Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [131]
Children needed the taste of a defeat or two if they were to mature into useful citizens of the Empire. Chenaya had grown bored with winning bloodless games while yet a child and picked up steel instead. If Tempus, Vashanka’s minion, was the ultimate Rankan warrior, then Chenaya, Savankala’s misbegotten daughter, longed to be the Empire’s ultimate gladiator.
Chenaya had help in that quest. Her father had a passion for vicarious combat and the wealth to indulge it. He’d endowed one of the most successful gladiatorial gymnasiums in the Empire and, with her father’s blithe indulgence, Chenaya had started her training while still a child. Thanks in no small measure to Savankala’s blessing, she was as good with steel as she thought she was. Another thing Molin wouldn’t live to understand was why those, like Tempus and Chenaya, to whom the gods had granted a measure of immortality, felt the burning need to test that gift time and time again.
When Lowan Vigeles relocated to Sanctuary, he brought his gymnasium with him. Just what the city had needed: another cadre of hotheaded fighters!
Chenaya’s attitude and exploits had inspired her aunt Rosanda to take up swordwork—Molin had imagined why, though he’d never taken the threat seriously. Prince Kadakithis’s estranged wife, Daphne, who they’d all believed had died in an unfortunate caravan raid on her way from Sanctuary to the capital, was another matter. Obviously, Daphne hadn’t died, and by the time Chenaya rescued her from slavery, the traumatized woman harbored an understandable grudge against the prince and his advisors, who had never, it was true, searched for her. Worse, during her absence—when he’d believed himself a widower—Kadakithis had made an alliance a few steps short of marriage with the exiled queen of Sanctuary’s fish-eyed invaders.
If Molin’s northern features had made him a mongrel in aristocratic Rankan eyes, what must Daphne have seen when she first beheld the Beysa Shupansea with her bared and painted breasts and her wide, staring eyes?
Indulged utterly by Lowan Vigeles, Chenaya and her spearcarriers, Rosanda and Daphne, pursued their dreams of redress and retribution. Of the three, only Chenaya understood the consequences, but obscenely blessed as she was by Savankala, Chenaya didn’t need to worry about consequences.
Chenaya collected men—not that she’d ever have admitted it. She especially collected men who had no interest in women, because they spared her any need to consider the absurdity of the path she’d chosen for herself. She collected enemies, too, in a far more haphazard way and very nearly accomplished the impossible: uniting all Sanctuary’s irreconcilable rivals in common cause against her. The need to get the self-styled Daughter of the Sun out of Sanctuary before she brought the wrath of every god in creation down around their heads had been one of the few things Molin and Tempus had agreed upon without negotiation.
If only they’d had the ear of a god worthy of their combined prayers …
If only Vashanka hadn’t sunk into obsession with the Beysib mother-goddess, so many things might have turned out different. No soldiers, sorcerers, or Bloody Hands of Dyareela fighting their private battles on Sanctuary’s streets. The city might have made something of itself. Molin might have died in his prime rather than on a crumbling window ledge overlooking equally crumbling walls. So many things that might have been, but one thing was certain—
When Chenaya’s massed enemies finally paid a call at Land’s End, it had been Rosanda who had paid the price. Kama swore that neither she nor anyone else of the Third Commando had been along for the raid that night, and Molin chose to believe her, even though the men they did catch and charge with the crime—a home-bred gang that didn’t know the difference between freedom and anarchy—owed their tactics and weapons if not their viciousness to the Third in general and Kama in particular.
It was Kama’s opinion—voiced