by Lynn Abbey
“Illyra! Illyra!”
Molin hobbled over with the torch. He thought he recognized the face of one of Dubro’s journeymen through the blood and swelling. The man might have stood beside Dubro, fighting the mob to the end. More likely, Walegrin judged right, and he’d led the mob against his master.
“No use,” Molin whispered, tugging on Walegrin’s arm. “It’s done.”
“Illyra!” Walegrin’s speech had been reduced to a single, anguished word.
The tiny home where Illyra and Dubro had lived all these years stood unburnt, but the shutters had been broken, and the door had been wrenched from its hinges. Lengths of curtain cloth in Illyra’s bright, beloved colors flapped outward, into the smoke. Molin knew what he would see when he thrust the torch through the gaping doorway, but he did it all the same and blocked Walegrin’s view and entrance with his body.
They’d killed her. Slit her throat and plunged a knife at her heart where it remained. By firelight the metal glinted redder than the stains across her breasts.
“She’s been dead since sunset,” Molin assured Illyra’s brother. “At least since sunset.” Although it was hard to mark the time of death in winter. He’d learned that as a young man fighting the northern witches.
“Let me pass.”
Walegrin laid hands on Molin’s shoulders. He tried to shove the older man completely out of the ruined home, but Molin sidestepped. He wedged himself into a corner and wondered—point-lessly—how Dubro had fit into his own home. The flames from his torch licked the flimsy roof. Painfully, Molin got down on his knees. Walegrin knelt, too, misunderstanding Molin’s gesture, waiting for a prayer.
“Into Your mighty hands, O Vashanka, I consign our sister’s soul. Lift her up to paradise.”
The Tenslayer was not by any measure a woman’s god, but He’d take care of Illyra, if He knew what was good for Him.
Walegrin found his sister’s hand buried in the folds of her manylayered skirt. A rectangle of stiff paper slipped from her fingers before he lifted them to his lips. In charity—not wanting to witness a warrior’s tears—Molin looked away … at the painted paper.
It was a sign Molin had seen many times upturned on the cloth-covered table where Illyra scryed the future. A single face formed from the shards of many other faces, all of them anguished and deformed. She called it the Face of Chaos, and he almost fed it to the torch, then thought better of the sacrifice. He collected the rest of Illyra’s scrying cards and, though Molin had been careful as he searched, a flame leapt from the torch to the curtain cloth.
Walegrin snarled like a wolf when Molin shoved him at the door.
“Let it burn,” Molin countered. “She’s past pain or caring. Let it all burn.”
Bec laid down the white quill. He whispered, “Grandfather?” but wasn’t sure if he wanted to hear an answer or not. The old man had been talking all morning, and while keeping up with him, Bec had covered half a sheet of parchment with the tiniest script he could manage. Then Grandfather had started talking about a woman named Illyra (Bec had asked how it was spelled). He’d begun to mumble and wouldn’t speak clearly when Bec asked him to. Furzy feathers! The old man didn’t even seem to hear him ask the question.
And now he was crying! Tears were streaming down his cheeks, same as they streamed down Batty Dol’s cheeks when she got going about the Troubles. Or Momma’s cheeks, when she told him about the fine, fine house with twenty rooms that used to stand in the middle of the stoneyard.
Bec had never seen a man cry before.
“Grandfather?” he asked, his loudest effort yet. “Grandfather, are you dying? Should I get Cauvin?”
Bec stood up, but he’d been sitting crosswise too long, and his legs had gone to sleep. He hopped noisily, foot to foot, waiting for the burning and prickling to end. That finally got Grandfather’s attention.
“Stop dancing, boy!” the old man snapped. “Take up your quill. Where were we? Read back the last words you’ve written.”
The prickling was terrible when Bec folded his legs beneath him again, but Grandfather wasn’t the sort of man a boy argued with. He cleared his throat and read cautiously, because he hadn’t caught all the words: “It began to snow. The fires turned the ice flakes into raindrops …”
Molin continued, “But there wasn’t enough water in that winter night to keep the bazaar from burning to the ground. We beat a retreat to the Governor’s Walk and cut through the mob when it tried to follow us. Twenty men and women there on the walk. Good riddance! The gods alone know how many more died in the bazaar. They spread, you realize. The fires and the mob, they both spread through the city. It was two days, I swear, before we returned to the palace. Two days of fighting fires and damned fools. But damn us all, when the smoke cleared, the Quickening was gone, and the Servants of Dyareela took the credit.”
Chapter Seven
Bec blew across the cup of tea, not because it was steaming hot but because if he blew hard enough, Grandfather might think the tea had indeed once been steaming hot. Momma made the stoneyard’s tea. She went outside the walls to collect the leaves and flowers. She dried them and crushed them and, most important, she tended the hearth fire that heated the water that became the tea Bec drank with every meal. Bec watched his mother coax the embers back to life every morning. She made it look so simple, Bec had never imagined it wasn’t something he could do.
“Here,” he said, offering the cup. “I was afraid it might be too hot, so I blew on it for you.”
Grandfather extended a trembling hand. Bec tried to make the exchange without actually touching the old man’s fingers. It was impossible, and Grandfather’s flesh felt like—Well, it felt like nothing Bec could describe, except that it wasn’t right and sent shivers down his backbone. He took a backward step and then another before attempting to meet Grandfather’s eyes.
“Next time, boy—if there is a next time—don’t bother blowing.”
Bec opened his mouth to protest and shut it quickly. Grandfather was the most frightening man he’d encountered. Far worse than Poppa when Poppa was angry, or Cauvin, who got angrier and got that way more often. The old man was scarier than the Irrune who lived in the palace and took whatever they wanted from any shop in any quarter of the city—
Thank Shalpa (Bec’s favorite among Sanctuary’s gods, despite his mother’s Imperial disapproval, because Shalpa was quick and clever and He never, ever got caught) that the Irrune had no use for stone!
Bec had slipped into an Irrune daydream when Grandfather’s raspy voice brought him back to the ruins. “Did that stone-headed brother of yours buy more parchment, or is that the only skin you’ve got?”
Should he tell Grandfather that it had been his idea to buy a single skin? Momma could get a whole year’s worth of writing onto a single sheepskin. Or should he let Cauvin take the blame? Cauvin could take it. Cauvin could take anything because he’d walked out of the palace alive.
At least that’s what Cauvin said.
Giving the question a second heartbeat’s thought, Bec decided that he shouldn’t make things worse between Cauvin and Grandfather. Grandfather had an edge against Cauvin the likes of which Bec had never seen. It had something to do with the Troubles …
“That night when your friends died in the bazaar,” Bec asked boldly, determined to get his answers, “was that when the Troubles began … with the Servants? Cauvin says the Hand caught him, and that’s all he’ll say. Was the Hand the same as the Servants, or were they something different?”
Grandfather glared over the lip of the teacup. His eyes seemed to glow with a light of their own, and Bec regretted to the soles of his feet that he’d dared to ask any questions at all. Then Grandfather began talking again in a voice so soft that Bec ignored the ink, the quill, and the parchment. He sat on the floor beside Grandfather instead, with his chin resting resting on the mattress and his eyes closed to remember every word.
The shape of the future should have been clear to anyone with the
wit to see beyond the tip of his own nose, but the men and women Molin summoned to the dilapidated Hall of Justice in the wake of the fires that had leveled the bazaar and most of the Shambles, too, thought otherwise.
“I say it’s an excellent idea!” old Lord Mioklas declared, brandishing a white badge—a proof of purity given to him by the Servants he continued to house in his Processional mansion. It was not the only twisted bit of white cloth visible in the Hall. “A simple proof of one’s virtue and better than anything you’ve come up with in years, Lord Torchholder.”
“These Servants are doing what your precious garrison full of expensive guards never could do,” another peer continued. “In less than a week, they’ve rid Sanctuary of its most worthless elements and put a stop to the Quickening! My house has lost no one since we took the badge.”
“Hear, hear!” a third man shouted. He had the golden hair of an Imperial family and the crimson nose of a man who drank too much wine. “Why keep the garrison at all?” he demanded. “For five soldats—and not one of them pure silver—I’ve got a Servant sitting at my high door, sniffing everyone who comes or goes. And it’s not just moral contamination he can scent. He says he can smell a thief at ten paces—and I believe him. He pointed a finger at my wife’s maid and we found a gold necklace hiding in her skirts! Tell me your precious garrison could have done that—and caught the thief before she left my home! You’re wrong about the Servants, Lord Torchholder, as wrong as a man can be. This nonsense about Dyareela—you can’t expect us to believe your superstitions. Face it, Lord Torchholder: The Servants are the best thing that’s happened to this city since you stopped sending our taxes on to Ranke.”
Molin looked at the men and women arrayed before him. They were men—women—his own age or older, meaning they’d all lived through the tumultuous years when Prince Kadakithis had been Sanctuary’s governor and the city had become a battlefield for gods and distant wars. They knew what happened when gangs turned the city’s quarters into rival kingdoms. They knew that the purest silver, the whitest badge was no guarantor of safety—or they should have.
“Start packing,” Molin told Hoxa after the council had told him his services as acting governor were no longer needed. “We leave at dawn.”
“For where, my lord?” the loyal Hoxa asked.
“Anywhere. Anywhere but here. I’ve wasted my last breath on these fools. They deserve whatever the Servants do to them.”
No sooner were the words out of Molin’s mouth than the air chilled. By sundown, Sanctuary shivered in a bitter north wind. By midnight, sparkling white powder fell thick from a black sky. It buried the city to a finger’s depth with the promise of much more by dawn.
“Snow,” Hoxa observed. “Do you suppose anyone will notice it’s the same color as the Servants’ badges?”
Molin would not dignify the question with an answer. In his youth winters throughout the Rankan Empire might have been raw, but water rarely froze. Snow was yet another indignity that had befallen Imperial lands since the capital fell.
“Will we wait until this storm blows over, Lord Torchholder, or shall I continue packing?”
“What do you think?” Molin’s temper reached its breaking point. “Of course we wait!” he shouted at Hoxa. “I may be damned never to escape from this gods-forsaken town, but I’m not suicidal. Why die in a snowdrift tomorrow when we can sit tight and wait for Dyareela’s Servants to slit our throats!” He slammed the door hard enough to splinter the wood.
The sound was fresh and sharp in Molin’s mind, more real—more shocking—than anything that followed, because there was a limit to shock, a threshold which, when crossed, opened into numbness. He’d counseled emperors and princes and led armies to victory, but, once again, Sanctuary had gotten the best of Molin Torchholder. He knew who and what the Servants were, but knowledge was useless against their seductive weapons. He could anticipate the Servants’ moves—the escalation of their sermons from the simple scapegoating of the S’danzo and anyone else suspected of “contamination” and “impurity” to the trickier bits of Dyareelan theology: confession, mutilation, and execution disguised as sacrifice.
Molin had one weapon to wield against his red-handed enemies, at least in the early days. He paid the guards in Sanctuary’s garrison, and they repaid him with loyalty. Walegrin and the others would have carried out any orders he gave them, no questions asked, but not even the Architect of Vashanka dared send armed men into the courtyards of Sanctuary’s elite houses, and that was where the Servants laired once they’d gotten hold of aristocratic ears.
Loath as Molin was to admit it, then or now—Dyareela’s Servants were clever and subtle, and they were one step ahead of him from the start. They’d looked at the palace and realized that neither he nor his garrison could pose a threat to their plans, even after the bloodshed started, so long as they catered to the fears of the wealthy and self-righteous.
Two types of people met their deaths at the Servants’ hands. There were those who sacrificed themselves willingly—hysterics who swallowed the Servants’ theological clabber whole. They believed that their deaths would hasten the mortal paradise the Servants promised at the end of every sermon. There was no saving a man or woman from sheer stupidity. The other early victims were those who, like Molin Torchholder, saw through the Servants’ plans and opposed them. Unfortunately for Molin, these natural allies were also the heart and soul of Sanctuary’s underbelly—the gangs that ran its rackets, traded its drugs, and hosted the least savory houses on the Street of Red Lanterns.
Molin was a practical man, but he drew the line at joining forces with the likes of Basho Quarl, even though Quarl had the right measure of the Servants. The king of beggars and lord of thieves sent his minions to the palace offering gold and information in exchange for protection as the Servants closed in on him. Molin said no, he wouldn’t trade the stewpot for the fire. He watched from his palace balcony when white-robed justice dragged Quarl, naked, bruised, and pleading for his life, into the palace courtyard, where a platform built from charred wood had replaced the Hall of Justice. The Servants accused Quarl of every crime he’d committed and more besides. They judged him, then bled him out slowly, to the cheering satisfaction of the crowd.
Despite the false accusations, Quarl deserved every cut he got; but on his balcony, Molin couldn’t help wondering if he hadn’t been outfoxed again.
After Quarl’s “sacrifice” the peers eagerly paid tithes to the Servants rather than taxes to the palace. Molin saw how the wind blew. He released the garrison and told them to leave Sanctuary, fast. He made plans to travel with Walegrin to the city of Lirt, about as far to the north and west as a man could go and remain in what could still be called the Rankan Empire. He got as far as converting all his property into gold and jewels, then his gout flared up. His big toe swelled to the size of a melon, and despite his best efforts with mineral soaks and witchcraft combined, it stayed that way until an early winter put an end to all thoughts of following Walegrin to Lirt.
That winter, the eighty-fourth winter of the Imperial calendar, Dyareela’s Servants insinuated themselves into every temple ringing the Promise of Heaven. They wanted the palace, too—for an orphanage, they said. Dyareela was a mother-goddess, they said. She couldn’t bear to see a child’s tears, they said. Molin knew better; there wasn’t a priest in the world who didn’t know better: Innocent children were ever the easiest to shape for good … or evil. He sent messages to his remaining friends among Sanctuary’s peers; with his grossly swollen toe, travel, even across town, was out of the question. A few replied, but none was in the mood to listen.
Molin told Hoxa to find them a place outside the palace, a place where they could disappear until spring when—gods willing—his toe would have shrunk and they could set out for Lirt. Hoxa hunted up an abandoned wreck of a building deep in the Maze. It had three usable rooms: one for himself, one for Molin, and the largest for the eight wooden chests they smuggled out of the palace. They settl
ed in for a cold, quiet, and, for Molin, a painful winter.
Spring came and brought with it a long caravan of Imperial refugees. They carried good news and bad. The good news was that the Empire’s longtime enemy, Molin’s people—the Nisibisi witches of the north—had been beaten, crushed, vanquished, shattered into a thousand pieces the previous summer. The bad news was that the Nisi hadn’t been humbled by Rankan might. A horde of demonworshipers from the far east had crushed the witches, then demanded tribute—or else—from the Empire.
The horde’s numbers were great beyond counting. They’d formed a solid ring around the Imperial city of Lirt and when it refused their demands they burnt it to the ground. Not one soul, the refugees insisted, had survived. They weren’t Lirters; they were from the city of Sihan, south of Lirt. When the horde hove across Sihan’s landward horizon, the pragmatic Sihanites had simply abandoned their port city. Their fleet had sailed south, expecting a warm welcome in the capital.
Instead, they learned that there’d been another coup in the capital and a new usurper was sitting on the emperor’s throne. He called himself Vengestis the Magnificent and swore that he’d lead the army to victory over the Dark Horde, but until then the refugees could fend for themselves, west of the capital. He sent his soldiers to the wharves and threatened the Sihanites with death if they set so much as one foot off their ships.
“Lord Serripines says the last month has been hell, and this place is truly Sanctuary to his eyes,” Hoxa said while slowly shaking his head. “He means to settle his whole clan outside the walls. They’re going to grow grain for export, same as they did in Sihan!”
Molin lowered his foot from the cushion. His toe had shrunk. He could think of riding again without leaking tears, but there was nowhere to go if Lirt was gone. Lirt and Walegrin and the rest. He shivered—not from cold—and considered that except for Hoxa, there was no one left who shared his memories, certainly not this Lord Serripines from Sihan.