Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [64]
“I say it’s an excellent idea!” old Lord Mioklas declared, brandishing a white badge—a proof of purity given to him by the Servants he continued to house in his Processional mansion. It was not the only twisted bit of white cloth visible in the Hall. “A simple proof of one’s virtue and better than anything you’ve come up with in years, Lord Torchholder.”
“These Servants are doing what your precious garrison full of expensive guards never could do,” another peer continued. “In less than a week, they’ve rid Sanctuary of its most worthless elements and put a stop to the Quickening! My house has lost no one since we took the badge.”
“Hear, hear!” a third man shouted. He had the golden hair of an Imperial family and the crimson nose of a man who drank too much wine. “Why keep the garrison at all?” he demanded. “For five soldats—and not one of them pure silver—I’ve got a Servant sitting at my high door, sniffing everyone who comes or goes. And it’s not just moral contamination he can scent. He says he can smell a thief at ten paces—and I believe him. He pointed a finger at my wife’s maid and we found a gold necklace hiding in her skirts! Tell me your precious garrison could have done that—and caught the thief before she left my home! You’re wrong about the Servants, Lord Torchholder, as wrong as a man can be. This nonsense about Dyareela—you can’t expect us to believe your superstitions. Face it, Lord Torchholder: The Servants are the best thing that’s happened to this city since you stopped sending our taxes on to Ranke.”
Molin looked at the men and women arrayed before him. They were men—women—his own age or older, meaning they’d all lived through the tumultuous years when Prince Kadakithis had been Sanctuary’s governor and the city had become a battlefield for gods and distant wars. They knew what happened when gangs turned the city’s quarters into rival kingdoms. They knew that the purest silver, the whitest badge was no guarantor of safety—or they should have.
“Start packing,” Molin told Hoxa after the council had told him his services as acting governor were no longer needed. “We leave at dawn.”
“For where, my lord?” the loyal Hoxa asked.
“Anywhere. Anywhere but here. I’ve wasted my last breath on these fools. They deserve whatever the Servants do to them.”
No sooner were the words out of Molin’s mouth than the air chilled. By sundown, Sanctuary shivered in a bitter north wind. By midnight, sparkling white powder fell thick from a black sky. It buried the city to a finger’s depth with the promise of much more by dawn.
“Snow,” Hoxa observed. “Do you suppose anyone will notice it’s the same color as the Servants’ badges?”
Molin would not dignify the question with an answer. In his youth winters throughout the Rankan Empire might have been raw, but water rarely froze. Snow was yet another indignity that had befallen Imperial lands since the capital fell.
“Will we wait until this storm blows over, Lord Torchholder, or shall I continue packing?”
“What do you think?” Molin’s temper reached its breaking point. “Of course we wait!” he shouted at Hoxa. “I may be damned never to escape from this gods-forsaken town, but I’m not suicidal. Why die in a snowdrift tomorrow when we can sit tight and wait for Dyareela’s Servants to slit our throats!” He slammed the door hard enough to splinter the wood.
The sound was fresh and sharp in Molin’s mind, more real—more shocking—than anything that followed, because there was a limit to shock, a threshold which, when crossed, opened into numbness. He’d counseled emperors and princes and led armies to victory, but, once again, Sanctuary had gotten the best of Molin Torchholder. He knew who and what the Servants were, but knowledge was useless against their seductive weapons. He could anticipate the Servants’ moves—the escalation of their sermons from the simple scapegoating