Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [105]
Cauvin expected the weapon to pull his arm down the way a mallet did, but the sword’s weight was in its hilt, not its tip and it was pleasantly light in his grasp. Length, of course, exaggerated his movements: a wrist flick arched the tip from one end of the weapons table to the other. He flicked it again and sensed the weapon’s power. If he swung it the way he swung his mallet—especially if he cramped both hands onto the hilt to put all his strength into the effort—the Torch’s head would fly for yards before it landed.
At the Lucky Well, Bilibot said a man’s eyes went on seeing a while. Cauvin knew better than to believe a froggin’ word Pillbox said, but just this once he hoped the old sot was right, and the Torch got to see his body standing headless before it fell.
He took a practice stroke, a double-handed swing that started above his right shoulder and ended a heartbeat after the green sword smashed into the sheaf of upright swords. The sheep-shite collision raised a racket that could be heard in the middle of next week and brought a burning flush to Cauvin’s face. He dropped the sword. It bounced tip first, then hilt, then tip again against the stone floor. The chamber froggin’ rang like the inside of a great bell.
Cauvin clapped his hands over his ears and dropped to his knees, wishing that the froggin’ ground would open up to swallow him and praying that no lingering god or ghost would grant his sheep-shite wish. He wrestled with the fallen swords. There had to be some froggin’ trick to leaning them together but Cauvin hadn’t a froggin’ clue what it might be. After several failures he spread the weapons neatly on the table. Then he reached for the green-steel sword, dreading the damage he’d probably done to the weapon. It wasn’t a fancy sword—no froggin’ gemstones to knock loose or golden knotwork to untie—and the blade was neither nicked nor bent. Cauvin returned the weapon to its lacquered stand.
With his fists braced on the table and his head hanging low, he thought about the change three days and one dying old man had made to his life. Maybe he’d seen a god and a ghost—or maybe not; he’d been spelled by froggin’ sorcery. Nothing but sorcery could have made him handle the froggin’ things in this chamber. Bec would have mauled every weapon, every piece of armor, but not him, not the sheep-shite stone-smasher.
He knew better. He should have, anyway.
Cauvin drew a stuttering breath and raised his head. There was a shield propped against the wall behind the table. No, not a shield, merely a shield-shaped slab of wood with a painting of a one-horned beast that could only be a froggin’ unicorn caught in a froggin’ vulgar—and a froggin’ impossible for a four-legged animal—act of self-gratification.
Swords, masks, and a suit of armor fit for a god’s minion stored in the same froggin’ room as a signboard from some long-gone ancestor of the Vulgar Unicorn. Cauvin had to laugh: the great Lord Torchholder’s treasures hidden in a tavern’s cellar—and not any tavern, but the Vulgar Unicorn! Froggin’ sure, Grabar said the tavern had burnt twice in his lifetime; Cauvin hadn’t figured that meant it had moved as well. Buildings burnt and buildings got rebuilt in the same place because the land was still there and, usually, so were the froggin’ walls.
Cauvin wondered if the Torch even knew he’d stashed his froggin’ treasures in the old Unicorn’s cellar—it was hard to imagine a priest, for gods’ sakes, walking through a door with that signboard hanging over it. But if there was one thing Cauvin had learned in the past three days, it was that Molin Torchholder was no ordinary priest.