Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [214]
The rousting could have been worse. Cauvin’s shirt had escaped the worst of the spilled wine, and his black-wool cloak was finer than the officer’s. He wasn’t risking a dungeon cell, but with every question, Leorin’s torch got smaller. Finally, Cauvin said he was trying to find his way to the Inn of Six Ravens. The officer gave him directions—accurate directions—and insisted he carry a torch.
Cauvin accepted the torch; the officer wouldn’t take no for an answer. He followed directions, too, striding down the Processional until he could get onto the side streets and hurry back to the Walk.
“Help me,” Cauvin prayed to Shalpa, for Bec’s sake, not his own. “This could be my only chance. Don’t let me lose her.”
He cast the same prayer toward Savankala, because Bec was an Imperial citizen, then added Vashanka to his litany. One of the gods must have been listening. Cauvin was back on the Walk in time to see Leorin take her torch onto the Promise of Heaven.
Frog all, she was headed for the Hill! The Hand was holed up on the Hill! That messenger boy had been onto something after all. Cauvin ground his torch into the mud-choked ditch on the verge and headed onto the Promise, where he and Leorin were not alone.
Cauvin didn’t remember Sanctuary before the Hand, but from everything he’d been told, the Promise of Heaven had once been a mortal paradise. No longer. The Promise he knew belonged to the sorriest of Sanctuary’s denizens: women who’d lost their beauty, men who’d lost their strength. They looked for each other and for oblivion.
“Kleetel?” a bush called out as Cauvin approached.
He couldn’t hear if voice came from a man or a woman, a seller or a buyer. Kleetel, the poor man’s krrf, rotted the guts and throats of those who chewed its bitter, gummy leaves. Addicts lost their teeth and eventually bled to death from the inside out. But kleetel was cheap—one padpol for a bundle of leaves as thick as a man’s hand—or free to those who braved the brackish Swamp of Night Secrets, where the vine grew wild. By decree, kleetel was as illegal in Arizak’s Sanctuary as it had been in the Bloody Mother’s, but people searching for oblivion didn’t care about laws. When Cauvin mistakenly took a deep breath, his lungs filled with the stench of vomit and kleetel.
He pinched his nose and followed Leorin. Convinced that she was headed for the Hill, Cauvin would have lost her when she veered toward the marble walls of what had once been the whitewalled temple of Ils. But Leorin’s golden hair was unmistakable by torchlight.
She got cautious as she neared the ruins. Cauvin watched her pause several times. She seemed to be calling something, a password or a name; he was too far back to hear clearly. Each time, Cauvin expected a shadow to emerge out of the night. But none did, and, after a final hesitation, Leorin ran up the weedy steps. Her torch cast wild shadows on the inner walls as she ran into the temple’s depths.
Coincidence, Cauvin told himself. Froggin’ coincidence had returned him to the very place where he’d found the Torch. And maybe it was, but Cauvin stuck to the shadows, slipping into the temple from the side and staying far from the light until it flickered and vanished. Suddenly, Cauvin was blind and forced to shuffle through the rubble. He searched for the hole into which Leorin had disappeared and hoped not to fall into it by mistake.
Cauvin found what he was looking for in a recess made by a fallen column and a corner of the temple’s rear wall. There was a shoulder-wide gap into the paving stones and a rope ladder dangling into the pit below. The rope felt new, but the anchoring rings were rusted. The broken marble at the pit’s edge was damp and flaky when Cauvin put his weight against it. The whole area—the column, the walls, the floor, the pit, and the tunnel presumably at its bottom—had been rotted by rain and seepage. A few minutes