Amber and Iron - Margaret Weis [77]
“Atta, watch him!” Rhys ordered.
The dog leaped to her feet. She did not attack the abbot. She stood over him, her teeth bared, growling a warning. The abbot said something to her, but Atta had direct orders from her master now and wasn’t about to disobey him.
“Brother Rhys—” the abbot began.
“She won’t hurt you if you don’t move, Holiness,” said Rhys coldly. He was watching the other priests, who were now circling him.
Rhys lifted up his staff with his foot and flipped it into his hands. He wondered uneasily if the staff would continue to fight for him. After all, he was opposing Majere’s servants. He held the staff out in front of him, half-expecting it to splinter and crack. The staff remained firm and felt warm and comforting in his grasp.
“I don’t want to hurt any of you,” Rhys said to the priests. “Let me pass.”
“We don’t want to hurt you either, Brother,” said one of the priests, “but we have no intention of letting you go.”
They meant to try to subdue him, render him helpless. Rhys carried the image of the young woman and the terrible fate that awaited her in his mind. The five priests came at him in a rush, intent on dragging him to the ground.
Rhys lashed out with the staff. He clouted one of the priests on the side of the head, knocking him down. He thrust the end of the staff into another priest’s midriff, doubling him over, and struck a third on the back of the head—all in a flurry of moves that took only seconds.
He saw at once the priests were not as well trained in the art of merciful discipline as their abbot, for the two remaining on their feet fell back, watching him warily. The abbot must have tried to rise, for Rhys heard Atta bark and snap. He glanced back to see the abbot wringing a bleeding hand.
Wishing desperately he’d never walked this street, never set foot in this city, Rhys planted the butt end of the staff firmly in the cobblestones, and gripping it with both hands, used it to launch himself into the air. He vaulted over the heads of the startled priests and landed on the pavement behind them. Whistling to Atta, Rhys dashed off down the street.
He risked a glance backward, thinking they might be pursuing him, but he saw only Atta tearing along after him. Two of the priests were tending to the fallen. The abbot nursed his bleeding hand and gazed after Rhys with a sorrowful expression.
Rhys put all thoughts of the sins he’d committed out of his mind as he ran.
He reached the temple of Mishakal and found Patrick, his wife and Nightshade, along with the city guard, gathered in front of the building. Nightshade was pacing back and forth, peering up and down the street.
“Brother, you’re late!” Patrick cried.
“Where have you been?” Nightshade wailed, clutching at him. “It’s way after dark!”
“Come with me!” Rhys gasped. He shook off the kender and kept running.
he young mother’s name was Camille.
The only child of a wealthy merchant widower, she had been raised with every indulgence and was headstrong and spoiled. When, at sixteen, she had fallen in love with a sailor, she had willfully ignored her father’s command and run off to marry the sailor. Two children came along shortly thereafter.
Her father had refused to have anything to do with her and even went so far as to change his will to leave his money to his business partners. Time might have softened the old man, who truly loved his daughter, but he died within a week of making the change. Shortly after her father’s death, Camille’s husband fell from the rigging of his ship and broke his neck.
She was now a widow, destitute, with two small children to support. Her duenna had taught her to do fancy sewing, and Camille, swallowing her pride, was forced to go to the homes of the wealthy young women who had once been her peers to beg for work.
This did not bring in much money. She was twenty-one, lonely, half-starved, and in despair. The only other thing she had to sell was her body, and she was