Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [7]
Both the Wideway and the Processional were lit by public lanterns—an Irrune innovation that spoke well of Nadalya, Arizak’s second wife, who’d initiated it. There were torches, too, stowed in old barrels here in the Tween and at other intersections. It was said, though not in their hearing, that the Irrune feared the shadows and sounds of Sanctuary at night. Neither the torches nor the lanterns were necessary on a full-moon night, but, as Molin had learned, people took note of the small ways in which their rulers kept faith with them.
Molin took a stride in the Wideway direction. An unexpected shiver shook his spine, and he stopped. As a boy he’d been taught to equate such moments with his god’s presence. The prayer of welcome and acceptance came reflexively to his tongue and waited for his mouth to open, but Molin swallowed instead. There was still a god bearing Vashanka’s name and attributes somewhere, maybe within the Rankan Empire, maybe sulking somewhere in Sanctuary—immortals faded, but they never quite died. Molin Torchholder dutifully dedicated his rituals and daily prayers to his hidden god; but when a cold finger touched him, the erstwhile priest looked in a different direction.
The gods alone—all the Rankan gods, not just Vashanka—knew how Molin’s life might have gone if his priestly teachers had guessed the nature of the talent he’d inherited from his temple-slave mother. Most likely, he’d have had no life at all. Indeed, Molin, in his role as a Rankan priest, would never have allowed himself to be born if he’d had the opportunity to take his mother’s measure.
Of all the sorceries known to the world, witchcraft was the darkest, the most mysterious, and the one favored by the Empire’s northern enemies. Officially, witchcraft did not exist in the Empire. There was prayer, which directly invoked divine power, and there was magic, which—according to priests, if not magicians—used spells for indirect invocations to the same gods. Witches, in the Rankan scheme, were witless mages who’d surrendered their souls to gods so foul and evil that mortal tongues could not pronounce their names.
Rankan priests, especially the warrior-priests of Vashanka’s hierarchy, were adept at piercing a witch’s deception. The fate of a witch in the bowels of a Rankan temple was necessarily bleak: interrogation by torture and punitive mutilation, followed, inevitably, by a gruesome execution. In light of that fate, it was not surprising that a northern witch usually chose suicide over capture. But Molin’s mentors in Vashanka’s hierarchy had failed to detect the taint of witchcraft in a nubile, northern slave and, having failed to detect her heresy, taught her to dance. At a decennial Commemoration of the Ten-Slaying wherein Vashanka had freed his divine father, Savankala, from his siblings’ treachery, they’d given her to Vashanka’s lucky, wealthy avatar for a night of feasting, music, and ritual rape.
Molin had never met the woman who birthed him. She’d died, he’d been told, moments before his birth, taken up in his divine father’s arms. He’d known that for the lie that it was before he’d turned six, but he’d never worried about his bony face, his black hair, or his pale skin—so unlike the golden features of the Rankan aristocracy, so similar to Ranke’s enemies. Molin had never wondered at all until he found himself in Sanctuary and face-to-face with powers that Vashanka would not—or could not—vanquish.
Molin won the battle against those powers one dark Sanctuary night. He lost both his god and his faith after the victory, but the talent for witchcraft lingered. He denied it publicly, of course, and there was no north-witch mentor to whom he could turn for training. But he practiced diligently, exploring his limits and gradually expanding them, so that when the great nerves in his body shivered he understood that witchcraft had given him a message.
Gripping his blackwood staff, Molin spun right,