Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [60]
A handful of watchmen met them at the bazaar gate. Poorly armored for a winter night much less a riot, they said they’d sent a runner to the palace when the first gang appeared.
“Were there Servants with them?” Molin asked.
“No white robes, Lord Torchholder,” a watchman replied.
“None that we saw, anyway.”
“They was plain-dressed folk, my lords, not even from the Maze,” a watchman whose baldric and sword marked him as the night’s commander said, partly defending his men, partly defending the mob. “‘Tweren’t nothing we’d do to stop ’em.”
“’Twas let them pass or be killed ourselves.”
“Said they’d come to stop the Quickening. Said the Servants told ’em how with a patch of bleached cloth,” said the man who hadn’t seen a white robe pass near him.
Molin ordered the watchmen to take up their spears and torches before Walegrin could cut them down with his own Enlibar sword.
“They’re filthy cowards,” Walegrin hissed. “Wrigglie cowards!”
Walegrin had been born in Sanctuary and spoke Rankene with an outlander’s accent, but he was an Imperial citizen, as his father and grandfather had been before him. He bore his prejudices proudly, without repentance.
Molin’s ancestry wasn’t nearly so pure. “Let them redeem themselves,” he told his companion, “if they can. They didn’t join the mob.”
Grumbling, Walegrin allowed the watchmen to form up between the mounted guards.
Sanctuary’s bazaar was forbidding on a pleasant, moonlit night; on a frigid, smoke-filled night it was confusion incarnate. Walegrin, Molin, and the other guards had given their torches to the watchmen. The light barely reached beyond the moving ring of horses and was nowhere near as bright as the flames they glimpsed to the south.
“They live against the northern wall,” Walegrin reminded Molin, and took the lead.
It was just as well the riders had surrendered their torches. They needed both hands on their horses’ reins when the animals balked at the first overturned vendor’s cart they encountered. Betraying his own anxiety, Walegrin brought his gelding up short and berated it with heavy heels until a watchman shouted:
“There’s a body down here!”
“A woman?” Molin asked before Walegrin could.
“No, my lord—a man. Throat’s been slit ear to ear.”
Walegrin kneed his gelding to the north. “Keep moving!”
The smoke thickened with every stride the horses took, but worse than the smoke in their eyes were the sounds of chaos—shouts, screams, timbers snapping in flames as livelihoods were put to the torch. Molin’s consolation—small and bitter though it was—was that the riot seemed worst in the southern quarter of the bazaar. The northern quarter was quiet, perhaps untouched or, better, empty because those who dwelt there—Illyra and Dubro among them—had heard their neighbors screaming and slipped away before the noose was tightened around their own necks.
Molin’s conscience—that useless relic of his priestly education—prickled and reminded him that no good came of fortune seized from another’s tragedy. He hastily corrected his hopes, but not hastily enough. A woman clutching a torn and bloodied bodice over her breasts erupted from the smoke and ran toward them. Between shrieks of terror she pleaded for protection. Her hair was Imperial yellow, meaning she couldn’t possibly be Illyra, but the ruffian trio chasing her had murder in their eyes.
“They killed my son!” she wailed when she was still farther from Walegrin than the ruffians were from her. “Killed him before my very eyes!”
“Go on!” Molin shouted to Walegrin. He unsheathed his greentinged sword. “These puds are mine.”
It wasn’t an empty boast; Molin Torchholder had always been a better warrior than he’d been a priest. Aided by a battle-hardened horse, twenty years prior—even a decade earlier—he would have sliced through the ruffians like so much rotten cheese and caught up with the others before they’d disappeared from sight. Except it wasn’t twenty years ago, nor even a decade.