Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [98]
And tell her about last night? Tell her about the Torch, the Hand, and the froggin’ blue mask that was supposed to connect him with an armsmaster?
Cauvin pounded his head against an imaginary wall. Shalpa’s froggin’ cloak! If he’d had half the wits Father Ils had given the shited sheep, he’d have insisting on meeting the mysterious armsmaster somewhere other than the Vulgar Unicorn. Gods all be damned, the froggin’ Broken Mast would have been a better meetplace than the Unicorn!
Froggin’ sure he was going to regret going into the Unicorn tonight, so Cauvin resolved to put it off a bit longer. Following the Torch’s directions, he went left down a passage that was too wide to be called an alley but too narrow to be called a street anywhere except the Maze. Thieves could have jumped from black doorways on either side and from above as well.
A man needed a strong gut when he went exploring in the Maze; and if he were a smart man, too, he brought a froggin’ hat. In the froggin’ Maze, the buildings leaned out over the street. At noon the only sunlight to reach the pavement landed in the gutter along with the slops from upstairs. Bareheaded as he was, Cauvin barely avoided a honey-pot dousing as he plodded deeper into the dark.
The Torch’s directions ended precisely in a rubbish-strewn emptiness that the Imperials would call an atrium and a Wrigglie like Cauvin called a death trap: The only way out lay behind him, but there were froggin’ windows and roofs aplenty where an archer, or even a decent knife-man, could make short work of a sheep-shite fool with a glaring-bright torch blooming in his hand.
Gods damn your sheep-shite eyes, Lord Molin Torchholder, if this gets me killed, Cauvin swore silently.
Yet, aside from the predictable dangers of clambering over charred wood, crumbling brick, and broken pottery, the atrium felt as safe as his loft. Glancing at the gaping windows, Cauvin had the uncanny sense he was invisible, at least to anyone who might be lurking in those black holes. Froggin’ sure, a magician could hide a man. Back on Pyrtanis Street, the old-timers said that Enas Yorl had hidden his big house, with him still in it, in the middle of a big storm and kept it there all the years since.
Cauvin didn’t pay much attention to the old-timers. Hidden wasn’t the same as gone, and Yorl’s house was gone. A man could walk across the corner where it had once stood, if he had a reason to. Cauvin had run across on a ten-pad pol dare. It was a spooky place, full of shadows and sounds that couldn’t be heard from the street. He was head-to-toe gooseflesh before he’d reached the other side, but he’d gotten across and gotten his padpols.
The Hand could hide things, or Dyareela could hide things for the Hand. Priests prayed and gods worked miracles that froggin’ seemed like magic, but weren’t because priests weren’t mages and you could get in trouble if you said otherwise. The Hands, gods rot them all, were consecrated priests—
Molin Torchholder was a consecrated priest, too.
Cauvin thought about that staff the Torch kept beside him. froggin’ sure it was more than a stick of black wood, and that lump of amber had the look of sorcery. And why hadn’t the old pud died? The Torch swore that he was dying, but though that wound on his hip went down to the bone, he froggin’ sure wasn’t fading away.
Questions hung at the back of Cauvin’s mind, thoughts like midnight after a supper of cabbage and onions when it was down the ladder or lie there with a gut-ache until dawn. They kept him anxious as he rammed the torch into a crack in the wall and began clearing rubble.
He was still working up his sweat when he uncovered the edge of the trapdoor the Torch had said he’d find: a paving stone remarkable for its perfectly square shape and nothing more. There was no lifting it, but the geezer had given Cauvin an answer for that, too. He took the torch to another corner where, right as froggin’ rain, there was a perfectly square brick sitting shoulder high in the wall. Pull it out, the Torch had said,