by Lynn Abbey
“Gunderpah!” Bec complained. “You better spell me that one. What kind of word is Gunderpah?”
“The same kind as Bec or Cauvin or Molin Torchholder. It’s a name, boy; the name the mountain folk gave to hills where they lived. The Ilsigi king said to the mountain folk: Defend us from the king of Ranke and his armies! The tribes did, or tried. In those days, when Vashanka’s star was rising, we Rankans never lost a battle, not even a skirmish. The mountain tribes were no match for a well-led disciplined army. And when the Ilsigi army finally came down to the World’s End, they faced not only the Rankan army, but the mountain tribes as well—for it’s a truth, boy, that such folk will fight for gold and for whoever gives them the most gold.”
Bec laid down the quill. “Is any of this important?” He’d missed most of that last part anyway.
“I’m telling you the history of Sanctuary, boy—your history, and it’s a damn fool who isn’t interested in his own history. While that Ilsigi army was losing ground in the Spine, the Ilsigi king was taxing his people to the breaking point. There were uprisings throughout the Ilsigi kingdom. Their army had a choice—stand and fight, and lose everything; or make peace with Ranke, pay tribute, and hightail it home before the king’s own city was in flames.”
“So, what’s that got to do with Sanctuary?” Bec held the quill over the puddled ink. He squeezed the vane gently and drew up a column of the black liquid.
“This miserable city was founded by Ilsigi rabble—slaves, whores, gladiators, and all the rest who struck out on their own rather than stay in Ilsig once its king and army were humbled. And humbled they were, boy—”
“My name is Bec!”
“And humbled they were, boy, because the rabble got away, and the rest—the good folk who carry any kingdom or empire on their shoulders—saw their king’s weakness and lost heart—”
“The way the Enders have lost heart?” Bec met Grandfather’s eyes and held them a moment before looking away.
“Just so, Bec. Just so. A king can hold his people together after they are defeated by a worthy enemy, but when the enemy is unworthy or—worse—if the enemy is inside the kingdom, only the greatest kings or emperors will prevail. Our Empire had no great emperor when it needed him most. Men like Serripines retreated to Sanctuary, hoping a great man would emerge to lead the Empire back to glory. What he found here, of course, was worse than what he’d left behind.”
“What happened here, Grandfather? What really happened here that was worse than anywhere else?”
“Our gods abandoned us, and we abandoned our gods.”
Bec shook his head. “Dyareela,” he said solemnly. “What happened with Dyareela? Everybody remembers. Everybody tells me, ‘be glad you weren’t born yet,’ but nobody says why. Momma cries sometimes, and Poppa drinks. Batty Dol talks to ghosts, old Bilibot, too. And Cauvin—you made Cauvin remember Dyareela when you mocked him; that’s why he got all dark and scary. You know he’s got a great big scar on his chest? Two scars, like a crossroads … I asked him, and he wouldn’t talk for a week, so I asked Poppa, and he said the ’Reelans would sometimes cut through a man’s chest and take out his heart so quick that he was still alive and screaming. But they couldn’t have done that to Cauvin, could they have? If they’d cut through his chest, he’d be dead, wouldn’t he, whether or not they took out his heart?”
It was the wrong question to ask. It was always the wrong question. Bec lived in one world while everyone else he knew lived in another. They thought he was lucky, but how could anyone be lucky when there were secrets everywhere and even a dying old man went white around the eyes when Bec asked his wrong question?
The nightmare began in earnest one balmy summer morning, eighty-one years after the founding of the Empire. No one guessed, then, what lay ahead, not even Molin Torchholder, whose lifework had changed from building temples for the god of war and storms to the gathering of information and the detection of omens. He’d had reason to think the worst was over. Twenty years had passed since, on his orders, the Imperial city of Sanctuary had last sent its collected taxes to Ranke. Life hadn’t been easy—between storms and droughts, fires and floods, a priest might think all the gods in paradise had turned against him and the city whose course he guided—or tried to guide—from deep within the palace shadows. But lately, life had been better. The city’s defenses were solid, its fields were green, its treasury, if not overflowing with gold, was at least bright with silver.
They’d gone a year without a riot or plague.
Molin had been sipping flower-scented tea on the balcony of his palace apartment when Hoxa, by far the best of the amanuenses who’d served him over the years, arrived with the news:
“The S’danzo, Lord Torchholder, they’ve gone … pulled up stakes and disappeared during the night. The women have left their shacks in the bazaar, and the men are gone from the taverns, leaving only their debts behind. There’s not a one to be found. The word is they’ve all headed south—”
“South, Hoxa? How? All that lies south of Sanctuary is days upon days of empty ocean. Did they set sails in the middle of their wagons? Put oars in the hooves of their mules and oxen?”
“No, not directly south, Lord Torchholder. They’ve headed east first, east, then south—beyond the Empire. They said there’s a land far to the south, beyond the ice, where horses have wings and chickens lay eggs of pure gold.”
“That’s nonsense, Hoxa. Don’t believe a word of it.”
“No, Lord Torchholder, but the S’danzo are gone. Every last one of them. I looked for myself.”
There was at least one S’danzo left, of course, a half-breed woman living in the bazaar who saw the future more clearly than many men saw the past and who, sometimes, could be persuaded to share her visions with a disenfranchised priest.
Molin visited her that very afternoon.
“Last week, three women saw the same vision,” Illyra explained while they sat in a shadow-filled chamber behind her husband’s forge. “It was a warning: Bad times are coming. Very bad times.”
“Worse than we’ve already seen?” Molin remembered asking in a bantering tone. “Wetter storms? Hotter fires? A plague with spots? Or are the dead coming back again?”
Illyra folded her hands on her table and stared at them. “No,” she replied so softly Molin had leaned over the table to hear her.
“What then? Surely you were one of the three … ?”
She shook her head in denial before Molin could finish. “The Ancient One will return … to Sanctuary.”
“The Ancient One?” Molin asked.
He prided himself in his knowledge of the world’s pantheons. Off the top of his memory, he could recall two Ancient Ones. His palace library would undoubtedly contain references to more, but none of them would make mention of the S’danzo. The S’danzo did not acknowledge any gods; they’d lose their gift of timeless sight if they did.
Illyra was visibly anxious. She glanced about and twined her fingers, looking more like the young woman she’d been when Molin first arrived in Sanctuary than the gray-streaked seeress she’d become.
“An elder god,” she whispered. “To speak Her name is to invite Her across the threshold.”
“A goddess, then?”
Illyra watched her husband through the open door. Dubro remained a mighty man, but the years had taken their toll, and a pair of journeymen—adopted sons—did the heaviest work now.
“A goddess,” Illyra conceded. “A goddess with the parts of a man as well hidden beneath Her skirts.”
“Ah—” Molin began triumphantly, “The Bloody Bitch, the Mother—”
Illyra’s eyes and mouth widened. “My lord!” she pled. “Do not speak further, lest your voice be heard.”
Courteously, Molin complied, though he was confident that he’d linked Illyra’s Ancient One with Dyareela, a cesspool goddess with a reputation for savagery and androgyny. Dyareela was rightly outlawed throughout the civilized world, though Her cult had proved stubb
ornly impossible to eradicate. Molin could well imagine that respectable folk—and artisans like the smith and his wife were among those folk most concerned with respectability—would go out of their way not to speak Dyareela’s name, but She was not a particularly ancient goddess, nor had Molin ever linked Her name for good or evil to the S’danzo.
“Why the Ancient One?” he asked, all diplomatic innocence and curiosity.
Illyra explained, “The S’danzo were not always wanderers living in tents and wagon, my lord. Once they had homes like any other people until the Ancient One came to their lands. She offered many fine things if the S’danzo would worship only Her. Some of the S’danzo—the menfolk—were tempted, but the women used their gift of timeless sight to foresee that the Ancient One would steal their eyes to work great horror upon the innocent. There was much argument between husbands and wives, but the women prevailed. They preserved their vision and the world, but they paid a price: leaving their homes because the Ancient One had become their eternal enemy.
“Even since, the S’danzo have used their sight to stay free of the Ancient One. When Her shadow falls across a particular time or place, they pack their wagons and move on. The Ancient One’s shadow has fallen on Sanctuary.”
Molin nodded. He didn’t debate mythology with true believers, though he did observe, “You’re still here, Illyra. You didn’t go with the others. What did you see?”
The S’danzo touched the deck of cards that were never far from her hands. Reversed, they were ordinary rectangles of painted paper, but faceup, that was another matter. With his own eyes Molin had watched the images change from one of Illyra’s readings to the next.
“I saw nothing, Lord Torchholder. This dreamer was not one of those who dreamt the dream. The warning did not come to me. The S’danzo have no homes; they make none, so, when the time comes, they can leave without hesitation or regret. I have a home—here, in Sanctuary, with a husband and children. I am not S’danzo, not when it matters.”
Molin had misunderstood Illyra that afternoon, or perhaps the seeress, herself, had misunderstood. She was S’danzo, when it mattered, although two years had passed by then.
There’d been drought the previous summer, and the little rain they’d gotten had fallen at the wrong time. The grain harvest was meager. Come autumn, the remains of Sanctuary’s aristocracy sent envoys to the man who, that year, called himself the Emperor of the Rankan Empire while a deputation of Ils-worshiping priests and peers offered their city to the Ilsigi king in exchange for food.
The Rankan emperor sent Sanctuary’s envoys away without hearing their pleas. The Ilsigi king wanted no part of a legendarily troublesome city; not when his own granaries were less than half-full.
By Moruthus, the month of midwinter, death stalked Sanctuary’s streets.
The new plague struck fast, taking forms no healer had seen before and which none could cure. Men who were healthy and working in the morning fell into screaming agony by dusk and were dead by midnight. Their bodies bloated almost beyond recognition. Corpses turned black within hours and were apt to burst, leaking bile and contagion before the takers came to collect them.
Someone, somewhere in Sanctuary bitterly dubbed this new nightmare the “Quickening”; the name stuck.
With physicians helpless and charnel fires belching putrid smoke by day and night, the living began to whisper that the Quickening was not a disease at all but a curse sent by anonymous gods. They turned to Sanctuary’s varied temples for absolution and release. No known god went unapproached, unappeased.
Molin Torchholder put on the heavy Vashankan robes he had ignored for a decade. He chanted prayers of desperation, alone at first, then in alliance with other Imperial priests, and finally with the massed clergy of the city, be they Rankan, Ilsigi, or completely foreign. They even prayed to Mother Bey, the venomous goddess of the departed people of the sea.
And all their prayers were utterly without effect.
In many ways the Quickening was more a curse than a disease. It struck one street in one quarter, but not another. One house, but not its neighbors. One person, but not always his closest kin. Those who survived an initial brush with death learned not to count their fortunes: Like a marketplace thief, the Quickening returned to steal again and again.
The full moon of Moruthus shone over the trembling city when a small band of preachers appeared at the western gate. With white robes and red-stained hands, they proceeded from the bazaar to the wharves to the Processional, the palace, and the temple-ridden Promise of Heaven itself, warning one and all that judgment awaited Sanctuary. They called themselves the Servants, without saying whom or what they served.
People listened; they would have listened to anyone by then. Molin Torchholder worried. He had only his own memories to guide him—the annals of Vashanka had been lost when Ranke burnt—out it seemed to him that there was only one god beneath the sun—one goddess—who bid Her priests to stain their hands with crimson dye: the Bloody Bitch, Dyareela, Mother of Chaos.
The Red Mother’s cult was banned throughout the Empire, in the Ilsig Kingdom, and anywhere that men sought to hold themselves higher than beasts. Even in the north, among his mother’s people, the witches forbade the worship of Dyareela. Molin Torchholder had never encountered a chaos worshiper; he’d been taught the cult was a fraud and Dyareela’s so-called priests were never more than a criminal gang.
By dint of meditation, Molin recalled that the Dyareelan cult prophesied that the primal paradise would be reborn in the mortal world once everything raised by man and woman were destroyed. To hasten that rebirth, the Bloody Bitch’s priests practiced arson, murder, kidnapping, and—especially—deceit. He recalled, as well, his conversation with the seeress Illyra two years earlier after the S’danzo had disappeared.
If in those days of Moruthus Molin could have proved that the red-handed Servants were worshipers of the forbidden cult of Dyareela—if he’d summoned the city’s noblest and wealthiest residents to the Hall of Justice and told them what Illyra had told him about her Ancient One—who could guess how different these last two decades might have been? If Sanctuary’s peers had seen the danger as he saw it—as the S’danzo had foreseen it—might they not have helped him drive the Servants out of Sanctuary rather than invite them into their marble-walled homes?
But Molin had had only his suspicions, and in the bitterly cold waning days of Moruthus with the Quickening loose on the ice-slick streets of Sanctuary he kept his suspicions to himself because his gouty toe had swollen to the size of a pig’s bladder. The pain held him confined to a massive chair in his palace apartment, where he huddled beneath thick fur robes waiting for spring and for Hoxa to bring him another goblet of mulled wine. It was there beside a crackling fire that the city’s peers—its noble-blooded exiles from wherever and its boldest sea traders—trickled into his presence, each bearing a variation of the same message: The Servants had discovered the root of the Quickening. The S’danzo harbored a contagion in their godless, filthy souls, then they breathed that contagion into the faces of their enemies, causing them to die a Quickening death.
Summon the council, each whispering peer demanded, because with no prince of Ranke or Ilsig resident in Sanctuary, Molin Torchholder was all the government Sanctuary acknowledged. Send out guard, they urged, because Molin paid the city’s troops, often from his personal treasury. Rid Sanctuary of the S’danzo, they begged, none wanting to bear the burden of command. Sacrifice the godless outsiders to the Servants’ god and save the city from the Quickening!
Reluctantly—because there were dire risks each time he summoned the witch-y talents he’d inherited from his mother—Molin quenched the fire in his toe and stirred from his chair. He summoned the peers of Sanctuary to the Hall of Justice for the first time in five years. He settled himself gingerly on a bench in front of the prince-governor’s empty throne, the slender Savankh, symbol of Imperial authority, in his hands, but he did not give in.
“Rot and rub
bish,” he lectured the silk-wrapped peers. Had they all forgotten what had happened two years earlier? The S’danzo had vanished overnight. There weren’t any left in Sanctuary to breathe contagion or anything else on anyone. Frightening as it was, the Quickening was no different than any other plague. It would relax its grip on the town once people—led by Sanctuary’s peers—began enforcing a traditional quarantine. A week—two or three at the most—of strict isolation throughout the city and the Quickening would be just another of Sanctuary’s countless nightmares.
The peers weren’t interested in tradition. The Quickening, they insisted, was different—the Servants had told them so. Moreover, it had slipped over their doorsills (borne, they were certain, by sly tradesmen and flighty maidservants) as easily as it had slithered through the Maze. And while no one would object to burning a few plague-infested buildings in the Maze, it was unthinkable—quite unthinkable—that the peers might find their mansion windows sealed with foul-smelling pitch.
Far easier, Lord Mioklas insisted—far better—to take advantage of an opportunity to rid Sanctuary of its undesirables. “You know they’re still here,” the old man simpered. “Those women and their shiftless kin. They only pretended to disappear. The Servants have a sacred cloth that darkens when the contagion’s breathed across it. Let the guard carry it quarter to quarter, door to door—”
Molin lost his temper—a rare occurrence and possibly the price of the witchcraft he’d used to rise from his chair. He scolded the peers, calling them craven and greedy and swore he would never send the men he commanded—the heirs of the Hell-Hounds, the Stepsons, and all the other legendary units of the Imperial Rankan army—to do the bidding of the Mother of Chaos or Her red-handed priests.
