the army before he was ten. He was fourteen when he engineered the siege at
Valtostin, breaching the walls at four places in a single night. Some said he’d
become Supreme Hierophant, but his accomplishments in war, destruction and
intrigue were not accompanied by the proper deference to his superiors. He’d
disappeared, apparently in disgrace, into the inner sanctums of the Imperial
Temple, re-emerging in his early thirties to accompany the inconvenient
Kadakithis into exile in Sanctuary.
“You’d send half the men on the barricades to an early death,” Walegrin,
commander of the regular army’s garrison in Sanctuary, complimented the priest
as they set aside their swords. “Pity the fool who thinks Vashanka’s priests are
soft.”
Molin immersed his face in a bowl of icy water rather than acknowledge
Walegrin’s admiration. Vashanka’s priests were soft, due in no small part to the
irremediable absence of the god himself. Vashanka had died in Sanctuary-died
because when a god is separated from his worshipers, the worshipers go on
living-not the god. And the priests, intermediaries between worshipers and gods,
what of them when a god had simply vanished? It was not a question Molin enjoyed
pondering.
He settled the tunic of a successful tradesman around his shoulders and hid the
hammer in a crack between two man-high blocks of stone. “Did the barricades hold
last night?” he asked, tucking the sword into a saddle-sheath.
“Our lines held,” Walegrin replied with a grimace as they left the enclosure of
Vashanka’s last, incomplete temple. “There was trouble Downwind between the