Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [55]
“Ah—” Molin began triumphantly, “The Bloody Bitch, the Mother—”
Illyra’s eyes and mouth widened. “My lord!” she pled. “Do not speak further, lest your voice be heard.”
Courteously, Molin complied, though he was confident that he’d linked Illyra’s Ancient One with Dyareela, a cesspool goddess with a reputation for savagery and androgyny. Dyareela was rightly outlawed throughout the civilized world, though Her cult had proved stubbornly impossible to eradicate. Molin could well imagine that respectable folk—and artisans like the smith and his wife were among those folk most concerned with respectability—would go out of their way not to speak Dyareela’s name, but She was not a particularly ancient goddess, nor had Molin ever linked Her name for good or evil to the S’danzo.
“Why the Ancient One?” he asked, all diplomatic innocence and curiosity.
Illyra explained, “The S’danzo were not always wanderers living in tents and wagon, my lord. Once they had homes like any other people until the Ancient One came to their lands. She offered many fine things if the S’danzo would worship only Her. Some of the S’danzo—the menfolk—were tempted, but the women used their gift of timeless sight to foresee that the Ancient One would steal their eyes to work great horror upon the innocent. There was much argument between husbands and wives, but the women prevailed. They preserved their vision and the world, but they paid a price: leaving their homes because the Ancient One had become their eternal enemy.
“Even since, the S’danzo have used their sight to stay free of the Ancient One. When Her shadow falls across a particular time or place, they pack their wagons and move on. The Ancient One’s shadow has fallen on Sanctuary.”
Molin nodded. He didn’t debate mythology with true believers, though he did observe, “You’re still here, Illyra. You didn’t go with the others. What did you see?”
The S’danzo touched the deck of cards that were never far from her hands. Reversed, they were ordinary rectangles of painted paper, but faceup, that was another matter. With his own eyes Molin had watched the images change from one of Illyra’s readings to the next.
“I saw nothing, Lord Torchholder. This dreamer was not one of those who dreamt the dream. The warning did not come to me. The S’danzo have no homes; they make none, so, when the time comes, they can leave without hesitation or regret. I have a home—here, in Sanctuary, with a husband and children. I am not S’danzo, not when it matters.”
Molin had misunderstood Illyra that afternoon, or perhaps the seeress, herself, had misunderstood. She was S’danzo, when it mattered, although two years had passed by then.
There’d been drought the previous summer, and the little rain they’d gotten had fallen at the wrong time. The grain harvest was meager. Come autumn, the remains of Sanctuary’s aristocracy sent envoys to the man who, that year, called himself the Emperor of the Rankan Empire while a deputation of Ils-worshiping priests and peers offered their city to the Ilsigi king in exchange for food.
The Rankan emperor sent Sanctuary’s envoys away without hearing their pleas. The Ilsigi king wanted no part of a legendarily troublesome city; not when his own granaries were less than half-full.
By Moruthus, the month of midwinter, death stalked Sanctuary’s streets.
The new plague struck fast, taking forms no healer had seen before and which none could cure. Men who were healthy and working in the morning fell into screaming agony by dusk and were dead by midnight. Their bodies bloated almost beyond recognition. Corpses turned black within hours and were apt to burst, leaking bile and contagion before the takers came to collect them.
Someone, somewhere in Sanctuary bitterly dubbed this new nightmare the “Quickening”; the name stuck.
With physicians helpless and charnel fires belching putrid smoke by day and night, the living began to whisper that the Quickening was not a disease at all but a curse sent by anonymous gods. They turned to Sanctuary’s varied temples for absolution