by Lynn Abbey
“Inside?” Bec gasped. He’d stopped listening when Grandfather described the fate of infants. “They buried the babies inside their houses? I didn’t see any bones, I swear. I wouldn’t have touched any baby’s bones.”
“I’m sure you didn’t. Babies are buried beneath the kitchen hearth, where they’ll stay warm forever. Do you know that the Irrune do very much the same thing—burying children beneath a fire rather than immolating them within its flames?”
The boy shook his head. “Momma’s never told me any of this.” He folded his arms over his heart. “There aren’t any babies buried in her kitchen. No relic holes, neither.”
Grandfather took a breath for words, then didn’t say them. He took a second breath. “I said the traditions had died. Perhaps your mother didn’t know where her family’s reliquaries were kept, or perhaps there came a day when she no longer wanted to hold the past in the palm of her hand.”
“Like the family that lived here?”
“Perhaps—more likely, they all died in one of the plagues that swept through Sanctuary long before you were born, and there was no one left to remember or forget.” Grandfather plucked the green signet from Bec’s hand. “I should remember them. I must have been here, but the memories are gone, washed clean like the sand after the tide. I think I remember a woman-tall, with a slight limp …” He shook his head. His eyes brightened, but he wasn’t looking at Bec. “No. Her family packed everything up and left in Ninety. The last thing they’d have done would have been to empty the reliquary. She’d have carried the box on her lap—
“What was their name? The Monnesi?” Grandfather asked himself questions and answered them. “No, not Monnesi. The Serripines received the Monnesi relics when the last son died. The Tetrites! No … no … Serripines have theirs, too. You should see it, boy—your mother should—the reliquary at Land’s End! It is big enough to bury someone in. Say what you will about Lord Vion Serripines, he honors the ancestors. He’s got the relics of a score of families, treats them the same as he treats his own—”
Bec interrupted: “So it would be all right if we took all this to Land’s End? Do you think Lord Serripines really would let me see the other relics? Maybe he’s got the signets and such from my great-grandfather. Momma says they were rich. Their house on Pyrtanis Street had twenty rooms. My great-grandfather was an important man. Momma didn’t know him; he was dead before she was born—but you’re old, did you know him?”
“Possibly—what was his name?”
“Coricos,” Bec replied and it seemed that Grandfather’s eyes widened a bit. Momma had warned him against bragging about his Imperial ancestry. The folk on Pyrtanis Street didn’t understand how important lineage was to Imperials, to Momma. They made jokes about the family’s fallen fortunes. But surely Momma would have told Grandfather herself, considering who Grandfather was. “Coricos Cordion Coric—Corsic—Coricsicidos?” That wasn’t it. Too many sounds. Bec’s tongue frequently got tangled around all the sounds of Momma’s family name.
“Coricos Cordion Coricidius,” Grandfather supplied helpfully. “I would never have guessed. In his day, Coricidius was the face of the Empire in Sanctuary—the emperor’s vizier. A bit of irony, that. Vizier is an Ilsigi office, left over from the old days when the kingdom ruled this place. Only in Sanctuary were there Imperial viziers.”
“Great-grandfather wasn’t a Wrig—” Bec caught himself. Cauvin could call himself a Wrigglie, because he was, and so could Bec. Anybody who’d been born in Sanctuary or spoke the language of its streets could call himself a Wrigglie. But someone speaking Rankene or claiming Imperial lineage, he couldn’t call anyone a Wrigglie without it being a bitter insult. “Great-grandfather wasn’t Ilsigi; he was Imperial, the best Imperial—Momma said.”
“And what does your poppa say about that?” Grandfather asked, still speaking Rankene but sounding stern.
“Poppa knows,” Bec answered. There weren’t words in either language for the subjects that weren’t ever discussed at the stoneyard. “I put some water by the fire. I can make tea. Or stew. If you’re hungry.”
“Tea might be pleasant. No stew. I’m sure it’s delightful, but a dead man has no need of stew.”
Bec retreated, leaving Molin alone. The priest had lied about his pain, which was considerable, though not entirely physical—call it a consciousness of loss as his soul faded from his body; or regret for missed opportunities. Molin had bungled as many opportunities as he’d seized. He could have handled Bec better just now, and regretted that he’d mocked the boy’s ancestors. Molin knew the ache of inglorious ancestors.
Wrigglies weren’t the only reason Molin Torchholder despised the city where he was doomed to die. The native breed of Rankan aristocrat was worse than any son or daughter of Ilsigi slaves. The old vizier Coricos Cordion Coricidius had been among the worst of the worst.
To be sure, there were fouler specimens of mankind to be found in Ranke, but they left smaller marks on a vastly larger city. In Sanctuary, the Imperial vizier, Coricidius, had been the greatest fish in a tiny pond, proudly dominating the stolid Wrigglies, never guessing that he was great simply because in Sanctuary he had no competition. No competition, that was, until Emperor Abakithis had sent his young half brother into exile.
Prince Kadakithis, normally a man of the mildest temperament, had marked Coricidius for elimination within days of his arrival in the city. It wasn’t that the feast the vizier served that first night in Sanctuary was so poorly prepared that sixty years later Molin could still taste every miserable course—but the man had been fool enough to think that he could bribe the prince with glass jewels and doctored gold! The prince had wanted to pronounce judgment immediately; Molin had said no, give him rein, see where he goes and with whom.
If Molin had been attentive—not prescient, but merely clearheaded—he would have realized right then that he’d been bitten by Sanctuary and was doomed to die from its poison.
When he closed his eyes, Molin’s memories cleared. The crumbled brick walls reassembled themselves and became the villa once known in Rankene as High Harbor View. Only the Ilsigi gods knew what the Ilsigis had called it when they ruled the city; it had been built in their era. For his life—what was left of it—Molin couldn’t recall the name or face of the patriarch who’d called it home. It hadn’t been Coricidius, that would have been too bitter, even for Sanctuary. Coricidius had been a High Harbor View visitor, though. Coricidius and everyone else who’d mattered in those early days.
Thanks to its mongrel population, Sanctuary eagerly observed the festivals of the Rankan and Ilsigi gods, and a handful of other pantheons as well. The rabble would seize any opportunity to indulge their indolence. The nobility wasn’t much better. For them the festivals were an excuse to entertain—and observe—one another. For a hindmost city—the smallest of the Imperial cities—Sanctuary had been blessed—or cursed—with an abundance of aristocrats. No real mystery there—generations of kings and emperors had been exiling their malcontents to this armpit by the ocean.
A man of status and good conversation need not dine at home above one night in four.
Molin’s status and conversation in both Rankene and the Wrigglie dialect were beyond reproach, and the peace of his household had depended on his regular absences. Moreover, Kadakithis, who was every bit as clever as his half brother—the-emperor’s advisors had feared, ordered his own advisors to get to know the locals not in the palace, but in their own homes.
Now that he was thinking about it, Molin could see the face of the man who’d lived at High Harbor View. A dipsomaniac Wrigglie, wed to the daughter of a Rankan exiled in a prior reign. He still couldn’t remember the family’s name, but they were great entertainers. The various feasts and festivals of High Harbor View were firmly painted on Molin’s memory, not as individual events, but blended into one …
In the corner where the public and private rooms came together, Molin spotted a heavyset man, a Wrigglie by his swarthiness. His garments
were the best the local cutters could concoct, silk brocades carefully fitted to his barrel chest and thick arms. Despite the cutters’ efforts, the Wrigglie seemed uncomfortable. His timing was off—his laughter a heartbeat late for the jest, his greeting a shade shy of sincere. Women avoided him entirely, and men did not linger in his company.
Molin had sought him out, plied him with the subtlest interrogations, and learned little more than his name: Lastel. He was a broker, a middleman, but he resisted Molin’s every effort to draw him into conversation that might reveal something of his character. Resisted, but did not completely evade. Morsel by morsel, Molin learned that Lastel worked the darker shadows. He’d begun to piece together a network of drugs, whores, gambling debts, and disappearances that centered, somehow, on that notorious tavern in Maze’s heart: the Vulgar Unicorn.
He’d never guessed—not until it was much too late for profit—that Lastel lived a second life as One-Thumb, the tavern’s owner, and a third as a silent partner in a Red Lanterns brothel. By then Lastel himself had vanished, only to reappear more than a year later, a cowed shadow of his former self.
Even Molin had pitied Lastel in his later years, sitting in a corner of his own tavern, talking to his wine. Lastel survived only because Sanctuary needed the Vulgar Unicorn. Where else could men—or women—go to conduct business that could be conducted nowhere else? And who else would continue to run the place, except One-Thumb, a man with three pasts and no future?
The last time Molin had seen One-Thumb—not long before the Servants of Dyareela shuttered each and every one of Sanctuary’s taverns—the man had been missing more than a single thumb. His eyes were white with cataracts, and, with each step, he dragged one leg behind the other. Perhaps one of the Unicorn’s wealthier patrons—of which there’d always been more than a handful—had sheltered One-Thumb through his last days. Molin doubted it—One-Thumb had never cultivated friendship or bothered to sire the children a man needed to see him to death’s door.
For that matter, neither had Molin Torchholder, which was why he found himself on a ruined window ledge, tended by other men’s sons.
That was never the fate of Shkeedur sha-Mizle who scuttled through Molin’s memory, following his High Harbor View host, whose name remained elusive. Stop a Rankan nobleman, ask him to describe his Ilsigi counterpart, and he’d describe Shkeedur sha-Mizle: soft of flesh and discipline, superstitious, but faithless; given to worry, but untrustworthy; blessed with all the wits of a rabbit and the same strategy for survival: When sha-Mizle died his bedchamber had been too small to contain his numerous children. By reliable count, there’d been twenty; twice that many, if one counted the sons and daughters sha-Mizle had gotten on his slaves.
The sons had kept up their father’s traditions, and so, on a smaller scale, had the daughters. Another clan might have suffered for carving up the patrimony into so many pieces, but the sha-Mizle estate straddled the Red Foal River at its most fertile point. Then the great drought of ’82 turned the river into a stream of dust and the lesser branches of the clan scattered on the dry wind. Those who’d remained guessed wrong when the Dyareelans seized the town. No few ended their days on the bloody sands of the palace courtyard, and their fertile estate lay abandoned until Lord Serripines plowed it into Land’s End.
Rabbits were timid, rabbits ran, and at the end of the day, rabbits were harder to get rid of than rats. Surely, there must be a few of Shkeedur sha-Mizle’s great-grandchildren tucked away in Sanctuary.
In Sanctuary, Wrigglie rabbits chronically outnumbered the Rankans. Despite the efforts of Bec’s mother, Rankene was a dying language on the city’s streets. The very name was disappearing; they were Imperials now, not Rankans. Molin asked himself when that had happened and realized the change had probably begun within months of the Imperial takeover. Change a few sounds and the word—in Ilsigi—implied irregularities in both parentage and partnership.
Wrigglie or perverse-bastard Imperial—what did it matter when they were all trapped in Sanctuary?
With his eyes still closed, Molin looked up and recognized a man he hadn’t seen in over thirty years, hadn’t thought of in at least twenty. When he couldn’t recall the name, the shade reintroduced himself—
“Lan-co-this-s-s, Tasfalen Lancothis.”
Molin’s eyes popped open and he reached for his staff. Straining his weakened senses, he took the measure of his surroundings: a warming day, a bald sky, a boy making tea, a leg that was deadnumb from the hip down, but nothing of Rankan nobleman, Tasfalen Lancothis, though he, too, frequented High Harbor View.
Molin loosed a sigh and let his eyes fall shut again. Before the Servants of Dyareela brought terror to Sanctuary, there’d been witches—his mother’s people, though the Nisi weren’t the only ones wreaking chaos and living death on the city.
For a heartbeat Molin imagined Sanctuary if the Servants of Dyareela and the witches had been in town at the same time. Between the Hands’ preferred methods of execution and the witches’ love of corpses … He shook the image of flayed and charred drunks ordering ale in the Vulgar Unicorn from his mind and concentrated on Tasfalen Lancothis instead.
A heavy-lidded man—his eyes were ever-shadowed, his moods impossible to gauge—and inclined to indulgence, particularly in the bedroom, Tasfalen Lancothis had the wealth, the connections, and even the wits to escape Sanctuary. Molin had never been able to determine why he remained in residence, except that his roots were sunk deep. The few times they’d talked—the few times when Lancothis hadn’t been drunk on wine or in the grip of some other drug—Lancothis had hinted about loves gone awry in the capital. If true, Lancothis wouldn’t have been the first man to ruin his life for a woman, but, surely, few men born since the dawn of time had ruined it so completely.
Half a lifetime later and approaching his own death, Molin still winced when he recalled Tasfalen’s fate. The man had wound up an unwelcome guest in his own body after a witch—Roxanne, the witch of the north, by some reckoning, and quite possibly one of Molin’s unacknowledged aunts or cousins—claimed it for herself. It had taken a handful of magicians, an equal number of gods, and more mortal lives than Molin cared to recall to ward what remained of Tasfalen’s body and Roxanne’s mind inside the walls of Tasfalen’s house not far from Bec’s stoneyard home on Pyrtanis Street.
Twice a month—new moon and full—Molin had inspected the wards himself, visiting that near-deserted neighborhood where wisps of angry, blue light sometimes flickered in the gaping windows. Alone, he nursed them through Sanctuary’s first great fire and, a few years after that, the second and third. When glints of rotten green began to seep through the roof tiles, Molin donned a blindfold and paid a visit to the basilisk-guarded home of Tasfalen’s erstwhile neighbor, Enas Yorl.
Yorl had no need of the gold which, even then, Molin had accumulated in such embarrassing quantities. All the shape-shifting mage wanted was death. On his best day and with the might of his god behind him, Molin was no match for Enas Yorl’s curse, but the decaying wards were another matter—At least that had been Molin’s argument and there was a chance—an outside chance—that he was correct.
When next the moon was dark, Molin and the dregs of Sanctuary’s mageguild witnessed Enas Yorl enter the very haunted home of Tasfalen Lancothis. The mage did not come out again, but some days later Tasfalen’s house crumbled into a layer of dust no thicker than a baby’s knuckle. A few nights later Yorl’s forbidding home disappeared as well, leaving not even a layer of dust behind.
For years, Molin allowed himself to believe that Yorl’s dearest wish had been granted. Certainly the mage never again proclaimed his presence in Sanctuary—nor anywhere else that Molin had determined—but a man who rarely looked the same two days running could hide in plain sight more readily than most. There’d been times when a message that crackled with Yorl’s bitterly dry wit would reach Molin’s ears. He suspected—but would never prove, not with the time that remained—that the shape-shifter had been transfor
med by what he’d found inside Tasfalen’s home, that he had transcended his curse, but that when confronted with the choice of death and freedom or the curse of endless life in Sanctuary, Yorl had chosen Sanctuary.
It was a choice Molin Torchholder could at last understand—a choice he might make himself, if it came to him on the hard bricks of High Harbor View. He loathed Sanctuary—the city was beneath him in every respect, yet there was no denying that he’d lived a better life in Sanctuary than he would have lived in Ranke. Not an easier or more comfortable life, but a life that made a greater difference.
Sometimes it took the worst to bring out the best … More often there were no such fortuitous symmetries, and the worst was best forgotten.
Of all the memories of Sanctuary Molin had striven to forget, none was more inglorious than the fate of his wife. Oh, he’d counted himself in the ranks of the most fortunate when, as a young hero freshly returned from the northern campaigns, his superior in Vashanka’s hierarchy had suggested that he pay court to one of his own cousins: Rosanda, the youngest of Lord Uralde’s four daughters, the eldest of which was the emperor’s much-beloved second wife and mother of Prince Kadakithis.
Lord Uralde had resisted the notion. Molin’s heroics notwithstanding, his god was a rapist and his mother had been a temple slave and a foreigner, to boot. A less determined man might have folded his tent, but determination had been Molin’s strongest armor, his sharpest weapon … plus he’d been utterly beguiled by Rosanda’s perfection. Her eyes were brightest amber, hair was the color of sunrise gold, her laughter could teach the birds to sing, and if her wit was limited to worshiping the men in her life, well, what more could any husband want?
The poet-sage Eudorian had laid down the rules of domestic bliss at the Empire’s founding: A good wife was a delicate bird. She was not meant to fly wild among the brambles. A wise husband kept her safe inside his home, listening to the songs she sang only for him.
