Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [9]
Those who’d dwelt within the walls and survived the madness had accepted Arizak’s decree. They’d been silently grateful to turn their backs on the place where so many had died for so little reason. But the exiles of Land’s End—who’d been conspicuous that day by their absence—they mourned the loss of the Rankan temples they had not visited in years. They nurtured that mourning—that sense that fate had conspired against their beloved Empire—in their children.
“The gods—All the gods, Ilsigi and Rankan alike and every other god ever worshiped here, do not care about an empty piece of earth, Lord Larris.”
“But, Vashanka—!” the young man protested. “Surely—”
“Surely if Vashanka had cared, Vashanka would have done something, but He left this mess for men to clean. Come, Lord Larris. If we’d walked rather than talked, we’d be halfway across by now.”
Molin slipped his free arm beneath Atredan’s elbow to nudge him forward. A rooster in one of the yards nearby chose that moment to mistake the moon for the rising sun. The sudden sound surprised them both, and another man—to judge by the moonlit silhouette—out on the empty Promise who darted into the ruins that had once enshrined Thousand-Eyed Ils of the Ilsigi, another god who’d done nothing for Sanctuary when it could have used divine help.
“Let’s take the other way, Lord Torchholder,” Atredan pled, no longer hiding his fear.
When he’d been a young man—or even a middle-aged one—Molin would have pursued the straggler into Ils’s temple. He had no quarrel with some Ils-worshiper who preferred chiseled stone to the pile of bricks outside the wall, but once the Hand had driven Ils’s priests out of His temple, they’d chosen His marble hall as the site for an altar to their bloodthirsty goddess.
Molin had worked beside a score of priests representing almost as many gods to destroy that altar, that abomination. He’d take no chance that some misbegotten soul could undo his work—
Tomorrow, Molin chastened himself. Tomorrow, and with a handful of men walking ahead of him. Tonight he would sate himself with the view from the weedy steps.
“The other way, Lord Torchholder. My lord father charged me with your safety—”
Molin led the way, one hand gripping his staff, one eye stuck on the Temple of Ils.
Were those flame-shadows flickering on the walls?
So intense was Molin’s interest in the distant temple that he heard nothing, saw nothing move in the nearer shadows until a man with daggers in his hands blocked the street some five paces ahead of him and Atredan.
“Prepare to die, Torchholder,” the stranger snarled with a man’s voice, and flung the metal in his hands.
Molin pressed his staff against the ground and called upon his mother’s accursed power. He swayed left, then right as his witchblood quickened. One knife missed completely; the other tangled in his cloak and rang down against the cobblestones. Molin swung the staff into a two-handed grip across his chest and sought his attacker’s face in the moonlight. What he found disturbed him to the core of his old bones—the man concealed his features beneath tightly wrapped, dark cloth which was almost certainly silk, almost certainly dyed bloodred, almost certainly worn by a worshiper of the Bloody Mother, Dyareela.
Nonetheless, Molin replied with confidence: “It will take a better man than you to lay me in my grave.”
Witchcraft demanded tribute in exchange for its gifts, and Torchholder could not guess what price he would pay for drawing down to the depth of his talent, but for now and the next little while, he was the man he’d been—quick, strong, and cunning. The would-be assassin had not expected a fight from an old man; even less had he expected one from a man in his prime, but he stood his ground and drew another, longer, dagger from his belt. That was more than could be said for Atredan Larris Serripines, who shrieked like a maiden and ran for the Stairs.
The long dagger flew toward the youth; Molin let it pass and closed with the Dyareelan. Old man or young, witch or priest,