both preferred to avoid.
Mina looked up from the porridge pot she had simmering on the hearth. “Mind your damned language.” She gave Cauvin a good glower, which he returned, then reached for a wooden bowl. “Here, take your breakfast.”
There were peas in the porridge and enough bacon to start Cauvin’s mouth watering. He took the steaming bowl from Mina’s hands with genuine thanks.
“There’s more if you want it, and drippings in the melter. Help yourself, but leave plenty for Grabar and the boy.”
That was the essence of their relationship: So long as Cauvin left plenty for Mina’s husband and her nine-year-old son, Bec, maternal resentment wouldn’t boil over. Fortunately, the stoneyard was thriving, and there was enough oil in the melter to spread a golden puddle atop everyone’s porridge.
“You slept through the day’s excitement,” Mina announced, while Cauvin stirred his breakfast. “Sunup found not one, but two bodies up at the crossing! That’s what comes of letting the damned Dragon carouse throughout the town!”
“Couldn’t have been the damned Dragon,” Cauvin countered between spoonfuls.
Grabar swore that Cauvin and Mina were so contrary toward each other, they’d argue about the sun and tides. Grabar had a point of the truth.
“I’d have heard him and his gang carousing, if they’d been anywhere near this quarter of Sanctuary. There’s nothing but one lousy wall between my bed and the crossing and those Irrunes froggin’ sure sound like jackasses when they jabber to each other.”
“You sleep dead, Cauvin; nothing short of a kick to the head wakes you. You were like that the day you walked through the door, and you’ll be the same when you walk out. Batty Dol says no one heard the two men die, but she saw the palace guard come to claim the bodies.”
“Batty Dol?” Cauvin rolled his eyes. “You’re listening to froggin’ Batty Dol and believing her?”
Mina banged her iron ladle against the iron pot. “Mind your language! Batty gets mixed up sometimes, but she doesn’t lie—not like some I could name. She came running here soon as she saw the guard in the street picking up bodies with drawn swords. Gave her a damned fright, it did. She had a hard time during the Troubles.”
Nobody on the topside of the Stairs knew what hard times were, not compared to what had gone on in the pits, but the Troubles were the one subject that Cauvin and Mina held taboo. Not many people talked about the Troubles-except to say that times had been hard and that lots of people still couldn’t sleep.
“So, did old Batty say who’d gotten himself killed?”
“No names, but one was a Land’s End sparker—all fancy clothes and a fancy sword that was still in its scabbard. She said there wasn’t a mark on him save for the hole from the knife that killed him. The other was an old man, stripped near naked—now, that’d be a sight to give any woman a damned fright. No knife in him; he’d been beat to death, she said. But he must’ve been somebody important, though, ‘cause the guards took him away with the Ender.”
Cauvin scraped the last of the porridge from the side of his bowl. He thought about seconds and decided not to, at least until Grabar showed up and told him what they’d be doing all day.
“Someone better knock on
all the doors and make sure no old man’s turned up missing overnight. A Land’s End sparker’s got no good reason to be topside of the Stairs after dark.”
“The Enders still own half the properties on this street. Pyrtanis Street was their street when my grandmother lived here. The grandest street in Sanctuary. When the Enders come back into Sanctuary—this is where they’ll live. They’ll rebuild their houses and serve dinners that last all night. Imagine it, Cauvin! My grandfather’s house—the house that stood right here—was four stories high. It was built from dressed stone and had twenty rooms! The whole top floor was divided into two rooms: one for the menservants, the other for the ladies’. Grabar, he pulled it down right after we married. Sold the stone to a sea captain. He built a warehouse down by the wharf …”
Cauvin looked up and caught Mina with tears in her eyes. Some people had problems because of the Troubles; Cauvin understood that. Mina’s problems were older than the Troubles. Grabar had told Cauvin that by the time he married Mina, her Imperial grandfather’s house had burnt and rotted. Froggin’ sure, Mina and her father were still living on the property, but in a root cellar under the chicken coop. That was the real reason why Mina wouldn’t gather the eggs: She didn’t dream about the Hand, she dreamt about froggin’ chickens.
When Mina hit the wine harder than she ought, she’d put on airs and talk about how she’d be living with the Enders if they knew who her grandfather had been, and if she’d been willing to set aside her marriage vows to Grabar. She bleached her hair because the best Imperials had golden blond hair—only hers looked more like last year’s straw. If the Enders came back to Pyrtanis Street—a froggin’ big if: It was ten years since the Irrune wiped out the Hand and not one of them had returned. But if the Enders did return, they wouldn’t pay attention to a stonemason’s blowzy wife.