Sanctuary

by Lynn Abbey

  Flush with the blood of victory, the Hands spread a new message through Sanctuary’s swampy streets. Drought and famine, storm and flood, plague and fire were each and all a clear message from the Mother of Chaos: The end of the old age was upon the world, the time of final purification had begun. The people of Sanctuary had been honored above all others because Dyareela had appointed Her Bloody Hand to lead them against the rest of the world.

  But before the people of Sanctuary could wield the Bloody Mother’s cleansing swords, they had to become the purest of the pure.

  Molin was a veteran of the Wizardwall campaigns. He’d dwelt thirty years in Sanctuary. He’d have sworn he’d seen the deepest depths of darkness, then Hoxa fell afoul of the Hands. With all his spies and contacts, Molin could never learn who had denounced his faithful amanuensis. Probably they’d both been denounced, but the Hands had drawn the line at cracking Vashanka’s Architect. The Hands extended no such professional courtesy to Hoxa. The poor man was mad and mutilated by the time Molin bribed his way into the palace chamber where a corpulent thug calling himself the Fist of the Bloody Hand presumed to do a goddess’s bidding.

  In his heart of hearts, Molin had convinced himself that the Bloody Hands of Dyareela and the Servants of the Chaos Mother before them were frauds. The atrocities the Hands committed—the eyes they’d gouged from Hoxa’s skull, the nerves they’d laid bare in the stumps of his arms and legs—were evil, to be sure, but the offspring of mortal imagination rather than divine inspiration. Gods—Vashanka foremost among them—could be inscrutable, capricious, and unspeakably cruel, but evil was a mortal vice.

  That day in the dungeon chamber beneath Sanctuary’s familiar palace, Molin learned how wrong he was. Though his features were hidden by a robe and the red silk swathed around his head, the Fist of Dyareela’s Bloody Hand was, by his voice and movements, a grown man, not so the two responsible for Hoxa’s suffering. They were children—a girl on the verge of maidenhood and a boy no older than seven. Their hands were red with fresh blood, not tattoos, and they giggled as they went about their ghastly work.

  Molin’s heart shuddered with shock when the girl recognized him.

  “Lord Torchholder!” she trilled, and ran to him, waving her bloody knife.

  Her breath was icy despite the heat of a roaring hearth and two physicians’ braziers. It invaded Molin’s lungs and burnt the pores of his flesh. He shuddered involuntarily and the girl’s trill became laughter. Then the cold was gone, leaving the sense that it had spat him out rather than the other way around.

  Had Vashanka bestirred Himself? Or was his maternal witchblood somehow incompatible with the essence of evil? Either way, Molin was properly—silently—grateful for the divine rejection.

  The Fist’s breath was no colder than his own, though the man was certainly filled with mortal evil. The children, nurtured for who knew how long in the orphanage, were different. They teased each other like any two children playing a game in the sun, except that this game was the dissection of a living man. Molin begged the Fist to give the order that would end both Hoxa’s life and the children’s hideous game.

  “He is past telling you anything you want to hear—past any hope of recovery. What’s the use of prolonging agony?”

  “Have you ever had a kitten, Lord Torchholder?” the Dyareelan asked, his red-swathed face pointed at the children.

  “Every house has its cats,” Molin admitted cautiously, unsure where the conversation was headed, and all the more uncomfortable.

  “Then you know that the mother cats teach their kittens to toy with their prey before they kill it. They know that the livelier the prey, the more nourishing the meal.”

  There were easily a thousand philosophical, ethical, and religious reasons to argue with the Dyareelan priest. Molin chose not to utter any of them. He left the palace knowing it would be too long before his friend escaped into eternity and that he couldn’t allow the Bloody Hand of Dyareela to endure.

  The next year was a grim one.

  The Hands’ quest for ultimate purity forbade the inhibitions of alcohol unless it was mixed with blood and drunk with Dyareela’s blessing. They shuttered the taverns and breweries and turned executions into festivals. Men and women continued to drink and drink too much. Molin mixed more of his morning-after remedies than anything else, but people drank alone behind locked doors, mourning private losses, and increasingly wary of sharing confidences with anyone. It was an open secret that the only way to escape once the Hands’ suspicion had fallen on your shoulders was to point an accusing finger at someone else.

  Everyone knew Molin Torchholder and nearly everyone offered him up to save themselves. Each time he talked or bought his way out of suspicion, and each time it was a little more difficult, a little more expensive. Like as not, he’d run out of luck before any of his nemesis schemes could be brought to fruition. A wise man might have swallowed his conscience and slunk out of town, but there was another new emperor in Ranke, a madman by the name of Ferrex, who’d slaughtered the Imperial commanders and replaced them with birds trained to recite his favorite orders. Compared to Ferrex and his birds, Molin chose the pain of his conscience.

  One crisp autumn day, after a two-year absence, a handful of Irrune rode into Sanctuary, looking for a barrel or two of beer. The Irrune didn’t know the shifts of power inside Sanctuary, couldn’t have understood, and probably wouldn’t have cared if they had. Arizak’s young wife and his son’s wife had both given birth on the same auspicious day. He’d called for a celebration and, for a young Irrune rider, there were few honors greater than fetching their chief’s beer from the nearest, hapless settlement.

  When no one would give them a barrel (the Irrune rejected any notion of payment), they went looking for unguarded barrels to steal. They found the Bloody Hands instead. Three of the Irrune—Arizak’s youngest brother and two companions—wound up upside down, skinless and bleeding on the black platform in front of the palace, but one was held back as a witness and sent home to tell Arizak that the Irrune would be the first to feel Dyareela’s wrath if they defiled Sanctuary again.

  It was the wrong message sent to the wrong man.

  The Irrune were raiders at heart. They would have raided Sanctuary eventually. The Hands gave them a good reason to come raid with vengeance in the spring of ’91. Sanctuary’s walls were weak and patched with rubble, but they were enough to ward off less than a hundred hell-bent horsemen. Sanctuary’s outlying settlements weren’t so fortunate. Those villagers and farmers who could run, ran to Land’s End for protection. Lord Serripines, who fancied that the gold his grain trade brought to Sanctuary bought him protection from the Bloody Hand of Dyareela as well, descended on the palace demanding protection for his family and the refugees cluttering his courtyard.

  No apothecaries were consulted before or invited to Lord Serripines’ meeting with the Fist. Molin knew about it, of course; his ears were still the sharpest in Sanctuary. And he knew that the lord of Land’s End was doomed to dissatisfaction, but he didn’t guess that the Bloody Hands would send the same message to Lord Serripines that they’d sent to Arizak. The very next time Lady Serripines entered the city they were waiting for her. She was dead before Lord Serripines knew she was missing.

  The terror that was part of common life finally invaded the great houses. They bestirred themselves against the Bloody Hands, but it was too late for stout men in silk robes to reclaim their city. Since Lord Serripines’ natural allies within Sanctuary bowed to Dyareelan intimidation, he turned to a neglected apothecary.

  “The Hands are madmen!” the Rankan lord raged. His eyes were red. He hadn’t slept well since his wife’s death.

  Molin helped himself to a goblet of the nobleman’s wine. “I told you that years ago.”

  “They must be stopped—driven from the city!”

  “I told you that, too.”

  “And the Irrune! I thought you’d gotten rid of the barbarians!”

  “I thought I had,
Lord Serripines, no thanks from you. I’ve heard they’re quite happy up there along the Spine.”

  “They’re ravaging my fields!” Lord Serripines sputtered. “They’re attacking me, as if I were their enemy. They’re madmen, too—I am not their enemy!”

  “The Irrune are not mad, Lord Serripines—they’ve simply made a mistake. The Irrune believe the Bloody Hands cherish the same things they themselves cherish. The Fist of the Bloody Hand of Dyareela executed Arizak’s brother. The Irrune would execute the Fist’s brother, if he had one or Arizak could touch him. But they can’t, so they ravage the villages, instead. As the Irrune see it, the villages are the herds of Sanctuary, and if the Fist were Irrune, he and the rest of the Bloody Hand would have to come out from behind the walls to protect or avenge them. You and I, Lord Serripines, we both know that the Hands are not the Irrune. The Irrune cannot goad or outrage the Hand. The Hand’s only weapon is terror. It is more effective with some than with others.”

  Molin sipped his wine while Lord Serripines grew dangerously pale and quiet. A knotted vein on his forehead throbbed as if it might burst, but when the nobleman spoke his voice was soft and calm.

  “I’ve appealed to the emperor—”

  “Pork all,” Molin interrupted, resorting to vulgarity. “Ferrex is madder than the Hands … and he won’t lend you one of his birdbrained armies.”

  “I know,” Serripines replied, perhaps the most painful admission he’d ever uttered. “I’d hoped … you … You were quite the soldier in your day, quite the hero. And you sent the barbarians away before … .”

  “So, you think I’m the one to send them away again. Explain to them that the farmers they’re killing, the fields they’re burning have nothing to do with the boys who got skinned last autumn? Would you listen to such tripe, Lord Serripines?”

  “I’d hoped there was something you could do, because you have proven yourself wiser than all of us—wiser than I—time and time before. I’d hoped you could see a way to rid Sanctuary of the Irrune and the Hand together. To turn them against each other, the way you turned the Irrune against the Gunderpah brigands.”

  The man had audacity, Molin would grant him that. He set the goblet down; it was a prime Caronne vintage, as old as he was himself, and it would be a sin to waste one drop. “The Irrune are raiders, Vion, not an army. The Irrune live in tents. Their idea of a wall is something you can cut with a knife. Sanctuary’s wall stopped them. If you want to drive the Hands out of Sanctuary, you’ve got to get into the palace, then you’ve got to drive them out. Gods, Vion—do you have any idea what that place is like on the inside? I’ll take the damned Maze any day over the palace storerooms. And the Irrune—they’d be chasing their tails after the first step.”

  “I was hoping—and I’m not the only one holding hope—that you’d lead them. You’re Vashanka’s Architect. The way I always heard that, Vashanka’s Architect doesn’t spend all his time drawing up the plans for the next temple, his true calling is battle plans.”

  “You’re mad, Vion.” Molin deflected the flattery. “Madder than the emperor. Madder than the Hands themselves.”

  But the back of his mind was already churning. It wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done.

  It would be done.

  The next day, Molin took what he needed from his locked treasure chests, then covered them with dusty canvas and shuttered the apothecary. He slipped out of the city and claimed a stallion—the best in the Serripines stable. Two weeks after he rode into the raiders’ camp, he led them back to the World’s End Mountains. By the time they arrived there, Molin had mastered enough of the Irrune language—its grammar was similar to the Rankene of the oldest prayers—to get him into Arizak’s tent without Nadalya’s help.

  Molin’s schemes would never succeed if he relied on the chief’s second wife to present his arguments. An outsider with young sons, Nadalya stood on shaky ground with her husband’s people and—remarkably—she knew the limits of her influence. She was shrewd enough to stay out of Molin’s way; wise enough to send him messages that warned him of tribal rivalries before he inflamed them.

  Nadalya’s messenger was her son’s nursemaid, who showed up in Molin’s appointed tent every night. She was a comely enough woman—if you liked your women stout and strong enough to carry a horse on her own back. Molin preferred his women lean—not that it would have mattered. He was in his seventies, decades too old for passionate affairs or wintering in a tent with only a few furs for warmth and a layer of autumn grass for a mattress. Night after night, Terzi knelt over him, kneading the aches from his old muscles, imparting her mistress’s wisdom.

  Molin won the Irrune one by one, like a man spinning fleece into yarn. Arizak’s first wife, the redoubtable Verrezza, was the hardest. She distrusted him and hated Nadalya not because she was younger or more beautiful—though Nadalya was both of those things—but because Nadalya was change incarnate for Irrune traditions and Verrezza, a handful of years older than her husband, remembered the colors, sounds, and smells of the Irrune homeland. She’d suffered too many changes since her girlhood to embrace any more.

  “Think on this, dear lady,” Molin suggested to Verrezza in her own language. He’d learned more of the language in three months than Nadalya had learned in ten years. “Sanctuary is small and gods-forsaken, but it is Rankan. There is a bathing pool within the palace—”

  “Feh! Such things do not impress me.”

  Molin ignored the interruption—“Where the water runs cool in summer and hot in winter; there are three of them, in fact. One of them is lined with black marble and ringed with alabaster statues of naked women cavorting with unicorns.”

  The redoubtable’s eyebrows formed a disapproving angle. Her chin receded into the soft flesh of her neck.

  “Think on this as she will think on it. Do you think that she will choose to live in a tent when she can live in such a palace? Do you think that she will expose those boys of hers to the sun when she can surround them with thick walls and whisper-soft silk?”

  Verrezza at last cracked a smile. “My husband is Irrune. He could not bear to live between walls that cannot be moved. He will leave her there and her sons with her. His heart will be mended toward me and mine.”

  Once Molin had the voice of tradition on his side, the remaining holdouts and doubters fell quickly in line. After that he had until the snows melted and the ground hardened to mold a passel of raiders into a force that would follow him through the distractions of Sanctuary’s streets to the palace, where the fighting would be done afoot, not astride, against fanatics who worshiped destruction.

  Two hundred men and twice as many horses thundered away from the Spine. From a distance, they could pass for Rankan cavalry. Closer, they were raw and rowdy. The oaths Molin had collected from the lot of them wouldn’t have held through the first night, but Arizak per-Mizhur was a rarity among barbarians—a leader who could see beyond tomorrow. He craved vengeance for his brother’s death, and he’d been sincerely appalled by Molin’s tales of Sanctuary’s recent, desperate history; but mostly Arizak had grasped the advantages of separating his wives before Molin explained them.

  With Arizak firmly in command of his clans, the journey south was as smooth and swift as the White Foal River flowing beside them.

  The Sanctuary Molin had left behind had been under Dyareelan control for nine years. Its people despaired, but they were accustomed to despair. The executions of Arizak’s brother and Lady Serripines had inflamed the Irrune and the Rankans at Land’s End, but in the minds of the common folk in the quarters, they were merely two more links in a long chain of outrage. Molin had no reason to think that the Sanctuary to which he returned would be any different, but it was.

  For a start, the outlying settlements were empty. There wasn’t a person, a chicken, a pot, or a bucket to be found in any of the deserted settlements the riders passed. Some time after the Irrune abandoned their raiding, the people had packed up their belongings and disappeared. The I
rrune congratulated themselves on the fear they’d struck in the dirt-eaters’ hearts, but Molin suspected a less sanguine cause. He persuaded Arizak to circle the Irrune eastward, to Land’s End.

  Lord Serripines greeted Molin without enthusiasm. He’d lost weight, his eyes were redder than ever, and his villa overflowed with quiet, gaunt men, most of them from nearby Sanctuary rather than some other benighted corner of Ranke’s once-thriving empire.

  “You’re too late,” Lord Serripines explained. “No sooner had you left for the Spine, than their bloody goddess made some unholy appearance to her Bloody Hand priests. Next we knew, they were hauling everyone out of their homes—inside the city and out, too. The ones you see here, they’re the ones who got out before they shut the gates. We’ve got food, for now, but they’ve shut down the harbor.” Serripines squeezed his eyes shut—remembering, perhaps, a scene he couldn’t share, or was trying to forget. When his eyes reopened, he stared out the window a moment before picking up the fabric of his thought a few strands distant from where he’d dropped it. “They’ve got power, Molin … prayer, sorcery, call it what you will, but it’s not madmen anymore. They’ve got a god in there, the footprints of one. The stories—Stragglers got out for a while, a few at a time. No one since midwinter. It’s hell in there. Monsters. Demons. Dyareela’s got Her army. She’s packed Sanctuary’s wounds with poison; the Hands are waiting for it to burst open. We can hear the chanting. They’re coming, Torchholder. When those gates open again, it’ll be the end of us. I’ve sent the women and children away with all the horses, all the wagons I could muster. I pray they reach safety, but who’s listening?”

  Vashanka listened, for all the good a disenfranchised storm-god could do. Wreathed in moonlight, incense, and memory, Molin recalled the days when Sanctuary had been a divine playground, swarming with gods, heroes, magicians, witches, priests, not to mention whole neighborhoods populated with the living dead. He’d thought that was hell. He’d never thought to see the day when he’d have welcomed the likes of Tempus, Ischade, or his own overly troublesome niece, Chenaya, with open arms.