Sanctuary

by Lynn Abbey

  “The man thinks this is Sanctuary?” Molin murmured. “And he thinks he’s going to grow grain here? The man’s either a fool or a green-thumb genius.”

  “And us, Lord Torchholder? What do you make of this Vengestis the Magnificent?”

  “Get your cloak, Hoxa. We’re leaving.” Molin stood up and immediately stubbed the wrong toe. He gritted his teeth against the pain, then stamped into his softest boots.

  “For Ranke, Lord Torchholder?”

  He sighed as he thumped one of the chests with his fist. “It’s time to forget Ranke, Hoxa.” The chest groaned and opened. Molin took a handful of soldats and coronations from the wealth of coins, gems, plate, and weaponry. He poured the coins into a plain leather scrip and let the chest lid slam.

  “If we don’t go to Ranke, Lord Torchholder, where shall will go?” The little man glanced about the dingy room. “We can’t stay here.”

  “I absolutely agree.” Molin tore a length of brick red cloth from one of his court robes. He wound it intricately around his head, covering his steel gray hair, and let the loose ends fall against his face. With his profile thus obscured he could pass for anything but an Imperial lord.

  “Come, Hoxa. By sundown we shall be shopkeepers—”

  “Lord Torchholder?”

  “Forget ‘Lord,’ Hoxa—Forget Hoxa, too. Call yourself … call yourself Venges, for our new emperor. Call me Boss. By sundown we shall be the new proprietors of a respectable wine shop—or an apothecary. An apothecary would be best. I have some small knowledge of mixing potions, you know.”

  And by sundown they were proprietors of a run-down apothecary that had been clinging barely to life in what, twenty years earlier, had been the jewelers’ quarter.

  Compared to the ashes of Lirt or Sihan, or the convulsions of Ranke itself as the Imperial city digested Vengestis and his successor, life as an apothecary in Sanctuary wasn’t unbearable. An honest apothecary could make a living in Sanctuary no matter who held power. People ached, they couldn’t sleep, they couldn’t stay awake, they got indigestion, they looked for an apothecary to solve their problems. Word got around quickly that the shop in the old jewelers’ quarter had a new owner whose syrups and powders worked most of the time and whose prices were fair.

  Life as a grain exporter wasn’t impossible, either. Lord Serripines was a fool when it came to his home, his family, and his undying belief that Imperial glory would be restored no later than next year. But he was a genius in the ground. He bought up land that had lain fallow since the Imperial families of Prince Kadakithis’s reign had abandoned the city. Then he went to the villages ringing Sanctuary and made himself useful to the villagers that Molin Torchholder, like other city-dwelling men, preferred to ignore. Serripines had added the treasury of Sihan to his own before he left the city and he spread his coins like autumn manure, convincing the villagers to work his fields before they worked their own. Two years after his arrival, there was more land under the plow and scythe than there’d ever been, and big-bellied argosies were sailing high into Sanctuary’s harbor, sailing low in the water when they left.

  But life that wasn’t unbearable or impossible wasn’t necessarily good. Slowly, inexorably, the Servants of Dyareela squeezed the priests of Ranke and Ilsig out of their Promise of Heaven temples. The High Priest of Ils got himself flayed for preaching against Dyareela’s plans, but most of the city’s clergy either changed their allegiance—the Servants were accommodating that way—or slipped out through the walls. Dyareela’s justice was swift, and few were tempted to take up the underbelly life once they’d seen a man bled out or a woman peeled of her skin.

  Molin Torchholder’s little apothecary shop bought more than herbs, of course, and it sold more than syrups and powders. Though Molin had become inconspicuous, he hadn’t disappeared, and the secrets of Sanctuary—even the secrets of the Servants of Dyareela—made tracks through his shop, especially its back room.

  There wasn’t a large market for knowledge within Sanctuary while the Servants gripped it, but the city’s harbor was the last deepwater anchorage between Ranke and the Hammer’s Tail at the southern tip of the Spine Mountains—or the first, if the ship had sailed around from the Ilsigi side of the Spine. Strangers floated frequently into Sanctuary. Some were drawn there by the grain Lord Vion Serripines grew on the hills above the city, some by misfortune or accident. All strangers, though, eventually made their way to the unassuming shop in the old jewelers’ quarter.

  Lord Vion Larris Serripines got wind that there was an officer of the old Imperial court—an archpriest of the old Imperial storm-god—selling potions in Sanctuary. Scarcely a day went by when someone from that lord’s new Land’s End estate didn’t cross the apothecary shop’s threshold. Those habits would have tragic consequences eventually, but in the Empire’s eighty-fifth year, it was simply good business for both the Serripines and Molin Torchholder, so long as the Rankan exiles kept their youngsters safe at home.

  “Don’t be deceived,” Molin warned Lord Serripines. “The Servants are like an arrow wound—you think it’s healing, then one day your leg’s swollen purple and the next you’re lying on your deathbed. I can’t get an eye inside the palace anymore—no one can, including the Servants who’ve set up housekeeping in Savankala’s temple. They’re not there for worship, Vion, they’ve been tossed out by their brethren. That alone would be a bad omen, but I know for a fact, the Servants still in the palace have snatched many a child from its parents to keep their so-called orphanage filled. Had I a son or daughter, I’d never let them out of my sight.”

  The golden-haired Rankan aristocrat straightened the sleeves of his impeccably Imperial robe. “I’ve sent word of the Servants to Emperor Vengestis. I’ve told him what must be done, and he agrees. Any day now, we’ll be seeing a contingent of real soldiers arrive to put these heretics in their place.”

  Vengestis had regained the Imperial throne twice since his initial usurpation, each time less magnificently than before. The man had a positive genius for manipulating aristocrats like Serripines, who should have known better but chose pipe dreams of resurrected Imperial glory over the truths held in their own memories. Lord Serripines wasn’t an utter fool. Though he kept his absurd faith in the Rankan Empire’s promise and had sited his Land’s End villa where it could be easily seen by ships sailing down the coast from Ranke, he took Molin’s advice and kept his sons and daughters under close watch.

  Lord Serripines never got his Imperial ships or soldiers, but he and all Sanctuary did get the Irrune. Traveling under a cloud of dust as tall as a thunderstorm, the city-sized tribe advanced on Sanctuary’s ill-guarded walls in the autumn of the Empire’s eighty-sixth year. They’d come from the north and east, fleeing the same barbarian hordes that destroyed Lirt and drove the Serripines clan out of Sihan—which, considering the manners and appearance of the Irrune, painted a truly nightmarish picture of the barbarians.

  The Irrune had taken a less direct route to Sanctuary than the Serripines. For a generation the tribe had wandered the north, offering their services now to the Nisi witches and next to the Imperial generals in exchange for a new homeland. Both the witches and generals had found it easy to make promises to the Irrune and easier to forget them until outriders of the Black-toothed Beasts—the Irrune name for the barbarians who’d driven them from the lands of their ancestors—reappeared on the eastern horizon.

  As soon as he saw the banners of the Beasts, Arizak per-Mizhur, chief of the Irrune, rode west to the Spine, then south in search of empty land for his people and their herds. Their quest finally brought them to the gates of Sanctuary and into sight of more water than their language could describe.

  Arizak’s demands were simple: food, land, and all the wealth of the city or he’d do to Sanctuary what the Beasts had done to Lirt. He shouted the demands himself from the back of a lean, mettlesome stallion and in the midst of two hundred similarly tempered warriors. The chief Servant of Dyareela, a Maze-bred pimp who’d changed h
is name to Retribution, scurried to Her altar in what had been Savankala’s temple. He asked his goddess for guidance and She, remarkably, sent him to an apothecary’s shop in the old jewelers’ quarter.

  Less remarkably, perhaps, Molin was dressed in a soldier’s leather armor when Retribution arrived. For Sanctuary’s sake—for the sake of all those whose worst crime was ignorance—he proposed a plan that took him into the Irrune encampment as sole negotiator. Molin expected the worst from the ragged nomads and got Arizak’s second wife instead.

  Nadalya was a handsome woman and young enough to be the chief’s daughter. Molin met Verrezza, Arizak’s first wife, at the same moment he met Nadalya. Glancing from matron to maiden, he thought he had the full measure of the chief’s domestic disharmony. It was an honest mistake. The Irrune were a sturdy, light-haired, fair-skinned people. Cleaned up and properly attired, not one of them would have attracted attention on the capital’s streets—not the way Molin had, growing up swarthy and black-haired in Vashanka’s Temple.

  Then Nadalya opened her mouth.

  “My husband asks me to speak for him, Lord High Architect,” she said, using Molin’s god-bestowed title, which she shouldn’t have known because Molin hadn’t used it in her lifetime. “Though Arizak per-Mizhur understands Rankene as well as you or I, it is not the language of his inner thoughts. On his behalf and for all the Irrune, I bid you welcome, Lord High Architect. We are honored to meet you—me, most of all. To his dying day, my father spoke highly of you, Lord High Architect, and often. I heard how you led the charge at Phorixas on Wizardwall so many times, I sometimes think I was there myself.” Her smile was cultured, her Imperial grammar, flawless, her accent marred only slightly by a northern twang. Clearly her father, whoever he’d been, had spared no expense for Nadalya’s education.

  Molin strained his memory and recalled her father’s chosen battle. If he’d had moments of greatness in the northern wars—and Molin humbly believed that he had—Phorixas hadn’t been one of them. A warrior cherished the victories he hadn’t earned but, if he were a wise man, he never bragged about them. The Rankan center, led by a commander’s vainglorious nephew, had collapsed when the young man panicked and got himself killed. Molin had led a desperate cross-field charge against the Nisi flank because it was attack or be cut down where they stood.

  “Was your father an officer?” he asked Nadalya tactfully.

  “Chief purveyor, Lord High Architect,” she replied with a blush.

  “Ah,” Molin sighed.

  Purveyors were the necessary evil that followed every army, keeping it supplied with food and fuel, weapons and armor, and everything else it required. There’d never been an Imperial commander who wouldn’t rather face the enemy naked than a cranky purveyor. Molin had been grateful that as a priest he’d never had to deal with the breed—until now.

  “Where do we begin?” he asked cautiously.

  They began with food. Molin gave away the grain Lord Serripines had hoped to sell for a tidy profit. Lord Serripines wouldn’t dare complain, not since he’d chosen to live in an undefendable villa far beyond the city walls. To satisfy the Irrune appetite for gold, Molin gave away some of the treasure the Servants had appropriated when they took over the temples. Retribution wouldn’t dare complain, either.

  Then he and Nadalya got down to the hard bargaining: After a generation of wandering, the world-weary Irrune had come to the end of their road. They needed land for themselves and their herds of sheep and horses, and they expected Sanctuary to provide it.

  Though Molin habitually thought of Sanctuary as a carbuncle plunked down in the middle of nowhere, it was, in fact, one of the thirty-seven Imperial cities. It did not sit in reeking isolation beside the sea; instead, it was surrounded—quite thoroughly surrounded—by a broad ring of homesteads, hamlets, and villages. No matter that most of the people living in the Sanctuary’s purview regarded the city with the same suspicions and low opinion that Sanctuary itself held for the Rankan capital, the fact remained that there were easily four times as many people living around Sanctuary as lived within its walls—and if Molin had settled the Irrune among them, he’d have doomed them all.

  The nearest empty land lay southwest of Sanctuary, and it was empty for a good reason. Between Sanctuary and the Hammer there wasn’t enough high ground to forage a pig. What wasn’t saltwater marsh was bracken fen or blackwater swamp. The natives of Sanctuary called it simply—accurately—the Great Morass, and if Molin had tried to settle the Irrune there, they’d have returned in a month with blood in their eyes.

  What Molin and the Irrune needed was grass-covered land which, if not empty, was at least not occupied by Imperial citizens. There was such an expanse in the foothills of the World’s End Mountains, about four days’ ride to the north and west.

  “Follow the White Foal River to its source,” Molin advised, omitting any mention of the Gunderpah brigands as he went on to describe a nomads’ paradise.

  If the brigands and the Irrune couldn’t stand the sight of each other—and Molin doubted they could—they’d resolve their differences with the brutal efficiency of their kinds. If the Irrune wiped out the brigands—well, the foothills were a veritable paradise for horse herders. And if the brigands drove out the Irrune? Sanctuary had little to fear from a tribe that ran from the Gunderpah brigands with their tails between their legs.

  Arizak per-Mizhur had heard too many hollow promises to take Molin’s word for land that lay over the horizon. He dispensed with Nadalya’s interpretations and took charge of the negotiations himself. Molin would never have gotten rid of the tribe without the help of a sea squall that roared out of a blue-sky afternoon. The wind-whipped, salty rain panicked the herds, flattened half of the Irrune tents, and convinced Arizak per-Mizhur that he would not spend another night near water that spanned the horizon.

  The haste with which the Irrune departed for Gunderpah was enough to make an old priest think that his god was taking an interest in the mortal world again.

  Molin went back to reciting his prayers when he returned to the city, and it seemed for a few years thereafter that Vashanka was indeed listening—though Lord Serripines and his fellow Land’s End exiles stopped listening or visiting the apothecary shop after Molin gave away their profits, and the Servants were no happier to surrender even a small portion of the treasure they’d looted from Sanctuary’s temples and palaces. Still, the apothecary business prospered, and so did Molin’s back-room trade in information.

  The Irrune found their way to the Spine foothills, where the Gunderpah brigands took one look at their new enemy and high-tailed themselves into Ilsig territory without so much as a skirmish—at least that was how the Irrune told the tale whenever they returned to Sanctuary for bribes or barrels of beer. The Servants, having killed or intimidated their opposition, turned inward and, in the way of all those who placed paramount value on purity and prophecy, accusations of heresy began to fly between the Servants tending Dyareela’s altars on the Promise of Heaven and those who tended Her orphanage in the palace.

  By the winter of the Empire’s eighty-seventh year, there were two Dyareelan sects within the city: the Servants of Mother Chaos along the Promise of Heaven and the Bloody Hand of Dyareela in the palace. The Servants had the numbers and the freedom of Sanctuary’s streets, but the Hands were utterly self-righteous and utterly ruthless. Anyone unlucky enough to get caught between the two sects could count the remainder of his life in agonizing hours, but the ordinary denizens of Sanctuary were as adept at avoiding Dyareela’s authority as they’d been at ignoring the laws of both Ranke and Ilsig.

  Sanctuary’s reputation as an outpost of stability—provided one could tolerate the occasional public flaying—seeped through the crumbling Empire. The city’s population rebounded, and the talk in the back room of Molin’s apothecary was that the Servants were on the verge of victory in their religious war with the Hands. Compared to the Hands or the new emperor (who, after slaying Vengestis in his mistress�
��s bed, had, reportedly, raped, then married her himself), the Servants were rulers with whom a prudent man could live.

  Then the spring rains failed and became a brutal summer drought. What little grain sprouted, withered and died before it was knee high. Land’s End feared for their granaries filled with last year’s harvest while Servants and Hands spilled blood on their altars. In the palace, Dyareela told the Hands that Sanctuary was home to too many strangers, too many newcomers whose purity was suspect. The Servants, after listening to the same goddess, prayed for rain. The Hands were wrong outright, but the Servants were city-bred fools who knew how to rob a second-story bedroom but nothing about the ways of grain.

  Ending the drought with slow, steady rains wouldn’t have harmed Sanctuary, though they wouldn’t have prevented famine, either. Only the Serripines could do that, with the keys to their granaries. But the rain the Servants prayed into Sanctuary was a wind-whipped sea storm. The worst weather surged ashore beneath a new-moon midnight when the tide was already rising. It sucked off roofs, collapsed entire quarters, and undermined another section of the city’s walls. In the villages beyond Sanctuary, the storm wrote a different story. Torrential rains recarved the hillsides and flooded fields with ominous, muddy lakes. Then, before the rain had ended, the White and Red Foal Rivers burst out of their banks. Swirling currents swept up toppled trees, drowned livestock, and ruined lives. All flowed downstream, to helpless Sanctuary.

  Plague was loose again before the rivers crested.

  Someone got the notion that flames would stop the plague and set blazes between the Maze and the harbor. Against all expectation, the fires took root in sodden wood. Molin and Hoxa were throwing buckets of water at their shop’s walls when the Bloody Hand emerged from the palace looking for vengeance. When the last flame died, there was only one Dyareelan sect in the city, and it wasn’t the Mother’s Servants.