Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [36]
Moments of flames, screams, and sheer horror exploded in Cauvin’s mind when he thought of the last time he’d seen his mother, like bumping a sore he’d had so long he’d forgotten it was there, forgotten how froggin’ much it could still hurt. She’d been stripped of her clothes and tied to a post on the Promise of Heaven before the Hand bled her out by stripping away her skin—
Cauvin hadn’t loved his mother, not the way Bec loved Mina—all trust and devotion. She hadn’t loved him, either, but it could have been froggin’ worse. Everything except the pits could have been froggin’ worse. He didn’t truly remember her death. Just as the Hand put their knives to her face, some man Cauvin had never seen before spun him around and conked him cold. When he thought about her dying, Cauvin filled in the empty moments with the sights and sounds of the uncounted sacrifices he witnessed later.
When Cauvin had come back to consciousness, he’d been in a dark, sweat-smelling room with a naked, snoring man pressed up against him. He had lit out of there like a greased cat. He knew what went on in rooms like that. Whenever she got angry with him, Cauvin’s mother had threatened to sell him to dark, sweaty men who collected unruly, sheep-shite boys. He’d run to the Maze …
After all the years, Cauvin still couldn’t decide if he’d made the biggest mistake of his sheep-shite life that night. Not that it mattered. The Hand followed him into the Maze. They caught him in an alley more than a month—caught Leorin, too—less than a year after they’d caught his mother. The years of his childhood were blurred in Cauvin’s head—he couldn’t have been more than eight when they’d ended.
A whole froggin’ lifetime had passed since then, and the Maze changed every storm or season. Unless he were there every day, a man stuck to the Serpentine, the oldest and widest of the quarter’s streets.
Cauvin passed a knot of Irrune betting shells-and-nuts with a smooth-talking Mazer. Waste of time on both sides: the Maze-rat wouldn’t let the Irrune win; the Irrune wouldn’t pay if they lost. In the right-side shadows, someone puked his guts. Another sheep-shite drunk was doing the same across the Unicorn’s threshold. Cauvin stepped over the mess.
Inside, the Unicorn was brighter than the Broken Mast had been and untainted by the sweet-rotting tang of krrf. Newcomers—including Cauvin when he’d begun meeting Leorin here—expected a darker, far-more-menacing lair but, as Leorin had explained, the Unicorn wasn’t a place where solitary patrons came to swill themselves into a stupor. Drunks were rare, brawls, rarer, because the Vulgar Unicorn truly was a covered market where services were bought and sold, no different than the stone in Grabar’s froggin’ yard.
Most of the light came from an old wheel—once part of a wagon or a froggin’ ship, Cauvin couldn’t tell which through the soot—suspended from the massive center beam. The wheel supported a half score of oil lamps, each of them hooded with polished copper to cast the light downward. The rest of the light came from clay lamps centered on most tables.
If he wanted to, a man could find a shadow deep enough to hide him and a few friends in the corners or beneath the stairs, but most patrons preferred to keep an eye on their closest drinking companions. Or, they saw no reason to pay extra for shadows. Whoever owned the Unicorn these days—and it wasn’t the lean, surly Stick who minded the coin box whenever Cauvin dropped in—had decreed that the drinks cost more at the tucked-away tables. Never one to pay a padpol more than necessary, Cauvin found himself a stool at one of the long tables beneath the wheel. The Torch’s box pinched Cauvin’s gut when he leaned forward. He set it, still wrapped in Sinjon’s ratty cloth, on the table between his elbows.
His nearest neighbor was an arm’s length away: a greasy-haired fellow who drank with his eyes closed. Farther along on the other side, a quartet of men younger than Cauvin were arguing about the Dragon,