Sanctuary Read online

  “The gods remember. The gods marked this place.”

  Atredan was young—not yet twenty—and born outside the city walls at Land’s End. He could have few personal memories of the Bloody Hand of Dyareela doing its awful work on the Promise, nor of Arizak leading his warriors against them in a battle that left the last of the old temples in ruins. When the last of the bodies had been collected it had been Arizak, the Irrune chieftain, who’d decreed that while he ruled Sanctuary, no god or goddess would be worshiped within its walls.

  Those who’d dwelt within the walls and survived the madness had accepted Arizak’s decree. They’d been silently grateful to turn their backs on the place where so many had died for so little reason. But the exiles of Land’s End—who’d been conspicuous that day by their absence—they mourned the loss of the Rankan temples they had not visited in years. They nurtured that mourning—that sense that fate had conspired against their beloved Empire—in their children.

  “The gods—All the gods, Ilsigi and Rankan alike and every other god ever worshiped here, do not care about an empty piece of earth, Lord Larris.”

  “But, Vashanka—!” the young man protested. “Surely—”

  “Surely if Vashanka had cared, Vashanka would have done something, but He left this mess for men to clean. Come, Lord Larris. If we’d walked rather than talked, we’d be halfway across by now.”

  Molin slipped his free arm beneath Atredan’s elbow to nudge him forward. A rooster in one of the yards nearby chose that moment to mistake the moon for the rising sun. The sudden sound surprised them both, and another man—to judge by the moonlit silhouette—out on the empty Promise who darted into the ruins that had once enshrined Thousand-Eyed Ils of the Ilsigi, another god who’d done nothing for Sanctuary when it could have used divine help.

  “Let’s take the other way, Lord Torchholder,” Atredan pled, no longer hiding his fear.

  When he’d been a young man—or even a middle-aged one—Molin would have pursued the straggler into Ils’s temple. He had no quarrel with some Ils-worshiper who preferred chiseled stone to the pile of bricks outside the wall, but once the Hand had driven Ils’s priests out of His temple, they’d chosen His marble hall as the site for an altar to their bloodthirsty goddess.

  Molin had worked beside a score of priests representing almost as many gods to destroy that altar, that abomination. He’d take no chance that some misbegotten soul could undo his work—

  Tomorrow, Molin chastened himself. Tomorrow, and with a handful of men walking ahead of him. Tonight he would sate himself with the view from the weedy steps.

  “The other way, Lord Torchholder. My lord father charged me with your safety—”

  Molin led the way, one hand gripping his staff, one eye stuck on the Temple of Ils.

  Were those flame-shadows flickering on the walls?

  So intense was Molin’s interest in the distant temple that he heard nothing, saw nothing move in the nearer shadows until a man with daggers in his hands blocked the street some five paces ahead of him and Atredan.

  “Prepare to die, Torchholder,” the stranger snarled with a man’s voice, and flung the metal in his hands.

  Molin pressed his staff against the ground and called upon his mother’s accursed power. He swayed left, then right as his witchblood quickened. One knife missed completely; the other tangled in his cloak and rang down against the cobblestones. Molin swung the staff into a two-handed grip across his chest and sought his attacker’s face in the moonlight. What he found disturbed him to the core of his old bones—the man concealed his features beneath tightly wrapped, dark cloth which was almost certainly silk, almost certainly dyed bloodred, almost certainly worn by a worshiper of the Bloody Mother, Dyareela.

  Nonetheless, Molin replied with confidence: “It will take a better man than you to lay me in my grave.”

  Witchcraft demanded tribute in exchange for its gifts, and Torchholder could not guess what price he would pay for drawing down to the depth of his talent, but for now and the next little while, he was the man he’d been—quick, strong, and cunning. The would-be assassin had not expected a fight from an old man; even less had he expected one from a man in his prime, but he stood his ground and drew another, longer, dagger from his belt. That was more than could be said for Atredan Larris Serripines, who shrieked like a maiden and ran for the Stairs.

  The long dagger flew toward the youth; Molin let it pass and closed with the Dyareelan. Old man or young, witch or priest, he’d never been one to waste time defending a coward’s back.

  That much the stranger expected and, with yet another knife in his hand, tried to get inside the Molin’s defense. Molin struck fast with the staff’s amber finial, clouting his attacker on the left thigh. It wasn’t the blow he’d hoped it would be—no bones cracked or broke. Molin struck again, as close to the same place as he could—witchcraft had restored his vigor, but it couldn’t replace the practice he’d missed over the last many years. The stranger cried out in pain. He curved over his leg like a reed in the wind, but backed away from a killing blow.

  “Prayer will not save you, Torchholder. You tore her children from her breast. You fed them poison and let them die. You wasted their blood! Wasted blood! She has thirsted all this time for yours—” The Dyareelan had proved that he knew whom he was attacking.

  Molin’s heart skipped a beat. He clamped his lips together, which the stranger mistook for a prayer.

  “Your puny god cannot hear you. Dyareela has chosen my hands to take your blood.”

  They were mad—that was the first thing a man had to realize about the priests who served the goddess of discord, destruction, and chaos. Only madmen could believe that the world needed to be reborn in blood. Madmen or children. Children, in their innocent ignorance, could be taught to believe anything, and the teaching, if it got hold of their souls, could not be undone.

  Molin feinted at the stranger’s battered thigh, leading him in a sun-wise dance until moonlight fell on his silk-shrouded face. Morbid curiosity drew Molin’s attention to the man’s hands. They were as dark as his face from wrist to fingertips. In sunlight they would have been bright crimson.

  How? Molin demanded of himself. How had a Bloody Hand priest kept himself hidden for ten years? And, How had a Bloody Hand learned about the poison?

  Arizak knew, and his brother, Zarzakhan, the Irrune’s high shaman. The three of them had agreed that there was only one sure way to solve the problem they’d found living inside the liberated palace: sevenscore children, stolen from the streets and fed on blood and terror until their very souls had withered. That fateful day of Sanctuary’s liberation—before word of the Hand’s collapse spread through the streets—Molin, Arizak, and the shaman had examined each child in the light of prayer, witchcraft, and human cunning. No more than one in five had shown a spark of conscience; those they sent aside to be reunited with whatever remained of their families. For the rest, for the young, dead-eyed killers who preferred their meat raw, Molin and Zarzakhan had—with Arizak’s express permission—prepared a deadly feast: horse carcasses larded with poison and left where hungry hands could reach them.

  By midnight, all the children were retching. By dawn the problem had been solved. Molin and the shaman buried the bare-bone carcasses, replacing them with the corpses of red-handed priests. Then they’d set the carnage alight and sent an ignorant Irrune warrior to awaken Arizak. With his armor hastily buckled around him, Arizak proclaimed to the newly liberated Sanctuary that for its final atrocity the Bloody Hand had sacrificed their captive children.

  No one who’d seen what the Hand could do doubted the Irrune chief’s declaration.

  Back on the Promise of Heaven, the Dyareelan lunged. Molin dodged and pivoted his staff. The amber finial made glancing contact with the attacker’s chin. He reeled backward, grunting each time his right leg took his weight, but caught his balance before he fell.

  “She is with me,” the Dyareelan decided with a crazed laugh. “Stran
gle spoke the truth! She gives me strength. My hands—My hands!—will take your blood!”

  Molin put a stop to the wild laughter, landing several blows in quick succession on the Dyareelan’s neck and along his weapon arm. The last blow cracked the attacker’s knuckles, loosening his grip on the knife. It clattered to the cobblestones. When the Dyareelan tried to retrieve the knife with his off-weapon hand, Molin pivoted his staff a second time. This time the amber knob struck true, shattering the stranger’s jaw. He dropped to his knees, too stunned to scream or defend himself. Molin stepped in for the kill—a vicious thrust with the knob that drove the Dyareelan’s nose into his brain and left him lying still on the stones.

  Molin had no time to savor his victory; he barely had time to get the staff planted between two stones before his witchcraft-fueled vigor ebbed. His joints ached, his muscles burnt, and it took all his will to keep himself upright. When the worst had passed and he’d reopened his eyes, Molin saw not only the man he’d killed, but the awkward heap where Atredan Serripines had fallen.

  Slowly, painfully, and knowing what he would find, Molin made his way to the young man’s side. Kneeling, he felt for a pulse; there was none. After closing Atredan’s eyes, Molin withdrew the fatal dagger and studied it in the moonlight. To his mild surprise it was an Imperial dagger bearing—unless he was very much mistaken—the crest of Theron the Usurper carved into its hilt. Thirty years had passed since such knives had been common in Sanctuary and, notwithstanding Theron’s failings as emperor—he’d established the dubious and ongoing custom of usurpation rather than political compromise as the means of Imperial governance—a man who owned one of the Usurper’s steel knives wasn’t apt to part with it willingly.

  Which said what—if anything—about the red-handed assassin?

  Still hobbling, Molin returned to the corpse he’d created. He loosened the knotted silk. The lifeless face confirmed his worst suspicions: beardless, browless, and bald, with lips as dark as the silk; equally dark patterns swirled like serpents across his cheeks. Though it was hard to be certain between the tattoos and the moonlight, Molin judged the Dyareelan to be a man in his midthirties, too young to have received the knife direct from Theron.

  He’d gotten it from someone else. An accomplice?

  Molin shivered at the thought. No one in Sanctuary had offered a word of protest when Arizak banned Dyareela’s cult and sentenced Her red-handed minions to one of the many traditional Irrune executions: tied hand and foot to the tails of four horses. Molin accepted that there were those in the town who secretly worshiped the outlaw goddess—She spoke to a need, as old and dark as night itself—but no man dared walk the city’s streets with bloodstained hands, and another generation might pass before gloves were fashionable.

  Perhaps he’d mistaken paint for tattoos?

  Molin took the Dyareelan’s lifeless hand, spat on its wrist, and rubbed the border where light flesh met dark. The line remained sharp, his own fingers unstained. The stains were permanent and, recalling the assassin’s words and accent, he’d been no stranger to Sanctuary. Muttering curses as if they were prayers, Molin let the hand drop and searched for other clues.

  Arizak won’t like the sound of this; and Lord Serripines—Molin shook his head, imagining the Rankan patriarch’s reaction to losing his second son and losing him, after all these years, to the Bloody Hand. He tore into the stranger’s clothing, even pulled off his worn but serviceable boots. Aside from his tattoos and the silk, there was nothing—nothing at all—to distinguish the assassin from other men—no additional weapons, no jewelry, no luck charms, not even a sprinkling of the blackened metal bits that passed for money in the poorer quarters of Sanctuary.

  The absence of identity was uncanny and, for a moment, Molin regretted that final blow. But, with or without witchcraft, he was an old man, and he couldn’t afford generosity; besides, the Hand didn’t respond well to interrogation. They broke quickly enough … and succumbed to the madness inherent in their creed.

  Wearily, Molin wrapped his fingers around the staff. He felt the weight of all his years climbing to his feet. In part, that was the aftermath of witchcraft, but not all. If the Bloody Hand of Dyareela were back in Sanctuary, then he’d failed when it had mattered most, and every sacrifice he’d ever made for this gods-forsaken city had come to naught.

  Something. There must be something, some loose end I can trace to its source. If it’s not in his clothes, then where? The other stranger, the silhouette running into Ils’s ruined temple? The rooster’s crowing—a bird or a signal? Had he been betrayed—by the Serripines? Atredan hadn’t wanted to come this way. Could that have been pretense? Was the youth that good an actor?

  Molin was returning to Atredan’s corpse when a bolt of memory scattered his thoughts—“Strangle spoke the truth.”

  Strangle. A red-handed priest calling himself Strangle. Or herself.

  Dyareela was a goddess with unusual attributes and appetites and, though every image Molin had seen portrayed Dyareela as a woman with crimson lips and breasts, it was said that She was hermaphrodite beneath Her skirts. The Irrune had found muralpainted rooms in the liberated palace that Molin could not recall without breaking into a cold sweat. It had taken more than sermons or knives to turn boys and girls into remorseless killers.

  By the time the Irrune finished cleansing both the palace and the defiled temples, they’d killed or captured more than three hundred red-handed veterans of Dyareela’s cult. The people of Sanctuary had cornered forty or fifty more. No one could say for certain; the tattooed bodies had been in pieces when the Irrune collected them. A few more Dyareelans had turned up in alleys and sewers—suicides, mostly—but the last four years had gone by without so much as a red-handed rumor, and Molin had begun to relax.

  Never again.

  Never as long as he lived—which didn’t allow much time.

  Molin knelt uncomfortably beside the red-handed corpse. He pressed his staff across its chest. He’d pay—surely he would pay a high price for indulging in witchcraft twice before the setting of the moon, but it would be worth it, if he could lure Strangle into the light.

  The theory was simple—slip into another mind, ransack its memories for a particular face, a particular name; then call that person and wait for him—or her—to appear. In the north, among his mother’s people, witchblooded children learned the trick early, but Molin Torchholder had come into his talent late and without a mentor. The theory was all he knew, and a dead man’s mind was a bleak midnight sinking toward oblivion.

  Once, Molin thought he’d captured the prize—a gaunt face, scared and malefic; stained hands with mutilated fingers. It was accounted an honor among the Bloody Hands to lop off a knuckle or two in the goddess’s honor. He whispered the name—Strangle—and felt a tug, as if from the far end of a long, slack, rope.

  Satisfaction proved Molin’s undoing. One heartbeat he was the fisherman hauling in his catch; the next he was the fish. The fish got lucky. It threw the hook and swam free.

  Molin awoke with his forehead resting against the dead man’s chest. He was chilled to the bone and stiff to the point of paralysis. Tears trickled from his eyes as he straightened his neck—

  The moon had set. The street was dark, but in the east, the stars had begun to fade. He’d been kneeling on the stones for the better part of the night. It was a miracle—a sign, perhaps, that Vashanka had not completely forgotten His old priest—that he had survived the night.

  Then Molin tried to stand. Something was wrong with his hands. He could feel the staff against his palms but his fingers would not grip it strongly enough to lever him up. He attempted to straighten his spine and the pain of a lifetime lanced through his right hip. Moaning softly, Molin collapsed. When he’d found the strength to try again, the sky was bright enough for shadows.

  Molin reached for his staff and stopped short. His hands … his hands were not his hands. Yes, he was an old man with blotched, crinkled skin, but the hands that moved, grud
gingly, according to his will were bone and gristle wrapped in parchment.

  The price, Molin thought in horror. Witchcraft always extracted a price, and foolish, clumsy witchcraft exacted the highest price of all. His heart raced, or it tried. He had been old, now he was decrepit, too, and the least effort left him panting and dizzy. With exquisite slowness, Molin wrapped first one hand, then the other around the staff. He had visions of his bones crumbling when he tried to stand, but he foresaw worse if he couldn’t drag himself off the streets.

  The hip pain was not as severe as it had been before dawn. Molin could stand but knew, even as he balanced on the cobblestones, that he could not walk. The long, black wool robe he’d worn to the Foundation feast was stiff and sticky with blood. His blood, Molin thought incredulously and at the same time remembered the stranger throwing a knife that had tangled in his cloak. It had nicked him; and he hadn’t noticed. No doubt it had been slick with poison—the Hand was especially fond of paralytic poisons; and he hadn’t noticed. He’d plunged into witchcraft, not noticing that he bore an open wound.

  Molin had killed himself. It was as simple as that. A man who’d prided himself on his cleverness had slain himself with carelessness. The only thing Molin felt more keenly than the pain in his hip was shame. He hid his face behind a frail hand while with his mind’s eye he beheld all his unfinished intrigues.

  Not now, Molin complained to fate, which was never known to answer prayers. Not with Arizak crippled and his family divided. Not with the Hand loose in Sanctuary again. I’ve got work to do; I can’t die now, not without an heir …

  Vashanka was not a chaste god, nor did He expect His priests to live a celibate life. Molin had been married once, long ago. He’d sired children then and later, but none had lived more than a handful of years. Something to do with the witchblood, he suspected. He’d had other opportunities to choose an heir; and he’d rejected them all. Intrigue was Molin’s life. Without intrigue he’d have no life, so he’d never surrendered, nor even shared his web of secrets.