Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [103]
At last Cauvin’s gaze fell upon the object he’d come to retrieve. On the floor like he was and out of sight near the corner, the Torch had collected the blue leather masks that protected the wearers with a fringe of fake feathers and his nose with a sharp, downturned beak.
Cauvin crawled to the heap, reached out, then pulled his hand back before his fingers met the leather. First the brick in the atrium, next the armor. Was he froggin’ foolish enough to touch something else in this hole?
He was, because the mask was what he’d come for. It was stiff, yet supple, in his grasp, like the best boot leather, the kind no one on Pyrtanis Street could afford. One eyehole was damaged; a crusty stain thickened the inside leather and coarsened its texture. As one of the thongs that would have held in place around its wearer’s head fell apart in his hands, Cauvin realized it had been removed from the corpse of a man who’d died from a head wound—decades, probably, before he’d been born.
“Too many men with froggin’ swords and grudges,” he whispered, fighting off another deluge of a god’s bitter memories. “Too many froggin’ rivals who’d rather fight one another than a common foe. They pissed it away.”
Sadness and regret filled the chamber. Cauvin breathed it in and made it his own. Retrieving an undamaged mask from the pile, he held it to his face and braced himself for an onslaught of visions in blue.
There was nothing but a loss of sidewise vision. The sheep-shite men who’d worn the blue masks couldn’t see what was coming toward them, unless it came from straight ahead—unless it was froggin’ exactly what they were expecting. If this was the sort of thing the Torch’s armsmaster relied upon, he’d say no to the lessons. Frog all—the Hand had taught him better than that: You were only as good as what your eyes and ears revealed.
As he reached to untie the mask’s thongs, Cauvin got his vision, not as dramatic as the visions he’d gotten from Vashanka, but froggin’ powerful all the same. The men—and women—who’d worn these masks were brawlers, not warriors like those who’d worn the room’s armor. They were like the Hand who’d taught Cauvin to fight, and they’d worn masks for the same reason the Hand wrapped their heads in red silk—not to protect their faces, but to hide them. The Hawkmasks collected debts and marketed slaves on behalf of their gang’s leader, a man named …
The name hovered just out of reach in the shadows, then it strode forward: a bull-necked man of a ghost with a blue mask across his face and skin as dark as the shadow behind him. Cauvin lowered his borrowed mask. The ghost remained. It wasn’t merely that the ghost’s skin was a dark, shiny brown—that could have been a mark of death—everything about him was different: the jut of his nose and chin, the angle of his eyes, the shape of his mouth.
“Spare me your judgments,” the ghost said with a voice that was deeper than Vashanka’s and almost as weary. “Men have bought and sold one another since men began. It’s an old business, and it will last as long as a few men are strong while the rest are weak. Ask a beggar which he would rather have: a bowl of food or his freedom, and you’ll get the same answer every time. Strong men will not protect the weak unless they are property.”
“I’d choose freedom,” Cauvin responded without hesitation.
The ghost’s throaty laughter echoed off the walls. “Then you’ve never been a beggar.”
No, Cauvin had been a thief, and a sheep-shite unlucky one at that. He hadn’t been a slave, either, not officially. The Hand didn’t keep slaves; slavery was against the froggin