Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [6]
This year? Molin did the calculations. (Any priest worth his prayers knew the sky calendars as well as he knew the civil ones.) This year, the moon overhead this very night was the first full moon since autumn equinox had passed.
He begrudged the coincidence and the inconvenience, then, with a second thought, reconsidered the coincidence. The Irrune were as raw and rowdy a nation as ever galloped out of the eastern heartland. Their superstitions put Sanctuary’s Wrigglie-speaking mongrels to shame, and their language was so primitive that they’d borrowed words left and right to describe their new homeland, yet they looked Rankan; and the Rankan myth said that before there’d been a Rankan Empire or even a Rankan kingdom, there had been a band of horse-riding warriors from the east.
If he’d been a full-blooded Rankan, Molin might have been appalled to think that the likes of Arizak and his kin were distant cousins, but he wasn’t full-blooded anything except tired.
“Open the gate, good man,” he pled with the guard. “Which are your barracks? I’ll see that Burggit knows I’m the one who countered his orders.”
The guard resisted. “Them Irrune—The streets ain’t safe, Lord Torch, and you—pardon me—ain’t no youngster to skip from trouble. No, no—trouble finds you, Lord Torch, and ’s’my head will roll twice over for forgettin’ my orders and for lettin’ trouble find the Lord Torch.”
“I have an escort.” Molin indicated Atredan, who needed no encouragement to scowl and draw his sword.
The guard made one more protest, then relented. Moments later, to the clank of metal and the scrape of wood, the smaller of the two heavy doors cracked open. Atredan slipped through first. Molin followed.
“Don’t forget,” the guard called after them. “Tell Burggit ‘twas on your orders, Lord Torch, that Leaner Vurben opened the gate. ’Tweren’t no thought of Leaner Vurben’s, ’twas your orders, Lord Torch.” The clatter of the closing gate drowned out anything else Vurben might have said.
“Did you hear that? The brazen cur,” Atredan complained. “You’re not thinking of running this Burggit to ground, are you? Let the man suffer.”
“For what? I did countermand his orders. Common men expect protection from their officers.”
“That man presumed to give you an order! He gave orders to an Imperial lord. He spoke to you as though you were another Wrigglie pud. He should be made an example of. Forget this Buggit; go to Captain Eraldus—he knows who puts food on his damn plate. He’ll take care of that Vurben fellow.”
Molin sighed quietly. He was a lord, and he enjoyed his privileges, but he wasn’t an aristocrat. “I’ve found it useful, over the many long years of my life, to keep my word when I can. Oddly enough, if you honor the small things, the big ones are less significant. It took me years to learn that lesson.”
“But a common Wrigglie pud! Who cares if you keep your word to him?”
Molin didn’t bother to answer. When he’d given the orders to expand Sanctuary’s walls, he’d imagined a plaza here between the old wall and the new—a place where visitors could be scrutinized from front and back, and cut down with impunity, when necessary. As with so many of his plans for Sanctuary, the final result bore little resemblance to his original vision. Instead of an empty plaza, there was the Tween, a relatively peaceful quarter populated largely by smugglers and hostlers.
The Tween’s main street—such as it was—connected the new gate to the old gate, once called the Gate of Gold, but an empty arch these last fifteen years. Past the arch, the Wideway opened up between Sanctuary’s wharves and its warehouses. Midway down the Wideway, the Processional