by Lynn Abbey
The treacherous old pud had said it himself: He didn’t have much froggin’ time. All Cauvin had to do was stay away from the red-walled ruins for a few days, and the Torch would be dead. Shite for sure, he might have another run-in with Soldt, and no man wanted a froggin’ assassin on his back, but Cauvin thought he could endure that … and the Bloody Hand of Dyareela, too.
Damn the Bloody Hand, but Sanctuary knew the Mother of Chaos now. They wouldn’t make the same mistake again. If red-handed preachers started showing up in the streets, the city would rise up to exterminate them. Cauvin didn’t have to do it alone—if it needed doing at all, if the froggin’ Torch wasn’t responsible for his own ambush, or the Copper Corner attack on Bec. Keeping Bec safe was Cauvin’s responsibility. Bec, Grabar, and Mina, too.
And Leorin.
Cauvin paused with his oil-dripping boots in his hands. Damn the Torch to Hecath’s coldest hell, but Cauvin had had doubt about Leorin when she reappeared in his life and, no froggin’ thanks to the Torch, he had them again. He had the means to extinguish those suspicions forever—if he were willing to believe a S’danzo seeress or tempt her into answering his questions with the Torch’s second wooden box.
He pondered his dilemma through an uneventful breakfast, then, confident that he was clever enough to outwit a froggin’ S’danzo, followed Grabar into the work shed.
“Has Mioklas paid what he owes us?” he asked, laying the groundwork for another day away from the stoneyard.
Grabar shook his head. “Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him—and the wife would have said if he’d sent someone else to pay.”
“I’m off, then. I’ll be back with what he owes us by sunset.” Cauvin tried to hold Grabar’s narrow-eyed stare, but his foster father knew him too well, and he looked away first.
“Your back’s up; you’re looking for a fight again. Father Ils knows why—”
“Because Tobus won’t pay us a padpol if Mioklas doesn’t settle up.
“Tobus has already left ten of his soldats for earnest and showed me the others. He wants those houses, Cauvin; he’ll pay. Lord Mioklas pays slow, the whole city knows that; but he’s good for his debts over time. Settle yourself. I’ll tell you when—and if—it’s time to knock on his high door.”
“It’s time. He said autumn, and it’s froggin’ autumn. He froggin’ owes us.” Cauvin made a fist and held it between his face and Grabar’s. “I’m not asking for anything that’s not already ours, anything that he doesn’t froggin’ already have in his froggin’ chamber.”
“You’re looking for a fight.”
“I’m not,” Cauvin insisted. “I ask. He pays. No fights. Froggin’ simple.” He met his foster father’s eyes.
“What’s come over you these last few days, Cauvin?” Grabar asked, conceding defeat without admitting it. “You’re not yourself. Are you in trouble? Of your own or someone else’s?”
Cauvin couldn’t answer that. “I’m not looking for a fight, Grabar. I swear to you. I’ve got things to do—not trouble. Tell Mina not to cook supper for me; I’ll eat at the Unicorn.”
“The Unicorn! Where are you getting the money to eat at the Unicorn?” Grabar demanded. “What kind of trouble are you tangled in?”
But Cauvin was already headed out the gate. He walked fast until he was past the emptiness where Enas Yorl’s home had stood, then headed for the Stairs. Every few steps, he glanced back, cursing Grabar, yet hoping to see him.
Tangled is right, he thought, pounding through the Tween. I’m so tangled. I’m going to bribe a S‘danzo to learn if I can trust the woman I love. I’ve got a man who should be dead working sorcery on me and a froggin’ gods-be-damned assassin telling me how to fight and dress—
“Whoa! Cauvin, where’re you headed so fast?”
An unfamiliar voice hailed Cauvin from behind. Spinning, he saw an older, careworn woman coming toward him with her arms wide-open. Cauvin needed a moment before he recognized dead Jess’s mother. He hadn’t spoken to her since Jess threw himself in the froggin’ harbor. For Jess’s memory, she had to wrap her arms around him and tell him how good it was to see him, never mind that there were tears leaking from her eyes; and Cauvin had to endure the embrace, even return it. He’d patted her shoulder and was wondering if meeting her counted as a good omen or a bad one when flickering movement snagged his attention. He turned quickly, but not quickly enough, and was left with only the sense that he’d seen something black disappear into a shop, or an alley, or thin air itself.
If it had been Soldt, then he knew what kind of omen held him in her trembling arms.
“You come by the shop.” She wept. “There’s always candles for you and little Pendy.”
He couldn’t tell her that Pendy was dead, too, or that nothing would lure him to the chandlery where Jess had seemed so froggin’ happy, right up to the day he killed himself. Jess’s mother must have guessed. She stretched an arm’s length between them and gave Cauvin a strange look. Then she hid the lower half of her face behind her scarf and took off running.
Froggin’ gods all be damned, Cauvin swore, but he made his way toward the Shambles more carefully after that, not drawing attention and keeping an eye out for Soldt’s black cape, which didn’t reappear.
What Cauvin did see were words. Words painted on open shutters, above doorways, on barrels and crates, even fluttering on banners hung from upper-story windows. Most of them added nothing to his understanding. (What use was the written word for bakery in Wrigglie or Imperial—rarely both—when a man’s nose could find the shop faster than his eyes?) But a few unmasked mysteries Cauvin had never suspected.
A banner above one fish stall proclaimed that the owner sold only today’s catch while his nearest competitor claimed only his fish were good enough for Land’s End. Given a choice, Cauvin would prefer today’s catch over what was left after the Enders took theirs—assuming both sellers were completely honest, which sellers almost never were. They lied easily enough to a customer’s face; froggin’ sure, they’d lie even more easily with a pen.
Someone had chalked ENDOSH CHEATS AT DICE on the wall of an abandoned warehouse and, as if to challenge that claim, a different hand had written MANAKIM OWES ENDOSH 5 SHABOOZH right below it. ERLIBURT’S SCRIPTORIUM had work for anyone who could read and write Ilsigi, Rankene, or two other languages employing letters Cauvin still couldn’t make sense of. The SISTERS OF SHIPRI ALL-MOTHER would offer prayers of thanksgiving at the goddess’s fane beneath the full moon of Esharia, which was one month away.
A message so fresh that its white paint glistened in the morning light advised that the bodies pulled from the ruins of PELCHER’S TAVERN had been taken to the charnel house on Shambles Cross, where, for a fine of five padpols, they could be claimed until sundown by relatives.
Cauvin’s path of discovery took him past the Broken Mast, where a good-sized signboard he hadn’t noticed during his first visit hung between two upper-story windows. Its words were arranged in two columns, the first of which was ships’ names and the second was dates, some in red, others in white. The red dates were past and gone; those ships, he realized, were overdue. The EMPEROR OF THE SEAS was nearly a year overdue, but the KABEEBER was due the same day the Sisters of Shipri would be offering their prayers.
The comings and goings of ships was of no froggin’ concern to a stone-smasher, unless he were waiting for a load of fancy marble to arrive from Mrsevada. Cauvin wondered if such a ship would be listed on the Broken Mast’s signboard. It might be useful to know when their ship was due; more useful to have read it off the Broken Mast’s roof rather than depend on Captain Sinjon’s honesty, and most useful of all if the captain never suspected a stone-smasher could read.
No wonder that Mina spent so much time teaching Bec how to read and write. No froggin’ wonder, either, that she’d never offered the same lessons to Cauvin: a lettered man had the same advantage day in and out that Cauvin had when he weighted his fist before a fight.
Cauvin found hi
mself glad that he hadn’t mentioned his sudden mastery to Bee—froggin’ glad and froggin’ ashamed, too. But the boy would eventually tell his mother, and Cauvin felt no shame about keeping secrets from Mina.
Beyond the Broken Mast, Cauvin followed his nose up Stinking Street and into the Shambles. Written words were rare in a quarter that was, on the whole, less prosperous than Pyrtanis Street. The words Cauvin did see were etched rather than painted or chalked onto the walls. Most of the etchings weren’t truly words at all, just letters—the same Ilsigi letters scratched over and over until Cauvin passed an old warehouse whose lintels proclaimed that: THE EYES OF ILS WATCH SHARP. THE DEAD WALK PAST. Taken in order, the first letters of each word on the lintels matched the letters he saw repeated on less substantial walls. Cauvin realized that the mysteries of writing went as deep as sorcery.
Cauvin hadn’t heard the stories of dead men walking the streets of froggin’ Sanctuary until after Grabar brought him home to Pyrtanis Street. Old Bilibot had cornered Cauvin outside the Lucky Well and told him, with breath so foul it had turned his stomach— that neither the Hand nor the Troubles were the worst Sanctuary had endured. The worst—if a man were sheep-shite foolish enough to believe Bilibot—had been the witches and hazard-mages who’d invaded the town during the northern wars and the living-dead corpses they’d raised. The living dead had been men, mostly, but some women and a few animals, too—their death wounds gaping for all to see and their minds so frogged they didn’t remember dying.
Even fresh out of the froggin’ palace, Cauvin wasn’t sheep-shite stupid enough to take Bilibot’s word for anything. He’d asked his new foster father if the sot’s memory was as rotten as his breath.
Grabar had replied that though he’d been born after the witches and hazards left Sanctuary, he’d grown up with a neighbor man who claimed he’d been dead once—
“He had an eye as white as the moon but, other than that, there weren’t no differences from other men that I saw—’til he slipped on the Wideway and got himself crushed beneath an oxcart. Swelled up like the pox straightaway, then burst and shriveled, all before they could get the cart off him. Weren’t nothing left ’cept the bones they took to his widow. Didn’t see it myself, mind you—I weren’t no older than Bec when it happened—but that’s what I heard. Saw one of his rib bones, though, years later—they said was his bone—black as night and all shiny, like it had been glazed and baked in a potter’s kiln. Some say that’s the witches’ mark, but he wasn’t no witch, so maybe the old hags put it on him, if they’d raised him—
“Or maybe not. His widow, she was young and Sumese. Could be she did him in. She sold his tools for cheap soon enough and took off with a sea captain not long after.”
The Sumese were renowned for treachery … and poisons. It was easier to believe an unhappy wife had gotten away with murder than it was to accept walking corpses. Cauvin had taken the easy way and never given the matter another serious thought, until he read those words on the warehouse lintel. According to Bilibot, the Shambles had gotten its name from the corpses wandering its streets.
If that, the most unbelievable of the old sot’s tales were true, could the rest still be lies? Had there ever been a crab the size of a man terrorizing the harbor? A pillar of fire reaching up to the stars? A horned beast lurking in the alleys, skewering drunks in the Maze?
Had the mystery of words and reading ever been so widespread that ordinary neighbors in an ordinary quarter of Sanctuary had not only protected their homes with written charms, but assumed the dead could read them?
Before Cauvin could answer any of his private questions, his thoughts—and the thoughts of those near him on Shadow Street—were shattered by a woman’s scream. Cauvin’s ears placed the sound at his back and well above his head. He’d be looking at second-story windows once he’d turned himself around, but while he spun, his gaze stayed low, on the crowded street, because bad things happened in Sanctuary when people got distracted.
At the corner of Cauvin’s vision two men collided. One continued to run away from the scream, which had not been repeated. The other became a sudden statue, clutching its tunic. Letters and words were new to Cauvin, but he’d been reading the language of Sanctuary’s streets since he’d learned to walk. A crime had been committed: a theft of property or possibly life, and the thief was getting away. Let others attend the victim; by instinct, Cauvin went after the thief.
Chasing down one of Shadow Street’s innumerable dodges, Cauvin gained strides on the thief. The thief was aware of Cauvin’s pursuit, casting desperate glances over his shoulder as he shoved his way past stalls along the narrow passage. Cauvin shoved back, flattening vendors and their customers alike against the walls and dropping a customer to the ground. They cursed him and the thief with equal venom.
A roving sausage-seller with his wares hung from poles like battle pennants heard the commotion and chose to block the dodge against them both. The thief crashed hard against him. Sausages flew and, for a heartbeat, Cauvin clutched the thief’s tunic. Then, the thief back-slashed with a bloody knife. Cauvin released the cloth and they were running again.
The thief cried, “Father!” and crashed through a flimsy gate, exposing another passageway. Cauvin, bigger, heavier, and unfamiliar with the lay of the street, barely kept his balance as he cornered. He was still reeling when the passage opened into a courtyard. Skidding to a two-stride halt, Cauvin saw mounds of pottery: raw and baked; a pair of shimmering kilns; and a handful of men, each armed with heavy kneading sticks and the will to use them.
For the moment, the strangers held their ground, and so did Cauvin. He spotted his quarry, the thief, in the shadow of a stranger, much as he might have taken shelter in Grabar’s shadow during his first years on Pyrtanis Street.
“Who are you?” the thief’s protector demanded.
Cauvin swallowed an honest answer. The potters’ faces were unfamiliar but not entirely unknown. The man to his extreme left—a rangy sort, his face ringed with wild, black hair, his club thumping against an open palm, and his eyes so narrowed they didn’t glint in the sun—that man’s name hung just out of reach in Cauvin’s memory. If he waited another moment, he might remember these men.
“He robbed a man on Shadow Street—” Cauvin pointed at the thief. “Maybe killed him. A woman screamed first.”
The protector seemed unsurprised, undisturbed. “That’s no concern of yours.”
The leftmost potter strode forward. Forget the wild hair and change the thumping club into a five-tailed whip—one blistering braid for each finger—drawn again and again through a cupped hand, and you’d have one of the pit guardians of the Bloody Hand. It seemed impossible that Cauvin could forget the men who’d tormented him, but ten years was a long time. The guardians’ faces were nearly as faded as his mother’s now, and the potters’ hands were stained with brown clay, not red-as-blood tattoos.
“You’re not part of this, boy,” the protector warned. “Get out before you are.”
Boy? Bec was a boy; Cauvin never was. The thief, now there was a froggin’ boy, with nary a whisker on his chin but a fresh bloodstain smeared across the front of his shirt. His chest heaved from the chase—so did Cauvin’s—but he wasn’t afraid. Cauvin hadn’t been afraid when he’d walked behind the Hand.
Cauvin wasn’t behind or ahead of the Hand any longer, so he did what men and women had done when the Hand owned Sanctuary: He ran. His feet kicked up dust and grit, but there was no pursuit. The potters were as good as their word. Besides, they knew Cauvin wouldn’t take his tale of blood and theft to the guard … He was an outsider in the Shambles; the guard wouldn’t believe a word he said.
After leaping over the broken gate, Cauvin slowed down. No one took note of him leaving the dodge; the street’s attention was still fixed at its other end, where a flash of sunlight off metal showed that the city guard had finally arrived to investigate a murder. Guards might wander down the dodge, talk to the people he and the thief had shoved asid
e, even find the broken gate and visit the pottery. The potters would deny everything. They’d have their boy hidden by now and wouldn’t set the guards on Cauvin’s trail.
Cauvin thought he could count on that, the same way they’d counted on him. The stoneyard wouldn’t set the guard on a stranger’s trail, not without reason; and Cauvin hadn’t given them reason. Enough reason. It might be a froggin’ clever idea to get his sheep-shite arse out of the Shambles—
Then Cauvin spotted a banner tied to the side of a corner-front cooking oil stall. “Jaires,” it read—Wrigglie letters for a Wrigglie name—and “best quality” and “Dippin Lane.” He’d come this far; he took the chance of walking down what might be Dippin Lane. He hadn’t gone far when he saw a green-headed duck surrounded by rippling lines in faded paint on a signboard: the Paddling Duck tavern behind which lived a woman who could tell him the truth about Leorin.
Neither the potters nor the guard were likely to look for him—if they were looking for him at all—in a S’danzo’s sitting room.
“I’ve got a message for a woman, name of Elemi,” Cauvin said to the old woman sweeping the tavern’s steps. “I was told she lived around the Paddling Duck.”
She stared at Cauvin long enough that he’d begun silently cursing the Torch for sending him on another sheep-shite fool’s errand.
“There’s a woman above goes by that name. Around back. Take the stairs.” She shaped fingers into a crescent and pressed them against her temple, a warding against the evil eye. “Mind the dog.”
Cauvin minded. He avoided eye contact with the mastiff—larger and fiercer than the stoneyard’s dog—which growled ominously but let him climb the detached stairs. His butt scraped the roughplanked wall until he’d reached the narrow porch with a single door at its far end. One gentle tap on the wood, and a woman opened the door.
