Sanctuary

by Lynn Abbey

  Come to froggin’ think on it: Molin’s god, Vashanka, was the Imperial god of storms. Maybe a break in the clouds wasn’t a good omen at all.

  Cauvin worried that he’d get trapped into escorting his brother to the froggin’ funeral. He’d assumed the boy had been working on Mina all day and with that kind of time, Bec usually got what he wanted. The boy wanted to go to the funeral. He wanted to see a corpse burn, no matter whose it was. But Bec was hurting still. One eye was swollen nearly shut, his lower lip was the size of a chicken sausage, and everything in between was angry purple. He sat slumped over his right side, favoring ribs that the Hand had probably broken.

  For mercy’s sake, Cauvin heard himself suggest that he’d stay with Bec on Pyrtanis Street while Grabar and Mina went to the feast, but Mina would have none of that. Her precious son was moving slow, and she wasn’t about to let anyone else take credit for his recovery. It was a froggin’ trial to steal a moment’s privacy to press the lump of tree sap into the boy’s hand.

  “He says to suck on it and you’ll feel better,” Cauvin whispered. He wanted to muss Bec’s hair the way he usually did, but didn’t dare.

  “Who says?” the boy demanded with a wince.

  “Your froggin’ grandfather, that’s who.”

  “Is it sorcery?”

  The question hadn’t entered Cauvin’s mind until Bec asked it.

  “He didn’t say. Better not be. I’ll wring his froggin’ neck.”

  Bec popped it in his mouth and immediately made a demonface. “It’s sour. I’m going to shrivel up like dried fruit!”

  “You could do with a little shriveling, sprout.” Cauvin patted Bec’s hair lightly and stood up. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Later tonight?”

  “Not tonight. Tomorrow. You go to bed tonight and you stay there.”

  “You’re going to see her, aren’t you?” The boy stuck out his lower lip. With the swelling, it was an impressive sight.

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re going to make babies?”

  Cauvin hadn’t given a thought to that possibility, either. “Tomorrow, Bec, I’ll tell you everything tomorrow.”

  “You’re not going to that other place, are you? That seaman’s place …?”

  Cauvin didn’t answer.

  When Grabar suggested they walk down the Stairs together, he said he’d rather go alone and left immediately. There were still swatches of clear sky overhead, but clouds were back. They’d swallowed the sun, and there’d be no saying for certain when sunset became evening. Arizak’s shaman would have to guess when to light the froggin’ pyre. He’d figure it out; priests always found a way to do what their princes, if not their gods, wanted them to do.

  Grabbing a torch from the bucket outside the stoneyard’s gate—he’d need it later—Cauvin hustled toward the palace.

  Whether for the funeral or the feast, Sanctuary turned out to say farewell to Molin Torchholder. Most of Pyrtanis Street was there: Swift, with his arm around the woman he meant to marry someday; Honald, the potter; Teera the baker and her whole froggin’ household down to its squalling infants; Bilibot, of course—that geezer could smell free food clear across the horizon. Cauvin nodded at them all and kept to himself.

  The stoneyard’s customers were scattered through the crowd in the forecourt. They gave Cauvin the nod as he passed; at least the ones who weren’t owing nodded. The dodgers pretended they didn’t know him, and maybe they didn’t. Maybe Cauvin was mistaken about whom he recognized and whom he didn’t. The Torch’s funeral—the funeral of the man everyone thought was the Torch—had drawn the largest crowd of Cauvin’s memory.

  Wealthy Wrigglie merchants from the Processional mansions stuck together behind their spear-toting bodyguards upwind of the pyre. Froggin’ sparkers, they looked uncomfortable in their embroidered silks and fluffed-up furs, but they had good reason to mourn an Imperial geezer. With the Torch gone, who’d plead their froggin’ cases to the Irrune? There was a throng from Land’s End, too, keeping an arm’s length or more between them and the common folk. Every one of them was dressed in garments that might have been the proper style in Ranke—a generation ago—but looked sheep-shite foolish here in Sanctuary. Shite for sure, they’d rather be tucking the Torch’s corpse in a Land’s End grave, but Arizak wanted to give his friend an Irrune send-off, and the Irrune ran Sanctuary, no matter the Wrigglie merchants or the Enders.

  The sky was darkening gray when some twenty Irrune men marched out of the palace, ten of them bent double by the drums they carried on their backs, another ten banging away, and one leftover Irrune waving horse-head rattles in each hand.

  “Zarzakhan,” Cauvin’s neighbor in the crowd said, or something similar.

  When people spoke Imperial, Cauvin heard words he couldn’t understand, but when he overheard Irrune jabber, he might have been listening to a drunkard sneezing.

  Zarzakhan—if that was the shaman’s name—was a froggin’ unholy sight to behold wrapped in a cloak of froggin’ tied-together, raw pelts. He’d worked a black paste into his hair so it whipped around his face like so many dead snakes. The wild man was a blur of paws and tails, serpents and skulls as he danced away from the palace doors.

  Cauvin’s sheep-shite luck put him between Zarzakhan and the pyre. A line of garrison guards locked spears and shoved the commoners aside. Cauvin got an elbow in his already bruised ribs, and elsewhere, too, but he got a good look at Zarzakhan as he passed by, a good whiff, too. He could have done without either. The shaman froggin’ reeked of rotting fish, and the muck from his hair clumped on his lips, eyebrows, and beard. Cauvin didn’t need to understand a word of Irrune jabber to know that Zarzakhan represented death come to collect a mortal soul.

  The Irrune swarmed behind their shaman, more of them than Cauvin had ever seen in one place. They’d matted their forelocks with red clay and drawn greasy black rings around their eyes. Arizak rode a sedan chair borne on the shoulders of four men who weren’t accustomed to the work. There was no hiding his concern as his heavily bandaged leg swung from one near collision to the next. But Arizak wasn’t nearly as grim-looking as the woman who stood behind his right shoulder once the chair was set down.

  Cauvin hadn’t seen Verrezza, Arizak’s first wife, before. She was a tall woman with steel gray hair and the eyes of an angry hawk. Age had clawed countless lines across her face, and by the lay of them, Verrezza wasn’t a woman who smiled much, though maybe she was just unhappy that the Dragon, her son, wasn’t on hand. Cauvin didn’t pretend to understand the power struggles of Sanctuary’s rulers, but he had an inkling of what an elder son might feel when he got pushed aside by a younger one.

  Arizak’s second wife Nadalya stood behind Arizak’s left shoulder. She was oh-so-froggin’-careful not to touch Verrezza and didn’t seem a match for her hardened rival, though maybe that was because Nadalya looked enough like Mina to be her sister. Nadalya acted like Mina, too—her mouth and hands were never still, and she fussed over her youngest son, the red-haired Raith, already head and shoulders taller than she, but not yet as tall as Verrezza.

  Of all the folk gathered upwind of the pyre, only Raith and Arizak had the hollow look of men in mourning. There were streaks on Raith’s face where his tears had sluiced through the black grease. Nadalya swiped at them with a bit of cloth that would never be clean again. Raith didn’t seem to notice his mother’s efforts—the froggin’ sure sign of a boy whose mind was in another place. Apparently, Bec wasn’t the only boy to fall under the Torch’s froggin’ “Grandfather” spell.

  Naimun, eldest son of Arizak and Nadalya, arrived late and stood apart from his kin. No streaks in the grease around his eyes, Naimun appeared as sullen as Verrezza, but not nearly so strong. He whispered something to a sparker companion and brought a smirk to that man’s face.

  The drumming stopped, and Zarzakhan leapt onto the pyre, which creaked but didn’t tumble. For the first time since he’d arrived, Cauvin found himself looking closely at
the corpse that wasn’t Molin Torchholder’s. Tightly wrapped in dark, wrinkled cloth, it resembled a log more than a man, which was froggin’ fine with Cauvin. Despite all the death he’d seen, he wasn’t comfortable with cremation. There was something about the notion of rendering a man down to froggin’ ashes that left him weak in the gut.

  Zarzakhan exchanged his horse-head rattles for burning torches, which, after a jabbering speech, he pointed at Arizak. After a moment’s hesitation—and a froggin’ nudge from his father—Raith made his way to the pyre. The boy said a few words no one but Zarzakhan and the corpse could have heard before taking the torches and shoving them between the logs.

  In a heartbeat the pyre was engulfed in searing flame. Sorcery, Cauvin suspected, or pitch, or a combination of the two. The shrouded corpse was briefly visible, a dark shadow within the fire, then it burst into flames. Cauvin felt the heat where he stood. He held his breath as long as he could, let it out, and inhaled reluctantly. The difference between a roast on the hearth and a corpse on a pyre was in the mind, not the nose. But—Sweet Shipri’s mercy—the only smells in the evening air were wood, bitter pitch, and the froggin’ muck in Zarzakhan’s hair.

  “Look at him,” a nearby stranger complained.

  Cauvin followed the woman’s eyes and guessed she was speaking about Raith. The boy had returned to his father’s side with unmanly tears running down his cheeks.

  “The Torch won’t see justice,” another stranger, a man, added.

  Cauvin realized they were watching Naimun, still joking with his Wrigglie companion.

  “Sure as shite,” the first stranger agreed. With her round, chinless face and frayed, blue shawl, she could have been any one of the middle-aged women Cauvin saw in the doorways and market stalls once he’d strayed from Pyrtanis Street. “Arizak’s not going to look inside his own house.”

  “Nor outside it neither,” another shapeless woman added.

  “Aye,” said the man. “Frog-all sure, the Dragon’s taken off—and look at his mother’s face. She knows who killed the Torch. Frog-all sure.”

  “Strange beds for stranger times. Those two—the old bat and Naimun—had just one thing in common: hating the Torch,” the blue-shawled woman said.

  “No wonder there,” the man explained, showing off for the women. “The Dragon wants his father’s people, Naimun wants Sanctuary—no need to fight between them. But Raith—the Torch raised him to want both—and take both, if he’d lived long enough.”

  The second woman sucked loudly on her teeth. “Poor lad—he’ll be lucky to see midwinter now that his protector’s gone; Arizak, too. See those wrappings? My neighbor’s brother says that his cousin’s wife does the palace laundry and she says Arizak’s linen stinks of death. A week ago they cut away the last of his toes on that foot. Says she saw them burn the bits on the roof.”

  “Eyes of Ils have mercy,” the other two chanted together.

  “Eyes of Savankala,” the man corrected. “We’re at the Enders’ mercy already.”

  Cauvin edged away from the man and his audience. He sought a better view of the clumped-together Enders. Which one of those white-robed men was Lord Serripines? And what was in his mind? What little Cauvin knew about the Enders he learned from Mina, and the harder she tried to build them up, the more they seemed like sheep-shite fools, but sheep-shite fools who owned frog-all everything worth owning in Sanctuary: the fields, the ships … the land beneath the stoneyard.

  What were they thinking as Zarzakhan continued his wild dance around the blazing pyre?

  —“If there’s an emperor in Ranke who’ll give them the gold, he’ll swear whatever he’s got to swear to get it.”

  Cauvin’s attention slewed back to the nearby conversation. He’d been thinking about Lord Serripines and the rest of the Enders, but—no froggin’ surprise—he was froggin’ wrong.

  “You’ve got it wrong, Dardis,” the blue-shawled woman said with exaggerated patience. “If the Dragon bends a knee, he’ll bend it toward King Sepheris in Ilsig. He’ll get the same gold; and after he takes off to conquer the old Irrune lands, he’ll be on the far side of the Empire, where he can ignore his oaths.”

  “And we’ll have Sepheris all over our backs—”

  “Better an Ilsigi king who speaks our language than the Rankan Empire and Rankan taxes.”

  The man called Dardis expressed his opinion of Sanctuary’s ancestral home with a loud hawk and louder spit. “Pox on Sepheris. The Empire,” he declared, “can levy all the taxes it wants on Sanctuary, seeing as it can’t collect a rusty soldat.”

  “Wherever the Dragon goes,” another man, a stranger to the others as he was to Cauvin, chimed in, “he’ll bleed us all white before he leaves. He thinks the only good city is a sacked city. Naimun’s the man for us. Does what he’s told.”

  Dardis hawked and spat again. “Frog all—Naimun does what Naimun wishes … and Naimun wishes for gold, women, and wine!”

  “Then we’ll give him women and wine until he forgets about the gold,” the other man argued.

  A fourth voice—Cauvin’s voice-entered the conversation. “I think we’d be better off with Raith.”

  Strangers turned and stared as if a froggin’ dog had reared up on its froggin’ hind legs and started to talk.

  “You’re young yet,” Dardis explained. “Take it from a man who’s seen it all. The last man Sanctuary needs for prince-governor is a froggin’ clever man who learned his lessons from the froggin’ Torch.”

  The others grumbled their agreement while the blue-shawled woman muttered, “Raith’s still a boy. Once Arizak’s gone, his older brothers will dispose of him quick enough.”

  “Arizak or no, Raith’ll be dead by midwinter, mark my words,” Dardis swore, repeating the words Cauvin had heard when the conversation began. “The Dragon won’t wait until Arizak’s dead to bring that one down; his froggin’ mother will boil his balls if he doesn’t do it by then.”

  “If the Torch taught Raith,” Cauvin scarcely believed he was hearing his own froggin’ voice. A sheep-shite stone-smasher didn’t care who ruled Sanctuary. “He won’t be easy to kill.”

  “If the Torch taught him everything,” the second man agreed with a cackling laugh, “but what boy learns all his lessons, eh? Did you, lad? Put your money on the Dragon, if you want to see the future of Sanctuary.”

  Dardis cleared his throat; they all stepped back, but the man didn’t spit this time. He stared straight into Cauvin’s eyes, and said: “If Raith’s brothers can’t kill him, then froggin’ Ils have mercy on our shite-baked souls, ’cause he’ll be ours for-froggin’-ever, just like the Torch.”

  For a moment, Cauvin thought he recognized Dardis after all. A stoneyard customer? The wheelwright who’d mended the mule cart three years back when the axle split? Or maybe someone from the older depths of his memory? The palace? Dardis was too old to have been in the pits but could he have been a Hand? His weren’t stained red, but was that proof? Or was he only another hard-eyed wary man come to say farewell to the one thing in Sanctuary that hadn’t changed in a lifetime?

  Before Cauvin could make up his sheep-shite mind, the Irrune started pounding their drums again. The aroma of roast meat wove through the funeral crowd as oxcarts emerged from the palace kitchens. Servants bore a platter of delicacies to Arizak and his close companions. The Irrune tossed fatty morsels onto the pyre, where they burst into sorcerously bright flames: The false Molin Torchholder’s funeral feast had begun.

  The women of Sanctuary had the foresight to bring bowls and knives. They and whoever stood beside them devoured generous portions of meat and bread. Cauvin, who’d come to the funeral feast without a woman or a bowl, pierced a stringy slab of ox shoulder with his boot knife. He burnt his fingers, got stains on his shirt, and savored each juicy mouthful.

  Street musicians roamed the forecourt with their instruments and leather cups. They sang new songs that celebrated the Torch’s life and the traditional dirges of Ilsig. Neither withs
tood the onslaught of the Irrune drums. Nothing could compete with that pounding; nothing could resist it, either, not after the casks were breached and the ale began to flow.

  Ordinary folk who wouldn’t froggin’ dream of dancing like a Red Lanterns whore clapped and whirled about. Swift’s face was as red as his forge fire when he and his ladylove spun into Cauvin’s view. They called Cauvin’s name, inviting him into their celebration. He’d sooner leap blind off the froggin’ highest wall in the city and beat a retreat to the crowd’s fringes. There he spotted Batty Dol arm-in-arm with Bilibot. Once he’d seen that gods-forsaken sight, Cauvin was ready to look for a blue leather mask.

  The Maze was quiet, nearly deserted, which made it all the more froggin’ dangerous. Cauvin loaded his fist with bronze and, with the torch he’d carried down from Pyrtanis Street in his off-weapon hand, straddle-walked the gutters that ran down the middle of the quarter’s twisted, narrow streets. His directions were precise, including the number of paces between turns as well as the corner turns themselves, but Cauvin didn’t entirely trust them.

  The Maze was riddled with tunnels, sewers, and other hidden passageways that were apt to collapse without warning, taking a house or two with them. New buildings sprang up almost immediately, but never in quite the old location. Season to season, the streets of the Maze moved like a flooded stream, finding new courses between familiar places or disappearing altogether. Since he’d started seeing Leorin, Cauvin had made it a point to visit the Maze at least once a week, lest he lose the Vulgar Unicorn.

  The Torch was far too old for carousing in taverns or chasing wenches. Froggin’ sure it had been more than a week since he’d visited the Maze. A man following the old geezer’s directions put himself at risk for getting lost or worse. Cauvin’s shoulder muscles were aching knots as he counted another eight paces, turned a tight corner, and found himself unexpectedly staring at the lantern-lit doors of the Vulgar Unicorn.