by Lynn Abbey
“It fits. Nothing happened. I don’t feel any different.”
“That’s good. Go to the palace. Show it on your hand to the majordomo. Tell him that Arizak, chief of the Irrune and lord of Sanctuary, wishes to see you. Show it to Arizak the same way, then do what you’re told. After that, Cauvin, you’re on your own.”
“Froggin’ shite,” Cauvin muttered. He turned around, saw three faces staring at him, each different with worry and all the same with expectation, and cursed again.
Soldt spoke first. “You want company?”
Cauvin shrugged. He was good at doing what he’d been told to do. Had Elemi foreseen how easy the choice would be? He stood over the hole in the loft’s floor and dropped to the straw-covered ground beneath.
“There’s soup on the hearth,” Galya told him, as though she’d heard nothing of what had happened above her head.
“I’m not hungry.”
He got out of the way, letting both Grabar and Soldt use the ladder to leave the loft.
“You should eat before you go the palace,” Galya persisted. “No ring is going to get you to Arizak without a long wait first. You’ll think clearer if your mind’s not distracted by your gut.”
Cauvin tried arguing, but he was hungry, and he could slurp down a bowl of soup—even the thick, creamy soup Galya ladled out for him—in less time than it took to object to it. Or he could have, if everyone hadn’t been watching him, and Galya hadn’t followed the soup with a snowy white bundle of linen.
She shook the cloth out and held it against Cauvin’s shoulders. “If you’re going to stand before Arizak, you need to look your best.”
There was nothing fancy about the shirt, no gold-thread patterns or lacy fringes, just fine-woven cloth and rows of tight stitching.
“Sweet Sabellia!” Mina complained, snatching a sleeve for closer examination. “Where’d you get the soldats for this? Look me in the eye and tell me your hands are clean.”
Mina got an eyeful of Galya instead. “I keep what gets left behind at the Ravens and I do with it as I see fit. If I charged Cauvin ten soldats for making a shirt or a single shaboozh or nothing at all, that’s my affair. Would you rather Cauvin pled for his brother’s life in rags?”
The sleeve slipped through Mina’s fingertips. “You don’t forget who took you in when you had no place to go. We fed you and kept you in clothes. Treated you as our own. Don’t you forget that when you’re standing in the damned palace.”
Cauvin had no intention of forgetting. He didn’t blame her for her choices, either. He’d have made the same ones. Shite for sure, his own mother would have chosen Bec over him.
The new shirt fit Cauvin perfectly. Galya produced a tortoiseshell comb and dragged it through his hair. Batty Dol pronounced him a “right handsome young man.” Cauvin turned to Grabar.
“You coming with us?”
Grabar looked at his hands. “Lord Torchholder didn’t give me his ring. I’m minded to visit the Crook and see if I can find this Othat. Could be he did see something.”
“The Hiller was right—he’ll see more if you dangle a shaboozh or two in front of his eyes. There’s a broker’s purse under my pallet, under the Torch. It’s full of the money I collected from Mioklas yesterday—” Cauvin wouldn’t be needing it any time soon.
“Who gave you—”
“Wife!” Grabar silenced Mina. “No need to disturb the old man. We’ve got shaboozh in the hidey.”
“You ready?” Cauvin looked at Soldt.
Soldt shrugged. He seemed on the verge of saying no, then shrugged again and followed Cauvin onto Pyrtanis Street.
“What do you know about this ring?” Cauvin asked.
“I’ve never seen Lord Torchholder without it. If it’s sorcery you’re looking for, look at his staff.”
“Aye, I’ve noticed. What about Arizak?”
“He’s not the man he was, especially on days when his leg’s bad. Best hope today’s not one of the days when he’s chewed black-poppy seed or it could get dicey. They’ve made promises, one to the other; I don’t know what they are.”
The quickest way from Pyrtanis Street to the palace was, as Cauvin had told Gorge, across the Promise of Heaven and in through the old God Gate. But quickest wasn’t easiest, not for Cauvin. The God Gate was the gate the Hand had used when they crept out of the palace, looking for anyone who’d displeased the Bloody Mother, anyone who caught the Whip’s eye. He hadn’t retraced those steps for nearly ten years.
“Having second thoughts?” Soldt asked when Cauvin hesitated in the God Gate’s shadow.
“It’s been a long time.”
“We can go around to Governor’s Walk and the Processional Gate.”
“No, the froggin’ gate’s here, whether I walk through it or not, and so are the memories.”
There were no guards at the Promise end of the God Gate but there were two of them where it opened onto the palace forecourt, both of them Irrune with rust-colored hair and ruddy faces. They spoke Wrigglie well enough to challenge a Sanctuary native, but the truth was that well-dressed, well-groomed men weren’t seriously challenged, regardless of their language.
When Cauvin said he had to see the majordomo because Arizak was expecting him, the guards were unimpressed, until Cauvin added—
“But we’re not sure where to find that worthy man. Can you tell us where he’d likely be at this hour?”
The taller Irrune pointed across the courtyard. “In the Exchange.”
“So, that’s what they’re calling it now,” Cauvin said, mostly to himself.
When the Hand ruled Sanctuary, they’d called the gray-stone building an armory and kept some of their weapons in it. The whole forecourt had smelled of sweat and shite, with slop buckets fermenting in the sun, flayed corpses hung on iron hooks until the crows picked them apart, flies everywhere—except in winter—and rats the size of a man’s forearm.
The rats kept their distance by day but come darkness, they’d ooze out between the stones, looking for food. When it came to cleanliness, the Mother of Chaos was a man’s god. Food for rats collected in every corner of the Hand’s palace, in every open space, too—but there were so froggin’ many rats. The Hand’s rats were as scrawny as its orphans. If you caught one brushing against your leg, it was all bone and gristle, scarcely worth the effort of splitting it open and sucking dry.
But Cauvin had … whenever he could, because food was food, and if he hadn’t, someone else would. He’d been big for his age from the time he stood up, but when the Hand caught him, he’d been one of the younger orphans. His first years in the pits were the darkest. By the end, when everyone older had either died or gone behind the walls with the Hand, he knew how to survive.
Impulse spun Cauvin around. Except for their color, deep blue instead of black, the Justice Doors of the palace hadn’t changed. They still swung outward, still three times the height of the tallest man, still a frame around darkness. Whoever had built Sanctuary’s palace had laid it out so sunlight never crept more than a few paces beyond the Justice threshold. Inside, Arizak might be holding council or the great altar of Dyareela might be leaking blood onto the marble floor.
In the right half of the forecourt, in a line that ran between the God Gate in the eastern wall and the flagstone path to the Processional, Cauvin spotted the scars of the pits themselves. Another man might not see the slight depressions in the dirt, the slight difference in color, darker and redder than the rest. Another man, even noticing the differences, might not grasp their meaning. Cauvin was not another man. He shivered when a stabler led a horse across a rusty scar.
If Batty Dol shivered like that, she’d say, Someone’s walking on my grave. The pits weren’t Cauvin’s grave, but they’d been the death of so many others …
“See someone you recognize?” Soldt asked, tugging gently on Cauvin’s sleeve.
How to answer? He’d seen a girl, a few years older than he’d been.
The summer sun had just risen, b
ut already it turned the pits into ovens and she was too weak to crawl out of its light, too weak to whisk away the flies buzzing around her eyes and mouth. She’d been sick for a week. Now she was dying, not quickly enough. If she couldn’t climb out of the pit when the Hand overseers lowered the ladders, they’d drag her out and take her to the Mother’s altar.
“Please? Please?” Her lips formed the words. She was too weak, too parched to make a sound. Her hand twitched, reaching for his?
Cauvin couldn’t remember what had happened next. He didn’t remember them dragging her to the altar. Maybe that was memory enough. He stared at the sky and blinked.
“No, no one.”
“Come on, then. Let’s find this majordomo.”
“Right,” he agreed, and turned back toward the exchange.
The Hand never did an honest day’s work, not when they had a steady supply of orphans to order about. Cauvin and the others hauled jugs of water and jugs of night soil. They baked the bread, and they washed the linen, whenever some mighty Hand decided it needed to be washed. They scrubbed the floors around the Mother’s altar, and they climbed onto the steep, slippery roofs after every storm looking for broken tiles. No froggin’ way some mighty Hand was going to have water dripping on his or her froggin’ face at night.
The roof hadn’t changed much and the tiles were still apt to break in a gale-force wind and men still had to check them after every storm. They worked in three-man teams, linked by long ropes. Two men with steady footing hugged the crest and guided a third man, who worked his way up and down, back and forth. If the third man slipped—and it was a man slipping that had caught Cauvin’s eye—the ropes snapped taut. Froggin’ sure he’d have busted ribs and rope burns along his flanks, but his two keepers had kept him alive.
Cauvin would rather have cleaned the middens than check the roof tiles; and the same storms that loosened roof tiles flooded the middens. At first, he’d found ways to get put on midden duty, but Whip—damn him to Hecath’s foulest hell—figured out that Cauvin feared heights. After that he was climbing ladders every time it rained, humping tiles before the last drops had fallen. He wasn’t ever the only orphan scrambling across the roof, but they didn’t work in teams and the only ropes were those each orphan used to lower the broken tiles and fetch up new ones.
It was late autumn—same time of year as now. Cauvin and the other roof-crawlers were barefoot. The tiles were so froggin’ cold his feet were numb to his froggin’ knees. The Hand had him working the lower courses of tile, the rows closest to the edge, the rows that frightened him more than the high courses near the crest. He’d spotted a cracked tile below his knee and the temptation was to pretend he hadn’t seen it—but that was risky. The Hand weren’t just brutes and bastards, they’d been truly consecrated by the Mother of Chaos and any one of them might be looking at the roof through his eyes at that very moment, seeing what he saw, waiting for him to shirk, waiting for him with the long, thin flaying knife when he got down to flat ground again.
The worst kind of death the Hand delivered wasn’t when they peeled an entire skin. That froggin’ bastard screamed and howled, but he was dead long before they finished. No, the worst was when the Hand flayed just an arm or a leg or peeled a circle of skin they called the “Mother’s Face” off some poor pud’s belly. Froggin’ sure, the red flesh underneath would swell and weep. It would draw flies, turn black, and stink like the rotting meat it was until the pud died. That could take a month.
So, Cauvin had scrabbled down to the very edge and gotten to work prying out the broken tile. Bits of broken, baked clay clattered to the brink and disappeared. If they landed on someone’s head … well, that was one of the few froggin’ things that wouldn’t be his fault. It was different, though, up on the roof. The crawlers staggered themselves, so the ones working the upper courses weren’t dropping tiles on those working below. And they shouted warnings, “Ware, heads!” whenever they were chipping.
Of course, sometimes scrabbling alone was enough to make a tile crack and shed a froggin’ chunk of clay. Or maybe Cauvin had just been so intent on getting his tile out—so afraid of falling—that he hadn’t heard Tashos shout his warning. He’d never know. What Cauvin knew—what he remembered—was that something sharp and heavy had struck his anchoring arm. He lost his grip, was sliding toward the edge, maybe screaming, maybe praying, his fingers desperately seeking something to cling to.
Tashos slid by. Tashos was screaming: “Help me! Stop me! Cauvin!” —For a heartbeat, the boy hung from the brink, then the edge tiles broke from the strain, and he was gone. Cauvin heard a thud.
He didn’t fall. His fingers had latched around the lip of a tile that held. Cauvin didn’t think he’d ever make them move again, but the Hand had other ideas. He hadn’t finished replacing the broken tile that he’d found and, by the Mother Herself, there were the four tiles Tashos had broken in his fall. The Whip shouted up that Cauvin would fix those fast, if he knew what was good for him.
Cauvin knew.
“You’re sure you’re not fevered?” Soldt asked. “You’ve gone pale and broken a sweat.”
Cauvin’s arm hurt where Tashos’s tile had struck it years ago. He massaged the muscle, then looked at his fingers, half-expecting to see them slicked with blood. Froggin’ sure, there was none, but his fingers were trembling, and his heart was pounding in his gut, not behind his ribs. “Let’s go. I can do this.”
With every step Cauvin remembered more. He might easily have been walking in two times: the present and his past. He’d dwelt in the pits for ten years, and it wasn’t as though someone had died every day. But that was the way his sheep-shite memory served it up, face after face, moment upon moment when life had stopped. Cauvin blamed the froggin’ Torch. He blamed him for singling him out and keeping him alive when he could have died with the other orphans. And he blamed him for reopening all wounds he’d thought were healed.
Cauvin fought his memories. He reminded himself that the only face he wanted to see, the only life he wished he could save was Bec’s. He concentrated on the present, on the horses, the stablers, the rich merchants in lush silk robes standing on the shaded porch outside the Exchange. No one had worn silken robes while the Hand ruled Sanctuary. If there was wealth in Sanctuary, it belonged to the Bloody Mother, for Her glory, for Her return to the mortal world.
One particular silk robe caught Cauvin’s eye. It rippled with the colors of the rising sun. If Cauvin had favorite colors, they were the colors of sunrise: red becoming orange becoming gold. The merchant wearing the sunrise robe was talking to a younger man in the loose-fitting breeches and half-sleeved leather coat of the Irrune. When the Irrune gestured at the palace doors, Cauvin got a good look at his face and realized he was Naimun, the sour-looking youth he’d seen at the Torch’s funeral. Naimun laughed as he turned back to catch the merchant’s next words.
The merchant held Cauvin’s attention, too; and the longer he looked, the less he noticed the sunrise silk. Cauvin would swear he’d seen that face before, right here in the palace courtyard. But that couldn’t be—Hadn’t Leorin described in great detail how she’d gutted the Whip with his own knife on the road out of Sanctuary? And, even if Leorin had lied—which Cauvin knew wasn’t froggin’ unlikely—the merchant’s hands were paler than his face. The Whip’s hands had been stained scarlet, front, back, and halfway to his elbows.
No way the Whip could show his hands in Sanctuary. But—could two men share the same nose and chin, the same jabbing gestures as they spoke?
Naimun, son of the most powerful man of Sanctuary, took a step backward to avoid the merchant’s stabbing finger.
Cauvin stopped. “Do you know that man?”
“Naimun,” Soldt replied. “Nadalya’s eldest. Thinks he was born to rule.”
“No, the pud he’s talking to.”
Soldt scratched his chin. “He’s a merchant—more of a ship’s broker. He’s Ilsigi, from Ilsig, but his name doesn’t come to me. Works mostly fo
r Caronne and Aurvesh, exchanging their wines for Land’s End grain—at no risk to the Serripines, mind you. He used to stay at the Ravens. Stays at the palace these days … for obvious reasons. Galya might know his name, or your friend Lord Mioklas. They’re in the same circle, always buzzing around Naimun.”
“He’s always been—what did you call it?—a ship’s broker here?”
“Not here. I don’t remember seeing him here until about two years ago. But he’s got connections all along the western coast, from the Hammer clear up to Caronne and across the Sparkling Sea to Aurvesh. That sort of web takes a lifetime to put together, maybe your father’s lifetime and your grandfather’s—”
Cauvin stopped listening. Two years. Two years ago, Leorin had reappeared in Sanctuary.
No!—Cauvin chided himself. He was imagining things, feeding suspicions for no good reason, other than he was here, where he’d been before, and the Hand had Bec. Cauvin struck off again, walking faster than before.
Maybe that change in determination attracted the broker’s attention. Or something else. Or nothing at all, and the man wasn’t truly giving Cauvin the once-over, as though he saw something vaguely familiar coming toward him. Grinning, the broker touched his right forefinger to his temple. The Hand greeted one another that way: May Dyareela keep watch over you. But half of Sanctuary used the same gesture to invoke Eshi’s blessing or to simply say, I see you.
Then Cauvin got the itch, the froggin’ itch at the base of his froggin’ neck, the itch that told him he wasn’t alone. It wasn’t always a bad itch, but here at the palace, with a man who looked like the Whip making Bloody Hand gestures and him not able to hide—
Cauvin pointed himself at the Processional gate and started walking. “Frog all, Soldt. I can’t do this.”
“Nonsense.” Soldt got in front of Cauvin to stop him. “You’ve got the ring. If Lord Torchholder says the ring is the key to getting the help you need to rescue your brother, then, if I were you, I’d believe him. Follow his instructions—”