The Dead of Winter- - Thieves World 07 (13 page)

"Send for a groom to take this horse to the stables and see that he's well-cared for," Torchholder demanded when he reached the guardhouse at the West Gate of the Palace, forgetting his torn and dripping tradesman's clothes.

"Forgettin' your place, scum? I don't take orders from stinkin' Downwind scum

..."

"Send for a groom-and hope that I forget your face." The soldier froze-tribute to the instant recognition the Storm Priest's oratory could claim and to the unconcealed rage that accompanied Molin's crisp movements as he wrapped the reins around the guard's trembling hand. The terrified young man hauled away on the stable-gong rope as if his life depended on it. The storm intensified once the Hierarch stepped into the vast, empty parade ground before the Palace. Lightning grounded in the mud, releasing steam and stench. Those who remembered the terrible storms of the summer had already taken cover in the deepest, driest rooms. Molin glanced at the annex which housed the two children who were, somehow, avatars of both Vashanka and a new, unconsecrated Storm God, just as lightning caressed it with blue-and-silver. His instinct was to run across the courtyard but his belief that he would survive such bravery was not strong enough; he ducked into one of the stair-niches built into the West Gate.

"My Lord Molin," the bald courtier in rose-and-purple silk said, catching his arm as he strode down the corridors. A mere clothing disguise would never fool a Beysib courtier, accustomed as the Beysibs were to dressing like flowers and dyeing their skin to match. "My Lord Molin, a word with you-" The Beysibs only called him "Lord" when they were frightened. They had a snake loving bitch for their only goddess and knew nothing of the temper of Storm Gods. Molin plucked his dripping sleeve from the courtier's hands with all the disdain his anger and frustration could muster. "Tell Shupansea I'll come to the audience chamber when this is over-not before," he said in perfect Rankene rather than in the bastard argot that passed for communication between the cultures.

Lightning reflected off the courtier's scalp as he ran to inform his mistress. Molin slid behind a dirty tapestry into the honeycomb of narrow passages the Ilsigi builders had put in the Palace and which the Beysibs had not yet unraveled. Barely the height and width of an armed man, the passages were foul smelling and treacherous, but they kept the remnants of the Rankan Presence in Sanctuary united, to the consternation of their fish-eyed conquerors. Molin emerged in an alcove where the sounds of the storm were inconsequential in comparison to the fury emanating from a nearby room. An unnatural brilliance filled the corridor before him. His skin tingled when he crossed the sharp line from shadow to light. Thirty-odd years of habit told him to fall to his knees and pray to Vashanka for deliverance-but if Vashanka could have heard him there would have been no need for prayer. He told himself it was no worse than walking on the deck of a sailing ship, and entered the nursery. The blond, blue-eyed demon he'd named Gyskouras, on the advice of a S'danzo seeress, was the focus of the brilliance. He was shouting as he swung his red glowing toy sword, but the words were lost in the light. The other child, the peaceful child of that S'danzo seeress, had a hold of Gyskouras's leg, trying to pull him away from the motionless body he was battering. Arton, though, was no match for his foster-brother while the god's rage was in him. Molin forced himself deeper into the blazing aureole until he could grab the child and lift him from the floor.

"Gyskouras," he bellowed countless times.

The boy fought with the determination of a street urchin: biting, kicking, flailing with the straw-sword until Molin's damp clothes began to steam. But Molin persisted, imprisoning the child's legs first, then trapping his arms beneath his own.

"Gyskouras," he said more gently, as the radiance flickered and the sword fell from the child's hand.

'"Kouras?" the other child echoed, clinging now to both of them. The light flared once and was gone. Gyskouras became only a frightened child wracked with sobs. Molin stroked the boy's hair, patted him between the shoulders, and glanced down where one of his priests lay in a crumpled heap. With a gesture and a nod of his head, Torchholder commanded the others to do what had to be done. When he and the children were alone he sat down on a low stool and stood the child in front of him.

"What happened, Gyskouras?"

"He brought porridge," the boy said between sobs and sniffles. "Arton said he had candy but he gave me porridge."

"You are growing very fast, Gyskouras. When you don't eat you don't feel good." Since they'd brought Arton into the nursery some four months earlier, both children had grown the length of a man's hand from wrist to fingertips. Growing pains were a living nightmare for all concerned. "If you had eaten the porridge I'm sure Aldwist would have given you the candy."

"I wished him dead," Gyskouras said evenly, though when the words were safely out of his mouth he fell forward against Molin. "I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it. I told him to get up an' he wouldn't. He wouldn't get up." It was only Molin's experience with the children that let him make sense out of Gyskouras's garbled syllables-that and the fact that he'd known, in his heart, what had happened as soon as the storm began.

"You didn't know," he repeated softly to convince himself, if not the child. Gyskouras fell asleep once his sobs subsided; the Storm God rages always exhausted the small body of their perpetrator. Molin carried an ordinary child to a small bed where, with any luck, he would sleep for two or three days.

'"Kouras can't stay here any longer," Arton said, tugging at the hem of the priest's much-abused tunic.

The S'danzo boy rarely spoke to anyone but his foster-brother. Torchholder let Arton take his hand and lead him to a corner away from the others who were beginning to return to the now-quiet nursery.

"You have to find a place for us, Stepfather."

"I know, I'm looking. When I hear from Gyskouras's father-"

"You cannot wait for Tempus. You must pray. Stepfather Molin." Talking with Arton was not talking to a milk-toothed child. The seeress had warned him that her son might have the legendary S'danzo ability to foretell the future. At first Molin had refused to believe in the child's pronouncements, until Arton had utterly rejected Kadakithis and the Prince had finally owned up to Gyskouras' true paternity. Now he trusted the child completely.

"I have no gods to pray to, Arton," he explained as he walked toward the door.

"I have only myself and you-remember that." He pulled the curtain shut. The two acolytes who had been arranging Aldwist's corpse on a simple pallet moved aside to let the Hierarch speak the necessary rites of passage. A war-priest, Molin had sanctified the deaths of so many unrecognizable chunks of mortal flesh that nothing could bring a tremor to his voice or gestures. He had come to believe himself truly immune to death's outrages, but the imploded face of the gentle old priest brought twisting pangs of despair to his gut.

"We do not have enough bitterwood for the pyre. Rashan took what we had with him," Isambard, the elder of the two acolytes, informed him. Molin pressed his fingertips between his eyes, the traditional priestly gesture of respect for the departed and one which, coincidentally, dammed his tears. Rashan: that conniving, provincial priest whose sole purpose in life, even before Vashanka's death, had been to thwart every reform Molin instituted. A cloud of rage worthy of Vashanka swirled up invisibly around Molin Torchholder. He wanted to confront Rashan, the so-called Eye of Savankala, shove every splintered log of bitter-wood down the whey-faced priest's gullet and use that nonentity to light Aldwist's pyre. He wanted to take his ceremonial dagger and thrust it so deep in Gyskouras's chest that it would pop out the other side. He wanted to take Isambard's tear-stained face between his hands.... Molin looked at Isambard again, little more than a child himself and unable to hide his grief. He swallowed his rage along with his tears and rested comforting hands on the acolyte's shoulders.

"The Storm God will welcome Aldwist no matter what wood we use for his pyre. Come, we three will carry him back to his rooms and you will be his chorus." They bore their burden in silence. Molin chanted the first chorus with them, then departed for his quarters hoping that the sincerity of the young men's grief would compensate not merely for the missing bitterwood but for Vashanka, Himself, and for his own heart's silence. The priest used another set of passageways to reach a curtained vestry behind his priest's sanctum. A robe of fine white wool was waiting for him and Hoxa, his scrivener, could be heard prodding the brazier on the other side of the tapestry-though just barely. His wife, and whatever gaggle of disaffected Rankan women she'd gathered since dawn, were clambering in the antechamber that separated his sanctum from their conjugal quarters.

He pulled the tunic over his shoulders and winced as the cloth reopened a wound he didn't remember taking. Fumbling in the darkness he found a strip of linen, then emerged into his sanctum clad in boots and loincloth; his robe draped over one shoulder; blood running from his left forearm and a strip of linen between his teeth. Hoxa, to his credit, did not drop the goblet of mulled wine.

"My Lord Torchholder-My Lord, you're injured." Molin nodded as he dropped his robe on top of Hoxa's carefully arranged scrolls and studied the pair of bloody horseshoes on his arm. The street urchins, possibly, but more likely Gyskouras. With his good arm and teeth he ripped the linen in two. He pulled a knife from his belt and handed it to Hoxa.

"Hold it above the coals. No sense taking chances-I'd rather have the bite of a sword than the bite of a child any day."

The priest didn't wince when the cautery singed his skin, but after the wound was bandaged he used both trembling hands to carry the goblet to his work-table.

"So tell me Hoxa, what sort of a morning has it been for you?"

"The ladies, Lord Torchholder-," the scrivener began, jerking a shoulder toward the door, beyond which a chorus of feminine voices was raised in unintelligible argument. "Your brother, Lowan Vigeles, has been here looking for his daughter and complaining," Hoxa paused, took a deep breath and continued with a credible imitation of Vigeles's nasal twang, "about the lowness of the Rankan estate in Sanctuary, which is still part of the Empire although you have seen fit to conceal the arrival of a coterie of Beysib exiles, and their poorly defended gold, from the Empire, which could put all that gold to good use in its campaigns rather than see it squandered by Wrigglie scum and fish-eyed barbarians."

He took another gasping breath. "And the storm shook the windows loose from the walls. Your Lady Wife's glass from Ranke is ruined and she is in high wrath, I fear-"

Molin rested his head in his hands and imagined Lowan's aristocratic, somewhat vapid face. My brother, he thought to the memory, my dear, blind brother. An assassin sits on the Imperial Throne, an assassin who sent you running to Sanctuary for your life. In one breath you tell me how desperate, how depraved the Empire has become, and in the next you chide me for abandoning it. You cannot have it both ways, dear brother.

I've told you about Vashanka. It will take many years, generations, before the Empire disappears, but it is dead already, and it will be replaced by the people of the new Vashanka. I've already made my choice.

But the priest had said all this, and more, to his brother and would not say it again. "Hoxa," he said, shaking Lowan from his thoughts, "I've been attacked in the streets; I've been to the nursery where the child has killed one of my oldest friends; my arm is on fire, and you talk to me about my wife! Is there anything worthy of my attention in this forsaken pile of parchment before I go fawn at the feet of Shupansea and tell her everything is under control again?"

"The Mageguild complains that we've not done enough to locate the Tysian Hazard, Randal."

"Not done enough! I've poured twenty soldats into our informers. I'd like to know where the little weasel's vanished to! Damn Mageguild: Wait till Randal's here; Randal can do that; Randal fought on Wizardwall-he can control the weather. I could control the weather better than that damned pack of incanting fools! Gyskouras is making the ground move. He's three years old and his tantrums are shaking the stones. We'll have to go to the witch-bitch herself if this keeps up-tell them that, Hoxa, with flourishes!"

"Yes, my Lord." He shuffled the scrolls, dropping half of them. "There's the bill from the metal-master Balustrus for mending the temple doors. The Third Commando asks for a list of warrants against their enemies; Jubal's proxy asks for warrants against Downwinders and merchants; citizens from the jewelers'

quarter demand warrants against Jubal's lot and half the Commando; everyone wants warrants on the Stepsons-"

"Any word from the Stepsons' Commander?"

"Straton presented his warrant-"

"Hoxa!" Molin looked up from his writing table without moving his head.

"No, Lord Torchholder. There's no reply from Tern-pus." The enmity between the priest and the not-quite-immortal commander of the Stepsons had never been expressed in words. It was instinctive and mutual on both sides but now, because Kadakithis had admitted that Tempus was the real father of the tantrum-throwing godlet in the nursery, Molin needed Tempus and Tempus was incommunicado somewhere along Wizardwall.

Torchholder was not, however, allowed the luxury of contemplating the myriad disappointments around him. The door from the antechamber burst open to admit the unhappy figure of his wife, Rosanda.

"I knew you were in here-sneaking around like vermin -avoiding me." A wife had never been part of Molin's dreams for the future-and certainly not a wife like Brachis had foisted off on him. It was not that the priests of Vashanka were celibate; they had problems enough without such unnatural strictures. Simply put, it was the custom of Vashanka's priests-priests, after all, of the Divine Rapist-to choose rather more casual liaisons among the many Azyunas the temple housed in their cloisters. No Vashankan ever voluntarily plowed the fields with a Celebrant (Hereditary Harridan, in the vernacular) of Sabellia.