Sanctuary

by Lynn Abbey

  His presence lifted heads at the handful of occupied tables. Strangers gave Cauvin the froggin’ once-over, and he returned the favor. They were a strange lot—seamen with dressed hair and jewelry dangling from their ears and elsewhere. One sported a jeweled eye patch that glowed in candlelight. Several were drawing down on small-bowled pipes. Cauvin sniffed. The dominant smell inside the Broken Mast wasn’t rot, nor even incense to disguise it; it was krrf, the dreamer’s drug from northern Caronne.

  What have you froggin’ sure gotten me into, Torchholder? Cauvin demanded of the absent geezer.

  A tall young man, pale-eyed and maybe a year or two older than Cauvin himself, ghosted out of the shadows.

  “You be looking for someone, eh?” The ghost’s Wrigglie was colored by an accent Cauvin couldn’t place. He carried his left arm bent and close to his side. The hand was withered and curled like a chicken’s foot.

  “I’ve come to see Sinjon.”

  “Captain Sinjon?”

  “Could be he’s a froggin’ captain. Could be he’s not. I’m here to speak for another … privately.”

  The maimed man grinned, revealing a shiny gold tooth in his upper jaw. “How privately?”

  “You Sinjon?”

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t froggin’ need to know, do you, pud? Is Sinjon here?”

  “And who’s here to speak privately with Captain Sinjon?”

  Cauvin gave his own name and knew at once he’d said the wrong thing. He considered the passwords Molin had given him, but that was for Sinjon and this wasn’t Sinjon, so he gave Molin’s name instead. The maimed man recoiled as if he’d just gotten a mouthful of something foul. In the edgy silence, Cauvin produced the carved jade token.

  “Tell Sinjon I’ve got this.”

  The ghost attempted to conceal his froggin’ astonishment and failed utterly. “W-wait here,” he stammered, and ran two-at-a-time up a crooked flight of stairs.

  Cauvin had enough time to regret every word he and Molin Torchholder had exchanged before the ghost reappeared. He hadn’t come down the stairs and didn’t lead Cauvin up them either.

  “Froggin’ fantastic smell around here,” Cauvin snarled as they stepped out onto a balcony ringing the second floor of the Mast. “Is it coming from your sheep-shite kitchen?”

  “Blackfish,” the guide said with a soft chuckle. “As big as a boat. Washed in last night. Have you ever seen the hagfish?”

  “Blackfish, hagfish, what’s the difference? A froggin’ fish with an old shrew’s sheep-shite head?”

  The ghost chuckled again. “The hagfish, she’s a fair lover and not no shrew. She always knows when a body’s drownded. She glides up to him, all soft and gentle, ’til she finds his arse, then she slips herself inside, like a greased witch, and reams him from the gizzard out—”

  Cauvin hesitated with one foot poised to follow the ghost down a different flight of stairs. He had no difficulty imagining the ghost’s hagfish or guessing where those pale eyes would go in a crowded room. There hadn’t been much room for innocence growing up in his mother’s shadow, and less in the pits. He thanked his froggin’ father that he’d never been the sort to attract a boy-eater’s eye and wondered how loud the froggin’ ghost would scream if his chicken-y fingers were forced straight.

  “I was on the Queen of the Waves,” the ghost continued, drawing farther ahead of Cauvin, who cursed Molin Torchholder earnestly and silently, then followed him into the Broken Mast’s depths. “We came upon jetsam and grappled it on deck. There was a man in the wrack, naked pink as the morning he was born and not a mark on him. The cook’s mate, he gives it a shove with his toe—as to waken it up. Burst like a ripe carbuncle, it did and there was hagfish all over the Queen’s deck, writhing like snakes. We shoveled like the damned getting them back to the deep, and when we were done, there was only the hide of a man left on the wrack, not a speck of bone or blood. The hags’d eaten him up, stern to stern.”

  Between the still air, the stench, and the ghost’s story, Cauvin wiped cold sweat from his forehead. “This the way you usually welcome new customers?”

  “The fools on the shore … they touched the blackfish, same as the cook’s mate, he touched that corpse. That’s why the stink.”

  “Froggin’ fantastic.”

  The ghost knocked on a door. From the inside a man’s deep voice said, “Send him in, Anst.”

  “The captain will see you now.”

  Chapter Four

  Cauvin entered a low-ceiling room heated by a brazier smoking in a sandbox atop one of the barrels. The room was cluttered with crates and barrels that might contain the Broken Mast’s stock of brandy. Captain Sinjon—a bald, gray-bearded man—sat behind a checkered table that had been cleared of its counters. A brass lamp of unfamiliar design cast shadowy light on the captain’s lean, weathered face and an intricately, but obscurely, carved and painted box.

  When Cauvin had closed the door, Captain Sinjon asked to see the token. The room was considerably warmer than the commons or the streets had been. Cauvin felt himself beginning to sweat before he stood the little ship in the center of one of the black squares.

  The captain examined the jade by lamplight. “How’d you come by this?”

  There was only one chair in the chamber, and Sinjon was sitting in it, which left Cauvin standing and feeling awkward. He nudged one of the crates with his boot and, judging it solid, sat down on the corner.

  “I got it from an old man with the instructions to tell you that there was blood on the moon last night.”

  From his crate-corner perch, Cauvin could meet the captain’s stare directly, which quickly proved a mistake. The man didn’t blink. One eye—his left—bore straight on, like a snake’s, while the other wandered slowly: up, down, inward, outward. Cauvin had seen more than his share of strange sights, but Sinjon’s roving eye made him anxious. He had a predictable response to anxiety.

  “My old man,” he snarled angrily, “says you’re supposed to give me a froggin’ box. That froggin’ box.”

  After an overly long hesitation, the captain sighed. He folded his hands over the carved box and pushed it toward Cauvin without releasing it.

  “Just today I’d begun to hope it was mine to keep … and open. Considering who he was … what he was, Lord Torchholder understood the sea. So long as he was up in the palace, the captains could be sure of a fair hearing for their grievances—no telling what’s to happen now. The Irrune—they’d never seen the sea, didn’t have a porking word for it in their jabber. Most of the Rankans, they weren’t much better than that stinking silty port of theirs. The Ilsigi—now they understand the sea. You can sail an Ilsig ship through any water, any weather, but as She rules, you’ll pay and pay forever for the privilege. The Ilsigi—they understand gold and silver best of all. The Torch, he knew that, so when Her folk came to Sanctuary, he saw the advantage straightaway.”

  Captain Sinjon said a word—a name, perhaps—in a language that Cauvin had never heard before. It sounded like “bey-sib” or “bey-sah”; or maybe it was two different words. The captain must have seen the confusion on his face.

  “You’re too young,” he said. “You couldn’t remember, even if you wanted to—and who wants to remember nowadays, eh? Better tuck your head under your wing. No one here saw them coming—a fleet as big as the harbor, and it sailed in all unannounced carrying the hope of the Empire: the bey-sah herself, her court and all they’d need to sustain them until Mother Bey made rights of the home they’d left behind. Bow down, She says; sail away to the north and east, She says. Sail away and wait, for there’s nothing She can do to right the wrongs with the righteous bey-sah still about and apt to suffer. So the bey-sah shipped out with her court, north and east, came to Sanctuary, and waited.”

  The captain stroked his beard. His left eye stared at a point past Cauvin’s shoulder while the right wandered a while before he sighed, and said:

  “A life in exile’s too long and twice as bitt
er—that’s what my mother told me. They never belonged here, never meant to stay past the first tide home. She was a sailor, born on her ship—died there, too, if the Mother was willing. The sea’s the same for every sailor; they got on all right with Sanctuary’s sailors. Not like the court. There was blood in the street every night—gods’ blood and worse—until the ships started coming again.

  “My own eyes were open then. I saw them myself. Big and graceful. They sailed closer to the wind than any ship before or since, but they shipped oars, too. Old Lord Torchholder, he never set foot on a bey-sib ship that I saw, but he took one look at ’em and knew what they were meant for. When pirates from Scavengers Island took to harrying our ships, he sent those ships after them. When the tide went out, it took the pirates with it. When it came back in, Scavengers Island was Inception Island—because Sanctuary was going to grow greater than Ranke or Ilsig together—”

  “That’ll be the froggin’ day,” Cauvin interrupted, though the captain’s tale held his attention. The only mother-goddess he knew was Dyareela, and no one ever spoke of Her with the reverence in Sinjon’s voice.

  Cauvin knew the hell he’d lived through, but folk who’d survived the Troubles didn’t talk much about what had gone before. Ashamed, he figured, because he’d smashed apart too many wellbuilt walls not to realize that there must have been a time when Sanctuary wasn’t a froggin’ wreck of a city. He wanted to know what had happened—no froggin’ good reason, except the same sheep-shite curiosity that got him whipped in the pits and kept him coming back for Bec’s gods-all-be-damned tales about the stoneyard chickens.

  Captain Sinjon leaned forward. “You hear,” he whispered, “if you hear anything at all—that it was the sack of Ranke that did in Sanctuary’s hopes. Even Old Lord Torchholder, he can’t see past his great Empire, his great city, but nothing born on land can rule the sea, my friend. Sacrifice—that’s the only way the sea can understand. ’Twas pride—lubber’s pride—that laid Sanctuary low. Tell me, my friend, tell me the sea-god’s name!”

  Startled by the shouted demand, Cauvin nearly unbalanced himself. “How in froggin’ hell should I know? Do I look like a sheep-shite priest?”

  The captain sat back, nodding smugly, as if Cauvin’s blurted answer had settled everything. “You live cheek by jowl with the sea, but do you worship? No, of course not. Temples aplenty alongside the whorehouse. Two for the sky and the storm, two for women, and others for the land, wine, and lesser things, but for the sea, only the little altars to Larlerosh in the well of every ship. You can catch fish with Larlerosh. You can run grain up and down the coast, timber and even stone—”

  Cauvin’s ears pricked at the mention of stone.

  “But rule the sea with Larlerosh? Not from the back of a boat!” Sinjon pounded the checked table with his fist. The Torch’s token and his box both jumped and landed on different-colored squares.

  “After the usurper fell in the Beysib Empire and her influence was purged from the land, my mother’s ships took the bey-sah and her people home; took Mother Bey with them. No sooner was the fleet gone when the sea and sky together turned black. We prayed, but Mother Bey was gone, and there was none to take Her place. We suffered winds so strong they’d lift a man clean off his feet and tides that carried ships to the very gates of the palace. Five storms like that we suffered in ten years and when they ended, Sanctuary was wracked and alone on the edge of the sea.

  “Oh, I’ve got me a cog or two that’ll carry grain and such out to Inception—but it’s Ilsigi ships that keep the pirates away, not ours. And the bey-sib? Even if I had me one of my mother’s sleek ships, I wouldn’t know how to sail it, or where. It’s all lost, lad—lost forever, and not all Lord Torchholder’s gold will bring it back again. Damned shame. We paddle the shores now, like children, never out of sight of the shore. And we shun the seas where we once sailed like men.”

  Sinjon stared across the table, both eyes together and watching something that wasn’t in the room with them. Then he blinked—only not with his froggin’ eyelids, but with something clear and shiny that flicked out of the inside corner of his eyes.

  “Shipri’s tits!” Cauvin shouted. He was on his feet before he knew he was moving. “You—You’re—!”

  Word failed Cauvin because the only words he knew to describe what he’d seen were too crude, too insulting to say to any man’s face without starting a brawl. Indeed, he’d never actually seen anyone blink without moving their eyelids.

  “You’re a froggin’ fish,” he sputtered, settling on the word Mina used to describe the invaders who’d ruled and left Sanctuary before she’d been old enough to remember anything, because Mina truly did try not to curse. By what Cauvin had heard, the fish-folk were worse than the froggin’ Dyareelans, which was—for him, anyway—froggin’ hard to imagine.

  Captain Sinjon hadn’t exactly denied his race. He’d spoken of his mother and her departed kin; the phrases swam in Cauvin’s freshest memories.

  “B-B-But they left. They all left … didn’t they? Packed up and went home as if they’d never been?”

  There were some on Pyrtanis Street who swore they hadn’t—that the fish were just froggin’ stories made up to frighten children when tales of the froggin’ Hand weren’t enough. Sheep-shite Batty Dol—she swore the fish were real, that she’d seen their froggin’ staring eyes for herself and stood on the Wideway with her children beside her to watch them sail away for good … But, frog all, Batty Dol talked to the ghosts every night and swore up and down that the dead could come back to life. A man had to be froggin’ moontouched if he believed Batty Dol.

  Then Sinjon blinked again, and said, “The ones who came, left. And the ones who’d been born here with clan rights through their mothers and fathers. But not the others, not the ones born to the bey-sib and Sanctuary. It wasn’t a matter for questions. I wouldn’t have gone; I’d visited the land—maybe—I could have passed. I knew the language, then”—the captain made noises that froggin’ might have been words—“and I have the look. But the Beysib Empire’s no place for a man without a clan to back him. The Torch made me an offer. He thought the trade would continue—Damned shame,” the captain said, and blinked again, as if he were holding back tears.

  The remains of Mina’s mutton stew heaved in Cauvin’s gut. Gods-all-be-damned knew that the Hands with their worship of pain, blood, and chaos were worse than the fish. The fish stared … and their women did things with snakes. They had snakes between their legs, so did their men—according to Batty Dol, who said a man-fish could see where he pissed and what he fucked. If he believed Batty Dol …

  Cauvin found it getting harder not to believe Batty Dol.

  Damn your froggin’ eyes to froggin’ hell, Cauvin sent a heartfelt curse toward the old man in the redwall henhouse.

  “Gimme the froggin’ box and let me out of here.” He held out his hand.

  “You’re too young,” the captain countered, his hands still resting on the box. “You don’t know what it means to watch your dreams disappear.”

  “Gods damn your dreams—there was blood on the froggin’ moon last night. That box belonged to the Torch, now he says it belongs to me.”

  Sinjon slowly lifted his hand from the box, leaving it where Cauvin could reach it without moving closer. The carvings were all leaves and froggin’ serpents with forked tongues and fangs. Cauvin guessed that the box had probably been carved by one of Sinjon’s mother’s snake-y, staring relatives and realized, a few heartbeats later, that there was no obvious way to open it—although he could hear, as he turned it this way and that, sounds that could easily be coins sliding against one another.

  “Where’s the froggin’ clasp? The froggin’ key?”

  The captain shrugged. “You’ll have to break it—unless Lord Torchholder taught you the trick?”

  Tricks. Suddenly Cauvin imagined a welter of tricks—poisoned needles, deadly insects … froggin’ snakes—that opening the box improperly might release. To froggin’ he
ll with the old man’s quills and parchment. On the spot, Cauvin decided that he’d take the box, unopened, to Molin Torchholder. The old man could open it himself. Froggin’ bad cess, if it killed him—at least it wouldn’t kill Cauvin.

  And if the old man died before dawn?

  Fleetingly, Cauvin considered marching down the Hill, through a breach—He stopped cold before his imagination took him all the way back to the ruined estate.

  If the old man died, then he’d prop the box against a wall and heave stones at it until it cracked apart.

  “Did he?” Sinjon asked while Cauvin tossed imaginary stones.

  “He froggin’ sure told me not to froggin’ open it in front of witnesses.” Cauvin forced himself to meet the captain’s eyes but, of course, he couldn’t break the older man’s stare. “It’s too shiny to carry at night; attract too much attention. Give me a scrap of cloth to wrap around it?”

  Sinjon cocked a thumb toward a pile of rags in a corner. “Two padpols.”

  Cauvin had bright soldats and an uncut shaboozh, fresh from the palace mint and not yet tarnished, in a pouch tied to his belt. He could bite off a corner of the shaboozh and still have enough silver for a feast at the Unicorn, but the notion of buying rags offended him. He snatched a piece of tight-woven, reddish cloth that looked large enough to tie around the box. “The Torch would’ve wanted his box kept safe for free.”

  Trailing a knotted, filthy cord, the cloth proved to be a verminchewed sack, and though the box was larger than any individual hole, Cauvin wasn’t about to test the sack’s strength by slinging it over his shoulder. He loosened his shirt instead and tucked the stiff cloth against his gut.