Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [94]
Whether for the funeral or the feast, Sanctuary turned out to say farewell to Molin Torchholder. Most of Pyrtanis Street was there: Swift, with his arm around the woman he meant to marry someday; Honald, the potter; Teera the baker and her whole froggin’ household down to its squalling infants; Bilibot, of course—that geezer could smell free food clear across the horizon. Cauvin nodded at them all and kept to himself.
The stoneyard’s customers were scattered through the crowd in the forecourt. They gave Cauvin the nod as he passed; at least the ones who weren’t owing nodded. The dodgers pretended they didn’t know him, and maybe they didn’t. Maybe Cauvin was mistaken about whom he recognized and whom he didn’t. The Torch’s funeral—the funeral of the man everyone thought was the Torch—had drawn the largest crowd of Cauvin’s memory.
Wealthy Wrigglie merchants from the Processional mansions stuck together behind their spear-toting bodyguards upwind of the pyre. Froggin’ sparkers, they looked uncomfortable in their embroidered silks and fluffed-up furs, but they had good reason to mourn an Imperial geezer. With the Torch gone, who’d plead their froggin’ cases to the Irrune? There was a throng from Land’s End, too, keeping an arm’s length or more between them and the common folk. Every one of them was dressed in garments that might have been the proper style in Ranke—a generation ago—but looked sheep-shite foolish here in Sanctuary. Shite for sure, they’d rather be tucking the Torch’s corpse in a Land’s End grave, but Arizak wanted to give his friend an Irrune send-off, and the Irrune ran Sanctuary, no matter the Wrigglie merchants or the Enders.
The sky was darkening gray when some twenty Irrune men marched out of the palace, ten of them bent double by the drums they carried on their backs, another ten banging away, and one leftover Irrune waving horse-head rattles in each hand.
“Zarzakhan,” Cauvin’s neighbor in the crowd said, or something similar.
When people spoke Imperial, Cauvin heard words he couldn’t understand, but when he overheard Irrune jabber, he might have been listening to a drunkard sneezing.
Zarzakhan—if that was the shaman’s name—was a froggin’ unholy sight to behold wrapped in a cloak of froggin’ tied-together, raw pelts. He’d worked a black paste into his hair so it whipped around his face like so many dead snakes. The wild man was a blur of paws and tails, serpents and skulls as he danced away from the palace doors.
Cauvin’s sheep-shite luck put him between Zarzakhan and the pyre. A line of garrison guards locked spears and shoved the commoners aside. Cauvin got an elbow in his already bruised ribs, and elsewhere, too, but he got a good look at Zarzakhan as he passed by, a good whiff, too. He could have done without either. The shaman froggin’ reeked of rotting fish, and the muck from his hair clumped on his lips, eyebrows, and beard. Cauvin didn’t need to understand a word of Irrune jabber to know that Zarzakhan represented death come to collect a mortal soul.
The Irrune swarmed behind their shaman, more of them than Cauvin had ever seen in one place. They’d matted their forelocks with red clay and drawn greasy black rings around their eyes. Arizak rode a sedan chair borne on the shoulders of four men who weren’t accustomed to the work. There was no hiding his concern as his heavily bandaged leg swung from one near collision to the next. But Arizak wasn’t nearly as grim-looking as the woman who stood behind his right shoulder once the chair was set down.
Cauvin hadn’t seen Verrezza, Arizak’s first wife, before. She was a tall woman with steel gray hair and the eyes of an angry hawk. Age had clawed countless lines across her face, and by the lay of them, Verrezza wasn’t a woman who smiled much, though maybe she was just unhappy that the Dragon, her son, wasn’t on hand. Cauvin didn’t pretend to understand the power struggles of Sanctuary’s rulers, but he had an inkling of what an elder son might