Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [160]
Then Cauvin spotted a banner tied to the side of a corner-front cooking oil stall. “Jaires,” it read—Wrigglie letters for a Wrigglie name—and “best quality” and “Dippin Lane.” He’d come this far; he took the chance of walking down what might be Dippin Lane. He hadn’t gone far when he saw a green-headed duck surrounded by rippling lines in faded paint on a signboard: the Paddling Duck tavern behind which lived a woman who could tell him the truth about Leorin.
Neither the potters nor the guard were likely to look for him—if they were looking for him at all—in a S’danzo’s sitting room.
“I’ve got a message for a woman, name of Elemi,” Cauvin said to the old woman sweeping the tavern’s steps. “I was told she lived around the Paddling Duck.”
She stared at Cauvin long enough that he’d begun silently cursing the Torch for sending him on another sheep-shite fool’s errand.
“There’s a woman above goes by that name. Around back. Take the stairs.” She shaped fingers into a crescent and pressed them against her temple, a warding against the evil eye. “Mind the dog.”
Cauvin minded. He avoided eye contact with the mastiff—larger and fiercer than the stoneyard’s dog—which growled ominously but let him climb the detached stairs. His butt scraped the roughplanked wall until he’d reached the narrow porch with a single door at its far end. One gentle tap on the wood, and a woman opened the door.
The S’danzo was roughly Cauvin’s age, dark-haired, thin, and sun-starved as though she rarely left her curtained chamber. Her clothes were drab, nothing like the legendary layers of color that came to Cauvin’s mind whenever he heard the word “S’danzo” spoken—but, then, the legendary S’danzo had vanished from Sanctuary long before he’d been born, vanished on their own or massacred by the Hand.
Not to contradict Soldt, at least not to his froggin’ face, but to Cauvin’s understanding, the reason there weren’t any S’danzo in Sanctuary had nothing to do with any curses laid on the S‘danzo or the city. Shite for sure, the fortune-tellers simply weren’t welcome. Thirty-odd years earlier, long before the Mother of Chaos stuck Her bloody Hand in Sanctuary, why hadn’t any of them warned their neighbors what was coming? Maybe they couldn’t have saved everyone or stopped anything, but a few families might have gotten away. Instead, the S’danzo had taken the cowards’ way, saving their own necks—most of them, anyway—leaving everyone else to suffer.
As men and women, most of Sanctuary would have lit out, same as the S’danzo, but as a community, the city had a long, unforgiving memory.
Elemi said, “I’ve been expecting a stranger since yesterday—you, I suppose.” She spoke Wrigglie, but not like someone born in Sanctuary.
Cauvin waited until she’d closed the door and bolted it before saying—“I’m not a stranger, Elemi. My name is—”
“I don’t want to know your name. It is enough that you know mine.”
The room was stifling, but it might have been a windy winter day on the wharf for all the warmth in Elemi’s voice. Cauvin removed the carved box from a sack he’d tied to his belt.
“I’ve brought you a gift.”
Elemi refused to take the box from Cauvin’s hands. Awkwardly, he put it down on a cloth-covered table. The S’danzo’s home got its light from a pair of oil lamps. Their flickering transformed the carved vines into writhing serpents. No wonder Elemi didn’t want to touch it; Cauvin didn’t either, once he’d set it down.
“It’s from the Torch—Lord Molin Torchholder. He asked me to give it to you.”
Beyond froggin’ doubt, Elemi recognized that name. With her arms behind her back, she retreated from her own table, watching the box as though it might burst into flames.
“I’m sorry,” Cauvin muttered, renewing his silent curses. “The old pud didn’t tell me anything, except where to find it—I dug it out of the froggin’ ground in the bazaar. And that I should give it to you. Sheep-shite fool that I am, I thought it would be something