by Lynn Abbey
“Worse than the hawkmasks?” Hakiem asked scornfully. “Worse than the damned Stepsons? Worse than a harbor filled with ships filled with people who don’t blink and whose women bleed poison?”
“Regrettably, yes. Though it is true that Vashanka’s priests are not generally known for their prognostications, I am convinced that we’re confronting nothing less than a collapse of all things proper. I have intimations of tears in the fabric of existence—inversions of life and death, sorcery everywhere, and the annihilation of gods themselves.”
Hakiem sipped his wine. “What can I possibly do to forestall the death of a god?”
“Nothing,” Molin admitted. If he’d performed the rites properly, then the god marked tor annihilation was his own god, Vashanka, and it would be regarded as a blessing by one and all, including—presumably—himself when it came. “There is an old Rankan proverb, older than the Empire: When two dragons fight, it does not matter which dragon wins, the grass will be scorched. I want you to fortify the grass.”
“Fortify the grass?” the storyteller’s eyebrow rose to a dangerous height.
“Yes, tell them stories about simple joys that cannot be taken away. Remind them that the genius of Sanctuary is its incorrigibility. If the city will not consent to be governed by tyranny or anarchy, then it must, in time, triumph over both. Make sure the people remember who they are—the children of slaves and pirates, yes, but survivors. Hakiem—so long as the people of Sanctuary do not forget who they are and what they can do simply by being themselves, then they will survive. That is what I expect for my two soldats a week—stories that will help Sanctuary survive the hard times I foresee.”
Hakiem scowled and squinted. He looked at the soldats, then at Molin, and back again. Molin was certain the storyteller would scoop the coins into his purse. Instead, he pushed them away.
“No deal.”
“What?” Molin sputtered. He knew Sanctuary’s insolence—he’d just praised that very quality—but he’d thought there was a limit to its self-destructive stubbornness, individual and collective. “I cannot believe what I’m hearing. Have you ever been offered two soldats a week for anything?”
“Never,” Hakiem admitted.
“Have you even the sense of an ant? Bad times are coming … horrid times. Sanctuary needs you, Hakiem. I’m offering you the means to serve your beloved city! Have you listened to a word I’ve said?”
Hakiem nodded. “Every word. Now, you listen to mine, Lord High-and-Mighty Molin Torchholder. I will not take your soldats because you’re right—Sanctuary is my home, and I do not need coins to serve her. I would do anything in my power to ‘fortify’ my neighbors if even half of your dire omens came to pass. But that is not the only reason; I won’t take your Rankan money because conscience cannot be bought.”
“I am appealing to your conscience, not trying to buy it!”
“And I am not speaking of my conscience, Lord Molin. I’m speaking of yours. I see it in your eyes, hear it in your voice. You believe you have been cursed by Sanctuary and you think that by giving me two soldats each week, you can free yourself from the curse. Have you listened to yourself? You say that you despise Sanctuary, but your passions betray you. Look at yourself—you’re not a golden-haired, golden-eyed Rankan. Your fellow priests resent you. The Imperial court suspects you. And your wife’s glorious family regards you as no better than … no—worse than a gutter-scum Wrigglie off the streets of Sanctuary.
“You’ve come home, Lord Molin. You love Sanctuary as I love it, but you can’t admit it, so you call your love a curse. More’s the pity, Lord Molin—you’ve blinded yourself to happiness, and I will have no part of it.”
“Not at all,” Molin protested. “You’re wrong. I’ll be gone from here before any of what I’ve foreseen comes to pass. I’ll be gone. I won’t die here. I won’t—
“I won’t die here. I won‘t—”
Grandfather slumped sideways on the pallet. His whole body trembled.
“Momma!” Bec shouted, because he’d heard her lurking at the bottom of the ladder, waiting for Grandfather to finish his story. “Momma! He’s dying, Momma! Grandfather’s dying!”
The box was a masterpiece of woodcarvers’ art, inlaid with stones carefully chosen to complement the wood grain. The scrollwork vines and leaves were so lifelike that Cauvin expected to hear them rustle when he touched them. Yet for all its advanced beauty, the box was kin to the boxes he’d received from Sinjon at the Broken Mast and dug out of the bazaar dirt. When he place his thumbs on the familiar spots, the vines and scrolls separated, and the lid opened.
“What’s in it?”
“What has my friend the Torch been hiding all these years? Where does he keep his gold?”
The first voice was Soldt’s, the second belonged to Arizak per-Mizhur, lord of the Irrune—the man who had brought Cauvin to this bright, sunlit room on the southeast corner of the palace.
“Nothing—” Cauvin began, because in such a box a scrap of dirty parchment was nothing.
Then, before Cauvin could mention the paper, his nostrils filled with the scents of flowers, spices, and the sea. With the scents came … memory. He knew where the Torch’s treasure was—all the places, all the gold, the jewels, and the names of Arizak’s mistresses—all of them. To say nothing of the thousand other secrets the Torch had hoarded.
Cauvin braced himself. The myths of the Empire and Ilsig alike were lousy with men who’d lost themselves to gods or sorcerers but the assault on his sense of self didn’t happen. He was simply the Torch’s heir, beneficiary of property, not personality. Cauvin figured he’d need the rest of his natural lifetime to sort through his inheritance, but he could already feel a difference.
How else had he known—not guessed, but froggin’ sure known—that he remained himself?
“What about it, Cauvin?” Soldt asked. “I see something in there.”
Cauvin unfolded the parchment. “It says, ‘Fortify the grass.’”
Soldt’s comment was, “Odd,” while Arizak, a true herdsman, said, “Only a complete fool builds forts on grass.”
But Cauvin remembered his friend—the Torch’s friend—Hakiem in a hundred different conversations, all of which ended with the same sentiment: We certainly fortified the grass today, didn’t we? He hid a smile behind his hand and returned the paper to the box.
“We’re done here,” he told the other two men.
“He was a strange one,” Arizak said, leading them slowly from the room.
The Irrune used a padded crutch to get around and never put any weight on his heavily wrapped foot. Cauvin wondered if there even was a foot within the bandages. His inheritance quickened, and he recalled the night when he—or rather the Torch—sat by Arizak’s shoulder, holding his hand while a physician summoned from Caronnne performed the amputation.
This would take some getting used to.
He missed the start of Arizak’s eulogy.
—“To call him friend was to give your fate to a summer storm. Are you certain the Hand invades Sanctuary from below? All this burrowing in rock and hardened sand, it would not be a problem if we dwelt in tents. Live in a tent, and your enemies can only come at you like the wind.”
Cauvin waited until he was certain Arizak had finished speaking—the inheritance let him know that the froggin’ Irrune never interrupted their froggin’ chief—before saying, “We’re sure. And the Hand’s not just below the palace, Sakkim—” that was the froggin’ Irrune word for sheep-shite leader-of-many-chosen-by-all. “The Hand’s in the palace, too. I saw your son, Naimun, speaking to the very bastard Soldt killed with his arrow.”
Arizak hobbled away, saying nothing. Cauvin guessed he’d froggin’ offended the man. There was another Irrune word, Bassomething, for the Sakkim’s sons but just because he knew the right words didn’t mean Cauvin was going to froggin’ use them. He wasn’t Lord Molin Torchholder. They were in a ground-floor corridor, headed for Arizak’s private quarters, before the I
rrune chief spoke again.
“I am disappointed in my son, but not truly surprised. He is the image of my wife’s brother, and it would appear that he has Teo’s love of treachery, as well. Verrezza will rejoice, but the one Naimun should truly fear is his mother. Nadalya won’t forgive treachery. But that’s family. What am I to do with these Hand below the palace?”
“Smoke them out,” Cauvin suggested. “Build a wet-wood fire in the pit at Temple of Ils, then use bellows to drive the smoke through the warren. Post your men throughout the city and outside the walls, too—to watch for men escaping. And smoke—wherever they see smoke, they’ll find an entrance to the warren—”
Both Soldt and Arizak stared at him.
“It works with froggin’ rats,” Cauvin explained. And Teera the baker did smoke out the storerooms every fall, but the idea hadn’t come from Teera. The Torch had used wet-wood fires to flush the enemy out of caves along the Empire’s northern frontier some sixty years earlier.
“Throw some camphor wood on your fire, and you can use dogs to help you sort the Hand out,” Soldt added.
Arizak wasn’t comfortable with the plan. “This will be a very large fire. Very dangerous.”
“For the Hand. The other choice is to send your men into the dark.”
“Ah, yes, it would be very dark underground. Without light, men could get lost, killed. Better those men are not Irrune, not Wrigglies.” As far as Arizak was concerned, all the people of Sanctuary were Wrigglies—it was an improvement over the Irrune word for anyone not born into the tribe.
“No matter what we do,” Cauvin warned, “a few will escape—just as they did last time. We got lazy. We can’t make the same mistake again. The Hand won’t go away, not in our lifetimes.”
“Not in mine,” Arizak agreed. “I will speak with my commanders—only Irrune, at least until we’ve winnowed the Hand from the palace. My wife Nadalya will say that we need that Savankh she’s always talking about. How else to know whether a Wrigglie is lying?” He looked Cauvin in the eye. “Can you bring my wife this great Savankh?”
Yesterday, the Torch had been ready to turn over both the Savankh and the Necklace of Ils. Cauvin wasn’t the Torch. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Listen to him!” Arizak exclaimed to Soldt. “He has an idea—He’ll see what he can do—I have heard this all before. Next he will be telling me that he is but a poor man and reminding me that Sanctuary is the least of the Imperial cities. He does not have my old friend’s voice, but already he has begun to talk like him!”
It was late afternoon before Cauvin left the palace, finally satisfied that the Irrune were hauling green wood over to the Promise of Heaven. They’d have a smoky fire burning by sunset, which might be too late, but was the best they could do. Soldt agreed to stay with Arizak. The duelist wasn’t pleased to be seen in the company of Sanctuary’s prince, but Cauvin had been a night without sleep before he’d opened the Torch’s froggin’ box. The weight of the old pud’s memories had left him pillow-walking and scarcely able to string a thought together in any of the odd languages whose words were rattling around in his mind.
Arizak had suggested he settle into the old pud’s palace apartment—three unremarkable chambers, including the one where he’d opened the ornate box. Cauvin would use them, or more accurately, he would use what they contained. The Torch was a froggin’ pack rat—
Had been.
The Torch had been a froggin’ pack rat, and Cauvin was still a sheep-shite stone-smasher. He wouldn’t hazard a guess how he’d feel in a month or a year, but for the time being, Cauvin didn’t want to sleep in a dead man’s bed no matter how tired he was. Cauvin wanted to go home, to the stoneyard, his foster parents, and—especially—to Bec. His hand still stung from striking his brother. It had been the right thing to do; he hadn’t known Soldt had followed him and Leorin into the warren or that the magician, Enas Yorl, had his own quarrels with the Mother of Chaos. Still, right or not, Cauvin had to apologize.
The stoneyard gate was closed and barred. Cauvin didn’t have the strength to scale the wall. He rang the bell and waited for someone to let him in. The yard dog set up a racket, but there was a second dog in the chorus.
Vex.
If Vex was in the stoneyard, then Bec was, too. Since he’d come to on the steps of the Thunderer’s temple, Cauvin hadn’t allowed himself to think anything else. Soldt swore the dog was dependable, but Soldt also insisted that Cauvin had to go to the palace before he went home.
Vex was barking. Vex was here. Bec was home. Bec was safe. Cauvin slumped against the wall and began to shiver. He straightened up as the gate swung open, but couldn’t stop shaking. Grabar looked Cauvin over in silence and made him feel like a ghost—an unwelcome ghost. Grabar had come to the gate with a stone mallet in his hand, and he wasn’t about to let his foster son cross the threshold.
“Bec?” Cauvin asked, suddenly fearful that he’d leapt to the wrong conclusion when he’d heard a second dog barking.
“Here,” Grabar answered. “The boy said you’d gone over to the Hand. That your woman had been over for years.”
Mina, standing beside Grabar, added, “You struck him. You knocked him down and made him bleed.” Her look said she would never forgive Cauvin for that.
That was more injustice than Cauvin intended to bear. He pounded his fist against the gate planks. Mina jumped back in surprise, while Grabar tightened up on the mallet.
“I was trying to save his life!” Cauvin complained. “Bec wouldn’t go. He wouldn’t leave without me unless I scared him or hurt him or both, so I hit him. I hit him good, and he started running.” The inheritance assured Cauvin that his plan was nothing to be ashamed of, it didn’t assure his foster parents. “froggin’ sure, I’m sorry I hit him. Shite for sure, I thought I was going to die, and you froggin’ know I’m not made much for thinking.”
Neither Mina nor Grabar was convinced.
“The boy said you’d gone over to the Hand,” Grabar repeated. “Don’t see how we can trust you.”
“I froggin’ didn’t go ’over to the Hand.’ I told Leorin I’d submit to the froggin’ Mother, so she’d take me to their lair. I told the froggin’ Whip I’d submit, so he’d let Bec go. I froggin’ told Bec, so he’d get the froggin’ hell out of there. I didn’t think I was getting out of there alive, but, no froggin’ way did I go ‘over to the Hand.’
“Shite for sure, didn’t Bec tell you that Soldt was there, too? That’s Soldt’s damn dog I hear barking! Soldt put an arrow through the skull of the Hand’s high priest. There was a magician there, too—maybe Enas Yorl himself—lobbing fire left and right. If I’d froggin’ known they’d be there, I’d have done froggin’ different. When Soldt and I made it out, we went to the froggin’ palace first—I’m sorry about that, too; I froggin’ should’ve come here—but Arizak believed me. Arizak’s got the guards and his Irrune building a wet-wood fire in the Temple of Ils. Go up to the froggin’ Promise right now if you don’t believe me—”
Grabar lowered the mallet and let Cauvin into the stoneyard—over Mina’s scowled objection. “We only know what the boy knew.”
“Shite.” Cauvin could have dropped to the ground and slept for a week, but he couldn’t, not yet. “Where is he? Where’s Bec? Where have you got the Torch laid out? Arizak’s sending a cart for the body. There can’t be another funeral, but he’s claiming it just the same.
“Comes now, it comes early. Lord Torchholder’s not dead yet.”
“Frog all?”
Cauvin spun toward the work shed just in time to see Bec coming out with the Torch’s big black staff in both hands. The staff was longer than the boy was tall. When Bec tried to point it, spearlike, at Cauvin’s heart, the amber finial bobbed unsteadily. Cauvin wrenched it effortlessly from Bec’s grasp.
He asked, “Do you know what this is? What it does?” because Cauvin knew that the Savankh Lord Serripines kept in his Land’s End vault was the Savankh of Sihan in the northeast corner of
the Empire. The Torch had stuffed Sanctuary’s Savankh down the shaft of the blackwood staff.
“It makes you have to tell the truth.”
“So, froggin’ ask.”
“Are you one of them—a Bloody Hand like her?”
“No. Not now, not ever.”
That was all Bec needed to hear. He ran straight at Cauvin, and maybe it was simply that Cauvin was bone-weary, or maybe Bec had grown some in the past few days, but Bec knocked Cauvin off-balance and they wound up on the ground.
Cauvin had told the shite-for-sure truth while he held the blackwood staff, not that it mattered. The Torch could lie left and right when he held his staff and the Savankh within it. Cauvin had inherited that treacherous, little ability. But the other powers of the staff—how it started fires where fire shouldn’t ever burn and the way it had kept the Torch alive since the attack—those were shrouded secrets. Cauvin would need time—not to mention sleep—before he understood them, if he ever did.
Just then Cauvin used the staff’s most ordinary strength and steadied himself against it as he stood.
“Grandfather said I could keep the his staff”—Bee held out his hand—“because I might be needing it, if—But you’re back! And everything’s going to be just the way it was—except you’re going to get rid of the Hand … and her?”
“Arizak is,” Cauvin replied. He doubted that anything was going to be the same, but there was no reason to say that—the staff didn’t compel him to tell the truth. “And Grabar tells me the Torch isn’t dead yet. Maybe he’ll change his mind about giving you the staff. Maybe you will—if it means you’ve got to tell the truth all the time.”