Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [126]
Thanks to its mongrel population, Sanctuary eagerly observed the festivals of the Rankan and Ilsigi gods, and a handful of other pantheons as well. The rabble would seize any opportunity to indulge their indolence. The nobility wasn’t much better. For them the festivals were an excuse to entertain—and observe—one another. For a hindmost city—the smallest of the Imperial cities—Sanctuary had been blessed—or cursed—with an abundance of aristocrats. No real mystery there—generations of kings and emperors had been exiling their malcontents to this armpit by the ocean.
A man of status and good conversation need not dine at home above one night in four.
Molin’s status and conversation in both Rankene and the Wrigglie dialect were beyond reproach, and the peace of his household had depended on his regular absences. Moreover, Kadakithis, who was every bit as clever as his half brother—the-emperor’s advisors had feared, ordered his own advisors to get to know the locals not in the palace, but in their own homes.
Now that he was thinking about it, Molin could see the face of the man who’d lived at High Harbor View. A dipsomaniac Wrigglie, wed to the daughter of a Rankan exiled in a prior reign. He still couldn’t remember the family’s name, but they were great entertainers. The various feasts and festivals of High Harbor View were firmly painted on Molin’s memory, not as individual events, but blended into one …
In the corner where the public and private rooms came together, Molin spotted a heavyset man, a Wrigglie by his swarthiness. His garments were the best the local cutters could concoct, silk brocades carefully fitted to his barrel chest and thick arms. Despite the cutters’ efforts, the Wrigglie seemed uncomfortable. His timing was off—his laughter a heartbeat late for the jest, his greeting a shade shy of sincere. Women avoided him entirely, and men did not linger in his company.
Molin had sought him out, plied him with the subtlest interrogations, and learned little more than his name: Lastel. He was a broker, a middleman, but he resisted Molin’s every effort to draw him into conversation that might reveal something of his character. Resisted, but did not completely evade. Morsel by morsel, Molin learned that Lastel worked the darker shadows. He’d begun to piece together a network of drugs, whores, gambling debts, and disappearances that centered, somehow, on that notorious tavern in Maze’s heart: the Vulgar Unicorn.
He’d never guessed—not until it was much too late for profit—that Lastel lived a second life as One-Thumb, the tavern’s owner, and a third as a silent partner in a Red Lanterns brothel. By then Lastel himself had vanished, only to reappear more than a year later, a cowed shadow of his former self.
Even Molin had pitied Lastel in his later years, sitting in a corner of his own tavern, talking to his wine. Lastel survived only because Sanctuary needed the Vulgar Unicorn. Where else could men—or women—go to conduct business that could be conducted nowhere else? And who else would continue to run the place, except One-Thumb, a man with three pasts and no future?
The last time Molin had seen One-Thumb—not long before the Servants of Dyareela shuttered each and every one of Sanctuary’s taverns—the man had been missing more than a single thumb. His eyes were white with cataracts, and, with each step, he dragged one leg behind the other. Perhaps one of the Unicorn’s wealthier patrons—of which there’d always been more than a handful—had sheltered One-Thumb through his last days. Molin