THE GOD-CHOSEN by 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 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 Stepsons and the rabble-again. And something dead or deadly moving along the White Foal. But nothing to disturb our fish-eyed masters."

It was Ilsday for the Ilsigi, Savankhday for the Rankans and Belly's-day for the Beysin (who demonstrated their barbarism by giving days to their bodies rather than to the gods); but, most important, it was Market-day. Civil war would abate for one day while partisans and rivals rubbed shoulders in disorder of another kind. The Path of Money, like every other thoroughfare in town, was filled with the intense activity of commerce-legal and otherwise. The pair was separated near the Processional when a food stall erupted in flames. Walegrin, the soldier and representative of such order as the town possessed, went to the merchant's aid and Molin, in the disguise of a merchant himself, found his journey redirected into a tangle of streets.

Here, where a rainbow of painted symbols proclaimed which gangs and factions had been paid off by each household, there was no amnesty and a well-fed man on a well-fed horse was only a moving target. Torchholder shed his merchant's demeanor: straightening his back, holding the reins in one hand while the other rested on his thigh ready to wield whatever weapon his cloak might conceal. Ragged children gauged his ability to defend himself by shouting epithets combining anatomy and ancestry with an originality a soldier could admire-never guessing that they cursed Vashanka's Hierarch in Sanctuary. He ignored them all as he turned down a sunnier alley.

Then the sunlight vanished. The heavy black clouds which had foretold countless perversions of weather since the Storm God's demise condensed overhead. A blast of ice-laced wind roared down the alley making the horse rear in panic. The children and beggars struck the moment Molin's attention was on the horse instead of Sanctuary, and the priest found himself in the midst of a deadly little alley-fight even as needle-like pellets of sleet began their own assault from the sky.

He dropped the reins, a signal to his army-trained horse that it was free to attack, and drew the sword from its saddle-sheath. The odds swung back in his favor once he got a film grip on the hand pressing a knife into his kidney and tossed that urchin back into the street. Whatever his attackers had expected it wasn't a merchant who fought like one of the thrice-damned Stepsons and, though they would have dearly loved to drag this anomaly back to their leader for a closer interrogation, they cowered back under the eaves. Molin gathered the reins, pounded his heels against the gelding's flanks and made a dash for the Palace.

"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.