Sanctuary

by Lynn Abbey

  Like the rest of the quarter, the Unicorn was uncommonly quiet. Through an open window, Cauvin saw two of the wenches sitting at a table, deep in their own conversation. Neither of them was Leorin, but she was surely working. She hadn’t been at the funeral. Crowds spurred her nightmares—not the rowdy crowds that frequented the Unicorn, but open-air crowds. She said they reminded her of executions. She’d never have gone back to the palace to see a man burn, even a dead hero.

  Two nights ago, Leorin had wanted to run away from Sanctuary forever. Last night Cauvin had gone home to bed, not to the Unicorn. They didn’t see each other every night, or every other night for that matter. Theirs wasn’t the sort of love that left the lovers red-faced and spinning like Swift and his lady, but it wouldn’t hurt to walk through the doors.

  And tell her about last night? Tell her about the Torch, the Hand, and the froggin’ blue mask that was supposed to connect him with an armsmaster?

  Cauvin pounded his head against an imaginary wall. Shalpa’s froggin’ cloak! If he’d had half the wits Father Ils had given the shited sheep, he’d have insisting on meeting the mysterious armsmaster somewhere other than the Vulgar Unicorn. Gods all be damned, the froggin’ Broken Mast would have been a better meetplace than the Unicorn!

  Froggin’ sure he was going to regret going into the Unicorn tonight, so Cauvin resolved to put it off a bit longer. Following the Torch’s directions, he went left down a passage that was too wide to be called an alley but too narrow to be called a street anywhere except the Maze. Thieves could have jumped from black doorways on either side and from above as well.

  A man needed a strong gut when he went exploring in the Maze; and if he were a smart man, too, he brought a froggin’ hat. In the froggin’ Maze, the buildings leaned out over the street. At noon the only sunlight to reach the pavement landed in the gutter along with the slops from upstairs. Bareheaded as he was, Cauvin barely avoided a honey-pot dousing as he plodded deeper into the dark.

  The Torch’s directions ended precisely in a rubbish-strewn emptiness that the Imperials would call an atrium and a Wrigglie like Cauvin called a death trap: The only way out lay behind him, but there were froggin’ windows and roofs aplenty where an archer, or even a decent knife-man, could make short work of a sheep-shite fool with a glaring-bright torch blooming in his hand.

  Gods damn your sheep-shite eyes, Lord Molin Torchholder, if this gets me killed, Cauvin swore silently.

  Yet, aside from the predictable dangers of clambering over charred wood, crumbling brick, and broken pottery, the atrium felt as safe as his loft. Glancing at the gaping windows, Cauvin had the uncanny sense he was invisible, at least to anyone who might be lurking in those black holes. Froggin’ sure, a magician could hide a man. Back on Pyrtanis Street, the old-timers said that Enas Yorl had hidden his big house, with him still in it, in the middle of a big storm and kept it there all the years since.

  Cauvin didn’t pay much attention to the old-timers. Hidden wasn’t the same as gone, and Yorl’s house was gone. A man could walk across the corner where it had once stood, if he had a reason to. Cauvin had run across on a ten-pad pol dare. It was a spooky place, full of shadows and sounds that couldn’t be heard from the street. He was head-to-toe gooseflesh before he’d reached the other side, but he’d gotten across and gotten his padpols.

  The Hand could hide things, or Dyareela could hide things for the Hand. Priests prayed and gods worked miracles that froggin’ seemed like magic, but weren’t because priests weren’t mages and you could get in trouble if you said otherwise. The Hands, gods rot them all, were consecrated priests—

  Molin Torchholder was a consecrated priest, too.

  Cauvin thought about that staff the Torch kept beside him. froggin’ sure it was more than a stick of black wood, and that lump of amber had the look of sorcery. And why hadn’t the old pud died? The Torch swore that he was dying, but though that wound on his hip went down to the bone, he froggin’ sure wasn’t fading away.

  Questions hung at the back of Cauvin’s mind, thoughts like midnight after a supper of cabbage and onions when it was down the ladder or lie there with a gut-ache until dawn. They kept him anxious as he rammed the torch into a crack in the wall and began clearing rubble.

  He was still working up his sweat when he uncovered the edge of the trapdoor the Torch had said he’d find: a paving stone remarkable for its perfectly square shape and nothing more. There was no lifting it, but the geezer had given Cauvin an answer for that, too. He took the torch to another corner where, right as froggin’ rain, there was a perfectly square brick sitting shoulder high in the wall. Pull it out, the Torch had said, then pull the lever at the back of the hole.

  Cauvin had gotten his fingers wedged around the brick when sensations that were both hot and cold shot up his arms. His hands shook so badly he couldn’t keep them pressed into the mortar. Then the sensations passed from his shoulders to his neck. He opened his mouth and would have been horrified, but not froggin’ surprised, if a hive of bees had swarmed out of his throat, except—suddenly—the sensations ended as if they’d never begun.

  Warding, he told himself. Cauvin knew a bit about warding, the expensive sorcery that rich people bought for their treasure chests and real thieves bought amulets to counter. He’d have wagered his last froggin’ padpol that there wasn’t anything in Sanctuary worth warding—out at Land’s End, perhaps, but nothing inside Sanctuary’s walls.

  Needless to say, the froggin’ geezer hadn’t mentioned warding. Cauvin stared at the froggin’ square brick a good long time before touching it gingerly with the fourth finger of his left hand.

  Nothing. No chills, no sweats, no tingling. Nothing at all.

  Cauvin dug deep into his stock of oaths and insults. There wasn’t one that satisfied. The froggin’ brick hadn’t been warded; warding strong enough to numb a man’s flesh didn’t disappear after a single touch—he’d learned that from the Hand. No, someone—the froggin’ Torch—had anchored a one-time spell on the brick, a spell which had gone to ground in Cauvin’s flesh.

  “You better froggin’ well be dead tomorrow morning, you froggin’ bastard!” Cauvin hoped the old pud could hear him; he didn’t care who else did. “‘Cause I’m going to smash every froggin’ bone in your froggin’ body.”

  Cauvin yanked the brick from the wall—his own choice, at least he thought it was. He’d come too far, risked too froggin’ much to turn back without the gods-all-be-damned blue mask. The lever took two hands and all his strength before it budged. In his mind’s eye, Cauvin saw the atrium transformed into a vast chamber with smoky lamps and pillars and Lord Molin Torchholder waiting for him atop a massive throne, but in the Maze nothing changed.

  The paving stone remained as Cauvin had left it. From his knees, he pried it loose, revealing not the mask-filled cache he’d hoped for, but the rising end of a steep, ladderlike stairway. The Torch hadn’t mentioned that either. Muttering and cursing himself for froggin’ foolishness as heartily as he cursed Molin Torchholder for deception, Cauvin dragged the paving stone to the center of the atrium and covered it with rubbish—little as he liked the prospect of leaving the froggin’ hole open behind him, he liked the notion of someone else closing it even less.

  With a stone-worker’s professional eye, Cauvin admired the stairway. Each of the steps was steep and narrow, befitting the paving-stone entry, but they were made from shaped stone and bore his weight without shifting. The tunnel at the foot of the stairs was stone-faced, solid, and drier than the atrium above it. There wasn’t a froggin’ cobweb or slime streak to be seen. The air was stale, but not foul, which reassured Cauvin as he made his way toward what he thought was a dead end but proved to be a dogleg turn to the right.

  Once he’d turned the corner Cauvin conceded that the Torch hadn’t sent him on a fool’s errand and almost forgave him for the warded brick. In front of him the tunnel widened into a chamber large enough that the light from Cauvin’s torch didn’t reach the walls. What t
he torch did reveal was racks of armor and benches covered with weapons, all bright and shimmering beneath layers of protective oil.

  Drawn by curiosity too strong to resist, Cauvin entered the chamber. It wasn’t occupied—at least not by anything larger than a mouse or lizard. He thought the torch flared when he raised it toward the chamber’s higher ceiling; more likely, it wasn’t the torch, but his eyes going wide with awe. Off to one side, in an alcove fit for a froggin’ god, a suit of armor like nothing Cauvin had seen before hung on a stone torso. The breastplate was burnished bronze and shaped in a style that was neither Imperial nor Ilsigi. Over one shoulder the torso wore a battle cape of boldly speckled fur from an animal Cauvin couldn’t name. A crested helmet rested on the floor beneath the torso along with bracers, greaves, and a sword that was remarkable for its plainness in comparison to the armor around it.

  Stories said the Torch had been a warrior in his younger days, but he’d never been man enough to fill that bronze armor, which begged the question: Who had worn it, and how had it wound up beneath the Maze?

  Cauvin looked for a bracket in which to set his torch. There was one beside the doorway but there was also a glass lamp—he was starting to expect the froggin’ unexpected—with a bellyful of oil hanging from the ceiling. He lit the lamp, waited a moment for the froggin’-gods-only-knew-what, then returned to the alcove.

  The air turned red the instant his fingertips touched the bronze. Cauvin had a moment to realize that the armor was leather, not metal, and to curse his curiosity before a voice surrounded him. It spoke in his mind and filled his ears.

  At last, you have—it began.

  A whirlwind circled Cauvin where he stood. It threatened to tear his clothes from his body but did not disturb either his torch or the lamp.

  You are not My chosen minion. I do not know you. You are no one. You do not belong here. Close your eyes, mortal; you have seen all that you will ever see.

  Cauvin was too sheep-shite frightened to move even his eyelids, but not too frightened to invoke another silent curse that touched the froggin’ Torch by name.

  You know him.

  The words weren’t a question, and Cauvin didn’t need to answer.

  He sent you. He lives?

  Cauvin croaked a single word: “Yes,” and the wind around him eased. “Your minion sent me, Holy Vashanka—” He guessed he was trapped in the presence of the Torch’s god. “He did not warn me—”

  The man was My priest, never My minion, and ever a source of doubt and stubbornness. Though Tempus was that, too, and more. I have been too long without a minion in the mortal world.

  Another wind wrapped around Cauvin; no longer indignant, it had the feel of Mina’s eyes when she looked for bargains in the market.

  Frightened as he was, Cauvin was that much more repelled by the god’s curiosity. He’d refused Dyareela; he’d refuse Vashanka, too, disregarding the risks. “I am not for sale.”

  Vashanka chuckled. And I do not BUY My chosen ones. Even in Sanctuary. I have come back to Sanctuary-

  The chamber went dark. It went more than dark; it froggin’ disappeared like Enas Yorl’s froggin’ house and took Cauvin’s body with it. His awareness was limited to his eyes, and his eyes were bird high above a transformed Sanctuary.

  A man wearing the bronzed leather armor and a bloody red glow rode a troublesome gray horse along a cleaner, busier Wideway. Cauvin thought of himself as a brawny man able to overpower any sheep-shite fool who challenged him, but not the bronzed rider. Measured against recognizable landmarks, the pale-haired man had to be at least a head taller and stronger not so much in muscle as manner. He exhaled power and contempt. People kept their heads down and got out of his way without—Vashanka agreed—knowing who the warrior was or why he’d ridden into their city.

  A bold youth—or simply a froggin’ careless and unlucky one—darted in front of the gray horse. The animal attacked with a ferocity Cauvin associated with wild dogs, not horses. No one on the Wideway dared come to the youth’s aid. They cowered behind paltry shelters and watched as the armored rider let the attack continue until the youth was past dead and little more than bloody pulp beneath iron-shod hooves. He rode on in silence, his and theirs.

  The warrior’s name was Tempus Thales, and he was used to being watched; he’d been Vashanka’s minion for nearly three centuries before he rode toward the palace.

  The omens were favorable … a city, isolated on the edge of the world, filled with ambition, with pride and hatred; and more wealth than showed on the surface … I sent My best and expected nothing less than perfection.

  Destruction followed the man called Tempus. Cauvin saw it all in an explosion of sparks each of which was too fleeting for consciousness but hot enough to burn memory. Within days of arriving in Sanctuary, Tempus slew a man who wore Imperial armor similar to his own and many whose protection was limited to a blue-leather mask. He brought sorcery and uncanny weapons to the Maze and terror to the Street of Red Lanterns because for Vashanka’s minion it was either rape or celibacy, and he was never a celibate man.

  Sanctuary cowered and Vashanka was pleased, then Sanctuary took vengeance. The Wrigglies ambushed Tempus as he lay in a drug-laced stupor. They dragged him beyond the walls and sold him to a man obsessed with pain. Tempus lost his tongue, an arm, a foot, and other parts besides. A mortal man would have died; Vashanka’s minion merely suffered and suffered and suffered.

  He never once called upon Me; therefore, I could not allow him to die.

  Recklessly—because he was not used to having a god in his head—Cauvin thought—How could Tempus call anyone without a tongue? And, How could he die, if a god had made him immortal?

  The red wind licked Cauvin’s throat. If I’d made Tempus immortal, I could unmake him … or save him.

  Like a froggin’ starfish, Tempus grew back his missing parts once he was freed from the vivisectionist’s lair, with nary a scar on his flesh to betray his suffering. But the minion’s mind, his spirit … Cauvin’s mind filled with weariness that was neither his nor Vashanka’s.

  He was never the same. He’d looked at death and seen that it would not take him. I thought it would make him bold … inventive—But he grew jaded instead. The game was over before it fairly began.

  No one in Sanctuary guessed that Tempus was a changed man, a hollow minion. Dizzying scenes of carnage and miscalculation passed before Cauvin’s eyes. Except for one, they were no different than the earlier visions. And that one vision, which lingered in Cauvin’s mind’s eye long after Vashanka had moved to other memories, revealed not Tempus, but merely a man known to him, a man who’d stumbled into the power of a witch who was more raven than woman.

  The witch had staked the man flat over a hole in the ground. She commanded her servants to start a greenwood fire, then bid them fan the smoke underground. Not even a god could forget the screams as a badger clawed its escape through the man’s gut.

  The omens changed. Vashanka conceded. Doom could have been seen, perhaps; I was distracted.

  Cauvin saw a woman—a goddess, perhaps—with snakes draped around her body and the same staring eyes Cauvin had seen on Captain Sinjon’s face in the Broken Mast. The snake-y woman did more than distract Vashanka, she destroyed Him and Sanctuary with Him. Tempus and the Torch worked together—a froggin’ odd and frightening pair they made—to pull their god out of the snake woman’s embrace, but failed.

  Darkness clouded Vashanka’s vision. The raven witch brought her war with all things Imperial and Tempus Thales in particular to Sanctuary. Gangs, not armies, waged nasty war in every quarter, even on Pyrtanis Street, where Cauvin glimpsed the mansion that meant so much to Mina and was now the stoneyard. He watched in astonishment as dead men and women were raised by a handful of rival witches and turned loose to ravage the city. Cauvin knew he looked down upon the dead because he saw the spread-eagled man moving among them, a froggin’ badger-sized hole, raw but not bleeding, right through his gut.

  Do
not blame Me. Was the storm-god sulking? Embarrassed? Ashamed? They blamed Me. Blasted My temple. Broke My minion and My priest. I had done nothing Savankala had not done a hundred times before and Ils, a thousand. If the dead did not stay dead, why blame Me? The dead were never My concern. Great Father Ils of the Ilsigi claimed the city. Its dead belonged to Him, too. His problem, not Mine. He solved it by banishing Me … Me! Ils thought to banish war; He banished victory instead. Did he think His gray daughter; Sivini, could grant Him victory?” Vashanka answered His own question with a clash of thunder and bolts of lightning. Sanctuary fell to the dead. To the dead, to thieves, and children.

  When Cauvin first came to the stoneyard, ignorant of everything except the streets and the pits, Grabar had told him tales of the days of children, thieves, and living corpses—the days of his childhood, when a man couldn’t leave home without a braid of colored strings and ribbons tied around his arm to grant him safe passage from one quarter to the next. He said the night the dead finally, truly died a pillar of fire rose from the Hill all the way to the stars.

  Cauvin knew the Hand was real because he’d lived through it … but living corpses, fiery pillars, and ribbons? Cauvin had listened, because after the streets and the pits he’d do anything to stay at the stoneyard, but listening wasn’t froggin’ believing.

  Believe, mortal. The dead did walk and a pillar of fire did burn all the way to paradise. It took the dead, the witches, the mages, and the priests with it. When the sun rose, there wasn’t a sorcerer left who could make water in the rain. And the gods of Sanctuary—the gods who’d banished Me for meddling!—They couldn’t make rain. They couldn’t undo what They’d done, so They went away. They forgot.