Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [12]
Something. There must be something, some loose end I can trace to its source. If it’s not in his clothes, then where? The other stranger, the silhouette running into Ils’s ruined temple? The rooster’s crowing—a bird or a signal? Had he been betrayed—by the Serripines? Atredan hadn’t wanted to come this way. Could that have been pretense? Was the youth that good an actor?
Molin was returning to Atredan’s corpse when a bolt of memory scattered his thoughts—“Strangle spoke the truth.”
Strangle. A red-handed priest calling himself Strangle. Or herself.
Dyareela was a goddess with unusual attributes and appetites and, though every image Molin had seen portrayed Dyareela as a woman with crimson lips and breasts, it was said that She was hermaphrodite beneath Her skirts. The Irrune had found muralpainted rooms in the liberated palace that Molin could not recall without breaking into a cold sweat. It had taken more than sermons or knives to turn boys and girls into remorseless killers.
By the time the Irrune finished cleansing both the palace and the defiled temples, they’d killed or captured more than three hundred red-handed veterans of Dyareela’s cult. The people of Sanctuary had cornered forty or fifty more. No one could say for certain; the tattooed bodies had been in pieces when the Irrune collected them. A few more Dyareelans had turned up in alleys and sewers—suicides, mostly—but the last four years had gone by without so much as a red-handed rumor, and Molin had begun to relax.
Never again.
Never as long as he lived—which didn’t allow much time.
Molin knelt uncomfortably beside the red-handed corpse. He pressed his staff across its chest. He’d pay—surely he would pay a high price for indulging in witchcraft twice before the setting of the moon, but it would be worth it, if he could lure Strangle into the light.
The theory was simple—slip into another mind, ransack its memories for a particular face, a particular name; then call that person and wait for him—or her—to appear. In the north, among his mother’s people, witchblooded children learned the trick early, but Molin Torchholder had come into his talent late and without a mentor. The theory was all he knew, and a dead man’s mind was a bleak midnight sinking toward oblivion.
Once, Molin thought he’d captured the prize—a gaunt face, scared and malefic; stained hands with mutilated fingers. It was accounted an honor among the Bloody Hands to lop off a knuckle or two in the goddess’s honor. He whispered the name—Strangle—and felt a tug, as if from the far end of a long, slack, rope.
Satisfaction proved Molin’s undoing. One heartbeat he was the fisherman hauling in his catch; the next he was the fish. The fish got lucky. It threw the hook and swam free.
Molin awoke with his forehead resting against the dead man’s chest. He was chilled to the bone and stiff to the point of paralysis. Tears trickled from his eyes as he straightened his neck—
The moon had set. The street was dark, but in the east, the stars had begun to fade. He’d been kneeling on the stones for the better part of the night. It was a miracle—a sign, perhaps, that Vashanka had not completely forgotten His old priest—that he had survived the night.
Then Molin tried to stand. Something was wrong with his hands. He could feel the staff against his palms but his fingers would not grip it strongly enough to lever him up. He attempted to straighten his spine and the pain of a lifetime lanced through his right hip. Moaning softly, Molin collapsed. When he’d found the strength to try again, the sky was bright enough for shadows.
Molin reached for his staff and stopped short. His hands … his hands were not his hands. Yes, he was an old man with blotched, crinkled skin, but the hands that moved, grudgingly, according to his will were bone and gristle wrapped in parchment.
The price, Molin thought in horror. Witchcraft always extracted a price, and foolish, clumsy witchcraft exacted the highest price of all. His heart raced, or it tried. He had been old, now he was decrepit, too,