Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [0]
Title Page
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilog
Copyright Page
For the readers and fans
of
Thieves’ World
Acknowledgments
Thieves’ World would not have been reborn and Sanctuary would not have been written without a lot of support and encouragement.
My thanks go first to Brian Thomsen, who believed even when I didn’t, and to everyone at Tor Books, especially Jim Minz, who was very patient, and Tom Doherty, who thought it was a good time to bring Thieves’ World home.
My thanks, too, to my agent, Jonathan Matson, who did all the things I could never do, and to my close friend, Elaine, who deduced that I wasn’t getting enough pizza and, despite the thousand miles separating us, arranged to have it delivered regularly.
And, last but not least, to the super-cell tornadoes that ripped through Oklahoma on May 3, 1999. For ten years I’d insisted that I’d return to Sanctuary “when pigs fly”; that night, the swine, along with everything else, were airborne.
Chapter One
A full moon shone over Sanctuary, revealing boats in its harbor, dwellings within and without its coiled walls. The city appeared prosperous, but Sanctuary always shone brightest at night. In sunlight, a man standing on the eastern ridge overlooking the city would see that the largest boats tied up along the piers were rotting hulks, that roofs were missing all over town, and the great walls had been breached by neglect in several places.
Sanctuary could have looked worse and had many times during the half century that Molin Torchholder had—however reluctantly—called it home. Gods had fought—and lost—their private wars on Sanctuary’s streets, but the city went on, resilient, incorrigible, just possibly eternal. Its citizens repelled catastrophe as readily as they squandered prosperity. Time and time again, Molin had watched fire, storm, plague, invasion, and sheer madness sweep through the city, carrying it to the brink of annihilation, only to ebb away, like the tide shrinking from the hard, black rocks wrapped around its harbor.
And should Molin Torchholder call himself a citizen of Sanctuary?
In the morning years of his ninth decade, no one would deny Molin the right to call himself whatever he wished. He preferred to think of himself as Rankan. Born in the Imperial capital, raised by priests of the war-god, Vashanka, and risen to the heights of their hierarchy before his twenty-fifth birthday, Molin Torchholder had been marked as a man with a glorious future. Then he’d come to Sanctuary, a city on the edge of nowhere, a city so far removed from the Imperial Court of Ranke that an insecure emperor had thought it a safe place in which to exile an inconvenient half brother when a sudden attack of conscience stopped the fratricide the Imperial advisors—including the high priests of Vashanka—had suggested.
I’ll be here a year, Molin had thought the first time he’d ridden down this road. One insufferable year, then he’d be back in Ranke, accumulating power, wealth, and a legacy for the ages. His god had had other ideas. Molin’s god had a taste for blood and chaos and once He’d gotten a taste of Sanctuary’s particular squalor, Vashanka couldn’t push the plate away.
Vashanka had amused Himself with children, thieves, and the pangs of lust. The war-god of the mightiest empire in the world had made an immortal fool of Himself for years. Spurred by immortal embarrassment, divine powers both great and small had allied to erase Vashanka’s name from the white-marble lintel of His own temple—from the temple Molin himself had raised in His honor. Reduced to little more than an itch on the world’s behind, the great Vashanka had slunk out of Sanctuary on a night very much like this one more than forty years ago.
Molin hadn’t felt his god’s departure