Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [127]
For that matter, neither had Molin Torchholder, which was why he found himself on a ruined window ledge, tended by other men’s sons.
That was never the fate of Shkeedur sha-Mizle who scuttled through Molin’s memory, following his High Harbor View host, whose name remained elusive. Stop a Rankan nobleman, ask him to describe his Ilsigi counterpart, and he’d describe Shkeedur sha-Mizle: soft of flesh and discipline, superstitious, but faithless; given to worry, but untrustworthy; blessed with all the wits of a rabbit and the same strategy for survival: When sha-Mizle died his bedchamber had been too small to contain his numerous children. By reliable count, there’d been twenty; twice that many, if one counted the sons and daughters sha-Mizle had gotten on his slaves.
The sons had kept up their father’s traditions, and so, on a smaller scale, had the daughters. Another clan might have suffered for carving up the patrimony into so many pieces, but the sha-Mizle estate straddled the Red Foal River at its most fertile point. Then the great drought of ’82 turned the river into a stream of dust and the lesser branches of the clan scattered on the dry wind. Those who’d remained guessed wrong when the Dyareelans seized the town. No few ended their days on the bloody sands of the palace courtyard, and their fertile estate lay abandoned until Lord Serripines plowed it into Land’s End.
Rabbits were timid, rabbits ran, and at the end of the day, rabbits were harder to get rid of than rats. Surely, there must be a few of Shkeedur sha-Mizle’s great-grandchildren tucked away in Sanctuary.
In Sanctuary, Wrigglie rabbits chronically outnumbered the Rankans. Despite the efforts of Bec’s mother, Rankene was a dying language on the city’s streets. The very name was disappearing; they were Imperials now, not Rankans. Molin asked himself when that had happened and realized the change had probably begun within months of the Imperial takeover. Change a few sounds and the word—in Ilsigi—implied irregularities in both parentage and partnership.
Wrigglie or perverse-bastard Imperial—what did it matter when they were all trapped in Sanctuary?
With his eyes still closed, Molin looked up and recognized a man he hadn’t seen in over thirty years, hadn’t thought of in at least twenty. When he couldn’t recall the name, the shade reintroduced himself—
“Lan-co-this-s-s, Tasfalen Lancothis.”
Molin’s eyes popped open and he reached for his staff. Straining his weakened senses, he took the measure of his surroundings: a warming day, a bald sky, a boy making tea, a leg that was deadnumb from the hip down, but nothing of Rankan nobleman, Tasfalen Lancothis, though he, too, frequented High Harbor View.
Molin loosed a sigh and let his eyes fall shut again. Before the Servants of Dyareela brought terror to Sanctuary, there’d been witches—his mother’s people, though the Nisi weren’t the only ones wreaking chaos and living death on the city.
For a heartbeat Molin imagined Sanctuary if the Servants of Dyareela and the witches had been in town at the same time. Between the Hands’ preferred methods of execution and the witches’ love of corpses … He shook the image of flayed and charred drunks ordering ale in the Vulgar Unicorn from his mind and concentrated on Tasfalen Lancothis instead.
A heavy-lidded man—his eyes were ever-shadowed, his moods impossible to gauge—and inclined to indulgence, particularly in the bedroom, Tasfalen Lancothis had the wealth, the connections, and even the wits to escape Sanctuary. Molin had never been able to determine why he remained in residence, except that his roots were sunk deep. The few times they’d talked—the few times when Lancothis hadn’t been drunk on wine or in the grip of some other drug—Lancothis had hinted about loves gone awry in the capital. If true, Lancothis wouldn’t have been the first man to ruin his life for a woman, but, surely, few men born since the dawn of time had ruined it so completely.