Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [71]
Plague was loose again before the rivers crested.
Someone got the notion that flames would stop the plague and set blazes between the Maze and the harbor. Against all expectation, the fires took root in sodden wood. Molin and Hoxa were throwing buckets of water at their shop’s walls when the Bloody Hand emerged from the palace looking for vengeance. When the last flame died, there was only one Dyareelan sect in the city, and it wasn’t the Mother’s Servants.
Flush with the blood of victory, the Hands spread a new message through Sanctuary’s swampy streets. Drought and famine, storm and flood, plague and fire were each and all a clear message from the Mother of Chaos: The end of the old age was upon the world, the time of final purification had begun. The people of Sanctuary had been honored above all others because Dyareela had appointed Her Bloody Hand to lead them against the rest of the world.
But before the people of Sanctuary could wield the Bloody Mother’s cleansing swords, they had to become the purest of the pure.
Molin was a veteran of the Wizardwall campaigns. He’d dwelt thirty years in Sanctuary. He’d have sworn he’d seen the deepest depths of darkness, then Hoxa fell afoul of the Hands. With all his spies and contacts, Molin could never learn who had denounced his faithful amanuensis. Probably they’d both been denounced, but the Hands had drawn the line at cracking Vashanka’s Architect. The Hands extended no such professional courtesy to Hoxa. The poor man was mad and mutilated by the time Molin bribed his way into the palace chamber where a corpulent thug calling himself the Fist of the Bloody Hand presumed to do a goddess’s bidding.
In his heart of hearts, Molin had convinced himself that the Bloody Hands of Dyareela and the Servants of the Chaos Mother before them were frauds. The atrocities the Hands committed—the eyes they’d gouged from Hoxa’s skull, the nerves they’d laid bare in the stumps of his arms and legs—were evil, to be sure, but the offspring of mortal imagination rather than divine inspiration. Gods—Vashanka foremost among them—could be inscrutable, capricious, and unspeakably cruel, but evil was a mortal vice.
That day in the dungeon chamber beneath Sanctuary’s familiar palace, Molin learned how wrong he was. Though his features were hidden by a robe and the red silk swathed around his head, the Fist of Dyareela’s Bloody Hand was, by his voice and movements, a grown man, not so the two responsible for Hoxa’s suffering. They were children—a girl on the verge of maidenhood and a boy no older than seven. Their hands were red with fresh blood, not tattoos, and they giggled as they went about their ghastly work.
Molin’s heart shuddered with shock when the girl recognized him.
“Lord Torchholder!” she trilled, and ran to him, waving her bloody knife.
Her breath was icy despite the heat of a roaring hearth and two physicians’ braziers. It invaded Molin’s lungs and burnt the pores of his flesh. He shuddered involuntarily and the girl’s trill became laughter. Then the cold was gone, leaving the sense that it had spat him out rather than the other way around.
Had Vashanka bestirred Himself? Or was his maternal witchblood somehow incompatible with the essence of evil? Either way, Molin was properly—silently—grateful for the divine rejection.
The Fist’s breath was no colder than his own, though the man was certainly filled with mortal evil. The children, nurtured for who knew how long in the orphanage, were different. They teased each other like any two children playing a game in the sun, except that this game was the dissection of a living man. Molin begged the Fist to give the order that would end both Hoxa’s life and the children’s hideous game.
“He is past telling you anything you want to hear—past any hope of recovery. What’s the use of prolonging agony?”
“Have you ever had a kitten, Lord Torchholder?” the Dyareelan asked, his red-swathed face pointed at the