Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [61]
Molin needed two heartbeats to get himself righted and that was one heartbeat too many. The flat blade of a workman’s shovel slammed into his shin. His armor kept his leg in one piece, but it was numb from the knee down and left him with a deadly choice—finish off the ruffian he’d cut or protect himself from the shoveler. He had a better angle on the bloody ruffian, though as a man who’d breached a fortress rampant armed with nothing more than a flaming torch, Molin knew better than to underestimate a shovel.
So Molin bore down on the shoveler, Enlibar sword held high. The horse beneath him screamed and shied—this was no formal battle where the animals were sacrosanct. He corrected his aim at the last instant and struck true. The uncanny sword threw off a shower of spring green sparks as it sliced clean through the shovel’s shaft, no greater challenge to its temper and edge than the fruit in Molin’s bedchamber.
One down, two—no three … five to go.
The rioters had swarmed to the sounds of carnage. In a lucid flash worthy of a S’danzo seeress, Molin saw himself brought down by the least of Sanctuary, by ignorant men swinging tools and scraps of formerly white cloth. It would be an ignominious death, but so was every other death. He hauled on the horse’s reins until its mouth hurt more than the wound in its hindquarters and it charged at one man who’d die before Molin Torchholder did.
Naked hands fastened to Molin’s armor even before he delivered his killing stroke. He felt himself slipping sideways in the saddle, headed for the ground where his sword and armor would be useless. The first prayer he’d learned—Into Your mighty hands, O Vashanka, I consign my soul. Lift me up to paradise—passed through his mind.
A heavy weight struck his chest. Molin closed his eyes. Another weight fell. He couldn’t feel, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think …
And then he could.
Sensation returned with a jolt that began in his wrist and ended in his battered leg.
“Can you mount?” a voice Molin almost recognized demanded.
His vision blurred from smoke and shock. He didn’t know where he was or why.
“Can you walk? Stand? Can you fight?”
Walegrin. Walegrin had come back for him, or never left. Walegrin had chosen Ranke and duty over his half sister.
Molin found his balance. “Can’t mount,” he admitted. “Can stand. Can walk. Can fight.”
On foot himself, the bigger man dragged Molin forward, northward, through the bone-chilling panic. They marched with the torch-bearing watchmen, with the riders slightly ahead. Past the Settle Stone in the middle of the bazaar, impossibly rumored to be the first stone raised in Sanctuary; the northern wall, the oldest and thickest of the city’s walls, became a boundary they could sense but not see.
“Illyra!” Walegrin shouted, leaving Molin at last. “Answer me, damn you!”
He loved his sister, but he did not always like her.
Molin seized a torch from one of the watchmen and, true to his name, carried it forward.
“Sweet Sabellia—”
The northern quarter of the bazaar was indeed quiet, but it wasn’t empty. The mob had visited. Perhaps they’d begun their savagery right here, at Dubro’s forge. He’d put up a fight, that much could be seen by the light of the torch Molin held. There were three corpses … four … sprawled in the dirt around the dead blacksmith. A man who forged iron needed wood for his fire. Dubro had been almost as good with an ax as he’d been with a hammer.
He’d died with his eyes open, the ax still clenched in his hands. By the looks of things he’d fallen backward—tripped, perhaps, or struck low and from behind and landed slumped against the anvil post. Bits of skull and scalp clotted on the anvil itself. The prime symbol of Dubro’s trade had slain him.
You’d think his seeress wife would have seen that coming.
Absently, Walegrin kicked over one of the corpses, then