Sanctuary

by Lynn Abbey

  Tempus couldn’t forget. He led what was left of his men, of Vashanka’s men, to fight the northern witches. His bronze armor shone, his gray horse pranced, but the minion left Sanctuary without his god. There would be no more victories, not for the Rankan Empire and not for Tempus Thales. He was immortal. No bleeding wound could kill him, but despair?

  The burnished armor had returned to Sanctuary while the Hand held the palace. A woman with silver-streaked hair had brought it. She’d dumped it on the floor of an apothecary shop and left without saying a word once-mighty Vashanka could overhear.

  Thunder became rain.

  Do not weep for Ranke or its gods. Sanctuary did not destroy the Empire. The Empire did that to itself. Sanctuary did not destroy Me. I did that to Myself. Now I wait, the only god in Sanctuary. Are you the one? Do you think you are?

  The red wind raised a shiver on Cauvin’s spine before it spun away to nothing. Cauvin shook sense back into his head. He was on the floor, underground in the Maze and staring up at a lamp. It seemed wise to stay there a moment longer, making certain everything still worked and getting clear of the images Vashanka had burnt into his memory.

  When Cauvin did move the first thing he saw was a rack of armor: four tunics made from squares of dull metal and worn leather laced together. They’d meant nothing to him when he’d walked through the door, now they froggin’ shouted Hell Hounds, and in his mind’s eye Cauvin could see the men who’d worn them: sour-faced veterans with their backs to the golden prince, Kadakithis, protecting him from Sanctuary.

  They’d have given the froggin’ Bloody Hand a hard time if they’d still been in Sanctuary when the city needed them. But Vashanka’s visions revealed the last Hell Hounds had left with the prince. They were buried in unmarked graves, except for one who’d been planted in an herb garden on Red Lantern Street.

  Cauvin shut his eyes to end the flow of unbidden knowledge and cursed an old man—

  “Gods all damn you and froggin’ damned god—”

  There wasn’t room left for a doubt in his sheep-shite mind: He’d fallen into a god’s power—a froggin’ Imperial god—and he wasn’t half the man that Tempus Thales had been.

  Cauvin couldn’t lie blind on the floor forever. He had to open his eyes again. That meant more armor—lacquered black, trimmed and laced with leather so dark Cauvin had to squint to realize it was wine-colored rather than black. A face-concealing helmet lay on the floor beneath the armor. It sported a crest of red feathers so bright and fresh it seemed likely the bird was still alive. Words came to Cauvin’s mind: Abarsis, another priest of Vashanka; he’d died not long after he arrived, but the men he brought with him, the Stepsons—the Stepsons of the rapist Tempus Thales—remained behind.

  The Stepsons got along well with each other, too froggin’ well, Cauvin decided when the full nature of their sword-side, shield-side pairs burst into his mind. No froggin’ surprise then, that no one else did. If there was one thing Wrigglies and Imperials had in common it was a distrust of men who had no interest in women. But, with Vashanka’s minion leading them, the Stepsons were meaner than the Hell Hounds and better trained than all the sheep-shite brawlers in Sanctuary, especially the gang that called itself the Hawkmasks—

  At last Cauvin’s gaze fell upon the object he’d come to retrieve. On the floor like he was and out of sight near the corner, the Torch had collected the blue leather masks that protected the wearers with a fringe of fake feathers and his nose with a sharp, downturned beak.

  Cauvin crawled to the heap, reached out, then pulled his hand back before his fingers met the leather. First the brick in the atrium, next the armor. Was he froggin’ foolish enough to touch something else in this hole?

  He was, because the mask was what he’d come for. It was stiff, yet supple, in his grasp, like the best boot leather, the kind no one on Pyrtanis Street could afford. One eyehole was damaged; a crusty stain thickened the inside leather and coarsened its texture. As one of the thongs that would have held in place around its wearer’s head fell apart in his hands, Cauvin realized it had been removed from the corpse of a man who’d died from a head wound—decades, probably, before he’d been born.

  “Too many men with froggin’ swords and grudges,” he whispered, fighting off another deluge of a god’s bitter memories. “Too many froggin’ rivals who’d rather fight one another than a common foe. They pissed it away.”

  Sadness and regret filled the chamber. Cauvin breathed it in and made it his own. Retrieving an undamaged mask from the pile, he held it to his face and braced himself for an onslaught of visions in blue.

  There was nothing but a loss of sidewise vision. The sheep-shite men who’d worn the blue masks couldn’t see what was coming toward them, unless it came from straight ahead—unless it was froggin’ exactly what they were expecting. If this was the sort of thing the Torch’s armsmaster relied upon, he’d say no to the lessons. Frog all—the Hand had taught him better than that: You were only as good as what your eyes and ears revealed.

  As he reached to untie the mask’s thongs, Cauvin got his vision, not as dramatic as the visions he’d gotten from Vashanka, but froggin’ powerful all the same. The men—and women—who’d worn these masks were brawlers, not warriors like those who’d worn the room’s armor. They were like the Hand who’d taught Cauvin to fight, and they’d worn masks for the same reason the Hand wrapped their heads in red silk—not to protect their faces, but to hide them. The Hawkmasks collected debts and marketed slaves on behalf of their gang’s leader, a man named …

  The name hovered just out of reach in the shadows, then it strode forward: a bull-necked man of a ghost with a blue mask across his face and skin as dark as the shadow behind him. Cauvin lowered his borrowed mask. The ghost remained. It wasn’t merely that the ghost’s skin was a dark, shiny brown—that could have been a mark of death—everything about him was different: the jut of his nose and chin, the angle of his eyes, the shape of his mouth.

  “Spare me your judgments,” the ghost said with a voice that was deeper than Vashanka’s and almost as weary. “Men have bought and sold one another since men began. It’s an old business, and it will last as long as a few men are strong while the rest are weak. Ask a beggar which he would rather have: a bowl of food or his freedom, and you’ll get the same answer every time. Strong men will not protect the weak unless they are property.”

  “I’d choose freedom,” Cauvin responded without hesitation.

  The ghost’s throaty laughter echoed off the walls. “Then you’ve never been a beggar.”

  No, Cauvin had been a thief, and a sheep-shite unlucky one at that. He hadn’t been a slave, either, not officially. The Hand didn’t keep slaves; slavery was against the froggin’ law. They tended orphans instead, raised them up for the glory of the froggin’ Mother of Chaos.

  “What use is freedom to a beggar?” the ghost persisted. “The freedom to starve and shiver? When a mighty king conquers his enemies, which is better—that he kill them all or make them his property? The poor man with a beautiful daughter—what use is freedom to either of them? A well-run slave market offers hope all around—to the buyer and seller, and the slaves.”

  “Froggin’ hell it does.” Cauvin threw the ghost’s words back at him: “You’ve never been a slave.”

  The ghost erupted with hollow laughter. “Not a slave? I was born a slave in a land so far from the Empire that it’s been forgotten ten times over. My father called himself a king—of what, I never knew, but he was afraid of his sons, even the sons of his slaves. He had them killed, except for me. Me, he sold to a friend or an enemy; it scarcely mattered to me. The world had become my enemy. I fought, not for freedom—what use was freedom? I fought to avenge my own shame. Whipped, branded, and whipped again, I was chained and sold a dozen times. Each time I was pulled farther from my birthplace, closer to the Rankan Empire until—when I was about your age—I had a master who brought me to Ranke itself.

  “He wasn’t a poor man, my new
Rankan master, but he owed more money than he could hope to beg from his rich father. In me—a man who hated everyone and lived for rage—he saw the solution to his problems. They had a special sort of slave in Ranke—they have them elsewhere, too—slaves who fight to the death in public arenas while unwashed crowds cheer and a lucky few grow rich by betting on the winners. My owner promised me freedom if I’d make him rich. He lied, but I made him rich all the same, then I bought my own freedom and slit his throat on my way out of the capital.

  “I made my way to Sanctuary to practice what I’d learned from my many masters. This city was mine and I cared for it until that golden-haired Kadakithis showed up at the palace with his priests and his Hounds. In the name of freedom and justice, they hunted my hawks like vermin. They broke me and used the home I’d built to quarter their animals—but did they protect the weak? Did they care for Sanctuary? Look around you—is Sanctuary better without slaves, without Jubal and his hawks? Answer honestly, if you dare.”

  Cauvin turned the challenge over in his mind. Only a sheep-shite fool would think life in Sanctuary had improved since Prince Kadakithis left the palace, but Vashanka had just refused to take credit for the city’s fall. “You take too much for yourself, Jubal,” he said, sinking into the stubbornness that got him into trouble more often than not. “Sanctuary’s not a froggin’ cesspool because of you, and if it’s going to change, freedom’s a better place to start than slavery.”

  “Are you the one to make those changes? Do you think you are?” Jubal asked, an eerie repetition of Vashanka’s words before the ghost, like the god, vanished.

  If there’d been either a ghost or a god. If the damned brick and its damned spell weren’t to blame for everything he’d seen and heard since entering the chamber. And if Lord Molin Torchholder weren’t to blame for the froggin’ brick.

  “The geezer’s going to die,” Cauvin swore when he was alone. “That froggin’ pud’s going to die.” But he folded the mask along well-worn creases and tucked it beneath his shirt.

  Cauvin was tempted to take the torch and hike out to the redwall ruin to settle things between him and Lord Molin froggin’ Torchholder, then his eyes fell on the weapons. He was angry enough to murder the Torch with his fists, but a froggin’ sword, though, would be more satisfying. Hadn’t the Torch said he’d needed to learn to fight with steel? And he’d spotted just the sword, resting beside its scabbard on a black-lacquered rack in the place of honor among the weapons.

  It was an odd-looking sword: half again as long as the swords Sanctuary’s guards carried and faintly green, as if mold had gotten into the metal. If it weren’t sitting alone on the rack, Cauvin would have figured it for junk. There were at least twenty swords in the chamber, most of them standing in a point-to-point cone on a kneehigh table. Any one of them could have sliced through the neck of a treacherous old man—not that Cauvin was any great judge of swords or the steel that made them. Until he closed his fingers on the green sword’s leather-bound hilt, he’d never so much as touched a froggin’ sword. They weren’t much use for smashing stone.

  Cauvin expected the weapon to pull his arm down the way a mallet did, but the sword’s weight was in its hilt, not its tip and it was pleasantly light in his grasp. Length, of course, exaggerated his movements: a wrist flick arched the tip from one end of the weapons table to the other. He flicked it again and sensed the weapon’s power. If he swung it the way he swung his mallet—especially if he cramped both hands onto the hilt to put all his strength into the effort—the Torch’s head would fly for yards before it landed.

  At the Lucky Well, Bilibot said a man’s eyes went on seeing a while. Cauvin knew better than to believe a froggin’ word Pillbox said, but just this once he hoped the old sot was right, and the Torch got to see his body standing headless before it fell.

  He took a practice stroke, a double-handed swing that started above his right shoulder and ended a heartbeat after the green sword smashed into the sheaf of upright swords. The sheep-shite collision raised a racket that could be heard in the middle of next week and brought a burning flush to Cauvin’s face. He dropped the sword. It bounced tip first, then hilt, then tip again against the stone floor. The chamber froggin’ rang like the inside of a great bell.

  Cauvin clapped his hands over his ears and dropped to his knees, wishing that the froggin’ ground would open up to swallow him and praying that no lingering god or ghost would grant his sheep-shite wish. He wrestled with the fallen swords. There had to be some froggin’ trick to leaning them together but Cauvin hadn’t a froggin’ clue what it might be. After several failures he spread the weapons neatly on the table. Then he reached for the green-steel sword, dreading the damage he’d probably done to the weapon. It wasn’t a fancy sword—no froggin’ gemstones to knock loose or golden knotwork to untie—and the blade was neither nicked nor bent. Cauvin returned the weapon to its lacquered stand.

  With his fists braced on the table and his head hanging low, he thought about the change three days and one dying old man had made to his life. Maybe he’d seen a god and a ghost—or maybe not; he’d been spelled by froggin’ sorcery. Nothing but sorcery could have made him handle the froggin’ things in this chamber. Bec would have mauled every weapon, every piece of armor, but not him, not the sheep-shite stone-smasher.

  He knew better. He should have, anyway.

  Cauvin drew a stuttering breath and raised his head. There was a shield propped against the wall behind the table. No, not a shield, merely a shield-shaped slab of wood with a painting of a one-horned beast that could only be a froggin’ unicorn caught in a froggin’ vulgar—and a froggin’ impossible for a four-legged animal—act of self-gratification.

  Swords, masks, and a suit of armor fit for a god’s minion stored in the same froggin’ room as a signboard from some long-gone ancestor of the Vulgar Unicorn. Cauvin had to laugh: the great Lord Torchholder’s treasures hidden in a tavern’s cellar—and not any tavern, but the Vulgar Unicorn! Froggin’ sure, Grabar said the tavern had burnt twice in his lifetime; Cauvin hadn’t figured that meant it had moved as well. Buildings burnt and buildings got rebuilt in the same place because the land was still there and, usually, so were the froggin’ walls.

  Cauvin wondered if the Torch even knew he’d stashed his froggin’ treasures in the old Unicorn’s cellar—it was hard to imagine a priest, for gods’ sakes, walking through a door with that signboard hanging over it. But if there was one thing Cauvin had learned in the past three days, it was that Molin Torchholder was no ordinary priest.

  Amid the charred wood, dented tankards, and the rusted iron that might have been a hanging lamp holding the shield upright against the wall, there was one chunk that seemed straighter and less damaged than the rest. Closer examination—Cauvin hadn’t shaken himself free of the froggin’ spell that drove him to touch whatever caught his sheep-shite eye—revealed a sheath of dark, scaly leather and, within, a long-bladed dagger quite unlike the tool he kept in his boot cuff. Both edges had been honed and a middle groove from hilt to sharp tip made the blade ideal for stabbing. The hilt was wire-wrapped wood, sweat polished, and the right size for Cauvin’s palm and fingers.

  When they were in their cups and talking about the days before the Irrune, before the Hand, the Lucky Well regulars insisted that there was a perfect weapon for every hand. To the extent that Cauvin listened—which was no froggin’ great extent—he presumed his perfect weapon was his right fist closed over a lump of bronze. Not so. A vulgar unicorn had been guarding Cauvin’s perfect weapon for gods knew how long.

  Once he’d held the long-bladed dagger in his hand, Cauvin knew he’d want it nearby always.

  Thongs trailed from the sheath. Cauvin could attach them to his belt or around his leg, but the weapon would rest comfortably against his thigh only after he’d loosened his belt to a dangerous extent. He’d need a froggin’ second belt, or a single belt, long enough to wrap once around his waist and again over one hip. He could see the long belt in his mi
nd’s eye. Thanks to the Torch’s box, he had the coins to purchase it, if any cobbler could match the sheath leather.

  Or perhaps he’d sling the sheath inside his breeches … or up his sleeve, or tucked in at the small of his back. As natural as the dagger felt in Cauvin’s hand, it was awkward everywhere else. Except for the bronze slug, which hid inside his shirt, Cauvin never carried a weapon. He left the dagger tied to his thigh, though it got in the way climbing the stairs to the atrium. While walking the Maze to the Vulgar Unicorn—Leorin’s Unicorn as opposed to the one below the atrium basement—Cauvin was froggin’ sure the knife was drawing attention from everyone who saw it.

  Leorin was working, or trying to. Business hadn’t improved. She spotted Cauvin as he came through the door and pointed toward one of the empty tables along the walls. Privacy cost at the Unicorn, and though Cauvin had the coins to buy it for one night, he didn’t want to develop either the taste or the habit. He took a seat at one end of a long, common table with a view of the front door. The knife, he realized, was the first thing anyone entering the tavern would see.

  Maybe he should sit on the other side of the table? Or, maybe he should bind the knife to his other leg? Cauvin was right-handed; he carried his boot knife in his right boot; he’d naturally slung the knife on his right side, but the men who wore swords—and there were several in the Unicorn—wore them on their off-weapon hip. Was his long-bladed dagger a froggin’ knife or a froggin’ sword? And what would the Torch’s froggin’ armsmaster think if the man saw Cauvin with a weapon worn the wrong way around?

  The unanswerable question reminded Cauvin that he needed to display the froggin’ mask. Where? Froggin’ sure not tied over his face. He settled on his belt, folded over the knife’s hilt. It was a clumsy solution, but the best he could do before Leorin arrived.

  She greeted him with a mug of beer and “Welcome, stranger. Missed you last night.”

  Leorin’s moods were never easy to follow—his weren’t either—but neither anger nor disappointment seemed to dominate her voice.