THE GOD-CHOSEN
Lynn Abbey
He might have been a stonemason by the way he swung the long-handled hammer save
that no solitary stonemason would be working before dawn in the unfinished
temple. He might have been a soldier since, when a younger man appeared, he
exchanged the hammer for a sword and held his own in a practice session that
went on until the sun edged through the leaning stone columns. He was, in fact,
a priest-a priest of the Storm God Vash-anka, and therefore a soldier and
stonemason before all else.
He was a Rankan aristocrat: distant nephew to the late, unlamented Emperor;
equidistant to the new one as well-though none would have recognized him with
sweat making dirty tracks down his back and his black hair hanging in damp,
tangled hanks. Indeed, because of the hair and the sweat his peers from the
capital would have picked his tall, blond companion as the aristocrat and
labelled the priest a Wrigglie or some other conquered mongrel. But there were
no observers and none who knew Molin Torchholder mentioned his ancestry.
He’d been born in the gilt nursery of Vashanka’s Temple in Ranke-the well-omened
offspring of a carefully arranged rape. His father maimed or killed ten men of
impeccable lineage before claiming Vashanka’s sister, Azyuna, in the seldom
enacted Ritual of the Ten-Slaying. It did not matter that Azyuna had been a
slave or that she’d died giving birth to him. Molin had been raised with the
best his mortal father and Vashanka’s cult could offer.
His rise was steady, if not meteoric: An acolyte at age five, he traveled with