by Lynn Abbey
“I’m a citizen. Momma made Poppa pay to put my name on the rolls at the palace. She keeps a copy behind a hearthstone, all sealed in wax to protect it.”
“Then you could live at Land’s End. That’s the way the Imperials are: They’ll treat you like a froggin’ turd, but show up with the right piece of parchment, and you’re one of them … well, maybe not quite—you’ll wind up like that steward, always having to make yourself important. I’m telling you, though—it’s different with the Ilsigis. We look like them, pretty much; we speak the same language, almost; and when some sparking Ilsigi comes to Sanctuary the only thing he sees is escaped slaves. A turd’s got use in this life—leave it alone and plants grow better; but a runaway slave means somewhere there’s a master who’s frogged himself. If we bow down to King Sepheris, we’ll stand up in chains with hot brands on our backs.”
“It’s been over two hundred years, Cauvin. All those slaves who ran away from their masters are dead and their grandchildren and their grandchildren’s children, too. Nobody could come into Sanctuary and say—you, your great-great-grandfather was a runaway slave. Nobody remembers who their great-great-grandfather was.”
“The Ilsigis won’t care. Far as their kingdom’s concerned, Sanctuary’s worse than a mistake, it’s shame, and there’s nothing worse than shame. It’s all smiles and shaboozh now, but if Sanctuary goes to bed with Sepheris, that parchment over the hearth won’t mean froggin’ shite.”
Cauvin had surprised himself with his passion. He’d surprised Bec, too. The boy squirmed free.
“Furzy feathers!”
Embarrassed, Cauvin mumbled, “I don’t know—I never froggin’ thought about it much, but everything just came clear in my mind all of a sudden.” He didn’t like the way that sounded, almost as if the thoughts hadn’t been his, the way reading hadn’t been his yesterday. “If it comes to choosing—If anyone asks me, I’d say Sanctuary should stick with the froggin’ Empire. The worst they’ll do to Sanctuary is start collecting taxes again.”
“Furzy feathers!”
Young as he was, Bec was the stoneyard’s clever one. When Bec’s mouth hung open with disbelief, Cauvin could be certain he’d made a fool of himself … again.
“I—”
“Furzy feathers! Grandfather said almost the same words. He even told me that the palace rolls wouldn’t count for anything with the Ilsigis, and that’s why Raith’s got to succeed his father, not Naimun or the Dragon. Did Grandfather tell you what to think?”
Stunned, Cauvin snapped, “The froggin’ Torch doesn’t tell me what to think!” though that was his precise fear. “You want to write down his froggin’ nonsense, that’s fine, but you shouldn’t pay attention to what he says. The Torch’s got one foot in his grave … and your stories about Honald and the hens are better than anything he’s told you. Forget about Inception Island. It’s all past and over. He’s crowding your skull with froggin’ideas you don’t need ’cause no one’s ever going to care what you know or think.”
Bec’s eyes stayed wide, but his mouth closed, and he wrapped his arms tightly over his chest. “You don’t mean that, Cauvin.” The boy’s voice was soft. He took after his father when it came to anger: slow and stubborn, not at all like Mina, who raged like a summer storm, or Cauvin himself. “You’re angry because I said that you and Grandfather see Sanctuary the same way, and you don’t want that to be possible.”
“He’s a froggin’ Imperial priest! Froggin’ sure, if the Torch says something’s good for him, it’s not going to be good for me. Can’t be.”
“Not good for you or Grandfather. Good for Sanctuary. That’s different. You agree on what’s good for Sanctuary, whether or not it’s good for you.”
“If something’s not good for me, I don’t care how good it is for froggin’ Sanctuary.”
The Ender steward and the watchmen had settled their differences. Carts were rolling forward. Looping Flower’s lead over his wrist, Cauvin guided her onto the Ridge Road.
He didn’t care about Sanctuary, Cauvin assured himself. He cared about himself, about Bec and Leorin, maybe about Grabar and Mina—on a good day. But suppose the Ilsigi did take over Sanctuary and they did just what he’d predicted? Would he let the Ilsigi burn their mark into Bec’s cheek? Or Leorin’s? Could he do anything to stop them?
Don’t think, Cauvin reminded himself. You’re not made for thinking. You’re sheep-shite stupid and made for doing what you’re told.
In desperation, Cauvin sought gray fog to quiet his mind, but the fog was impossible to find late of an autumn afternoon. Instead, he stared straight ahead and up a bit, at the carved-stone plaque above the open gate. He’d seen it countless times before—two heads in profile facing each other over a symbol made from two swords crossed over a spear, all of them pointed at the ground. The profiles were better than Grabar’s work, but not by much. They both looked alike, and neither looked like a real man.
Cauvin had looked at the plaque countless times. Today he read the inscription—
AT THIS PLACE
AT THE 60TH COMMEMORATION OF
THE FOUNDING OF THE GREAT EMPIRE
KADAKITHIS-PRINCE & THERON IV—EMPEROR
DID DECREE SANCTUARY
A CITY OF THE EMPIRE
BY THE GRACE OF SAVANKALA, HIS LIGHT AND His LAW
The words, Cauvin realized with a start, were Imperial, which made sense, considering what they meant, but it was froggin’ odd to read meaning from words he couldn’t froggin’ pronounce.
The watchmen beckoned Cauvin forward. They’d seen him often enough in the last few days to know him and Flower by sight, if not by name, and passed him through with only a few gibes about the aroma clinging to his boots.
Flower sensed that her stall and her grain weren’t far away. She would have picked up a trot if Cauvin had let her, but a trot would have brought them up against the slow Ender carts. So he kept a firm hand on her lead, which the mule protested by swinging her head hard against his arm. If he’d been in a good mood, Flower’s behavior would have soured it, but his mood wasn’t good and got worse with every stride, every head butt.
When Bec announced, “Grandfather won’t be surprised when I tell him that you think Sanctuary shouldn’t throw in with the Ilsigis. He says he owes you an apology. He says he was right about you the first time and wrong the second, whatever that means. And the only one who thinks you’re a sheep-shite fool is you,” Cauvin had all he could do to keep from striking the boy down.
“I don’t care a frog-sucking damn what the froggin’ Torch says about anything, especially me. I didn’t ask him to haul my froggin’ ass out of the pits, and I never should have hauled his out of the temple. He doesn’t owe me anything except his death. The sooner he dies, the better. Tonight! Good riddance!”
Bec blanched and knotted his fingers in Flower’s skimpy mane. The mule responded by straining against the traces and giving Cauvin her hardest butt yet. He snapped the lead against her nose—which was a froggin’ foolish thing to do. The world didn’t know from stubborn until the first mule got born. Flower bared her flat, yellow teeth and brayed up enough racket to draw a man down from the gate.
Cauvin made peace with the watchman and the mule while Bec sat on her back, white as winter snow, his eyes shiny with unshed tears. Bec’s obvious misery shamed Cauvin, and he hid deep in his own thoughts to escape its weight. The boy slipped off Flower’s back as soon as they were through the stoneyard gate. He ran straight to the kitchen. Cauvin didn’t think Bec would tell Mina the true reason he was on the verge of tears, but Mina would notice, and she’d blame Cauvin.
Supper was going to be froggin’ unpleasant. Cauvin would have climbed the ladder to his loft if he hadn’t gone hungry since breakfast. He could have gone to the Lucky Well for supper, or to the Unicorn, but he’d still have to face his foster mother, and the way he ached from top to bottom, he wasn’t eager to hike for supper. He tended Flower, hid the wooden box with the Ilbarsi knife, and after coat
ing his boots with sweet oil walked barefoot through the sunset into Mina’s kitchen.
Everyone on Pyrtanis Street knew there was an Ilsigi ship in the harbor—they need only walk to the end of the street to see its mast rising above the wharf. The first words out of Mina’s mouth weren’t about Bec’s tears or Cauvin’s feet—as he’d feared. They were a warning that supper would be long on grain, short on fish.
“Someone thinks they’re worth a feast and sucked half the fish out of the damned market. Drove up the prices up on what was left. Hecath’s fires will burn cold before I spend four padpols on scrod.”
Mina had added extra grain to the pot to make up for the missing fish. It was tasty, though—Mina knew her spices and, more importantly, her spice-sellers the way sots knew the town’s froggin’ taverns. But food couldn’t lighten Cauvin’s thoughts. Nor could conversation.
The night’s good news—if it could be called that—was that late in the afternoon Tobus the dyer had shown up at the stoneyard to talk about rebuilding an adjoining house for his soon-to-wed son. Tobus wanted the fronts to match—to show his prosperity, now stretching into a second generation, to anyone walking down Sendakis Way.
“More than bricks, Cauvin, Tobus wants new lintels across both houses, with carvings, no less. I warned him the Irrune won’t abide gods in the city, Imperial or otherwise. He’s settled for fish, a row of them above each door and window. Tobus the dyer lives in a house crowned by tobutt fish—clever? We’ll cross the fish like this—” Grabar made an X with his forearms. “We’ve agreed on forty coronations paid in soldats—soldats minted in Ranke and not cut since they got here.”
“Forty! You should have gotten sixty!” Mina carped from the hearth. “Even a good soldat’s not the same as a damned shaboozh, you know.” It bothered her that shaboozh were worth more than soldats, never mind that a shaboozh was almost four times the weight.
“Wife! Enough! We’ll see a good profit. And before we’re done, I’ll tempt Tobus with columns, great thick columns faced with brick, to frame his two front doors. Meantime, I’ve got to order red-veined marble for the lintels all the way from Mrsevada. Tobus gave me the name of a ship’s broker—Sinjin, Minjin, something like that. The three of us will meet Ilsday to make the necessary arrangements—”
“Forty!” Mina repeated, “If Tobus can afford foreign marble, then he’s got enough to pay you another forty coronations for your labor. Think of the boy, Husband! Another forty coronations would see him apprenticed to a master apothecary in Ranke.”
“Enough! Forty coronations it is and will be!”
Mina’s spoon clanged against the pot, but she said nothing more. Cauvin said nothing either, though his mind swirled with memories of the Torch assuring him that smashing red bricks wouldn’t prove a froggin’ waste of time. He wasn’t surprised. After sorcery and assassins, why would he be surprised that Tobus—a Wrigglie through and through despite his Imperial name—was suddenly reckoning his accounts in coronations and soldats or that Grabar was headed for a meeting at the frog-all Broken Mast?
Even tucked away in a root cellar, the froggin’ Torch had the power to shape a sheep-shite stone-smasher’s life.
Then conversation turned to the day’s bad news—not the appearance of an Ilsigi galley or the surge in prices at the market, but runners who’d appeared at the stoneyard not long after Cauvin had taken off in the morning. A building had collapsed in a quarter south of the palace and as Sanctuary’s only master stonemason it fell to Grabar to decide where men could safely dig for survivors.
“That rain we had last night must’ve done for the walls,” Grabar muttered. “The corner gave at the bottom and everything above collapsed. We pulled one lucky fellow out—he’d been asleep in the attic when it fell; he’ll live. The poor bastards below—”
“Husband!” Mina snapped with a sidelong glance at Bec, who was all ears listening.
“Damned miserable morning. Could’ve used you and the cart,” Grabar said in Cauvin’s direction.
“You knew where 1 froggin’ was,” Cauvin said, which wasn’t a complete lie—not for the morning, and he was covered for the afternoon: Bec would have said if runners had come to the ruins after he and Soldt had taken off. Shite for sure, the runners would have noticed the froggin’ Torch sitting on the window ledge, and that’s the story the city would be serving with supper, instead of a collapsed building or an Ilsigi galley.
Damned gods knew, Cauvin had been as lucky as the fellow Grabar had pulled out of the rubble. He couldn’t resist the relief, or the shame. Pushing the empty bowl aside, Cauvin left the kitchen for the loft. With no lamp or candle to break the gloom, Cauvin threw himself down on the straw, wishing he could unlive the last five days or, failing that, fall asleep.
As far back as he could remember, Cauvin’s best and surest defense had been sleep. No matter what had happened with his mother or with the Hand, once he was alone in the dark, Cauvin could retreat into the gray, hide in dreamless sleep, and wake up with an armor of emptiness between himself and his memories. Day or night, rested or exhausted, he’d been able to will himself into dreamless sleep, so it came as a froggin’ unpleasant surprise to find himself wide-awake and staring up at the shades-of-black rafters.
They were all there, whirling in Cauvin’s mind: the Torch with his glowing staff and parchment skin; Sinjon and his mismatched staring eyes from the Broken Mast; the guards, the watchmen, the Hiller from Ils’s temple, and the Ender steward on his sweating horse; the would-be killers who’d laid their red hands on Bec in Copper Corner; and—looming larger than Lord Molin Torchholder—the froggin’-sure killer, the assassin, Soldt. A crumbled home Cauvin hadn’t seen with his own eyes filled the center of Cauvin’s confusion. In his mind, it was a froggin’ redbrick ruin.
Cauvin’s friends were in there, his loved ones: Bec and Leorin, Grabar and Mina, Swift and his Pyrtanis Street neighbors; Pendy, Jess, and everyone who’d ever died. Even his ghostly mother was trapped beneath red bricks. He had to get them out, with a mallet, not a shovel—his mallet with a shiny bronze head. It was more than comfortable in his hands, and Cauvin swung it with confidence, certain that he could smash the bricks aside in time.
The ruins shuddered each time Cauvin struck them, loosening more bricks, piling them higher and higher. Between heartbeats the ruins swelled like waves before a gale. Growing faster than they crumbled, the brick walls towered over Cauvin’s head. He staggered backward, defeated, looking desperately for Grabar, who could read the strength of a wall and tell him which bricks could be removed and which must remain.
But his foster father was in the ruins, under the bricks with all the others. The Torch moved in Grabar’s place, squatting down on his haunches, measuring the jagged walls with his blackwood staff. The priest noticed Cauvin. He stood and pointed the staff at Cauvin’s scarred chest. His mouth opened and words came out, ribbons of written words—commands Cauvin couldn’t obey because he’d forgotten how to read. In a blind, frustrated rage, Cauvin swung his mallet, striking whatever stood in its path.
Arms reached into Cauvin’s madness. The arms became thick ropes that bound Cauvin against hard stone and held him prisoner. The bronze-headed mallet fell from his hands. Cauvin screamed from his gut, and the ropes were gone. He searched for his mallet. The ruins had swallowed it, as they’d swallowed everything else he cared about. Cauvin dropped to his knees. He attacked the rubble with his bare hands.
He was no longer alone. On either side, rows of men knelt and dug with their hands. They all looked alike. They all looked like the assassin, Soldt.
We’re just men doing our jobs … just men doing our jobs.
The sounds of suffering seeped up through the bricks. Cauvin dug frantically until burning pain made him stop. He looked down at his hands.
His hands were red, bloodred from fingertips to wrists.
His hands had turned red.
The stain was spreading from wrists to arms, arms to heart.
Cau
vin screamed again and found himself alone in darkness, gasping for air, and unable to hear a sound above the pounding of his heart. For a moment, Cauvin didn’t know where he was, then the wood at his back, the mule smells, and stone smells became familiar. He was in the loft—wedged into a corner beneath the eaves with no notion how he’d gotten there, but home all the same. His heart slowed. His breathing steadied.
He’d had a dream, a nightmare, and it was over. Yes, a building had collapsed in Sanctuary, but not the building Cauvin had dreamt about. Yes, people had died—crushed and broken, but not the people Cauvin cherished. Nightmares weren’t the truth—that’s what Cauvin told Leorin, Pendy, and the other orphan dreamers. The twisted memories nightmares left behind could be banished because they were lies.
Cauvin crawled back to his pallet and clutched the blankets tight. He had no intention of falling asleep—one nightmare was more than enough—then a fine rain began to beat on the walls around him …
The rain had ended when Cauvin awoke, blissfully emptyheaded. With little effort, he remembered his nightmare, but sleep had put an arm’s length of peace between him and it. He was calmer than he’d been since rescuing the Torch. The nightmare had been just the froggin’ dose Cauvin had needed to see the events of the last five—now six—days for what they were.
Frog all, Cauvin still didn’t know what he’d done to deserve it, but the Torch had singled him out—drawn him to the Temple of Ils, tricked him with froggin’ sorcery time and time again, battered him with gods and assassins, then—finally—invaded his dreams. Shite for sure, the old pud had sent him a nightmare message: Work with Soldt if you want your little brother, your beloved, or your foster parents to be safe.
Cauvin had heard that message before—from the Hand. He’d listened. What else could he have done? froggin’ Lord Molin Torchholder had made a froggin’ mistake when he’d seized the strings on Cauvin’s soul. He was still a sheep-shite fool, not made for thinking, but it didn’t take much froggin’ thinking to see that there wasn’t a big difference between the Torch and the Hand, except that the Torch was dying.