Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [68]
Vengestis had regained the Imperial throne twice since his initial usurpation, each time less magnificently than before. The man had a positive genius for manipulating aristocrats like Serripines, who should have known better but chose pipe dreams of resurrected Imperial glory over the truths held in their own memories. Lord Serripines wasn’t an utter fool. Though he kept his absurd faith in the Rankan Empire’s promise and had sited his Land’s End villa where it could be easily seen by ships sailing down the coast from Ranke, he took Molin’s advice and kept his sons and daughters under close watch.
Lord Serripines never got his Imperial ships or soldiers, but he and all Sanctuary did get the Irrune. Traveling under a cloud of dust as tall as a thunderstorm, the city-sized tribe advanced on Sanctuary’s ill-guarded walls in the autumn of the Empire’s eighty-sixth year. They’d come from the north and east, fleeing the same barbarian hordes that destroyed Lirt and drove the Serripines clan out of Sihan—which, considering the manners and appearance of the Irrune, painted a truly nightmarish picture of the barbarians.
The Irrune had taken a less direct route to Sanctuary than the Serripines. For a generation the tribe had wandered the north, offering their services now to the Nisi witches and next to the Imperial generals in exchange for a new homeland. Both the witches and generals had found it easy to make promises to the Irrune and easier to forget them until outriders of the Black-toothed Beasts—the Irrune name for the barbarians who’d driven them from the lands of their ancestors—reappeared on the eastern horizon.
As soon as he saw the banners of the Beasts, Arizak per-Mizhur, chief of the Irrune, rode west to the Spine, then south in search of empty land for his people and their herds. Their quest finally brought them to the gates of Sanctuary and into sight of more water than their language could describe.
Arizak’s demands were simple: food, land, and all the wealth of the city or he’d do to Sanctuary what the Beasts had done to Lirt. He shouted the demands himself from the back of a lean, mettlesome stallion and in the midst of two hundred similarly tempered warriors. The chief Servant of Dyareela, a Maze-bred pimp who’d changed his name to Retribution, scurried to Her altar in what had been Savankala’s temple. He asked his goddess for guidance and She, remarkably, sent him to an apothecary’s shop in the old jewelers’ quarter.
Less remarkably, perhaps, Molin was dressed in a soldier’s leather armor when Retribution arrived. For Sanctuary’s sake—for the sake of all those whose worst crime was ignorance—he proposed a plan that took him into the Irrune encampment as sole negotiator. Molin expected the worst from the ragged nomads and got Arizak’s second wife instead.
Nadalya was a handsome woman and young enough to be the chief’s daughter. Molin met Verrezza, Arizak’s first wife, at the same moment he met Nadalya. Glancing from matron to maiden, he thought he had the full measure of the chief’s domestic disharmony. It was an honest mistake. The Irrune were a sturdy, light-haired, fair-skinned people. Cleaned up and properly attired, not one of them would have attracted attention on the capital’s streets—not the way Molin had, growing up swarthy and black-haired in Vashanka’s Temple.
Then Nadalya opened her mouth.
“My husband asks me to speak for him, Lord High Architect,” she said, using Molin’s god-bestowed title, which she shouldn’t have known because Molin hadn’t used it in her lifetime. “Though Arizak per-Mizhur understands Rankene as well as you or I, it is not the language of his inner thoughts. On his behalf and for all the Irrune, I bid you welcome, Lord High Architect. We are honored to meet you—me, most of all. To his dying day, my father spoke highly of you, Lord High Architect, and often. I heard how you led the charge at Phorixas on Wizardwall