Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [70]
The haste with which the Irrune departed for Gunderpah was enough to make an old priest think that his god was taking an interest in the mortal world again.
Molin went back to reciting his prayers when he returned to the city, and it seemed for a few years thereafter that Vashanka was indeed listening—though Lord Serripines and his fellow Land’s End exiles stopped listening or visiting the apothecary shop after Molin gave away their profits, and the Servants were no happier to surrender even a small portion of the treasure they’d looted from Sanctuary’s temples and palaces. Still, the apothecary business prospered, and so did Molin’s back-room trade in information.
The Irrune found their way to the Spine foothills, where the Gunderpah brigands took one look at their new enemy and high-tailed themselves into Ilsig territory without so much as a skirmish—at least that was how the Irrune told the tale whenever they returned to Sanctuary for bribes or barrels of beer. The Servants, having killed or intimidated their opposition, turned inward and, in the way of all those who placed paramount value on purity and prophecy, accusations of heresy began to fly between the Servants tending Dyareela’s altars on the Promise of Heaven and those who tended Her orphanage in the palace.
By the winter of the Empire’s eighty-seventh year, there were two Dyareelan sects within the city: the Servants of Mother Chaos along the Promise of Heaven and the Bloody Hand of Dyareela in the palace. The Servants had the numbers and the freedom of Sanctuary’s streets, but the Hands were utterly self-righteous and utterly ruthless. Anyone unlucky enough to get caught between the two sects could count the remainder of his life in agonizing hours, but the ordinary denizens of Sanctuary were as adept at avoiding Dyareela’s authority as they’d been at ignoring the laws of both Ranke and Ilsig.
Sanctuary’s reputation as an outpost of stability—provided one could tolerate the occasional public flaying—seeped through the crumbling Empire. The city’s population rebounded, and the talk in the back room of Molin’s apothecary was that the Servants were on the verge of victory in their religious war with the Hands. Compared to the Hands or the new emperor (who, after slaying Vengestis in his mistress’s bed, had, reportedly, raped, then married her himself), the Servants were rulers with whom a prudent man could live.
Then the spring rains failed and became a brutal summer drought. What little grain sprouted, withered and died before it was knee high. Land’s End feared for their granaries filled with last year’s harvest while Servants and Hands spilled blood on their altars. In the palace, Dyareela told the Hands that Sanctuary was home to too many strangers, too many newcomers whose purity was suspect. The Servants, after listening to the same goddess, prayed for rain. The Hands were wrong outright, but the Servants were city-bred fools who knew how to rob a second-story bedroom but nothing about the ways of grain.
Ending the drought with slow, steady rains wouldn’t have harmed Sanctuary, though they wouldn’t have prevented famine, either. Only the Serripines could do that, with the keys to their granaries. But the rain the Servants prayed into Sanctuary was a wind-whipped sea storm. The worst weather surged ashore beneath a new-moon midnight when the tide was already rising. It sucked off roofs, collapsed entire quarters, and undermined another section of the city’s walls. In the villages beyond Sanctuary, the storm wrote a different story. Torrential rains recarved the hillsides and flooded fields with ominous, muddy lakes. Then, before the rain had ended, the White and Red Foal Rivers burst out of their