Bec blew across the cup of tea, not because it was steaming hot but because if he blew hard enough, Grandfather might think the tea had indeed once been steaming hot. Momma made the stoneyard’s tea. She went outside the walls to collect the leaves and flowers. She dried them and crushed them and, most important, she tended the hearth fire that heated the water that became the tea Bec drank with every meal. Bec watched his mother coax the embers back to life every morning. She made it look so simple, Bec had never imagined it wasn’t something he could do.
“Here,” he said, offering the cup. “I was afraid it might be too hot, so I blew on it for you.”
Grandfather extended a trembling hand. Bec tried to make the exchange without actually touching the old man’s fingers. It was impossible, and Grandfather’s flesh felt like—Well, it felt like nothing Bec could describe, except that it wasn’t right and sent shivers down his backbone. He took a backward step and then another before attempting to meet Grandfather’s eyes.
“Next time, boy—if there is a next time—don’t bother blowing.”
Bec opened his mouth to protest and shut it quickly. Grandfather was the most frightening man he’d encountered. Far worse than Poppa when Poppa was angry, or Cauvin, who got angrier and got that way more often. The old man was scarier than the Irrune who lived in the palace and took whatever they wanted from any shop in any quarter of the city—
Thank Shalpa (Bec’s favorite among Sanctuary’s gods, despite his mother’s Imperial disapproval, because Shalpa was quick and clever and He never, ever got caught) that the Irrune had no use for stone!
Bec had slipped into an Irrune daydream when Grandfather’s raspy voice brought him back to the ruins. “Did that stone-headed brother of yours buy more parchment, or is that the only skin you’ve got?”
Should he tell Grandfather that it had been his idea to buy a single skin? Momma could get a whole year’s worth of writing onto a single sheepskin. Or should he let Cauvin take the blame? Cauvin could take it. Cauvin could take anything because he’d walked out of the palace alive.
At least that’s what Cauvin said.
Giving the question a second heartbeat’s thought, Bec decided that he shouldn’t make things worse between Cauvin and Grandfather. Grandfather had an edge against Cauvin the likes of which Bec had never seen. It had something to do with the Troubles …
“That night when your friends died in the bazaar,” Bec asked boldly, determined to get his answers, “was that when the Troubles began … with the Servants? Cauvin says the Hand caught him, and that’s all he’ll say. Was the Hand the same as the Servants, or were they something different?”
Grandfather glared over the lip of the teacup. His eyes seemed to glow with a light of their own, and Bec regretted to the soles of his feet that he’d dared to ask any questions at all. Then Grandfather began talking again in a voice so soft that Bec ignored the ink, the quill, and the parchment. He sat on the floor beside Grandfather instead, with his chin resting resting on the mattress and his eyes closed to remember every word.
The shape of the future should have been clear to anyone with the wit to see beyond the tip of his own nose, but the men and women Molin summoned to the dilapidated Hall of Justice in the wake of the fires that had leveled the bazaar and most of the Shambles, too, thought otherwise.
“I say it’s an excellent idea!” old Lord Mioklas declared, brandishing a white badge—a proof of purity given to him by the Servants he continued to house in his Processional mansion. It was not the only twisted bit of white cloth visible in the Hall. “A simple proof of one’s virtue and better than anything you’ve come up with in years, Lord Torchholder.”
“These Servants are doing what your precious garrison full of expensive guards never could do,” another peer continued. “In less than a week, they’ve rid Sanctuary of its most worthless elements and put a stop to the Quickening! My house has lost no one since we took the badge.”
“Hear, hear!” a third man shouted. He had the golden hair of an Imperial family and the crimson nose of a man who drank too much wine. “Why keep the garrison at all?” he demanded. “For five soldats—and not one of them pure silver—I’ve got a Servant sitting at my high door, sniffing everyone who comes or goes. And it’s not just moral contamination he can scent. He says he can smell a thief at ten paces—and I believe him. He pointed a finger at my wife’s maid and we found a gold necklace hiding in her skirts! Tell me your precious garrison could have done that—and caught the thief before she left my home! You’re wrong about the Servants, Lord Torchholder, as wrong as a man can be. This nonsense about Dyareela—you can’t expect us to believe your superstitions. Face it, Lord Torchholder: The Servants are the best thing that’s happened to this city since you stopped sending our taxes on to Ranke.”
Molin looked at the men and women arrayed before him. They were men—women—his own age or older, meaning they’d all lived through the tumultuous years when Prince Kadakithis had been Sanctuary’s governor and the city had become a battlefield for gods and distant wars. They knew what happened when gangs turned the city’s quarters into rival kingdoms. They knew that the purest silver, the whitest badge was no guarantor of safety—or they should have.
“Start packing,” Molin told Hoxa after the council had told him his services as acting governor were no longer needed. “We leave at dawn.”
“For where, my lord?” the loyal Hoxa asked.
“Anywhere. Anywhere but here. I’ve wasted my last breath on these fools. They deserve whatever the Servants do to them.”
No sooner were the words out of Molin’s mouth than the air chilled. By sundown, Sanctuary shivered in a bitter north wind. By midnight, sparkling white powder fell thick from a black sky. It buried the city to a finger’s depth with the promise of much more by dawn.
“Snow,” Hoxa observed. “Do you suppose anyone will notice it’s the same color as the Servants’ badges?”
Molin would not dignify the question with an answer. In his youth winters throughout the Rankan Empire might have been raw, but water rarely froze. Snow was yet another indignity that had befallen Imperial lands since the capital fell.
“Will we wait until this storm blows over, Lord Torchholder, or shall I continue packing?”
“What do you think?” Molin’s temper reached its breaking point. “Of course we wait!” he shouted at Hoxa. “I may be damned never to escape from this gods-forsaken town, but I’m not suicidal. Why die in a snowdrift tomorrow when we can sit tight and wait for Dyareela’s Servants to slit our throats!” He slammed the door hard enough to splinter the wood.
The sound was fresh and sharp in Molin’s mind, more real—more shocking—than anything that followed, because there was a limit to shock, a threshold which, when crossed, opened into numbness. He’d counseled emperors and princes and led armies to victory, but, once again, Sanctuary had gotten the best of Molin Torchholder. He knew who and what the Servants were, but knowledge was useless against their seductive weapons. He could anticipate the Servants’ moves—the escalation of their sermons from the simple scapegoating of the S’danzo and anyone else suspected of “contamination” and “impurity” to the trickier bits of Dyareelan theology: confession, mutilation, and execution disguised as sacrifice.
Molin had one weapon to wield against his red-handed enemies, at least in the early days. He paid the guards in Sanctuary’s garrison, and they repaid him with loyalty. Walegrin and the others would have carried out any orders he gave them, no questions asked, but not even the Architect of Vashanka dared send armed men into the courtyards of Sanctuary’s elite houses, and that was where the Servants laired once they’d gotten hold of aristocratic ears.
Loath as Molin was to admit it, then or now—Dyareela’s Servants were clever and subtle, and they were one step ahead of him from the start. They’d looked at the palace and realized that neither he nor his garrison could pose a threat to their plans, even after the bloodshed started, so long as they catered to the fears of the wealthy and self-righteous.
Two types of people met their deaths at the Servants’ hands. There were those who sacrificed themselves willingly—hysterics who swallowed the Servants’ theological clabber whole. They believed that their deaths would hasten the mortal paradise the Servants promised at the end of every sermon. There was no saving a man or woman from sheer stupidity. The other early victims were those who, like Molin Torchholder, saw through the Servants’ plans and opposed them. Unfortunately for Molin, these natural allies were also the heart and soul of Sanctuary’s underbelly—the gangs that ran its rackets, traded its drugs, and hosted the least savory houses on the Street of Red Lanterns.
Molin was a practical man, but he drew the line at joining forces with the likes of Basho Quarl, even though Quarl had the right measure of the Servants. The king of beggars and lord of thieves sent his minions to the palace offering gold and information in exchange for protection as the Servants closed in on him. Molin said no, he wouldn’t trade the stewpot for the fire. He watched from his palace balcony when white-robed justice dragged Quarl, naked, bruised, and pleading for his life, into the palace courtyard, where a platform built from charred wood had replaced the Hall of Justice. The Servants accused Quarl of every crime he’d committed and more besides. They judged him, then bled him out slowly, to the cheering satisfaction of the crowd.
Despite the false accusations, Quarl deserved every cut he got; but on his balcony, Molin couldn’t help wondering if he hadn’t been outfoxed again.
After Quarl’s “sacrifice” the peers eagerly paid tithes to the Servants rather than taxes to the palace. Molin saw how the wind blew. He released the garrison and told them to leave Sanctuary, fast. He made plans to travel with Walegrin to the city of Lirt, about as far to the north and west as a man could go and remain in what could still be called the Rankan Empire. He got as far as converting all his property into gold and jewels, then his gout flared up. His big toe swelled to the size of a melon, and despite his best efforts with mineral soaks and witchcraft combined, it stayed that way until an early winter put an end to all thoughts of following Walegrin to Lirt.
That winter, the eighty-fourth winter of the Imperial calendar, Dyareela’s Servants insinuated themselves into every temple ringing the Promise of Heaven. They wanted the palace, too—for an orphanage, they said. Dyareela was a mother-goddess, they said. She couldn’t bear to see a child’s tears, they said. Molin knew better; there wasn’t a priest in the world who didn’t know better: Innocent children were ever the easiest to shape for good … or evil. He sent messages to his remaining friends among Sanctuary’s peers; with his grossly swollen toe, travel, even across town, was out of the question. A few replied, but none was in the mood to listen.
Molin told Hoxa to find them a place outside the palace, a place where they could disappear until spring when—gods willing—his toe would have shrunk and they could set out for Lirt. Hoxa hunted up an abandoned wreck of a building deep in the Maze. It had three usable rooms: one for himself, one for Molin, and the largest for the eight wooden chests they smuggled out of the palace. They settled in for a cold, quiet, and, for Molin, a painful winter.
Spring came and brought with it a long caravan of Imperial refugees. They carried good news and bad. The good news was that the Empire’s longtime enemy, Molin’s people—the Nisibisi witches of the north—had been beaten, crushed, vanquished, shattered into a thousand pieces the previous summer. The bad news was that the Nisi hadn’t been humbled by Rankan might. A horde of demonworshipers from the far east had crushed the witches, then demanded tribute—or else—from the Empire.
The horde’s numbers were great beyond counting. They’d formed a solid ring around the Imperial city of Lirt and when it refused their demands they burnt it to the ground. Not one soul, the refugees insisted, had survived. They weren’t Lirters; they were from the city of Sihan, south of Lirt. When the horde hove across Sihan’s landward horizon, the pragmatic Sihanites had simply abandoned their port city. Their fleet had sailed south, expecting a warm welcome in the capital.
Instead, they learned that there’d been another coup in the capital and a new usurper was sitting on the emperor’s throne. He called himself Vengestis the Magnificent and swore that he’d lead the army to victory over the Dark Horde, but until then the refugees could fend for themselves, west of the capital. He sent his soldiers to the wharves and threatened the Sihanites with death if they set so much as one foot off their ships.
“Lord Serripines says the last month has been hell, and this place is truly Sanctuary to his eyes,” Hoxa said while slowly shaking his head. “He means to settle his whole clan outside the walls. They’re going to grow grain for export, same as they did in Sihan!”
Molin lowered his foot from the cushion. His toe had shrunk. He could think of riding again without leaking tears, but there was nowhere to go if Lirt was gone. Lirt and Walegrin and the rest. He shivered—not from cold—and considered that except for Hoxa, there was no one left who shared his memories, certainly not this Lord Serripines from Sihan.
“The man thinks this is Sanctuary?” Molin murmured. “And he thinks he’s going to grow grain here? The man’s either a fool or a green-thumb genius.”
“And us, Lord Torchholder? What do you make of this Vengestis the Magnificent?”
“Get your cloak, Hoxa. We’re leaving.” Molin stood up and immediately stubbed the wrong toe. He gritted his teeth against the pain, then stamped into his softest boots.
“For Ranke, Lord Torchholder?”
He sighed as he thumped one of the chests with his fist. “It’s time to forget Ranke, Hoxa.” The chest groaned and opened. Molin took a handful of soldats and coronations from the wealth of coins, gems, plate, and weaponry. He poured the coins into a plain leather scrip and let the chest lid slam.
“If we don’t go to Ranke, Lord Torchholder, where shall will go?” The little man glanced about the dingy room. “We can’t stay here.”
“I absolutely agree.” Molin tore a length of brick red cloth from one of his court robes. He wound it intricately around his head, covering his steel gray hair, and let the loose ends fall against his face. With his profile thus obscured he could pass for anything but an Imperial lord.
“Come, Hoxa. By sundown we shall be shopkeepers—”
“Lord Torchholder?”
“Forget ‘Lord,’ Hoxa—Forget Hoxa, too. Call yourself … call yourself Venges, for our new emperor. Call me Boss. By sundown we shall be the new proprietors of a respectable wine shop—or an apothecary. An apothecary would be best. I have some small knowledge of mixing potions, you know.”
And by sundown they were proprietors of a run-down apothecary that had been clinging barely to life in what, twenty years earlier, had been the jewelers’ quarter.
Compared to the ashes of Lirt or Sihan, or the convulsions of Ranke itself as the Imperial city digested Vengestis and his successor, life as an apothecary in Sanctuary wasn’t unbearable. An honest apothecary could make a living in Sanctuary no matter who held power. People ached, they couldn’t sleep, they couldn’t stay awake, they got indigestion, they looked for an apothecary to solve their problems. Word got around quickly that the shop in the old jewelers’ quarter had a new owner whose syrups and powders worked most of the time and whose prices were fair.
Life as a grain exporter wasn’t impossible, either. Lord Serripines was a fool when it came to his home, his family, and his undying belief that Imperial glory would be restored no later than next year. But he was a genius in the ground. He bought up land that had lain fallow since the Imperial families of Prince Kadakithis’s reign had abandoned the city. Then he went to the villages ringing Sanctuary and made himself useful to the villagers that Molin Torchholder, like other city-dwelling men, preferred to ignore. Serripines had added the treasury of Sihan to his own before he left the city and he spread his coins like autumn manure, convincing the villagers to work his fields before they worked their own. Two years after his arrival, there was more land under the plow and scythe than there’d ever been, and big-bellied argosies were sailing high into Sanctuary’s harbor, sailing low in the water when they left.
But life that wasn’t unbearable or impossible wasn’t necessarily good. Slowly, inexorably, the Servants of Dyareela squeezed the priests of Ranke and Ilsig out of their Promise of Heaven temples. The High Priest of Ils got himself flayed for preaching against Dyareela’s plans, but most of the city’s clergy either changed their allegiance—the Servants were accommodating that way—or slipped out through the walls. Dyareela’s justice was swift, and few were tempted to take up the underbelly life once they’d seen a man bled out or a woman peeled of her skin.
Molin Torchholder’s little apothecary shop bought more than herbs, of course, and it sold more than syrups and powders. Though Molin had become inconspicuous, he hadn’t disappeared, and the secrets of Sanctuary—even the secrets of the Servants of Dyareela—made tracks through his shop, especially its back room.
There wasn’t a large market for knowledge within Sanctuary while the Servants gripped it, but the city’s harbor was the last deepwater anchorage between Ranke and the Hammer’s Tail at the southern tip of the Spine Mountains—or the first, if the ship had sailed around from the Ilsigi side of the Spine. Strangers floated frequently into Sanctuary. Some were drawn there by the grain Lord Vion Serripines grew on the hills above the city, some by misfortune or accident. All strangers, though, eventually made their way to the unassuming shop in the old jewelers’ quarter.
Lord Vion Larris Serripines got wind that there was an officer of the old Imperial court—an archpriest of the old Imperial storm-god—selling potions in Sanctuary. Scarcely a day went by when someone from that lord’s new Land’s End estate didn’t cross the apothecary shop’s threshold. Those habits would have tragic consequences eventually, but in the Empire’s eighty-fifth year, it was simply good business for both the Serripines and Molin Torchholder, so long as the Rankan exiles kept their youngsters safe at home.
“Don’t be deceived,” Molin warned Lord Serripines. “The Servants are like an arrow wound—you think it’s healing, then one day your leg’s swollen purple and the next you’re lying on your deathbed. I can’t get an eye inside the palace anymore—no one can, including the Servants who’ve set up housekeeping in Savankala’s temple. They’re not there for worship, Vion, they’ve been tossed out by their brethren. That alone would be a bad omen, but I know for a fact, the Servants still in the palace have snatched many a child from its parents to keep their so-called orphanage filled. Had I a son or daughter, I’d never let them out of my sight.”
The golden-haired Rankan aristocrat straightened the sleeves of his impeccably Imperial robe. “I’ve sent word of the Servants to Emperor Vengestis. I’ve told him what must be done, and he agrees. Any day now, we’ll be seeing a contingent of real soldiers arrive to put these heretics in their place.”
Vengestis had regained the Imperial throne twice since his initial usurpation, each time less magnificently than before. The man had a positive genius for manipulating aristocrats like Serripines, who should have known better but chose pipe dreams of resurrected Imperial glory over the truths held in their own memories. Lord Serripines wasn’t an utter fool. Though he kept his absurd faith in the Rankan Empire’s promise and had sited his Land’s End villa where it could be easily seen by ships sailing down the coast from Ranke, he took Molin’s advice and kept his sons and daughters under close watch.
Lord Serripines never got his Imperial ships or soldiers, but he and all Sanctuary did get the Irrune. Traveling under a cloud of dust as tall as a thunderstorm, the city-sized tribe advanced on Sanctuary’s ill-guarded walls in the autumn of the Empire’s eighty-sixth year. They’d come from the north and east, fleeing the same barbarian hordes that destroyed Lirt and drove the Serripines clan out of Sihan—which, considering the manners and appearance of the Irrune, painted a truly nightmarish picture of the barbarians.
The Irrune had taken a less direct route to Sanctuary than the Serripines. For a generation the tribe had wandered the north, offering their services now to the Nisi witches and next to the Imperial generals in exchange for a new homeland. Both the witches and generals had found it easy to make promises to the Irrune and easier to forget them until outriders of the Black-toothed Beasts—the Irrune name for the barbarians who’d driven them from the lands of their ancestors—reappeared on the eastern horizon.
As soon as he saw the banners of the Beasts, Arizak per-Mizhur, chief of the Irrune, rode west to the Spine, then south in search of empty land for his people and their herds. Their quest finally brought them to the gates of Sanctuary and into sight of more water than their language could describe.
Arizak’s demands were simple: food, land, and all the wealth of the city or he’d do to Sanctuary what the Beasts had done to Lirt. He shouted the demands himself from the back of a lean, mettlesome stallion and in the midst of two hundred similarly tempered warriors. The chief Servant of Dyareela, a Maze-bred pimp who’d changed his name to Retribution, scurried to Her altar in what had been Savankala’s temple. He asked his goddess for guidance and She, remarkably, sent him to an apothecary’s shop in the old jewelers’ quarter.
Less remarkably, perhaps, Molin was dressed in a soldier’s leather armor when Retribution arrived. For Sanctuary’s sake—for the sake of all those whose worst crime was ignorance—he proposed a plan that took him into the Irrune encampment as sole negotiator. Molin expected the worst from the ragged nomads and got Arizak’s second wife instead.
Nadalya was a handsome woman and young enough to be the chief’s daughter. Molin met Verrezza, Arizak’s first wife, at the same moment he met Nadalya. Glancing from matron to maiden, he thought he had the full measure of the chief’s domestic disharmony. It was an honest mistake. The Irrune were a sturdy, light-haired, fair-skinned people. Cleaned up and properly attired, not one of them would have attracted attention on the capital’s streets—not the way Molin had, growing up swarthy and black-haired in Vashanka’s Temple.
Then Nadalya opened her mouth.
“My husband asks me to speak for him, Lord High Architect,” she said, using Molin’s god-bestowed title, which she shouldn’t have known because Molin hadn’t used it in her lifetime. “Though Arizak per-Mizhur understands Rankene as well as you or I, it is not the language of his inner thoughts. On his behalf and for all the Irrune, I bid you welcome, Lord High Architect. We are honored to meet you—me, most of all. To his dying day, my father spoke highly of you, Lord High Architect, and often. I heard how you led the charge at Phorixas on Wizardwall so many times, I sometimes think I was there myself.” Her smile was cultured, her Imperial grammar, flawless, her accent marred only slightly by a northern twang. Clearly her father, whoever he’d been, had spared no expense for Nadalya’s education.
Molin strained his memory and recalled her father’s chosen battle. If he’d had moments of greatness in the northern wars—and Molin humbly believed that he had—Phorixas hadn’t been one of them. A warrior cherished the victories he hadn’t earned but, if he were a wise man, he never bragged about them. The Rankan center, led by a commander’s vainglorious nephew, had collapsed when the young man panicked and got himself killed. Molin had led a desperate cross-field charge against the Nisi flank because it was attack or be cut down where they stood.
“Was your father an officer?” he asked Nadalya tactfully.
“Chief purveyor, Lord High Architect,” she replied with a blush.
“Ah,” Molin sighed.
Purveyors were the necessary evil that followed every army, keeping it supplied with food and fuel, weapons and armor, and everything else it required. There’d never been an Imperial commander who wouldn’t rather face the enemy naked than a cranky purveyor. Molin had been grateful that as a priest he’d never had to deal with the breed—until now.
“Where do we begin?” he asked cautiously.
They began with food. Molin gave away the grain Lord Serripines had hoped to sell for a tidy profit. Lord Serripines wouldn’t dare complain, not since he’d chosen to live in an undefendable villa far beyond the city walls. To satisfy the Irrune appetite for gold, Molin gave away some of the treasure the Servants had appropriated when they took over the temples. Retribution wouldn’t dare complain, either.
Then he and Nadalya got down to the hard bargaining: After a generation of wandering, the world-weary Irrune had come to the end of their road. They needed land for themselves and their herds of sheep and horses, and they expected Sanctuary to provide it.
Though Molin habitually thought of Sanctuary as a carbuncle plunked down in the middle of nowhere, it was, in fact, one of the thirty-seven Imperial cities. It did not sit in reeking isolation beside the sea; instead, it was surrounded—quite thoroughly surrounded—by a broad ring of homesteads, hamlets, and villages. No matter that most of the people living in the Sanctuary’s purview regarded the city with the same suspicions and low opinion that Sanctuary itself held for the Rankan capital, the fact remained that there were easily four times as many people living around Sanctuary as lived within its walls—and if Molin had settled the Irrune among them, he’d have doomed them all.
The nearest empty land lay southwest of Sanctuary, and it was empty for a good reason. Between Sanctuary and the Hammer there wasn’t enough high ground to forage a pig. What wasn’t saltwater marsh was bracken fen or blackwater swamp. The natives of Sanctuary called it simply—accurately—the Great Morass, and if Molin had tried to settle the Irrune there, they’d have returned in a month with blood in their eyes.
What Molin and the Irrune needed was grass-covered land which, if not empty, was at least not occupied by Imperial citizens. There was such an expanse in the foothills of the World’s End Mountains, about four days’ ride to the north and west.
“Follow the White Foal River to its source,” Molin advised, omitting any mention of the Gunderpah brigands as he went on to describe a nomads’ paradise.
If the brigands and the Irrune couldn’t stand the sight of each other—and Molin doubted they could—they’d resolve their differences with the brutal efficiency of their kinds. If the Irrune wiped out the brigands—well, the foothills were a veritable paradise for horse herders. And if the brigands drove out the Irrune? Sanctuary had little to fear from a tribe that ran from the Gunderpah brigands with their tails between their legs.
Arizak per-Mizhur had heard too many hollow promises to take Molin’s word for land that lay over the horizon. He dispensed with Nadalya’s interpretations and took charge of the negotiations himself. Molin would never have gotten rid of the tribe without the help of a sea squall that roared out of a blue-sky afternoon. The wind-whipped, salty rain panicked the herds, flattened half of the Irrune tents, and convinced Arizak per-Mizhur that he would not spend another night near water that spanned the horizon.
The haste with which the Irrune departed for Gunderpah was enough to make an old priest think that his god was taking an interest in the mortal world again.
Molin went back to reciting his prayers when he returned to the city, and it seemed for a few years thereafter that Vashanka was indeed listening—though Lord Serripines and his fellow Land’s End exiles stopped listening or visiting the apothecary shop after Molin gave away their profits, and the Servants were no happier to surrender even a small portion of the treasure they’d looted from Sanctuary’s temples and palaces. Still, the apothecary business prospered, and so did Molin’s back-room trade in information.
The Irrune found their way to the Spine foothills, where the Gunderpah brigands took one look at their new enemy and high-tailed themselves into Ilsig territory without so much as a skirmish—at least that was how the Irrune told the tale whenever they returned to Sanctuary for bribes or barrels of beer. The Servants, having killed or intimidated their opposition, turned inward and, in the way of all those who placed paramount value on purity and prophecy, accusations of heresy began to fly between the Servants tending Dyareela’s altars on the Promise of Heaven and those who tended Her orphanage in the palace.
By the winter of the Empire’s eighty-seventh year, there were two Dyareelan sects within the city: the Servants of Mother Chaos along the Promise of Heaven and the Bloody Hand of Dyareela in the palace. The Servants had the numbers and the freedom of Sanctuary’s streets, but the Hands were utterly self-righteous and utterly ruthless. Anyone unlucky enough to get caught between the two sects could count the remainder of his life in agonizing hours, but the ordinary denizens of Sanctuary were as adept at avoiding Dyareela’s authority as they’d been at ignoring the laws of both Ranke and Ilsig.
Sanctuary’s reputation as an outpost of stability—provided one could tolerate the occasional public flaying—seeped through the crumbling Empire. The city’s population rebounded, and the talk in the back room of Molin’s apothecary was that the Servants were on the verge of victory in their religious war with the Hands. Compared to the Hands or the new emperor (who, after slaying Vengestis in his mistress’s bed, had, reportedly, raped, then married her himself), the Servants were rulers with whom a prudent man could live.
Then the spring rains failed and became a brutal summer drought. What little grain sprouted, withered and died before it was knee high. Land’s End feared for their granaries filled with last year’s harvest while Servants and Hands spilled blood on their altars. In the palace, Dyareela told the Hands that Sanctuary was home to too many strangers, too many newcomers whose purity was suspect. The Servants, after listening to the same goddess, prayed for rain. The Hands were wrong outright, but the Servants were city-bred fools who knew how to rob a second-story bedroom but nothing about the ways of grain.
Ending the drought with slow, steady rains wouldn’t have harmed Sanctuary, though they wouldn’t have prevented famine, either. Only the Serripines could do that, with the keys to their granaries. But the rain the Servants prayed into Sanctuary was a wind-whipped sea storm. The worst weather surged ashore beneath a new-moon midnight when the tide was already rising. It sucked off roofs, collapsed entire quarters, and undermined another section of the city’s walls. In the villages beyond Sanctuary, the storm wrote a different story. Torrential rains recarved the hillsides and flooded fields with ominous, muddy lakes. Then, before the rain had ended, the White and Red Foal Rivers burst out of their banks. Swirling currents swept up toppled trees, drowned livestock, and ruined lives. All flowed downstream, to helpless Sanctuary.
Plague was loose again before the rivers crested.
Someone got the notion that flames would stop the plague and set blazes between the Maze and the harbor. Against all expectation, the fires took root in sodden wood. Molin and Hoxa were throwing buckets of water at their shop’s walls when the Bloody Hand emerged from the palace looking for vengeance. When the last flame died, there was only one Dyareelan sect in the city, and it wasn’t the Mother’s Servants.
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 Irrune 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.
If a man lived long enough, he’d get the chance to relearn all his lessons from the back side.
Tempus and Chenaya were with Vashanka on the far side of legend, and Ischade had followed her deadly little curse into oblivion. Vashanka was there for His priest when Molin prayed, but there was a long, long way from Land’s End. He was on his own when he went down the Ridge Road to spy on the city he’d always hoped to leave behind.
Collecting a lifetime of debts, Molin made his way through Sanctuary’s grim streets. He saw no evidence of Lord Serripines’ monsters and demons, but more than enough guilt and shame. Of course, once brothers betrayed their sisters or parents betrayed their children to save themselves, they became monsters in the eyes of those around them, and in their own eyes, too. The only people who looked straight ahead when they walked were those who’d willingly surrendered what was left of their souls to the Bloody Hands of the palace.
Still, Sanctuary was a city of survivors, and Molin knew where in the Maze to look to find a handful of resilient optimists willing to risk their lives unbarring the eastern gate that very night, assuming Molin could deliver a fog dense enough to blind the Hands to the Irrune riding down from Land’s End.
Vashanka, god of storms, warmed Molin’s heart: He could do that much for His old priest. There was a chill in the air and clouds seeping off the harbor waters before Molin got back to Land’s End to make the final preparations.
“The gates were open when we got there,” Grandfather droned. “We were halfway to the palace before the Hands knew we were inside the city. They prayed Dyareela against us. If one of our men went down, the mob tore him apart, flesh from bone. We hung tight. I feared we’d have to kill them all, and even that might not be enough. She’s a soul-stealer, the Mother of Chaos. Our deaths strengthened Her. We dismounted and drove the horses ahead of us—O Vashanka, may His name be praised, the noise and the stench! It was pure butchery until we got to the palace. We lost every man on the ram, twice, and twenty more when we cracked the gate. Then the Hand lifted our fog; I thought for sure we were finished …” He shook his head. “Dyareela, She feeds on death and chaos, but She’s no battle goddess. Doesn’t have the belly for it. Her chanters couldn’t hold Her, and She fled with the fog. We fed on chaos—”
“Furzy feathers!” Bec interrupted. “All that, and you don’t know! You froggin’ don’t know what happened. You weren’t there. I know what happened after the Irrune got to the palace. That’s no secret. What I want to know is what happened before they got there!”
Grandfather got that owl-y look grown-ups got when Bec caught them cheating. “I’ve spent all afternoon telling you what happened before we swept out the palace.”
“Says you. I say you weren’t there and you don’t know what hell was like, no more than me. Momma and Pa were there and Cauvin was in the palace, in the palace for years, in that orphanage you talked about. But he won’t talk about it. No one will. Not one word, except by accident, kind of, or craziness, like Batty Dol. You said you’d tell me what really happened. You lied, Grandfather. You lied.”
Grandfather reached for his black staff again, and Bec scrambled for dear life. The crockery inkpot and the parchment both went flying.
“You didn’t write down a word I said!” Grandfather complained, as the parchment floated in a late-afternoon breeze. He lowered the staff and rubbed his wrinkly forehead.
“You were answering me. You didn’t say I should write down what you said when you were answering me.” Bec retrieved the crockery. The ink had dried. He spat on the thick stain and reached for the quill. “All right. You can start over; I’m ready. But who’s going to care if you don’t know what really happened that winter?”
“Your brother—”
“Cauvin can’t read … and he was there. He already knows.”
“What do I already froggin’ know?” a familiar voice asked from the doorway at Bec’s back.
Grandfather might be old and dying, but his tongue was quicker than Bec’s. “He says you already know what it was like in the palace that last winter. He wasn’t satisfied with my version.”
“Shalpa’s froggin’ shite!” Cauvin snarled.
For Cauvin, cursing was as natural as breathing and about as serious, but sometimes he meant it, and this was one of those times. His eyes fairly disappeared as his face got red in spots, pale in others. He charged across the rubble and kicked Bec’s improvised inkpot into a wall. The crockery shattered to dust. Then he ground the parchment beneath his boot. Through it all, Cauvin never took his eyes off Grandfather.
“You don’t go talking shite to my brother, you hear me? He’s got no need for it! No froggin’ need! That’s over. Over! Sooner it’s forgotten, the better.”
The parchment was holes and tatters. Cauvin advanced on Grandfather, who pulled his staff up, two-fisted across his chest.
“I haven’t told the boy what he wants to hear, Cauvin. I can’t. That’s for you; as he says, you were there, I wasn’t.”
Bec prayed to Mother Sabellia. She was the peacemaker among the gods his mother had taught him, and he needed a big dose of peace to come falling out of the sky. Cauvin wouldn’t back down for anything when he was blind angry, not even a staff topped with a stone that shone like fire. Bec closed his eyes. A whump of a breeze shot past his ears, then Grandfather said:
“You can’t make anything go away by hiding from it, Cauvin.”
“Shite if I can’t.”
Once again, Cauvin’s voice came from behind Bec, who turned toward the sound and opened his eyes. Cauvin was one stride out from the wall. There was dust in his hair and all over his back, but his face wasn’t all twisted up with anger anymore. Bec dared a glance in the other direction. Grandfather still gripped the staff crosswise. He didn’t look like he was an old man close to dying.
“If no one remembers, Cauvin, if everyone’s silent, then who’s going to stop them next time? They’re not gone, Cauvin. Not all of them. The man who murdered me, he had blood-red hands and red silk wound around his face.”
Bec swiveled in his brother’s direction.
“Froggin’ hell—You’re the one said they were gone. I heard you. Froggin’ sure you didn’t say anything about the Bloody Hand yesterday.”
“And I’m saying I’m wrong, Cauvin. I was wrong ten years ago, wrong two night ago, and yesterday, too. I’m dying of mistakes, Cauvin. The next move falls to you.”
Cauvin’s eyes got small, and for a heartbeat Bec thought his brother was going to fly off in another rage, but he didn’t get red or pale, just very still, like something had hurt him bad inside. When he talked again, his voice was soft.
“This has gone too froggin’ far. I’m not having any-damn-thing to do with the froggin’ Hand. I’m movin’ you to the palace. Let your high-and-mighty friends take care of you … of them.”
“Out of the question.”
“Don’t froggin’ think you can froggin’ stop me.”
Bec didn’t dare look Grandfather’s way. He had all he could do to keep his eyes open as Cauvin took a deep breath and held it a long time, then let it go.
“You froggin’ swear you won’t froggin’ tell my brother anything about the palace, or the Hand, or any other sheep-shite. He starts spouting off at home, his froggin’ mother’ll hang my froggin’ skin on the wall.”
“I wasn’t there, Cauvin,” Grandfather said, all sweet and nasty together.
“Swear, you sheep-shite pud!”
“In Vashanka’s sacred name and for the good of all, the boy’s ignorance is safe with me. What you won’t tell him, neither will I.”
The oath had to be a cheat. It sounded good, but Grandfather had used too many words for it to be simple-honest. Cauvin didn’t hear the holes. Bec could have warned him, but Bec wanted the holes, the tales his brother wouldn’t tell.
Cauvin was satisfied with Grandfather’s promise and ready to move on. “I’m ready to load the wagon, Bec. It’s not a full load. I’m telling Grabar that the mortar’s hard as steel, and I’ve got to come back tomorrow. I’m counting on you to back me.” He looked at Grandfather. “One more day, that’s all, then—” He shrugged. “Think about it, pud—you can’t stay out here. You’ve got to go to the palace—”
Grandfather waved Cauvin off. “I have a plan.”
“For what?”
“For teaching your brother his letters, for saving Sanctuary from Dyareela’s Bloody Hand. What does it matter? I need papers from my chambers in the palace. There’s an ironbound chest beneath my bed—”
“Froggin’ shite, I’m no thief! You need something at the palace, I’ll take you there. You can sleep on your own froggin’ bed. That’s where you belong.”
“You’re not stealing anything, Cauvin—and you won’t get caught, even if you were. I can promise you that. I’ve often needed to meet with people who couldn’t walk through the palace gates. Listen—”
Cauvin didn’t listen, not until they’d had another argument and Grandfather had shaken that blackwood staff. Bec was sure the staff was a wizard’s weapon—or a priest’s—though it didn’t belch fire or lightning or anything like that. Grandfather just held it in front of him and, little by little, Cauvin backed down and listened to Grandfather’s instructions. It had to be sorcery; Cauvin never backed down.
“So, can I go with you to the palace?” Bec asked when he was in the cart and the cart was headed back to Pyrtanis Street.
“Who said anything about going to the froggin’ palace?”
“You did—you told Grandfather you’d get his papers: the scrolls, the picture of gods—the one used to be painted on the temple walls—”
“He’s not your froggin’ grandfather, Bec, and I’m not risking my neck breaking into the froggin’, sheep-shite palace!”
“But you said—”
“I froggin’ lied, all right? Same as he froggin’ lied when he gave me that froggin’ worthless oath of his. Forget it, Bec. I’m coming out here alone tomorrow and I’m hauling that pud’s froggin’ ass down to the palace—where it belongs—unless I’m froggin’ burying it instead.”
Bec protested until Cauvin knuckled him across the back of his head. Not hard—but hard enough that Bec sidled around the piledup bricks in the cart and stayed out of reach until they got home.