Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [101]
Sanctuary cowered and Vashanka was pleased, then Sanctuary took vengeance. The Wrigglies ambushed Tempus as he lay in a drug-laced stupor. They dragged him beyond the walls and sold him to a man obsessed with pain. Tempus lost his tongue, an arm, a foot, and other parts besides. A mortal man would have died; Vashanka’s minion merely suffered and suffered and suffered.
He never once called upon Me; therefore, I could not allow him to die.
Recklessly—because he was not used to having a god in his head—Cauvin thought—How could Tempus call anyone without a tongue? And, How could he die, if a god had made him immortal?
The red wind licked Cauvin’s throat. If I’d made Tempus immortal, I could unmake him … or save him.
Like a froggin’ starfish, Tempus grew back his missing parts once he was freed from the vivisectionist’s lair, with nary a scar on his flesh to betray his suffering. But the minion’s mind, his spirit … Cauvin’s mind filled with weariness that was neither his nor Vashanka’s.
He was never the same. He’d looked at death and seen that it would not take him. I thought it would make him bold … inventive—But he grew jaded instead. The game was over before it fairly began.
No one in Sanctuary guessed that Tempus was a changed man, a hollow minion. Dizzying scenes of carnage and miscalculation passed before Cauvin’s eyes. Except for one, they were no different than the earlier visions. And that one vision, which lingered in Cauvin’s mind’s eye long after Vashanka had moved to other memories, revealed not Tempus, but merely a man known to him, a man who’d stumbled into the power of a witch who was more raven than woman.
The witch had staked the man flat over a hole in the ground. She commanded her servants to start a greenwood fire, then bid them fan the smoke underground. Not even a god could forget the screams as a badger clawed its escape through the man’s gut.
The omens changed. Vashanka conceded. Doom could have been seen, perhaps; I was distracted.
Cauvin saw a woman—a goddess, perhaps—with snakes draped around her body and the same staring eyes Cauvin had seen on Captain Sinjon’s face in the Broken Mast. The snake-y woman did more than distract Vashanka, she destroyed Him and Sanctuary with Him. Tempus and the Torch worked together—a froggin’ odd and frightening pair they made—to pull their god out of the snake woman’s embrace, but failed.
Darkness clouded Vashanka’s vision. The raven witch brought her war with all things Imperial and Tempus Thales in particular to Sanctuary. Gangs, not armies, waged nasty war in every quarter, even on Pyrtanis Street, where Cauvin glimpsed the mansion that meant so much to Mina and was now the stoneyard. He watched in astonishment as dead men and women were raised by a handful of rival witches and turned loose to ravage the city. Cauvin knew he looked down upon the dead because he saw the spread-eagled man moving among them, a froggin’ badger-sized hole, raw but not bleeding, right through his gut.
Do not blame Me. Was the storm-god sulking? Embarrassed? Ashamed? They blamed Me. Blasted My temple. Broke My minion and My priest. I had done nothing Savankala had not done a hundred times before and Ils, a thousand. If the dead did not stay dead, why blame Me? The dead were never My concern. Great Father Ils of the Ilsigi claimed the city. Its dead belonged to Him, too. His problem, not Mine. He solved it by banishing Me … Me! Ils thought to banish war; He banished victory instead. Did he think His gray daughter; Sivini, could grant Him victory?” Vashanka answered His own question