Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [207]
Of course, sometimes scrabbling alone was enough to make a tile crack and shed a froggin’ chunk of clay. Or maybe Cauvin had just been so intent on getting his tile out—so afraid of falling—that he hadn’t heard Tashos shout his warning. He’d never know. What Cauvin knew—what he remembered—was that something sharp and heavy had struck his anchoring arm. He lost his grip, was sliding toward the edge, maybe screaming, maybe praying, his fingers desperately seeking something to cling to.
Tashos slid by. Tashos was screaming: “Help me! Stop me! Cauvin!” —For a heartbeat, the boy hung from the brink, then the edge tiles broke from the strain, and he was gone. Cauvin heard a thud.
He didn’t fall. His fingers had latched around the lip of a tile that held. Cauvin didn’t think he’d ever make them move again, but the Hand had other ideas. He hadn’t finished replacing the broken tile that he’d found and, by the Mother Herself, there were the four tiles Tashos had broken in his fall. The Whip shouted up that Cauvin would fix those fast, if he knew what was good for him.
Cauvin knew.
“You’re sure you’re not fevered?” Soldt asked. “You’ve gone pale and broken a sweat.”
Cauvin’s arm hurt where Tashos’s tile had struck it years ago. He massaged the muscle, then looked at his fingers, half-expecting to see them slicked with blood. Froggin’ sure, there was none, but his fingers were trembling, and his heart was pounding in his gut, not behind his ribs. “Let’s go. I can do this.”
With every step Cauvin remembered more. He might easily have been walking in two times: the present and his past. He’d dwelt in the pits for ten years, and it wasn’t as though someone had died every day. But that was the way his sheep-shite memory served it up, face after face, moment upon moment when life had stopped. Cauvin blamed the froggin’ Torch. He blamed him for singling him out and keeping him alive when he could have died with the other orphans. And he blamed him for reopening all wounds he’d thought were healed.
Cauvin fought his memories. He reminded himself that the only face he wanted to see, the only life he wished he could save was Bec’s. He concentrated on the present, on the horses, the stablers, the rich merchants in lush silk robes standing on the shaded porch outside the Exchange. No one had worn silken robes while the Hand ruled Sanctuary. If there was wealth in Sanctuary, it belonged to the Bloody Mother, for Her glory, for Her return to the mortal world.
One particular silk robe caught Cauvin’s eye. It rippled with the colors of the rising sun. If Cauvin had favorite colors, they were the colors of sunrise: red becoming orange becoming gold. The merchant wearing the sunrise robe was talking to a younger man in the loose-fitting breeches and half-sleeved leather coat of the Irrune. When the Irrune gestured at the palace doors, Cauvin got a good look at his face and realized he was Naimun, the sour-looking youth he’d seen at the Torch’s funeral. Naimun laughed as he turned back to catch the merchant’s next words.
The merchant held Cauvin’s attention, too; and the longer he looked, the less he noticed the sunrise silk. Cauvin would swear he’d seen that face before, right here in the palace courtyard. But that couldn’t be—Hadn’t Leorin described in great detail how she’d gutted the Whip with his own knife on the road out of Sanctuary? And, even if Leorin had lied—which Cauvin knew wasn’t froggin’ unlikely—the merchant’s hands were paler than his face. The Whip’s hands had been stained scarlet, front, back, and halfway to his elbows.
No way the Whip could show his hands in Sanctuary. But—could two men share the same nose and chin, the same jabbing gestures as they spoke?
Naimun, son of