Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [158]
Cauvin hadn’t heard the stories of dead men walking the streets of froggin’ Sanctuary until after Grabar brought him home to Pyrtanis Street. Old Bilibot had cornered Cauvin outside the Lucky Well and told him, with breath so foul it had turned his stomach— that neither the Hand nor the Troubles were the worst Sanctuary had endured. The worst—if a man were sheep-shite foolish enough to believe Bilibot—had been the witches and hazard-mages who’d invaded the town during the northern wars and the living-dead corpses they’d raised. The living dead had been men, mostly, but some women and a few animals, too—their death wounds gaping for all to see and their minds so frogged they didn’t remember dying.
Even fresh out of the froggin’ palace, Cauvin wasn’t sheep-shite stupid enough to take Bilibot’s word for anything. He’d asked his new foster father if the sot’s memory was as rotten as his breath.
Grabar had replied that though he’d been born after the witches and hazards left Sanctuary, he’d grown up with a neighbor man who claimed he’d been dead once—
“He had an eye as white as the moon but, other than that, there weren’t no differences from other men that I saw—’til he slipped on the Wideway and got himself crushed beneath an oxcart. Swelled up like the pox straightaway, then burst and shriveled, all before they could get the cart off him. Weren’t nothing left ’cept the bones they took to his widow. Didn’t see it myself, mind you—I weren’t no older than Bec when it happened—but that’s what I heard. Saw one of his rib bones, though, years later—they said was his bone—black as night and all shiny, like it had been glazed and baked in a potter’s kiln. Some say that’s the witches’ mark, but he wasn’t no witch, so maybe the old hags put it on him, if they’d raised him—
“Or maybe not. His widow, she was young and Sumese. Could be she did him in. She sold his tools for cheap soon enough and took off with a sea captain not long after.”
The Sumese were renowned for treachery … and poisons. It was easier to believe an unhappy wife had gotten away with murder than it was to accept walking corpses. Cauvin had taken the easy way and never given the matter another serious thought, until he read those words on the warehouse lintel. According to Bilibot, the Shambles had gotten its name from the corpses wandering its streets.
If that, the most unbelievable of the old sot’s tales were true, could the rest still be lies? Had there ever been a crab the size of a man terrorizing the harbor? A pillar of fire reaching up to the stars? A horned beast lurking in the alleys, skewering drunks in the Maze?
Had the mystery of words and reading ever been so widespread that ordinary neighbors in an ordinary quarter of Sanctuary had not only protected their homes with written charms, but assumed the dead could read them?
Before Cauvin could answer any of his private questions, his thoughts—and the thoughts of those near him on Shadow Street—were shattered by a woman’s scream. Cauvin’s ears placed the sound at his back and well above his head. He’d be looking at second-story windows once he’d turned himself around, but while he spun, his gaze stayed low, on the crowded street, because bad things happened in Sanctuary when people got distracted.
At the corner of Cauvin’s vision two men collided. One continued to run away from the scream, which had not been repeated. The other became a sudden statue, clutching its tunic. Letters and words were new to Cauvin, but he’d been reading the language of Sanctuary’s streets since he’d learned to walk. A crime had been committed: a theft of property or possibly life, and the thief was getting