Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [10]
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. “Strangle 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.