by Lynn Abbey
The peers were aghast, made speechless not because they had taken Dyareelans into their marble-walled homes but because Lord Molin Torchholder, upon whom they had truly come to depend for such government as they found convenient, had suddenly gone mad. One had only to look at the Servants in their bleached white robes or listen to their piety to know that they were not—could not possibly be—chaos worshipers. Which raised questions none dared ask aloud in the Hall of Justice: Had Lord Torchholder fallen victim to the S’danzo curse? Was it safe to remain in his presence?
“Go home,” Molin ordered the peers as though they were naughty children. “And stay there. Seal your windows and hang a black flag above your door so everyone will know you’re observing quarantine. The guards will enforce it, and that’s all they will enforce!”
Grateful for any excuse, the peers fled the palace. Hoxa appeared, as he was wont to do, offering his arm to his footsore lord.
“If you ask me,” Hoxa said, though Molin rarely asked his opinion, “it’s the Servants brought the Quickening on us. Them and their chaos god.”
“Nonsense.” Molin sighed as he stood. “Savankala himself couldn’t piss up a plague in Sanctuary. The power’s gone. We used it up a generation ago. These days, whatever befalls Sanctuary is pure chance, fetched up here because there’s no god strong enough—or interested enough—to keep it away.”
Molin took a tentative step. His foot might have been carved from wood or stone for all he could flex it, but there was no pain. Releasing Hoxa’s arm, he began the limping journey to his apartments.
Hoxa walked beside him. “They’re fools, Lord Torchholder, and—wait and see—the common folk will tell them so. They won’t listen to the Servants; they’re outsiders. And we all know the common folk of Sanctuary don’t listen to outsiders. They know there’s only one S’danzo seeress left in Sanctuary, and she was born here. They’ve known her all their lives. They’d sooner point their fingers at each other than ask Illyra to breathe on some raggedy cloth—”
Suddenly Molin saw the truth between himself and his amanuensis. He gasped, “Light from above—” and seized Hoxa’s arm. “Run to the stables,” he ordered. “Tell them to saddle my horse and as many others as they’ve got, then go to the barracks. Find Walegrin, if you can, but find an officer no matter what. Tell him to gather his best men and meet me in the stables.”
“For what, Lord Torchholder? Should they arm themselves? And how?”
“For butchery,” Molin replied with his eyes closed. He prayed to his god; there was only the familiar emptiness. He opened himself to witchcraft’s power and it flowed into him from the earth, from the sky, and from the man at his side.
Hoxa’s face was white and glassy-eyed when Molin released him. He blinked blindly until Molin gave him a shove toward the stables.
Molin’s chamber servants were equally stunned when he stormed through the door calling for his long-unused weapons and armor. He’d been an old man, a limping invalid when last they’d seen him. They whispered Vashanka’s name, assuming that their priest had finally relocated his god. They didn’t know about his witchcraft talents, and he saw no reason to enlighten them.
Young men came forward to lace Molin quickly into layers of quilted wool and studded leather. A young woman approached with the ceremonial sword he wore whenever he needed to appear more warrior than priest.
“Not that one. Not today. Get me the sword beneath my bed.” The young woman stood as blank as a whitewashed wall. “Under my bed!” he shouted at her. “In the chest under the bed!”
They were all young enough to be the children of Molin’s own children, his children who hadn’t lived, who hadn’t survived. He’d never noticed before, but he’d always avoided the company of older people, even now that he’d become an old man himself.
The young woman opened the dusty oblong chest she’d dragged from beneath Molin’s bed. The scabbard it held was as long as Molin’s arm and, once wiped of its greasy protection, faintly green, as though the steel had been adulterated with brass or bronze.
“Surely, Lord Torchholder … ?” she asked, eyeing the newly cleaned blade with careful disdain.
“Behold, the fabled steel of Enlibar,” Molin replied, taking the weapon from her hands.
It was lighter than common steel and it was adulterated with bronze. At least this blade was, bronze from the Necklace of Harmony, which had once adorned the marble statue of Ils in His temple on the Promise of Heaven. The crippled bellmaker who’d forged the blade had said only that the formula called for a relic of sanctity and power. Molin could have commandeered a medallion or weapon from his own god, but he and Vashanka weren’t on good terms that season, so he’d sent his thief to Sanctuary’s rival pantheon.
The thief had succeeded; likewise the bellmaker. While his servants watched, Molin plucked fruit from a bowl and let it drop an arm’s length to the blade. There was silence as the fruit split and fell in halves to the floor, then the young woman gasped.
“Stay here,” Molin told her and the others. “Listen to Hoxa after he returns. His voice is my voice in my absence. Whatever he tells you to do, do it.”
Panic returned to his servants’ eyes. Molin didn’t waste time allaying it. If his assumptions proved correct, even the fabled steel of Enlibar might not be enough to see him safely to sunrise.
He met Hoxa on the stairs.
“Did you find Walegrin?”
Hoxa nodded. “He came to me in the stables, my lord, while the hostlers were readying the horses. They’re waiting for you below, at the gate. I don’t understand, my lord. The city is quiet. You sent the peers home to prepare for quarantine, yet now you’ve armed the guard—”
Molin pushed past his faithful servant, not answering any of his questions. He descended the remaining stairs as rapidly as weapons and armor allowed. The vast palace courtyard was gray with winter’s early twilight. The scent of ice sharpened the air. Walegrin himself held the reins of Molin’s horse and cupped his hands to boost the older man into the saddle.
Walegrin’s lifelong dream had been escape from Sanctuary, and he’d succeeded once or twice in putting the city’s walls behind him. He’d fought well in Ranke’s northern wars and led the clandestine expedition that rediscovered the ancient formula for Enlibar steel. But fate had always dragged him back to the city of his birth.
Though he was only in in his fifties, Walegrin’s shaggy, parchedstraw hair was streaked with wintry gray. His face was creased like last year’s leaves. He limped when he walked, thanks to a fractious horse. Three fingers had disappeared from his off-weapon hand after the Maze ran riot. Molin hadn’t seen Walegrin smile since his wife had died of the sweats five years earlier. Still, there was no man in Sanctuary—no man in the whole benighted Empire—that Molin would rather have beside him in a close-quarter skirmish.
“Have you heard the tales the Servants have sprouted about the Quickening’s source?”
Walegrin nodded his answer.
“Pray we’re not too late.”
“Two years ago was too late,” the green-eyed man countered. “I told her to go, her and Dubro both. But they wouldn’t listen. Dubro couldn’t imagine any other place, and she said because she was my half sister, the S‘danzo wouldn’t have her. Damn the S’danzo, says I, the Empire’s gone to ruin and Sanctuary’s Wrigglies wouldn’t treat her any better, push come to shove. They were stubborn, both of them. Break their backs before they’d take my advice … anyone’s advice.”
He put his hands on his horse’s withers, raised himself up on his arms, and balanced there. For a breathless moment it seemed Walegrin lacked the suppleness or strength to swing his weight across the animal’s back, then he and the horse grunted from deep in their guts. His leg arced over the saddle, and he settled lightly onto the blanketed leather.
“Say ‘they are stubborn’ instead,” Molin suggested. “There’s hope yet-”
“Say we’re after vengeance and be done with it.”
&nbs
p; With a minimum of motion, Walegrin wheeled his horse toward the city. They took torches from the guards at the palace gate.
“Lower the bar behind us,” Molin ordered, “and keep it down ’til it’s light. We’ll come back through the postern.”
“If we come back,” Walegrin added, though neither he nor the six men riding behind him hesitated to follow Molin onto Sanctuary’s streets.
Along Governor’s Walk they met a gang coming up from the slums on the hillside behind the Promise of Heaven. Armed with torches, shovels, and other tools, they were looking for someone to lead them against the S’danzo.
When Molin asked why, a lean, sour-faced man snarled, “The gods will.” His Ilsigi grammar was as bad as his teeth.
“Not your gods,” Molin snarled back, matching the churl’s tone. “Thousand-eyed Ils never wages war on women. He watches you now, and He’ll smite you a thousand times for every blow you take without His blessing. Go home, and quickly, lest you be marked for heresy, or worse.”
A dark-haired lout bearing an ax shaft in each hand objected to Molin’s advice by raising his weapons, but—no matter that Molin Torchholder was a Rankan priest or that his god had been vanquished years earlier—he couldn’t endure Molin’s glower for long. Once the lout’s arm dropped, the gang melted away.
“They’ll change their minds before they’re halfway home,” Walegrin muttered.
Molin agreed before adding, “But they’ll do their hunting in the uptown quarters, not the bazaar. That’s the best we can hope for tonight.”
They weren’t halfway from the palace to the bazaar when Molin first smelled smoke. Walegrin was right, he realized, and the best they’d achieved would be vengeance. But the men riding with him said nothing, and neither did he. Closer to the stone-arch entrance to the bazaar, the bitter scent and twilight merged into a thick fog.
A handful of watchmen met them at the bazaar gate. Poorly armored for a winter night much less a riot, they said they’d sent a runner to the palace when the first gang appeared.
“Were there Servants with them?” Molin asked.
“No white robes, Lord Torchholder,” a watchman replied.
“None that we saw, anyway.”
“They was plain-dressed folk, my lords, not even from the Maze,” a watchman whose baldric and sword marked him as the night’s commander said, partly defending his men, partly defending the mob. “‘Tweren’t nothing we’d do to stop ’em.”
“’Twas let them pass or be killed ourselves.”
“Said they’d come to stop the Quickening. Said the Servants told ’em how with a patch of bleached cloth,” said the man who hadn’t seen a white robe pass near him.
Molin ordered the watchmen to take up their spears and torches before Walegrin could cut them down with his own Enlibar sword.
“They’re filthy cowards,” Walegrin hissed. “Wrigglie cowards!”
Walegrin had been born in Sanctuary and spoke Rankene with an outlander’s accent, but he was an Imperial citizen, as his father and grandfather had been before him. He bore his prejudices proudly, without repentance.
Molin’s ancestry wasn’t nearly so pure. “Let them redeem themselves,” he told his companion, “if they can. They didn’t join the mob.”
Grumbling, Walegrin allowed the watchmen to form up between the mounted guards.
Sanctuary’s bazaar was forbidding on a pleasant, moonlit night; on a frigid, smoke-filled night it was confusion incarnate. Walegrin, Molin, and the other guards had given their torches to the watchmen. The light barely reached beyond the moving ring of horses and was nowhere near as bright as the flames they glimpsed to the south.
“They live against the northern wall,” Walegrin reminded Molin, and took the lead.
It was just as well the riders had surrendered their torches. They needed both hands on their horses’ reins when the animals balked at the first overturned vendor’s cart they encountered. Betraying his own anxiety, Walegrin brought his gelding up short and berated it with heavy heels until a watchman shouted:
“There’s a body down here!”
“A woman?” Molin asked before Walegrin could.
“No, my lord—a man. Throat’s been slit ear to ear.”
Walegrin kneed his gelding to the north. “Keep moving!”
The smoke thickened with every stride the horses took, but worse than the smoke in their eyes were the sounds of chaos—shouts, screams, timbers snapping in flames as livelihoods were put to the torch. Molin’s consolation—small and bitter though it was—was that the riot seemed worst in the southern quarter of the bazaar. The northern quarter was quiet, perhaps untouched or, better, empty because those who dwelt there—Illyra and Dubro among them—had heard their neighbors screaming and slipped away before the noose was tightened around their own necks.
Molin’s conscience—that useless relic of his priestly education—prickled and reminded him that no good came of fortune seized from another’s tragedy. He hastily corrected his hopes, but not hastily enough. A woman clutching a torn and bloodied bodice over her breasts erupted from the smoke and ran toward them. Between shrieks of terror she pleaded for protection. Her hair was Imperial yellow, meaning she couldn’t possibly be Illyra, but the ruffian trio chasing her had murder in their eyes.
“They killed my son!” she wailed when she was still farther from Walegrin than the ruffians were from her. “Killed him before my very eyes!”
“Go on!” Molin shouted to Walegrin. He unsheathed his greentinged sword. “These puds are mine.”
It wasn’t an empty boast; Molin Torchholder had always been a better warrior than he’d been a priest. Aided by a battle-hardened horse, twenty years prior—even a decade earlier—he would have sliced through the ruffians like so much rotten cheese and caught up with the others before they’d disappeared from sight. Except it wasn’t twenty years ago, nor even a decade. The horse was steady, but Molin’s arm was not. He missed his mark on the knife-wielding ruffian nearest the woman, giving the man a wound that would kill him, but not nearly soon enough, and—worse—unbalancing himself in the saddle.
Molin needed two heartbeats to get himself righted and that was one heartbeat too many. The flat blade of a workman’s shovel slammed into his shin. His armor kept his leg in one piece, but it was numb from the knee down and left him with a deadly choice—finish off the ruffian he’d cut or protect himself from the shoveler. He had a better angle on the bloody ruffian, though as a man who’d breached a fortress rampant armed with nothing more than a flaming torch, Molin knew better than to underestimate a shovel.
So Molin bore down on the shoveler, Enlibar sword held high. The horse beneath him screamed and shied—this was no formal battle where the animals were sacrosanct. He corrected his aim at the last instant and struck true. The uncanny sword threw off a shower of spring green sparks as it sliced clean through the shovel’s shaft, no greater challenge to its temper and edge than the fruit in Molin’s bedchamber.
One down, two—no three … five to go.
The rioters had swarmed to the sounds of carnage. In a lucid flash worthy of a S’danzo seeress, Molin saw himself brought down by the least of Sanctuary, by ignorant men swinging tools and scraps of formerly white cloth. It would be an ignominious death, but so was every other death. He hauled on the horse’s reins until its mouth hurt more than the wound in its hindquarters and it charged at one man who’d die before Molin Torchholder did.
Naked hands fastened to Molin’s armor even before he delivered his killing stroke. He felt himself slipping sideways in the saddle, headed for the ground where his sword and armor would be useless. The first prayer he’d learned—Into Your mighty hands, O Vashanka, I consign my soul. Lift me up to paradise—passed through his mind.
A heavy weight struck his chest. Molin closed his eyes. Another weight fell. He couldn’t feel, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think …
And then he could.
Sensation returned with a jolt that began in h
is wrist and ended in his battered leg.
“Can you mount?” a voice Molin almost recognized demanded.
His vision blurred from smoke and shock. He didn’t know where he was or why.
“Can you walk? Stand? Can you fight?”
Walegrin. Walegrin had come back for him, or never left. Walegrin had chosen Ranke and duty over his half sister.
Molin found his balance. “Can’t mount,” he admitted. “Can stand. Can walk. Can fight.”
On foot himself, the bigger man dragged Molin forward, northward, through the bone-chilling panic. They marched with the torch-bearing watchmen, with the riders slightly ahead. Past the Settle Stone in the middle of the bazaar, impossibly rumored to be the first stone raised in Sanctuary; the northern wall, the oldest and thickest of the city’s walls, became a boundary they could sense but not see.
“Illyra!” Walegrin shouted, leaving Molin at last. “Answer me, damn you!”
He loved his sister, but he did not always like her.
Molin seized a torch from one of the watchmen and, true to his name, carried it forward.
“Sweet Sabellia—”
The northern quarter of the bazaar was indeed quiet, but it wasn’t empty. The mob had visited. Perhaps they’d begun their savagery right here, at Dubro’s forge. He’d put up a fight, that much could be seen by the light of the torch Molin held. There were three corpses … four … sprawled in the dirt around the dead blacksmith. A man who forged iron needed wood for his fire. Dubro had been almost as good with an ax as he’d been with a hammer.
He’d died with his eyes open, the ax still clenched in his hands. By the looks of things he’d fallen backward—tripped, perhaps, or struck low and from behind and landed slumped against the anvil post. Bits of skull and scalp clotted on the anvil itself. The prime symbol of Dubro’s trade had slain him.
You’d think his seeress wife would have seen that coming.
Absently, Walegrin kicked over one of the corpses, then cursed and kicked it again, lifting it completely off the ground.
