by Lynn Abbey
Cauvin scarcely breathed while Leorin dressed. He heard her lift the latch. Then she was gone.
Chapter Eighteen
Cauvin searched for his cast-off clothes. Leorin had scrambled the clutter, and finding them was more of a challenge than he’d expected. He meant to follow his betraying bride, but he would have failed from the start if the Stick and Leorin hadn’t struck up a shouting match while she was still on the stairs. Though the barkeep didn’t win the argument, he slowed Leorin down. Cauvin was on the window ledge—black cloak flapping, breeches unbelted, boots in hand, and the Ilbarsi knife hanging by a single thong—when Leorin stormed onto the street.
She took a torch from the bucket, lit it from the lantern hanging over the Unicorn’s entrance, then strode east, the shortest way out of the Maze. Cauvin pulled on his boots and dropped to the ground. He didn’t dare carry a torch, even if he’d had the time to grab one. Instead, tightening his belt along the way, Cauvin barely kept up with his bride.
The Hand hadn’t felt a need for stealth when they searched for corruption and impurity, so stalking wasn’t an art that they’d bothered to teach their marauding orphans. Cauvin worried about the noise he made while walking the shadows. Twice within sight of the Unicorn, he tripped over the gods alone knew what, but Leorin never hesitated, never took a glance behind. He kept her in sight.
Leorin turned left on Shadow Street, striding past dives that made the Vulgar Unicorn look respectable. Her golden hair caught the attention of a pair of derelicts just past Slippery Street. One of them lumbered up like a baited bear at Anen’s springtime carnival. Before he could question his own instincts, Cauvin was running to Leorin’s aid, the Ilbarsi knife bare in his hand.
He needn’t have worried. Leorin knew the bear was behind her. When he got close—but not too close—she spun around, showing off a shiny knife of her own. The bear wasn’t drunk enough to impale himself on a lethal length of steel. He called her a “froggin’ witch” and retreated. His unsteady path brought him within a few arm’s lengths of Cauvin, who could have taught him the price of corruption, if he’d wanted to.
But Cauvin’s wants were limited to keeping pace with Leorin. He thought she might be headed for the bazaar and didn’t look forward to tracking her through a quarter where outsiders sometimes disappeared after dark. Fortunately, Leorin turned right, toward the palace gate, not left, toward the bazaar, when Shadow Street butted into Governor’s Walk.
Cauvin faced different problems on the Walk, where the guard kept the peace from two towers, one on either side of the palace gate. The guards were no more blind to Leorin’s golden beauty than the derelicts had been. They offered to protect her from any froggin’ Wrigglie skulking in the shadows behind her and weren’t likely to be cowed by a knife in her small, woman’s hand. Not that Leorin needed a knife to bend them around her fingers. While Cauvin flattened against the palace walls, she laughed and swayed and persuaded a stout fellow—an officer, to judge by his short cloak and shiny scabbard—to be her personal escort, carrying her torch past the other guards.
Cauvin couldn’t keep up from the shadows. He decided to risk walking down the center of Governor’s Walk as though Wrigglies had every right to be there. He’d have been in trouble if Leorin and her officer had entered the palace. The great, iron-banded doors closed at sunset, and a man had to be someone to get through the narrow watch gate. A woman had only to be beautiful, and Leorin was Imperially beautiful.
He thought there was a good chance she was headed for the palace. froggin’ sure, the palace was the quarter of Sanctuary that the Hand knew best. And, froggin’ sure, if that silk-wrapped Ilsigi he’d seen earlier wasn’t the Whip, then he was the Whip’s twin.
The officer stopped in front of the watch gate. His arm found its way around Leorin’s waist. He wanted to take her inside, but she eluded him. Reclaiming her torch, she continued along the Walk. Her jilted escort made Cauvin the target of his frustration. Who was he? What was he doing near the palace? Where had he been? Where did he think he was going?
The rousting could have been worse. Cauvin’s shirt had escaped the worst of the spilled wine, and his black-wool cloak was finer than the officer’s. He wasn’t risking a dungeon cell, but with every question, Leorin’s torch got smaller. Finally, Cauvin said he was trying to find his way to the Inn of Six Ravens. The officer gave him directions—accurate directions—and insisted he carry a torch.
Cauvin accepted the torch; the officer wouldn’t take no for an answer. He followed directions, too, striding down the Processional until he could get onto the side streets and hurry back to the Walk.
“Help me,” Cauvin prayed to Shalpa, for Bec’s sake, not his own. “This could be my only chance. Don’t let me lose her.”
He cast the same prayer toward Savankala, because Bec was an Imperial citizen, then added Vashanka to his litany. One of the gods must have been listening. Cauvin was back on the Walk in time to see Leorin take her torch onto the Promise of Heaven.
Frog all, she was headed for the Hill! The Hand was holed up on the Hill! That messenger boy had been onto something after all. Cauvin ground his torch into the mud-choked ditch on the verge and headed onto the Promise, where he and Leorin were not alone.
Cauvin didn’t remember Sanctuary before the Hand, but from everything he’d been told, the Promise of Heaven had once been a mortal paradise. No longer. The Promise he knew belonged to the sorriest of Sanctuary’s denizens: women who’d lost their beauty, men who’d lost their strength. They looked for each other and for oblivion.
“Kleetel?” a bush called out as Cauvin approached.
He couldn’t hear if voice came from a man or a woman, a seller or a buyer. Kleetel, the poor man’s krrf, rotted the guts and throats of those who chewed its bitter, gummy leaves. Addicts lost their teeth and eventually bled to death from the inside out. But kleetel was cheap—one padpol for a bundle of leaves as thick as a man’s hand—or free to those who braved the brackish Swamp of Night Secrets, where the vine grew wild. By decree, kleetel was as illegal in Arizak’s Sanctuary as it had been in the Bloody Mother’s, but people searching for oblivion didn’t care about laws. When Cauvin mistakenly took a deep breath, his lungs filled with the stench of vomit and kleetel.
He pinched his nose and followed Leorin. Convinced that she was headed for the Hill, Cauvin would have lost her when she veered toward the marble walls of what had once been the whitewalled temple of Ils. But Leorin’s golden hair was unmistakable by torchlight.
She got cautious as she neared the ruins. Cauvin watched her pause several times. She seemed to be calling something, a password or a name; he was too far back to hear clearly. Each time, Cauvin expected a shadow to emerge out of the night. But none did, and, after a final hesitation, Leorin ran up the weedy steps. Her torch cast wild shadows on the inner walls as she ran into the temple’s depths.
Coincidence, Cauvin told himself. Froggin’ coincidence had returned him to the very place where he’d found the Torch. And maybe it was, but Cauvin stuck to the shadows, slipping into the temple from the side and staying far from the light until it flickered and vanished. Suddenly, Cauvin was blind and forced to shuffle through the rubble. He searched for the hole into which Leorin had disappeared and hoped not to fall into it by mistake.
Cauvin found what he was looking for in a recess made by a fallen column and a corner of the temple’s rear wall. There was a shoulder-wide gap into the paving stones and a rope ladder dangling into the pit below. The rope felt new, but the anchoring rings were rusted. The broken marble at the pit’s edge was damp and flaky when Cauvin put his weight against it. The whole area—the column, the walls, the floor, the pit, and the tunnel presumably at its bottom—had been rotted by rain and seepage. A few minutes’ work with an iron-headed hammer, and any sheep-shite stone-smasher could have brought it all down.
Very reluctantly—Cauvin descended the ten-rung ladder. Once at the bottom, he felt his way along a dripping, absolutely dark and
unbraced tunnel until it split into two branches. Each of the branches branched again within ten paces. The left-side branches had kneedeep trip-pits, as well. If they marked the path Leorin had followed, then she knew it very well because there was no trace of her in the tunnel, not even the scent of smoke from her torch.
He returned to the temple and found a place where he could see or hear anything rising out of the pit but where—he hoped—torchlight wouldn’t find him.
She’s gone to tell them that she’s got me drugged asleep in her room at the Unicorn. She’ll come back this way, because if there were an easier way, she’d have taken it. And she’ll come back soon, ’cause she can’t know how long I’ll stay asleep—
And then, what? And then, what?
The question pursued Cauvin as he sat with his cloak pulled tight. Would he confront Leorin? Demand that she take him to Bec? Could he hurt her? Leave her bleeding or disfigured? What if she truly didn’t know where Bec was? What if she wasn’t alone when she emerged from the pit? What if there was another way out of the bolt-hole?
Cauvin pounded his head against the temple wall. He was sheep-shite stupid, not meant for thinking, and his little brother was paying the price. Three times, he convinced himself he was wasting precious time. Three times Cauvin stood up, determined to leave, and three times he sat down again because he couldn’t think of any place better to be. He was almost ready to stand up a fourth time when ghostly light arose from the pit.
Leorin emerged with a torch, but before Cauvin could decide to confront her, three other figures—men, by their size and movement—rose behind her. Confrontation was no longer a possibility, so Cauvin tailed them from a safe distance, straight back to the Maze. The Unicorn was busy, which was more of a problem for Leorin and her three companions than it was for Cauvin who, staying in the shadows, retraced his path to the roof outside Leorin’s window. He had his ear against the shutter when the latch clicked.
“He’s all yours,” Leorin advised, as lamplight flickered through the slats.
Cauvin squeezed his fist so hard around the brass he wore at his throat that he almost missed what the men had to say.
“Where is he?” Cauvin didn’t recognize the voice, nor could he easily distinguish it from the others who said, with increasing anger. “The bed is empty.” “There’s no one here.” “This is a poor jest, Leorin.” And, finally, in the threatening tone that was the Hand’s natural voice: “You brought us here for nothing.” “You’ve risked everything for nothing.”
Leorin quickly replied, “I gave him a doubled dose. He was—”
Her explanation stopped, cut short by a sound Cauvin did recognize: a well-made fist striking an unprotected gut. Leorin tried to scream for help, but they covered her mouth before anyone other than Cauvin could have heard her plea. It hadn’t been many moments ago that Cauvin had been asking himself if he could hurt Leorin. He had his answer—he couldn’t, but he wouldn’t risk his life to save her, either.
Cauvin waited until the three men had left before climbing into the room. By the light of the lamp the three men had left behind, Cauvin found his wife alive, but unconscious, on the floor beside her bed. They’d beaten her carefully—no blood, no blows to her face, nothing that wasn’t meant to heal without scars. Which meant, in the Hand’s brutal language, that they hadn’t cast her out.
He could have stayed with Leorin until she regained consciousness, but then he’d have to say something to her, and there wasn’t anything he could say that would change anything. He could have gone downstairs and told Mimise that Leorin needed help, but then he’d get the blame for her injuries—assuming, of course, that Mimise or any of the other Unicorn wenches would lift a finger on Leorin’s behalf. He could have at least laid her on her bed, but he’d already squandered too many moments on the woman who’d betrayed him while the three men who might lead him to Bec were getting away.
Two trios had their backs to the Vulgar Unicorn when Cauvin’s dropped down to the street. One trio, with two torches among them, was headed toward the harbor. The other, without torches, set a fast pace toward the palace. Cauvin followed the second trio. One man split off at Slippery Street; the second at a Shadow Street alley. The third kept Cauvin’s hopes alive until the dark expanse of the Promise was in sight, then he took the Split harborward.
Cauvin almost followed the third man. The Split passed close to Copper Corner, and he could almost convince himself that the Hand had a bolt-hole in that quarter, but almost wasn’t enough. He crossed the Promise instead and entered the Temple of Ils. The Hand had covered its tracks, literally. A scaffold of wood and ragged cloth had been dragged over the pit and against the broken column, concealing the metal rings. It was flimsy. Cauvin pushed it aside one-handed, but it was enough to fool quick observation.
He considered leaving the pit exposed and could almost hear the Torch and Soldt both telling him not to start something he couldn’t finish. He considered climbing down the ladder again. The voices in his conscience grew louder. Maybe Soldt had taken the Torch’s ring to Arizak after all. Cauvin wouldn’t hesitate to follow ten or twenty men like Gorge into the tunnel. And maybe, Grabar had gotten the gods’ own luck on the Hill.
Cauvin made his way from the crumbling temple to Pyrtanis Street. He scaled the stoneyard wall, whispering the yard dog’s name as he climbed. It was waiting, a wag in its tail, when Cauvin swung his legs over the top and let him into the yard without raising a ruckus. The house was shuttered up and quiet. Cauvin knocked lightly, got no response, and retreated to the loft, hoping the Torch was dead.
Never mind that the froggin’ pud had nothing to do with what Leorin was—what she’d been all along. Or, that Cauvin realized he was better off betrayed than otherwise. The Torch had destroyed his dreams, and he wished him dead. His wishes were worthless. Three floating embers, two small and close together, the third, large and getting brighter greeted him at the top of the ladder.
He started to ask, Aren’t you dead yet, pud? but got no farther than the first word before a wind struck his chest. Cauvin staggered backward, striking his head on a roof beam, before sitting hard on the floor.
“It’s me, pud—Cauvin. Frog all, I live here.”
“Where have you been?” the Torch demanded, a hoarse voice in dark.
“I’ve tracked the Hand to their lair—almost. You’re not going to froggin’—”
“Where’s my ring?”
The third ember in the loft—the amber knob atop the Torch’s staff—brightened and the third finger of Cauvin’s right hand became uncomfortably warm.
“What did you do with my ring? I gave you my ring! I gave you instructions—simple instructions: Go to the palace, talk to Arizak. Was that too complicated?”
Cauvin put his right hand behind his back. The burning lessened, but didn’t end. “Listen to me, pud—I know where the Hand is!”
“I didn’t send you on a wild-goose chase, I sent you to the palace! I asked you to do what you were told. Did you? No. No, you got cold feet and took off!”
“froggin’ shite, pud—Soldt and I went to the palace and saw all the wrong men once we got there. The wrong men, no matter what Soldt told you. I recognized a man from when I used to live there, in the froggin’ pits. Soldt didn’t recognize him, not for what he was. Shite for sure, you wouldn’t have recognized him, but I did. The Hand’s in the palace, pud. That’s how they got you.”
The third ember faded. Cauvin’s finger cooled.
“I haven’t seen Soldt since he left with you.”
“Then how did you know I didn’t go talk to your froggin’ Irrune friend?”
“Because I’m alive, Cauvin. I’m still alive. If you’d done what you were told, you wouldn’t have come skulking back here, and I’d be dead by now, damn it. Strike a light. What did you do?”
“I saw a man I recognized from before … we called him the Whip and Leorin told me she’d killed him herself—slit him open with his own knife. He was different—ten
years different, with pale hands and a silk robe—but …” Cauvin found his lamp, struck sparks for the wick, and made a nest for it in a sand-filled box—a a man couldn’t be too froggin’ careful with fire in a loft. “Leorin told me the Whip was dead. I couldn’t take the chance; I needed to see her—”
“That does not follow, Cauvin,” the Torch scolded. The only color in his face came from his weird eyes; otherwise, his withered face was white as ice.
“It followed for me,” Cauvin countered. “I went to the Unicorn. We talked; we more than talked. She put something in my wine; I didn’t drink it. Leorin left once she thought I was asleep, but I wasn’t. I followed her to the Promise of Heaven—”
The Torch hummed with curiosity.
—“She went into the old Temple of Ils, all the way to the back and down into a tunnel. I waited. She came out with three men. I’m froggin’ sure they were Hand.” “They must have been quite disappointed to find you among the missing. And none too grateful to your beloved Leorin.”
Cauvin grimaced. “They gave her a warning.”
“Only a warning? You know what this means, don’t you?”
“They weren’t ready to give her to the Bloody Mother. They think she might still be useful to them.”
“Cauvin, you sheep-shite fool, you knew what she was before you took her clothes off. A wise man does not swive with a Dyareelan! You’ve given her a part of yourself and who know what it might grow into. Of course, Leorin’s still useful to them, even if they trust her no more than you do. For a month, at least, maybe longer, if she’s caught you in her belly.”
“Shalpa’s midnight cloak—Leorin … Leorin …” Cauvin groped for words that wouldn’t scald his mouth as he said them. “Leorin’s barren. She’s said so herself: If she could have children, she’d have had a passel of them by now. I’m the one who held back.”
“Until tonight. Need I remind you that you’ve shared your beloved with the Bloody Mother all along? If barrenness served Dyareela, then your Leorin was barren; if not, then quite possibly, not. There’s no guessing what can happen with a god’s blessing.”