Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [56]
Molin Torchholder put on the heavy Vashankan robes he had ignored for a decade. He chanted prayers of desperation, alone at first, then in alliance with other Imperial priests, and finally with the massed clergy of the city, be they Rankan, Ilsigi, or completely foreign. They even prayed to Mother Bey, the venomous goddess of the departed people of the sea.
And all their prayers were utterly without effect.
In many ways the Quickening was more a curse than a disease. It struck one street in one quarter, but not another. One house, but not its neighbors. One person, but not always his closest kin. Those who survived an initial brush with death learned not to count their fortunes: Like a marketplace thief, the Quickening returned to steal again and again.
The full moon of Moruthus shone over the trembling city when a small band of preachers appeared at the western gate. With white robes and red-stained hands, they proceeded from the bazaar to the wharves to the Processional, the palace, and the temple-ridden Promise of Heaven itself, warning one and all that judgment awaited Sanctuary. They called themselves the Servants, without saying whom or what they served.
People listened; they would have listened to anyone by then. Molin Torchholder worried. He had only his own memories to guide him—the annals of Vashanka had been lost when Ranke burnt—out it seemed to him that there was only one god beneath the sun—one goddess—who bid Her priests to stain their hands with crimson dye: the Bloody Bitch, Dyareela, Mother of Chaos.
The Red Mother’s cult was banned throughout the Empire, in the Ilsig Kingdom, and anywhere that men sought to hold themselves higher than beasts. Even in the north, among his mother’s people, the witches forbade the worship of Dyareela. Molin Torchholder had never encountered a chaos worshiper; he’d been taught the cult was a fraud and Dyareela’s so-called priests were never more than a criminal gang.
By dint of meditation, Molin recalled that the Dyareelan cult prophesied that the primal paradise would be reborn in the mortal world once everything raised by man and woman were destroyed. To hasten that rebirth, the Bloody Bitch’s priests practiced arson, murder, kidnapping, and—especially—deceit. He recalled, as well, his conversation with the seeress Illyra two years earlier after the S’danzo had disappeared.
If in those days of Moruthus Molin could have proved that the red-handed Servants were worshipers of the forbidden cult of Dyareela—if he’d summoned the city’s noblest and wealthiest residents to the Hall of Justice and told them what Illyra had told him about her Ancient One—who could guess how different these last two decades might have been? If Sanctuary’s peers had seen the danger as he saw it—as the S’danzo had foreseen it—might they not have helped him drive the Servants out of Sanctuary rather than invite them into their marble-walled homes?
But Molin had had only his suspicions, and in the bitterly cold waning days of Moruthus with the Quickening loose on the ice-slick streets of Sanctuary he kept his suspicions to himself because his gouty toe had swollen to the size of a pig’s bladder. The pain held him confined to a massive chair in his palace apartment, where he huddled beneath thick fur robes waiting for spring and for Hoxa to bring him another goblet of mulled wine. It was there beside a crackling fire that the city’s peers—its noble-blooded exiles from wherever and its boldest sea traders—trickled into his presence, each bearing a variation of the same message: The Servants had discovered the root of the Quickening. The S’danzo harbored a contagion in their godless, filthy souls, then they breathed that contagion into the faces of their enemies, causing them to die a Quickening death.
Summon the council, each whispering peer demanded, because with no prince of Ranke or Ilsig resident in Sanctuary, Molin Torchholder was all the government Sanctuary acknowledged. Send out guard, they urged, because Molin paid the city’s troops,