Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [128]
Half a lifetime later and approaching his own death, Molin still winced when he recalled Tasfalen’s fate. The man had wound up an unwelcome guest in his own body after a witch—Roxanne, the witch of the north, by some reckoning, and quite possibly one of Molin’s unacknowledged aunts or cousins—claimed it for herself. It had taken a handful of magicians, an equal number of gods, and more mortal lives than Molin cared to recall to ward what remained of Tasfalen’s body and Roxanne’s mind inside the walls of Tasfalen’s house not far from Bec’s stoneyard home on Pyrtanis Street.
Twice a month—new moon and full—Molin had inspected the wards himself, visiting that near-deserted neighborhood where wisps of angry, blue light sometimes flickered in the gaping windows. Alone, he nursed them through Sanctuary’s first great fire and, a few years after that, the second and third. When glints of rotten green began to seep through the roof tiles, Molin donned a blindfold and paid a visit to the basilisk-guarded home of Tasfalen’s erstwhile neighbor, Enas Yorl.
Yorl had no need of the gold which, even then, Molin had accumulated in such embarrassing quantities. All the shape-shifting mage wanted was death. On his best day and with the might of his god behind him, Molin was no match for Enas Yorl’s curse, but the decaying wards were another matter—At least that had been Molin’s argument and there was a chance—an outside chance—that he was correct.
When next the moon was dark, Molin and the dregs of Sanctuary’s mageguild witnessed Enas Yorl enter the very haunted home of Tasfalen Lancothis. The mage did not come out again, but some days later Tasfalen’s house crumbled into a layer of dust no thicker than a baby’s knuckle. A few nights later Yorl’s forbidding home disappeared as well, leaving not even a layer of dust behind.
For years, Molin allowed himself to believe that Yorl’s dearest wish had been granted. Certainly the mage never again proclaimed his presence in Sanctuary—nor anywhere else that Molin had determined—but a man who rarely looked the same two days running could hide in plain sight more readily than most. There’d been times when a message that crackled with Yorl’s bitterly dry wit would reach Molin’s ears. He suspected—but would never prove, not with the time that remained—that the shape-shifter had been transformed by what he’d found inside Tasfalen’s home, that he had transcended his curse, but that when confronted with the choice of death and freedom or the curse of endless life in Sanctuary, Yorl had chosen Sanctuary.
It was a choice Molin Torchholder could at last understand—a choice he might make himself, if it came to him on the hard bricks of High Harbor View. He loathed Sanctuary—the city was beneath him in every respect, yet there was no denying that he’d lived a better life in Sanctuary than he would have lived in Ranke. Not an easier or more comfortable life, but a life that made a greater difference.
Sometimes it took the worst to bring out the best … More often there were no such fortuitous symmetries, and the worst was best forgotten.
Of all the memories of Sanctuary Molin had striven to forget, none was more inglorious than the fate of his wife. Oh, he’d counted himself in the ranks of the most fortunate when, as a young hero freshly returned from the northern campaigns, his superior in Vashanka’s hierarchy had suggested that he pay court to one of his own cousins: Rosanda, the youngest of Lord Uralde’s four daughters, the eldest of which was the emperor’s much-beloved second wife and mother of Prince Kadakithis.
Lord Uralde had resisted the notion. Molin’s heroics notwithstanding, his god was a rapist and his mother had been a temple slave and a foreigner, to boot. A less determined man might have folded his tent, but determination had been Molin’s strongest armor, his sharpest weapon … plus he’d been utterly beguiled by Rosanda’s perfection. Her eyes were brightest amber, hair was the color of sunrise gold, her laughter could teach the birds to sing, and if her wit was limited to worshiping the men