Turning Points (27 page)

“A soldat! Too much!”

“Pay the man,” Sharheya said, her eyes narrowing as if the pain had returned suddenly. Pel knew there was little love lost between his two visitors, but the widow Sharheya owned the wood and the lumberyard attached to it that was the family’s fortune. If Carzen wished his wife to be disinherited and all passing to Sharheya’s scholar brother, all Carzen had to do was infuriate Sharheya at the right moment. Accidents happened, especially in such a dangerous place as a sawmill. The woman was always changing her will. Pel had been in and out of it for a year. He had never cared whether a bequest was forthcoming; he would have provided care for those who genuinely needed his gift. If he liked them it would cost them less than it cost Carzen. He didn’t like Carzen. The man had all the conscience of a scorpion.

“What’s in it?” Carzen asked, peering at the taller man from under his shaggy brown eyebrows.

“Willowbark, dark-well water, cider, poppy, feverfew picked at the new moon, sgandi leaf…”

“Sgandi? You mean stinkweed? I could make your potion, for nothing!” Carzen snapped his fingers under the healer’s nose. “I could throw those weeds in a jug and save myself the price, as well as the trouble of coming to you.”

Pel just raised his salt-and-pepper eyebrow. “In what proportions would you mix them? Too much of one thing, not enough of another would be fatal. And do you know the propitious times to gather each plant? Where to get the most potent weeds?” It had been so long since he’d been here in his home city that the local Ilsigi—the Wrigglie—dialect felt strange and slippery in his mouth. What was the commonplace insulting term they used to one another? Yes, that was it. “Pay up, pud, or take your problems home with you. Fair for fair. If you won’t pay, then I have no obligation to you. I don’t care.” But he did. He could feel the suffering of the people who came to him, and he wanted them whole. His hand sought out Sharheya’s, and held it tightly. All their pain resonated in him. It was part of his punishment, and his salvation. The old woman gave her son-in-law a disgusted look.

“Pay him and let’s go home! I don’t trust the apprentices to make that rosewood table for Lord Kuklos without supervision.”

Grumbling, Carzen dug in his scrip. Looking up at Pel after each coin hit the table, he tossed out padpols one at a time. When he got to nine he started to put his purse away. Sharheya cleared her throat with meaning, the meaning being that if he didn’t move faster she would call for pen and parchment right there. He put the tenth down for the herb twist, then very slowly produced a soldat. It wasn’t very shiny.

“If,” Pel let his voice interrupt the woodman’s movements, “if you’d rather pay me in kind instead of in cash, I need a roof joist for the rear of my shop.”

“How long?” Carzen asked. Pel pointed up. The wood-smith ran a practiced eye across the ceiling. “Uhm. Nine yards. You need more than one, pud. All that’s holding up your roof is prayer. You need at least sixteen.”

“I can’t afford them all at once,” Pel said. “I’m in no hurry.”

“A good joist’ll cost you more than one soldat. Four.”

“Two. Add in next month’s treatment as well,” Pel offered, as the woodman started to protest.

“You’ve got a deal, foreigner,” Carzen said. He spat in his palm and held out his hand. Pel gripped it. “I’ll have my boys haul it up.” He leered at the apothecary. “Labor’s extra.”

“Carzen!”

“It’s all I expect,” Pel gathered up the money in his free hand and tucked it away in his apron. “Thank you.” He bowed over Sharheya’s hand, a Rankan custom that he’d picked up from the courtiers of his more exalted clients. “I wish you healthy. If you have need of me, come back at once, or send a messenger.”

Sharheya rose, chuckling. She stretched her back, arching it plea-surably. “I’d best come myself, healer. There are not too many boys in our yard who would willingly go running alone up the Avenue of Temples, no matter what kind of a beating I’d threaten them with for disobeying. Good day to you. Come, Carzen.” She stalked out of the stone building and waited at the side of their donkey cart, waiting. The sawyer followed, still grumbling.

Pel watched them go, jingling his earnings in his pocket. The Avenue of Temples might not be everyone’s idea of a choice address, but the muffling qualities of the empty buildings in between his shop and the next inhabited structure saved him many an explanation, especially at night, when guilt stalked him like a wolf.

The day he had fled Sanctuary he had never intended to return. The horrors he had left behind were more than any man’s mind could have taken without breaking. The worst was that he was responsible for some of it.

He had been called Wrath of the Goddess, because his long reach and swift stride meant that none could escape him. His emotions ran to extremes, but especially his anger. He had believed with all his heart in the cause of the Mother. Humanity was corrupt, as anyone could see by the plagues that it had called down upon itself from the gods. To save it, therefore, required purification, freeing the mortal sphere from that which angered the divine mother goddess. He’d entered Sanctuary with the others of the Hand, determined to wipe out the stain.

But the purge had not gone as he had expected. The Mother had not caused the city and all of humankind to ascend into a new, pure age. Instead, over the next nine years came more of the corruption he had always seen before, some of it coming from the very priests he respected, coupled with a savagery that horrified him. When earlier only the unrighteous were being sought out and destroyed, he’d been able to accept that. But as the occupation continued, with anyone who held back a padpol or had an impure thought being considered irretrievably evil, Pel began to doubt. Then he grew frightened. If he was suspected of losing faith in the Mother he would be next on the flensing block. He was not afraid to die for his beliefs, but they were slipping away from him. He waited for a cleansing fire to come down and consume all the priests who were killing indiscriminately, who took offerings from the impure then killed them anyhow. None came. Sacrifices were held for no reason. Men and women were bled out for no other reason than they had angered one of the Hand. Then came the siege by the Irrune. The Servants of the Mother offered up desperate sacrifices to regain control. His own wife, sister-priest who had stood beside him when they swore themselves to Dyareela, caught the blood fever, and pulled their own child from the pits to cast onto the Mother’s altar. The horror of watching their daughter die broke Pel’s mind free. No longer could he wield his knife without thinking that beneath it was some father’s son or daughter.

Then came the schism. Some of the priesthood rose up as the Bleeding Hand, challenging the traditional children of the Mother with their hideous vision of worship. Naniya went to the Hand and denounced him. Abandoned, betrayed and in mourning, Pel renounced his goddess.

Though he had pronounced them in silence, once the words had been said he could no longer remain with the other worshipers of Dyareela. Their stronghold was falling to the Irrune and Lord Molin Torchholder. Many priests had disappeared underground, ahead of the schism, and more ahead of the Irrune invasion. He told his masters that he was going into hiding, too. They gave him their blessing, thinking that he would continue secretly to do their bloody work for them. He let them believe it. As soon as he could, he fled Sanctuary.

He went as far as money would take him, then walked straight off the cart out of the last town into the countryside. He had no thought as to shelter or food or comfort. If his goddess had abandoned him, he had no choice left but to welcome death. But it didn’t want him yet.

The door of his shop creaked open. Pel spun, hand automatically going for the knife he had worn at his side for so many years. It was not there.

“Garwood, how goes the day?”

The pounding of Pel’s heart slowed when he recognized Siggurn, a regular at the Vulgar Unicorn. The burly man had one hand on the battered, dusty stone lintel as if he needed help standing upright. His skew-nosed face wore a sheepish look.

“Well, man, are you going to berate me that my jewelweed potion wasn’t strong enough?” Pel asked, feeling a touch mischievous.

“Strong enough!” Siggurn sputtered. “Why, it wouldn’t go down for three days! I… the girls thought it was a might funny, though they said I wouldn’t pay until it did. After the first night they said it was sorcery and only that Twandan wench, Mimise, would stay with me. I made it worth her while, though. I’m no cheat.”

Pel did some mental calculations and let out a hearty laugh, the first he’d had in days. “You don’t mean to tell me you took the whole bottle at once? I told you, it’s for a week’s worth of nights. One mouthful at a time.”

“You did! I… well, I got nervous when nothing happened right away.” Siggurn rubbed his nose with a knuckle. “I drank some more of it. Then, bang! And a mouthful’s not much, is it?”

“It’s meant to be a small draught,” Pel said, still chuckling. “Many who’ve had… trouble with potency… aren’t of a mind to drink down a great mugful when they want to perform.”

The big man looked horrified. “You’ve asked them about it? You didn’t mention me by name, did you?”

“No, no, of course not. When you pay my price you buy my silence as well. No, these are other men I’ve sold the same potion to—and I won’t give you their names, either.”

“I wouldn’t ask,” Siggurn said, relieved. “Only… now I’m going to see Dolange next week, and I’ve none left of the first bottle, so… would you?”

“With pleasure,” Pel said. “Will you wait, or come back?”

Siggurn glanced out of the door. “I’ll wait.”

The carter sought out a comfortable place to sit. The shop looked like an abandoned mansion more than a going business concern, yet Pel had occupied it for several months. It took time to rebuild a structure so far dilapidated, and Pel was in no hurry. Nobody else wanted it. Except for bored street urchins shying stones through the cloth he’d stretched over the empty window holes on the street side nobody ever troubled him. Even in the crowded city of Sanctuary few liked to brave the empty places of worship on the Avenue of Temples. This was one of the smallest and least ruined, but that was not to say it might not have been improved by simply tearing it down and building it up again from its foundations. More than two decades of neglect and some active destruction wrought upon it by the adherents of Dyareela and, more lately, those of Irrunega, had all but broken the back of a structure meant to last thousands of years. No one alive remembered that this temple was once dedicated to a minor but necessary Ilsigi goddess named Meshpri, lady of health and healing, sister of great Shipri; and her son Meshnom, patron of apothecaries. If they had, they might have considered it coincidental that a newcomer to Sanctuary would have come to set up an herbalist’s shop in its ruin, but there was no coincidence involved.

The structure was so derelict that not even lovers desperate for privacy would shelter there. The huge stone blocks comprising the walls had been cracked or shifted by gods-fire, earthquake, explosions and berserk men with hammers. As its supports had been attacked the roof decided to add to the debris below by shedding plaster, tiles and finally shards of wood. But Pel had found the place relatively sanitary. Deprived of donations and sacrifices for years, there was no food to attract insects or vermin, other than those attracted to the droppings of the birds that nested in the rotting rafters exposed between broken sections of roof. The weather had peeled the gaudy paint from the walls and made mush out of precious cedarwood and sandalwood incense boxes next to the rectangular stone altar. That was still in one piece, though incised all over its surface with graffiti by youths who dared one another to violate the haunted precinct. The air was cold, but after a lifetime of fire he was grateful for the chill of nature.

Because the chamber was open to the elements most of Pel’s books, tools and equipment had to be stored in heavy chests underneath braced tiers of stone, to protect them from falling tiles and rain. The first thing Pel had done, after cleaning the building as best he could, was to bargain with Grabar, the local stonemason, to smooth out the surface of the altar, eight feet long and four feet wide. Ostensibly he needed it as a mixing palette and operating table. Privately Pel intended it to be used for its original purpose as well, though he could not tell the stonecutter that. By order of Irrune law no worship might take place within the walls of the city. Pel was willing to risk refreshing the temple, as part of his personal penance, but in secret. He wasn’t stupid, or ready to face the Irrune system of justice. He washed out Siggurn’s bottle with cleansing liquid and sand, then chose a medium-sized mortar and pestle. He knew instantly which among the myriad of bottles, boxes, twists of paper and cloth, bundles of twigs, herbs and flowers to choose. A little here, a little there … he didn’t need to look up the formula. It had been only a few days since he’d made it. Imagine drinking a week’s worth of stimulants in one night! He couldn’t stop himself from grinning.

Siggurn propped himself up on half a lintel stone to watch Pel grind herbs to powder. “Did you hear?” he asked. “The Bleeding Hand has returned. They were under the Promise of Heaven.” Pel’s heart froze within him. He knew that warren well. If they had returned, that would be where they would congregate. Oh, Meshpri, keep me from their path! Siggurn noticed that his hands had stopped. “Oh, there’s nothing to worry about now,” he assured Pel. “It’s old news. I dunno what you hear, up here all by yourself. The Dragon’s men swept them all away a couple of weeks back. They say they got them all. Sewed them into bundles then stamped them all to death under horses’ hooves.” Siggurn stopped to swallow. “I

didn’t see it myself, but Dolange’s brother serves in the city guard. He said there wasn’t one man there who didn’t puke his guts out at the sight. You’d have done the same.”

“Likely I would,” Pel said, at the same time wondering if he would. He’d seen and done worse as a priest of Dyareela. He was grimly thankful. In his newfound faith he couldn’t rejoice in the pain and death of others, but it relieved him to know he wouldn’t have to face any of his former cohorts.