Blood Ties

THE TIE THAT BINDS by Diane Duane

Pillars of fire and other such events notwithstanding, people in Sanctuary have routines, just as they do everywhere else in the world. Dawn comes up and thieves steal home from work, slipping into shambly buildings or into early opening taverns for a bite and sup or some early fencing. Brothel-less whores slouch out of the Promise of Heaven, or make their way up from the foggy streets by the river, to go yawning back to their garrets or cellars before the sun makes too much mockery of their paint. And people of other walks of life fullers, butchers, the stallkeepers of the Bazaar-drag themselves groaning or sighing out of their beds to face the annoyances of another day.

On this particular summer morning, one fragment of routine stepped out of a door in a much-rundown house near the Maze. People who lived in the street and were going about their own routines knew better than to stare at her, the tall handsome young woman with the oddly fashioned linen robes and the raven hair. One or two early travelers, out of their normal neighborhoods, did stare at her. She glared at them out of fierce gray eyes, but said nothing-merely slammed the door behind her.

It came off in her hand. She cursed the door, and hefted it lightly by its iron knob as if ready to throw the thing down the filthy street.

"Don't do it!" said a voice from inside; another female voice, sounding very annoyed.

The gray-eyed woman cursed again and set the door up against the wall of the house. "And don't kill anyone at work, either!" said the voice from inside. "You want to lose another job?"

The gray-eyed woman drew herself up to full height, producing an effect as if a statue of some angry goddess was about to step down from her pedestal and wreak havoc on some poor mortal. Then the marble melted out of her, leaving her looking merely young, and fiercely lovely, and very tall. "No," she said, still wrathful. "See you at lunchtime."

And off she went, and the people in the street went about their business, going home from work or getting up for it. If you had told any of them that the woman in the linen chlamys was a goddess exiled from wide heaven, you would probably have gotten an interested inquiry as to what you had been drinking just now. If you had told that person, further, that the woman was sharing a house with a god, another goddess, and sometimes with a dog (also divine)-the person would probably have edged away cautiously, wishing you a nice day. Druggies are sometimes dangerous when contradicted.

Of course, every word you would have said would have been the truth. But in Sanctuary, who ever expects to hear the truth the first time... ?

"She hates the job," said the voice from inside the house.

"I know," said another voice, male.

The house was one of those left over from an earlier time when some misguided demi-noble, annoyed at the higher real-estate prices in the neighborhoods close to the palace, had tried to begin a "gentrification" project on the outskirts of the Maze. Sensibly, no other member of the nobility had bothered to sink any money in such a crazed undertaking. And the people in the mean houses all around had carefully waited until the nobleman in question had moved all his goods into the townhouse. Then the neighbors had begun carefully harvesting the house-never so many burglaries or so large a loss as to drive the nobleman away; just many careful pilfer-ings made easier by the fact that the neighbors had blackmailed the builders into putting some extra entrances into the house, entrances of which the property owner was unaware. The economy of the neighborhood took a distinct upward turn. It took the nobleman nearly three years to become aware of what was happening; and even then the neighbors got wind of his impending move through one of his servants, and relieved the poor gentleman of all his plate and most of his liquid assets. He considered himself lucky to get out with his clothes. After that the property fell into genteel squalor and was occupied by shift after shift of squatters. Finally it became too squalid even for them; which was when Harran bought it, and moved in with two goddesses and a dog. "Whose turn is it to fix the door?" Harran said. He was a young man, perhaps eighteen years of age, and dark-haired... a situation he found odd, having been born thirty years before, and blond at the time. His companion was a lean little rail of a woman with a tangle of dark curly hair and eyes that had a touch of madness to them, which was not surprising, since she had been born that way, and sanity was nearly as new to her as divinity was. They were standing in what had been the downstairs reception room, and was now a sort of bedroom since the upper floors were too befouled as yet to do anything with at all. Both of them were throwing on clothes, none of the best quality. "Mriga?" Harran said. "Huh?" She looked at him with an abstracted expression. "Whose turn is it to fix the door?... Oh, never mind, I'll do it. I don't have to be there for a bit."

"Sorry," Mriga said. "When she's angry, I get angry, too.... I have trouble, still, figuring out where she leaves off and I begin. She's out there wanting to throw thunderbolts at things."

"This is unusual?" Harran said, picking up a much-worn shirt and shaking it hard. Rock dust snapped out of the folds.

"It should be," Mriga said rather sadly. She sat down on one of their pieces of furniture, a large bed with multiple sword hacks in it. "I remember the way things were for her when she was a goddess for real. A thought was all it took to make the best things to wear, anything she wanted to eat, a god's house to live in. She didn't have to be angry then. But now..." She looked rather wistfully to one side, where a huge old mural clung faded and mouldering to the wall. It was a scene of Us and Shipri creating the first harvest from nothing. Everywhere there was a wealth of grain and flowers and fruit, and dancing nymphs and gauzy drapery and ewers of outpoured wine. The wood on which the mural was painted was warped, and Shipri had wormholes in her, in embarrassing places.

Harran sat down beside her for a moment. "Do you regret it?"

Mriga looked at him out of big hazel eyes. "Me myself? Or she and I?"

"Both."

Mriga put out a hand to touch Harran's cheek. "You? Never. I would become a goddess a hundred times over and give it up every time, to be where I am now. But Siveni..."

She trailed off, having no answer for Harran that he would want to hear. Perhaps he knew it. "We'll make it work," he said. "Gods have survived being mortals before."

"Yes," Mriga said. "But that's not the way she had it planned."

She looked at a bar of sunlight that was inching across the bare wood floor toward the other piece of furniture, a table of blond wood with one leg shorter than the three others. "Time to be heading out, love. Do we all eat together today?"

"She said she might not be able to make it... there's something going on at the wall that may take extra time. An arch of some kind."

"We should take her something, then."

"Always assuming that I get paid."

"You should hit them with lightning if they renege on you."

"That's Siveni's department."

"I wish it were," Mriga said. She kissed Harran goodbye and left as he was looking for a hasp to rehang the door.

Mriga walked slowly toward her own work, threading the streets with the unconscious care of a lifelong city dweller. It had been a busy year for all of them ... for her in particular. One day Mriga had been just another madwoman... Harran's bedwarmer and house servant, good for nothing but mindless knife sharpening and mindless sex. The next, she had been awake, and aware, and divine-caught in the backwash of a spell Harran had performed to bring back Siveni from whatever oblivious heaven she and the other Ilsig gods had been inhabiting. Harran had been one of Siveni's priests, the healer-servants of the divine patroness of war and crafts. He had thought he would remain so. But the spell had caught him, too, binding him and Siveni and Mriga together through life, past death. That was no mere phrase, either, for the three of them had been in hell together, and had come back again to what should have been a cheerful, delighted life together... long years rich with joy.

Mriga stepped over the sewer runnel in the middle of a street and reflected that even the gods were sometimes caught by surprise. The trouble had started with Stonnbringer's pillar of fire; the banner of a new power in Sanctuary, one that was going to diminish all others that were already there. She could still remember the night she woke in terrible shock to Siveni's anguished screams, and to the feeling of something fiercer than life seemingly running out of her bones, as godhead wavered and sank within them both like a smothered fire. And then the Globes of Power were destroyed, and what little innate power was left to the three of them began to go awry. She and Siveni had said they were willing to be mortal, to die, for Harran's sake. Now it appeared they would have a chance to find out just how willing. Meantime, a god (or goddess) without a temple needed a place to live, and food to eat....

Mriga walked across the bridge over the White Foal (briefly holding her breath against the morning smell) and headed into the Bazaar from the south side. Most of the stall-keepers were setting up their canopies, muttering to one another about prices, wholesalers, arguments at home: the usual morning gossip. She made her way over to the side near the north wall.

There was Rahi, her stallmate, setting up as usual... a large, florid, corpulent man, fighting with the canopy poles, sweating and swearing. Rahi was a tinker who did a small side business in small arms, knives, and the like. He boasted that he had sold knives to Hanse himself, but Mriga doubted this; anyone who really had would be too cautious to cry the man's name aloud. At any rate, apart from his boasting, Rahi was that astonishing phenomenon, an honest tradesman. He didn't mark up his wares more than a hundred percent or so, he didn't scrape true gilt off hilts or scabbards and substitute brass, and his scales had trustworthy weights to them. Why he chose to be such an exception, he usually refused to explain ... though one night, over a stoup of wine, he whispered one word to Mriga, looking around him as if the Prince's men were waiting to take him away. "Religion," he had said, and then immediately drank himself drunk.

Their association, odd though it might be, satisfied Mriga. When she had been job hunting and had passed through the Bazaar one day, Rahi had recognized her as the crippled former idiot-girl who used to sit there and hone broken bits of metal on the cobbles until they could split hairs, until Harran took her home to sharpen Stepsons' swords and his surgical tools. Rahi had offered her a spot in his stall-for a small cut of her profits, of course-and Mriga had accepted, more than willing to take up her old trade. Swords got dull or notched quickly in Sanctuary. A good "polisher" never starved... and Mriga was the best, being (these days) an avatar of the goddess who invented swords in the first place.

"'Bout time you got here," Rahi bellowed at her. Various people close by, sweetmeat sellers and clothiers, winced at the noise, and off in the cattle pens various steers lifted up their voices in mournful answer. "Day's half gone, where you been, how you gonna make your nut, I hafta kick you out, best spot in the Bazaar, eh lady?"

Mriga just smiled at him and unslung her pouch, which contained all her tools: oil, rags, and five grades of whetstones. Others in the city worked with more tools, and charged more, but Mriga didn't need to. "There's no one up but us and the birds, Rahi," she said. "Don't make me laugh. Who's been here with a sword this morning that I've missed?"

"Eh, laugh, sure, sometime some big guy from the palace, you'll laugh then, charge him big, but no, he'll be uptown and you, not a copper, out on the stones again, you be careful!" He rammed the last canopy pole into its spot and glared at her, sweating, smiling.

Mriga shrugged. Rahi traditionally spoke in a long gasp with a laugh at the end, and dropped out words as if he was afraid to run out of them some day. "Hey, Rahi, if it gets slow over here I can always go over to the wall and sharpen the chisels, eh?"

Rahi was shaking out the canopy, a six-foot rectangle of light cotton with some long-faded pattern just barely visible in the weave. "No good'll come of that, mark," he said, "didn't need the wall until now, what for? But to hold out armies, or hold people in. Put a lock on a door and people start thinking there's things to steal, sure. That-the Torch-" He was plainly unwilling to say Molin Torchholder's name aloud. That was no surprise; many people were. Sanctuary was full of ears, and there was frequently no telling who they belonged to. "Playing kingmaker, that one. If he doesn't get us burnt in our beds ..." Rahi trailed off into grumbling. "Your man, how about him, eh?"

"He's doing all right. Word's been getting about that there's a good barber to be had in the Maze. We haven't even been robbed yet.... They let us be, seeing as how it might be Harran that has to patch one of them up some night after a job goes sour."

"Doesn't do to have the barber mad at you, no indeed; pots! Pots to sell!" Rahi shouted suddenly, as a housewife with a thumbsucking child in tow went by the stall. "Other lady, the tall one, she leams that too? No? 'Spose not, doesn't seem the 'prenticing type, too proud, she."

Mriga silently agreed. While still active in the Ilsig pantheon, Siveni had invented many a craft and passed them on to men. Medicine, the sciences, the fine arts, the making and using of weapons, all had been hers. Trapped in the world Siveni might be, but what she knew of the spells and arts of medicine was far more than the best of her priest-healers had known; and Harran had been only a minor one of those. "No," Mriga said, "she's on the wall. She does well enough."

She took out a favorite knife, a little black-handled thing already fine-edged enough to leave the wind bleeding, wiped it with oil, and began absently to whet it. More people were coming into the Bazaar. In front of them Yark the fuller went by with his flat cart. On top of it one of the Bazaar's two big calked straw pisspots lurched precariously, making ominous sloshing noises. "Any last minute contributions?" said Yark, grinning.

Mriga shook her head and grinned back. Rahi made an improbable remark about Yark's mother, the last part of which Mriga lost as a young man passing by paused to watch her work. She lifted the knife, a friendly gesture. "Have anything that needs some work, sir?"

He looked dubious. "How much?"

"Let's see."

He stepped closer, reached under his worn tunic and pulled out a shortsword. Mriga looked at him covertly as she turned over the sword in her hands. Young, in his mid-twenties, perhaps. Not too well dressed, nor too poorly. Well, that might be a relief. People had been doing better lately; the Beyfolk's money was making a difference. The sword was of a steel that had forge patterns like those in Enlibrite, and it was dark-bladed with rust, and had notches in it. Mriga tsked at the poor thing, while sorting other impressions ... for even though swathed in flesh and trapped away from heaven, a goddess has senses a mortal has not. A dubious blade, this, with the memory or the intention of blood on it. But in this town, what weapon hadn't killed someone?... That was after all what they were for. "Dark or bright?" she said.

"What?" The young man's voice was very raw and light, as if it might still tend to crack at times.

"I can polish it bright for you, if it needs to be seen," she said. "Or leave it dark in the blade, if it needs not." She had learned that delicate phrasing quickly, after accidentally scaring away a few potential customers whose work required that their blades be inconspicuous. "Either way, the edge is the same. Four in copper."

"Two."

"You think you're dealing with a scissors grinder? The Stepsons brought their blades to me, and the Prince's guard do still. The thing'll be able to slice one thought from the next when I'm done with it. Always assuming that you can keep it out of the tables at the Unicorn after this." That got his attention; that much Mriga had been able to pick up from the blade itself, though it wasn't talkative as steel went. "Three and a half, because 1 like your looks. No more."

The young man screwed up his face a little, slightly ruining those looks. "All right, do it dark. How long?"

"Half an hour. Take mine," she said, and handed him her "leaner," a plain, respectable longknife with quillons of browned steel. "Don't 'lose' it," Mriga said then, "so I don't have to give you a demonstration with this one."

The young man ducked his head and slipped into the growing crowd. Rahi said something not in a bellow, and it got lost in the increasing noise of people crying fish and cloth and ashsoap.

"What?"

"You ever have to demonstrate?" he wheezed in her ear.

Mriga smiled. Siveni, so long unprayed-to by mortals, had been losing her attributes. And as such things will, one attribute-the affinity for things with edges-had slipped across into mortality and into the person best equipped to handle it: Mriga. "Not personally," she said. "Last time, the knife did it itself. Just lost its balance all of a sudden... slipped out of the thief's hand and stuck her right-well, whatever. Word got around. It's not a problem now."

Yark the fuller went by with the cart again. This one was sloshing. "Last chance!" he said.

"Pots," Rahi bellowed beside her, "pots! Buy pots! You, madam! Even a fish sorry-even a Beysib needs a pot!"

Mriga rolled her eyes and began to whet the new knife.

When Molin Torchholder let it be known that he was going to complete the walls of Sanctuary, the noise of merriment about the new jobs that would become available was almost as loud as Stormbringer's fireworks had been. There were, of course, quieter conversations about what the old fox was up to this time. Some dared to say that his sudden industriousness on the Empire's behalf had less to do with his desire to keep Sanctuary safe for the Imperials, as to keep it safe from them. Some day, not too far off, when Sanctuary's own trade was well enough established, when it had enough of its own gold, and was secure in its gods again... then the gates could swing shut, and Molin and others would stand on the walls and laugh in the Empire's face....

Of course those who said such things said them in whispers, behind bolted doors. Those who did not lost the tongues that had spoken them. Molin didn't bother himself with such small business; his spies tended to it. He had too many things to take care of himself. There was his new god to placate, old ones to assist out of existence, Kadakithis and (in a different fashion) the Beysa to manage. And there was the wall.

As an exercise in logistics alone it was trouble enough. First the plans, argued over for weeks, changed, changed again, changed back; then ordering the stone, and having it quarried; then hiring people enough to move such weights, others to work on the roughed-out stones, trimming them to size. Overseers, stonemasons, mortarers, caterers, spies to make sure everything was working.... Money was fortunately no problem; but time, all the things that could go wrong, were riding on Molin's mind. The vision of what it would be if all went well security against enemies, against the Empire, power for himself and those he chose to share it-that vision was barely enough to counter the murderous work of it all. He took any help he could find, and didn't scruple to use it to the utmost thereafter.

He hadn't scrupled on the morning several months or so back when the first courses of stone were being laid on the southern perimeter, and there was trouble with the foundations, dug too deep and uneven to boot. The plans were spread out on a block on undressed northern granite, and he was speaking to his engineers in that soft voice that made it plain to them that if they didn't set things to rights shortly, they would be very dead. And in the middle of the quiet tirade, he had become aware of someone looking over his shoulder. He didn't move. The someone snorted. Then a slender arm poked down between his shoulder and the chief architect's and said, "Here's where you went wrong. The ground's prone to settling all along this rise; using that for your level strings threw all your other measurements off. You can still save it, with cement enough. But you won't have time if you stand here gaping. That ground dries out, a whole city's worth of cement on top of it won't hold firm. And mind you put enough sand in it."

He had turned around to see the ridiculous, the laughable. It was a tall young woman, surely no more than twenty-five, with cool clean features and long black hair, and a most peculiarly draped white linen robe with a goatskin slung over it. He looked at her with annoyance and amazement, but she was ignoring him which was also ridiculous; no one ignored him. She was looking at the plans as if they had been drawn in the mud with a stick. "Who designed this silly heap of blocks?" she said. "It'll fall down the first time an army hits it."

Beside him, Molin's chief architect had turned a ferocious shade of red, and then began shifting from foot to foot as his gout started to trouble him. Molin looked at the gray-eyed woman and said, in the deadly soft voice he had been using on the engineers, "Can you do better?"

The woman flicked eyebrows at him in the most scornful expression he had ever seen. "Of course."

"If you don't," he had said, "you know what will happen."

She gave him a look that made it plain that his threats amused her. "Parchment, please," she said, knocked the plans aside into the mud, and sat down on the block like a queen, waiting for the writing materials to be brought her. "And you'd better do something about that cement right now, before the ground dries. That much of your wall I'll keep. You-" She pointed at one of the engineers. "Send someone to the biggest glassmaker in town and ask for all the cull they've got."

"Cull?"

"Broken glass. Pound it up fine. It goes in the cement.... What's it for?! You want rats and coneys tunneling under and undermining the wall? Leaving holes for people to pour acid in, or something worse? Well, then!"

The engineer in question glanced at Molin for permission, then hurried away. He turned to her to say something, but the parchment and silverpoint had already been brought, and the woman was sketching with astonishing swiftness on the smooth side of the skin-drawing perfectly straight lines without rulers, perfect curves without tools. He had to fight to keep the scorn in his voice. "And who might you be?" he had said.

"You may call me Siveni," she had said, not looking up, as if she were royalty doing a beggar a favor. "Now look here. That curtain wall was all wrong; it would never bear crenella-tions. And of course you are going to crenellate at some point...."

He entreated her politely, for the moment, to speak quietly; crenellation was forbidden by the Empire except under very special circumstances, and he had been planning to do it... just not now, when it was important to seem not to be having any thoughts of autonomy. Even as he entreated her, though, he found himself becoming uneasy. It was not as if Siveni was an uncommon name in Sanctuary; it was not. But every now and then he was troubled by the memory of how the abandoned temple of the goddess of that name had had its bronze doors torn right off and thrown in the street a while back; and from all indications, they had been broken out from the inside. ...

Siveni, of course-knowing all these thoughts of Molin's, in a goddess's fashion, as if from the inside-was amused by the whole business. It amused her, the inventor of architecture, to be building for mortals; to be building for the man who had cast her priests out of Sanctuary; to be confusing him, and unnerving him, and at the same time doing something worthwhile with her time. Like many gods, she had a flair and taste for paradox. Siveni was indulging it to the point of surfeit.

Such indulgence was one of the few pleasures she had these days, since she and Mriga and Harran had come back from hell. Harran had been dead, killed by one of Straton's people in the raid on the Stepsons' old barracks. The two of them, with Harran's little dog Tyr, and Ischade as guide on the road, had gone down and begged his life of hell's dark Queen, and (rather to their surprise) had gotten it.

The arrangement was peculiar. Harran (playing the barber even past death) had picked up the wounded soul of a mind-dead body, so that his own soul had somewhere to live again. The Queen had let them all out of hell on condition that from now on they should divide Harran's hell-sentence among them, and take death in shifts. Tyr was in hell presently, enjoying herself a great deal, to judge by the vague impressions Siveni occasionally received. Hell's Queen had made a pet of her. But how the rest of the arrangement would function now -even if it was still intact-Siveni had no idea. Hell's gate was closed. The magics that had made Ischade free of the place were severely curtailed since the loss of the Globes of Power.

And heaven's gate, it seemed, was closed, too; the Ilsig gods were locked away from the world by Stonnbringer's sudden terrible assertion of power. Originally, Siveni's plan and Mriga's had been to take Harran straight back to heaven with them, to her tall, fair temple-house in the country beyond the world's time. But they had dallied too long in the mortal world, while Harran got his bearings and got used to his new body... and then one night had awakened to find that heaven's gate was shut on them, and no way back. They were marooned....

So Siveni walked the mortal world without her armor, without her army-conquering spear, and built city walls, and pondered vengeance on Molin Torchholder. Some ways, this was all his fault. Harran would never have been moved to summon her out of the terrible calm of the Ilsig heaven had not the Torchholder banished her priesthood from Sanctuary. And now, she thought-looking down between the fourth and fifth courses of new stone at a little tunnel being built between them-now he would pay for it. Or perhaps not now; but as gods reckon time, soon enough.

"Yai there, Gray-Eyes," came a shout up to her from one of the stonemasons. "We're ready for the next one!"

She grimaced, a look she was glad the mason couldn't see through the kicked-up dust of the hot day's work. Gray-eyes, they all called her; but it was a joke. There was no telling them who she was. It hadn't been too long ago that she sat cool and calm in her house in heaven, hearing her name called in reverence, smelling the uprising savor of good sacrifices, stepping down in power to help those who called on her. No more of that.

Love she had now, yes; she had never had that before- certainly nothing so immediate. But was it as good... ?

"Right," she shouted back. "Kivan," she shouted in another direction, "get the crane around, man, the mortar's wet! It's three in a row here. Yes, those three. Get them up on the hoist. Where the hell are the draggers?"

She watched them haul the stone in question into place and wrap the crane's ropes around it. While they were grunting and straining she let herself go unfocused for a moment, and listened. Knife-grinding, she "heard"; and someone screaming, while sure hands worked over them and other hands held them down; and more faintly than the first two impressions, a clear sense came of being rubbed in the good place behind the ears. Siveni smiled to herself. She had always been a single goddess, being too busy inventing things to bother splitting off alternate personae, dyads and trinities and whatever. Now, after Harran's spell, and their trek past hell's gate, she was not only a trinity, but one with four members. Interesting, it was. And very unsettling.

And was it worth it... ?

A shadow fell over her as she leaned on the last-laid stone. "Molin," she said.

"How do you do that, mistress? Know how someone's coming behind you, I mean."

She stiffened a bit. "In sun like this," she said, "it would take a blind woman not to see your shadow's shape. Has that new stone come in yet? We'll need the softer stuff for the arrowshot wall."

"It's in. Come take a cup of something cold with me."

She stepped down from the stone, wondering about the odd tone in his voice, schooling herself to show no reaction. Carelessly she walked in front of him to the tent he'd had set up at the site, so that he could watch the workers, and her, in comfort. She flung one flap on its door aside. Silk, she thought. And not because it makes the best tents, either.

There were only two chairs, too close together for her taste. She took the better of the two and sat waiting for Molin to pour for her. Massive and splendid, he sat down in the other chair and looked at her for a long moment before reaching out to the decanter and glasses on its table between the chairs. Alarm, his mind sang to Siveni. Curiosity growing. Thought winding around itself, choking like ivy growing up sheer cold stone....

"Why do you live in that little hole in the Maze?" Molin said, pouring, and passing her the cup. "You could certainly afford better, with what I'm paying you."

She took the cup and looked at him, unsmiling, wishing she had her spear with the lightnings sizzling around it; he would not be daring to ask her questions. "It'd be too much bother to move in the middle of a work like this," she said.

"Ah, yes. Another question I wish you would answer, with your obvious expertise. What other jobs have you done?"

Better ones than you're doing now, Siveni thought as she lifted the cup and smelled, very deep in the bouquet of the wine, an herb she recognized. She had invented it; and this was one use for it that she had never approved. "Stibium," she said, answering his question and naming the drug, both at once. "Torchholder, for shame. The preparation has to be started weeks in advance if you intend to have someone drink it and then spill out their life's secrets to you. Though perhaps you just mean my next flux to be painless. A kind thought. But I manage that for myself. And I'm pained that you don't trust me."

"You live with a common barber and a woman who was an idiot once," said Molin. "She's whole now. How did that happen?"

"Good company?" Siveni said. Oh, for my lightnings; oh, for one good crack of thunder out of a clear sky, to back this impertinent creature down! "I'm no sorceress, if that's what you're thinking. Even if I were, what good would it do me these days? Most magicians are lucky if they can turn milk into cheese now. Your problem," she said, "is that I seem to have come out of nowhere, and you have no hold over me ... and at the same time, no choice but to trust me; for I've saved your wall from the rotten ground it stands on four times now, and will keep doing so until it's whole."

He gazed at her as levelly as he could, and made a point of drinking from his own cup. "You've taken arthicum, I imagine," she said. "Mind that you don't eat anything made with sheep's milk for the next day or so; the results would be unfortunate. At least, inconvenient, for a man who has to spend more than an hour without running off to ease himself."

"Who are you?" he said, very conversationally.

"I am a builder," Siveni said. "And the daughter of a builder. If it pleases me to do a masterwork while living in a slum, that's my business. Think, if you like, that I'm making this city safe for my family to live in in future years. Have you had anything to complain of about my work so far?"

"Nothing," said Molin. He sounded as if he would rather have had complaints.

"And have you not been checking the actual building against the plans each day and each night? And have you or your spies found one stone out of place, or anything not just as it should be?"

Molin Torchholder stared at her.

"Then let me do my work and take my wage in peace." She looked at him merrily. "Which reminds me," she said; "there are stones out there waiting for our attention at the laying. Come on." And Siveni drank off the cup and set it down appreciatively.

"It does add something to the flavor," she said, and got up. "Come, sir."

She went out into the bright hot day, Molin following. Alarm was still singing in his mind; and now in hers, too.

He suspects something... even though there's nothing to suspect. He'll do Harran and Mriga some harm if he must, to find out the truth. Wretched mortal! Why can't he leave off meddling?

I must think of something to do.

I never had these problems when I was single!

"Yai, Gray-Eyes! You ready?"

"Coming, Kivan," she called, and headed down along the stone course, feeling the Torchholder's eyes in her back, like spears without lightning.

"I'm sorry I couldn't have let you sleep through that," Harran said to the man he had been cutting. "But with the wound so deep in the hand, if you were asleep and I hit a nerve, we would never have known it, and the hand might have been useless an hour later, though the poison was out."

The joiner-Harran had forgotten his name, as he always forgot his patients' names-groaned a little and eased himself up to sit, his wife helping him. Harran turned away for a moment, busying himself with cleaning his tools and not noticing his surroundings. He had been a priest, used to clean, open temples, fresh air, scrubbed tables, light. Cutting someone on a kitchen table that until five minutes ago had had chicken dung on it was not unusual-not anymore-but he would never like it.

The few chickens in the mean little hut walked about the floor, scratching and singing, oblivious to the blood and pain of the last half hour. The joiner had driven a nail through his hand while working, and had yanked the thing out and thrown it away, going on with what he had been doing. Then the wound had festered, and there were signs of the beginning of lockjaw when Harran had finally been called in. He had had to run like a madman down to the flats by the river for the plant to make the lockjaw potion; luckily, even now, the small medicinal magics seemed to work-and then, once that was in the joiner, and the poor man was flushed and sweating from its effects, then came the cutting. He had never been terribly fond of that part of any surgery, but the suppurating wound had to be drained. It was drained, though it nearly turned his stomach, which was saying something.

Now the hand was bound with clean linen, and Harran's tools were clean and in their satchel. The man's head was lolling to one side, an aftereffect of the lockjaw remedy. Timidly, his wife came to Harran and offered him a handful of coppers. She tried to be nonchalant about it, but it was too plain from her eyes that they were all she and her man had. Harran considered, took one, for form's sake, and then professed great interest in one of the chickens, a rather scrawny red hen that looked good for soup, if nothing else. "How about her, eh?" he said. "Looks like there's nice pickings on her."

The joiner's wife saw instantly what Harran was trying to do, and began protesting. But the protests were feeble, and after a while Harran walked out of the hut with a copper, and a copper-colored chicken, and blessings raining on his back. He walked as fast as he could out of that particular comer of the Maze. It was always the blessings that embarrassed him the most.

The only good thing about them, Harran thought as he made his way toward the Bazaar, was that they made it unnecessary for him to cry his wares like a streethawker. In the old days, as Siveni's priest, people had known where to come for healing, and had done so without any fuss. Even in the Stepsons' barracks, they had known. It had galled him, after the return from hell, to have to go hunting the sick and injured like some grave robber in a hurry....

Graves.... It was a thought. There was an old friend he had not seen since shortly after he got back from hell. He began a detour, and stopped in a wine shop for a pot of cheap red, then headed across town toward the chamel house.

The day was leaning toward noon; the sun bumed down and the streets stank under it. What did I ever see in this foul place? he wondered as he went. The answer was plain enough; Siveni's priesthood, which had been all the life he wanted. But then the priesthood was banished as Molin Torchholder went systematically about making the smaller Ilsig gods unwelcome. Then he had started making the best of things, working with the Stepsons, and with their poor replacements, until the real ones came down on the stand-ins' barracks and slaughtered them wholesale.

And Harran with them.

Alive again now, in a new body, he had rather hoped that the memory of being dead would go away. Instead it got stronger. Images of hell laid themselves pale and chill over daylight Sanctuary-the cold-smoking river, the silences broken only by the abstracted moaning of the sleepwalking damned. More remotely, through the bond he shared with Siveni and Mriga, and even with Tyr, he saw things he had never seen himself. The great black pile of the palace of hell's rulers; hell's gate burst inward by a spear that sizzled with lightnings; Ischade the terrible, coolly leading them down the path into darkness; Tyr flying in splendid rage at the throat of a monster ten times her size. And one image, brief but clear, of the cold black marble floor of that dark palace seen as if by one who groveled upon it... while just out of eyeshot, Siveni's bright helm rolled on the floor where it had slipped off her as she bowed her proud power down, begging for Harran's life.

For him... all that done for him. He could never get used to it. And no matter how many times Mriga and Siveni protested that it was nothing, that they would do it again, he could not believe them. Oh, they believed it when they said it. But their faces from day to day, as Siveni came home looking drawn and grim from the job she had made for herself, as Mriga looked at her goddess-sister with pity, and at Harran with helpless, slightly sorrowful love-their faces betrayed them. They were exiled from the heaven where they belonged, and condemned to this wretched hole of a town, for his sake.

There must be something I could do, he thought.

The breath went out of him in annoyance as he sighted the enamel house not far away. He had been something of a sorcerer once; most of the priests of Siveni had been, since there was as much use for magic in the healing and building arts as anywhere else. But since Stonnbringer arrived, all other gods' powers were diminished-that was half his problem-and after the globes were destroyed, spells tended to fall to pieces or produce unlikely results.

Just ahead of him, a small ragged man crouched in an alleyway, wearing a furtive look. He glanced up at Harran, looked very cautiously around him, and whispered, "Dust? You want some dust, mister?"

Harran stopped and glared at the dustmonger, who shifted uneasily under the stare. "I don't want anything of Storm-bringer's," he said. "As if that stuff does anything ... which it doesn't." And he brushed past and made for the chamel house.

The amazing smell of the place briefly drove everything, even his annoyance at the dustmonger, out of his head. Farmers came from all over to get at its muckheap, and barbers and surgeons came here for corpses to practice on. Harran had other reasons. He choked his way through the long low building and prayed for his nose to turn itself off quickly.

Close to the end of the building, by the big pickling vats where innards were thrown until they could be buried, he found Grian. Grian had worked with Siveni's priests in the old days, supplying corpses for their anatomy classes, and he knew the last of Siveni's priests in Sanctuary rather better than Harran wanted to admit. He looked Harran up and down, noted the winepot under one arm and the chicken under the other, and a look of dull delight came into his eye. He tossed the paunching knife he was using to the slab where his present project lay, and said, "Lad, where you been this month and more? Thought you'd died. Again."

Harran had to laugh. "Not sure I could."

Grian moved his big red-headed bulk over to a bench where jars with secondhand stomachs and intestines were waiting for the sausagemakers. He pushed the jars off to the side, and Harran sat down next to him and offered him the winepot. The chicken, released, fell to scratching with great interest in the straw on the floor.

They spent a little while just drinking in companionable silence. Finally: "Home life keeping you busy?" Grian said.

"Not home so much. Work. There are too many sick people in this town, and only one of me." He took another drink. "Same as usual. You?"

"Business, business." Grian waved around him, where ten other men and women were handling the day's supply of dead bodies. "Had to hire on more help for the summer. Putting in a new muckpit, too, 'n' a new ossuary. Old one's full up. Muckpit kept overflowing. Neighbors complained." Grian laughed, a rough cheerful sound, though Harran noticed that his friend didn't breathe too deeply in the process. "They piffles, they're ruffling about trying to get the better of things again. No good. They kill somebody now and the noble-folk, the Imperials, everybody 'n' his brother comes down on 'em like bricks. Half the people in here are piffles this morning. Arrowshot, knifed, you name it. People in the city gettin' tired of them. About time, I say."

Harran agreed, passed the winepot back. Grian took a long one. "This new body," he said, elbowing Harran genially in the ribs, "working OK? Eh? Be interesting to get inside it one day, see what makes it tick."

Harran smiled again. Grian's humor never strayed far from his work. "I wonder myself, sometimes."

"Don't hold with such things myself," Grian said in cheerful disapproval. "Magic, eh, who needs it? Hear it's gone sour, and good riddance to it. So many magicians in this town, man can't spit without hittin' one. Unnatural. City should have done something long time ago. But now they don't have to, eh? They got other problems." Grian swigged at the pot again. "They puttin' less in these than they used to. Your gray-eyed lady-hear she and Molin are getting friendly. Work crew brought down some more heart-seizes from the Wall today, saw her sitting there in his fine tent, drinking his wine."

Harran's heart turned over in him. Not jealousy-of course not-but concern. Through the bond among them she could feel, too often, a clear cool regard turned on Molin Torchholder, a sense of vast amusement, vast satisfaction. And Siveni held a grudge better than anyone else alive. "Eh," Grian said, nudging him again. "You be careful, huh? Life's hard enough."

"Grian," Harran said, surprising himself-perhaps it was the wine-"have you ever been in a situation where you got everything you wanted, everything-and then you found out it's no good?"

Grian looked in mild perplexity at Harran and scratched his head. "Been so long since I got anything I wanted," he said softly, "I couldn't say, I'm sure. You got trouble at home?"

"Sort of," said Harran, and held himself quiet by main force for several minutes, letting Grian drink. He had started this whole thing. The thought of bringing an Ilsig goddess back into the world to set things to rights, that had been his idea. And the later, crazier idea of serving that goddess personally the stuff of fantasies-had been his idea, too. His idea it had been to bring a little knife-whetting idiot-stray home from the Bazaar as servant and casual bedwarmer. Now the idiot was sane, and not very happy; and the goddess was here, and mortal, and even less happy; and his dog was in hell, and though she was fairly happy, she missed him-and he missed her fiercely. And Harran himself was not completely mortal any more, and was also the cause of all of them having the promise of heaven snatched out from under their noses. His fault, all his fault. In this world where death wins all the fights and things run down, his fantasies had accomplished themselves and then promptly turned into muck.

Something had to be done.

Something would be done. He would do it.

"I have to go," he said. "Keep the wine."

"Hey, hey, what about these cord-twins here I been saving in pickle for you? Fastened together in the funniest place, now you come look a moment-"

But Harran was already gone.

"Here now," Grian shouted after him, rather hopelessly, "you forgot your chicken!"

Grian sighed, finished the wine, and picked up his paunch-ing knife again.

"Oh, well. Soup tonight. Eh, chickie?"

The three did not meet at lunchtime, and dinner turned out to be very late. It was midnight when Siveni came in, all over dust and grime, and sat down at the table with one short leg and stared at it moodily. Mriga and Harran were in bed. She ignored them.

"Eat something, for pity's sake," Harran said from under the covers. "It's on the kettlehook."

"I am not hungry," Siveni said.

"Then do come to bed," said Mriga.

"I don't want that either."

Harran and Mriga looked at one another in mild astonishment. "That's a first."

Siveni shrugged off her goatskin and threw it over a chair. "What's the use of losing my virginity," she said, "if I keep getting it back every morning?"

"Some people would kill for that," said Mriga.

"Not me. It hurts, and it's getting to be a bore. If I'd known what being a virgin goddess was going to mean down here, I would have gone out for being a fertility deity instead."

Mriga sat up in bed, wrapped a sheet around her, and swung her legs over the edge. "Siveni," she said, very quietly, "has it occurred to you that maybe we're not really goddesses anymore?"

Siveni looked up, not at Mriga, but at the poor mouldering mural, where Eshi danced in her gauze, and Us was godly-splendid, and everything was youth and luxury and divine merriment. The look was deadly. "Then why," Siveni said, just as quietly, "do we share this wretched heartbond, like good trinities do, so that all day I can hear you both thinking how unhappy you are, and how sorry for me you are, and how you miss the dog, and how we're trapped here forever?"

Harran sat up, too, tossing the other end of the sheet across his lap. "We're something new, I think," he said. "A mixture. Divine without being in heaven, mortal without-"

"I want to go back."

The words fell into silence.

"After this job," she said. "Harran, I'm sony. I'm not one of those dying-and rebom gods who makes the corn come up, and shuttles back and forth between being mortal and divine; I'm just not! It's not working for me! I've been fighting it, but the truth is that I was made for a place where my thought becomes fact in a second, where I shine, where I'm worth praying to. I was made to have power. And now I don't have it, and you're all suffering for my lack." She sat down against the table. It shifted under her weight, and the broken bit of dish propping the short leg crunched and broke with a sound that made them all start.

"I've got to go back," she said; Mriga looked unhappily at her. "How?" she said. "Nothing's working. You can't make so much as heat lightning these days."

"No," Siveni said. "But have we tried anything really large?"

"After what happened to Ischade..."

Siveni shrugged, a cold gesture. "She has her own problems. They don't necessarily apply to us."

"And Stormbringer..." Harran said.

Siveni cursed. The dust on the table began to smoke slightly with the vehemence of it. Siveni noticed it and smiled, approving. "Come on, Harran," she said. "The situation was no different when you called me out of heaven, and Savankala and the wretched Rankene gods were running things. You brought me out in their despite. This new god is too busy chasing Mother Bey to care a whit about us hedge-gods." The smile took on a bitter cast. "And why should He care what we're doing? We'd be leaving his silly city, not meddling with it further. I think He'll be glad to see the back of us."

"We," Harran said, and looked sober all of a sudden.

Both Mriga and Siveni looked at him in shock. "Surely you'd be coming with us," Mriga said.

Harran said nothing for a moment.

"Harran!"

"There is nothing here for you," Siveni said. "You've thought it a hundred times, you've cried about it when you thought we don't notice. You've seen hell, you've glimpsed heaven through us; how can mortal things possibly satisfy you anymore? Any more than they satisfy me? Or you," she said, looking at Mriga.

Mriga stared at the floor.

"Come on!" Siveni said, sounding a touch desperate. "You were bom a clubfooted idiot, you went through a whole life being used as a slave or a pincushion, living like a beast-and what do you do that's better now? You grind knives in the Bazaar as you always did, and take a little copper for it, but where's the joy in that? Where's the life you were going to lead with him in the Fields Beyond? All the peace, the joy? You expect that in Sanctuary?"

Harran and Mriga looked at each other. "There's something to be said for life," Harran said, as if doubting the words as they came out. "In heaven everything bends to suit you. Here, you bend-but you come back stronger sometimes-"

"Or you break," said Siveni.

Silence. The firelight and candlelight wavered on the mural; Eshi seemed to sway a little.

"I'm going back," Siveni said. "I know the spells. I wrote them. And you two-are you going to sit here and be miserable for all your short lives, on the off chance that it'll make you stronger?"

Mriga let out a long breath. "Harran?"

His eyes were for Siveni, as they had been so many times before, in statuary or the flesh. "I wanted you," he said.

They waited.

"It does seem selfish to want it all my way," he said. "All right. We'll try it."

Mriga sat back down on the bed. Siveni shifted her weight again, and again the table crunched and sagged.

"When will the Wall be done?" Harran said.

"Weeks yet," Siveni said, looking thoughtful. "It must be done before the frost sets in, or the mortar won't set. But they have the plans. They hardly need me to complete them." And she began to laugh softly, so that the table creaked.

Harran and Mriga exchanged looks. "You have to have known," Siveni said. "There are passages hidden in those walls already, alterations I made in the building that don't show in the plans. The wall is as full of holes as a bubble-cheese. No one knows-not even Molin. I was most careful. He'll think himself all secure, and until I choose to put the word in some oracle's ear, he will be. But that day-let Sanctuary look to its walls."

"Well," Harran said, "one thing only. What about Tyr? She's in hell. No one can go there anymore, from what I hear."

"But people can come out," Siveni said. "She's of us. Where we go, she'll go also, if she wants."

It seemed likely enough. "At any rate," said Siveni, "I shan't wait for the walls. All the work that I needed to handle myself is done. Let's get together the things we need and be gone tomorrow night. Not the mandrake spell, Harran. The older one, that you didn't have materials for the last time- the one that uses bread and wine and a god's blood. There'll be no accidents this time. We'll storm heaven, and settle down once and for all, and leave this poxhole to its own devices."

Harran shuddered once.

Mriga sighed and climbed back into the bed. "Come and get some rest, then," she said.

"Oh, all right," said Siveni, looking at them both with a lighter expression. It became apparent that rest was suddenly not on her mind.

Harran's ironic young face got lighter, too. He slid under the sheet and said, "Well, since it is my last night on earth..."

Siveni threw her chlamys over his head and put the candles out.

The old Temple of Siveni Gray-Eyes, near one end of the Avenue of Temples, was not what it once had been. Its brazen doors, struck down by its annoyed patroness's spear, had been taken away and melted down as scrap. Its old storerooms had been looted, first by its last priest, then by everyone in Sanctuary who could not resist an open door. Even the great gold-and-ivory statue of Siveni, armed and armored in splendor, had been stolen. Glass lay in bright shards on the dirty floor, fallen from the high windows; spiders wrought in every comer, and rats rustled here and there. There were fire-scorches in the comers from squatters' fires, and the bones of roast pigeons and cats.

Also still there, visible by the light of their one shuttered lamp, was an old round diagram traced on the floor in something black-bitumen, to judge by the scrape marks where curious feet had kicked at it through a year's time. Curious signs and letters and numbers in old languages were scribed smudgily there, and there was a brownish mark in the middle on the white marble, as if blood had been shed.

Harran put the lamp down, being sure its shutter was open no more than a hairsbreadth, and turned away from the street. "I wish the doors were still here," he said.

Siveni sniffed, putting down the bag she had been carrying. "Late for that now," she said. "Let's be about our business; it will take a while as is."

Mriga stepped up behind them and put down another bag, quietly beginning to son through its contents. "The wine was something of a problem," she said. "Siveni, you owe me two in silver."

"What?"

"I thought we were splitting this expense three ways." Siveni somehow managed to look indignant, even when there was no light to do it in. "You goose, we don't need money where we're going! I'll make you a whole house out of silver when we get there."

"Deadbeat."

Harran began to laugh softly. "Stop it. What kind did you get?"

"Wizardwall red," she said. "A half-bottle each of wine of our age. Enough?"

"Plenty. The wineseller say anything?"

"I told him it was for a birthday party. What about the bread?"

"It rose. You needn't have worried about the yeast. The worst part was grinding the wretched stuff. I think it's going to have pebbles in it from the flints."

The gongs of one of the temples down the way spoke midnight, a somber word that echoed in the summer-night stillness. There was no breath of wind tonight, and the heat seemed to have gotten greater after the sun sent down, rather than less. A fat bloated moon, gibbous and a day from full, was riding high, its pallid light slanting down through the shattered windows and striking gemlights from the broken glass on the floor. Echoes tinkled down from the high ceiling as Siveni kicked the stuff aside.

Harran looked up, brushing away a piece of glass that Siveni had kicked at him. "Siveni-are you really sure this is going to work?"

She looked at him haughtily. "All those spells that have gone awry have been done by mere practitioners of magic. Not authors of it. I helped Father Us write this spell; I taught the bread and wine what to mean. All the dying gods who come back to heaven on a regular basis swear by it. Really, Harran, we'll never make a decent mage out of you if you don't learn to trust your materials."

"Have you ever actually done the spell? Yourself?" Mriga said under her breath as she got a rag out of her bag and began scrubbing some of the old markings off the floor.

"Not myself. I gave it to Shils to test; it worked all right. In fact, they started to wish in heaven that I hadn't given it to him. He's a terrible bore, and now there's no getting rid of him. Throw him out of heaven and a second later he's back."

They worked in silence for a few minutes, Harran laying out the bread, Mriga finishing her scrubbing, then uncorking the wine and setting out the various cups into which it would have to be poured by thirds and mixed with blood, Siveni writing with a bit of yellow chalk inside one of the areas that Mriga had cleaned off. At one point she stopped and looked critically at one graceful phrase. "I never did like that letter after I invented it," she said, "but after Us sent it out to men, it was too late to call the wretched thing back."

Mriga sat back on her heels and laughed at her almost-sister. "Is there anything you didn't invent?"

"The rotgut they distill in the back of the Unicorn. That's all Anen's fault."

A few minutes' more work and they stood up, finished. "Well enough," Siveni said. "Are you sure of the words?"

They could hardly avoid it, being in some ways Siveni themselves, and hearing her mind nearly as clearly as their own, at the moment.

"Then let's be about it. The sooner I see the inside of my house again, the happier I'll be."

"Our house," said Mriga, in a warning tone.

Siveni began to laugh. "Harran, we used to have the best fights-the house would change its nature every other minute. How the neighbor gods stared...." Her eyes flashed, even in that light so dim as to make expression impossible. For a moment Harran looked at her and saw again the crazed hoyden goddess he had fallen in love with; and Mriga smiled, remembering many fights won best two falls out of three, while the noise scandalized the divine neighbors. "If this works..." she said.

"If?" Siveni reached out for the bread. "Give me that."

They took their places. The diagram was a triangle within a hexagon within a circle, and other lesser figures were traced in the apertures. At each point of the triangle they stood, each with a cup and a small round loaf of bread in front of them- the cup washed in wine and upended, the bread baked in a fire struck by the same flints that ground its grain. In the center stood an empty cup, this one of glass. If all went well, at the end of all this it would be cracked and they would never hear the sound; the heavens would have cracked open for them at the same moment.

"I call, who have the right to call," Siveni said, not too loudly. "Powers above and below, hear me; powers of every bourne; shapes and strengths unshapen. Night and Day Her sister; steeds of mom and evening, you forces that clip the great world round about; all thoughts and knowledges that live in elements; hear now my words, the law laid down, the rule enforced, the balance set aright..."

Harran was beginning to be upset. He knew this spell by reputation, though it was one that the younger priests had never been let near. He knew perfectly well that even now, at the first invocation, terrible quiet should have fallen around them, all light should have been extinguished, even the cold moonfire falling through the window should have hit the en-sorcelled marble and gone dark. But none of that was happen-ing.

"... new law, part with the Worlds and parcel; for I that was of times beyond and fields beyond, now go again unto my own. Death has taken hold on me, and failed; life has run my veins, and failed; and having conquered both, now I will to journey once again where time moves not, where the Bright Mansions stand, and my place is prepared me among the Deathless as of old..."

There were rats watching them from the walls. No living thing outside the circle should have been able to be so close to the wards without falling unconscious. Harran sweated harder. Did I put too much honey in the bread? Did one of them misdraw something... ?

"... and all Powers I call to witness as I open the gates for my going, by the means ordained of Them of old. By this bread baked in its own fires, as my body lives and is fueled of its own burning, I do call Them to witness; that by its eating, it becomes of me, and myself of it, in the old circle that is the way of gods, and both become immortal forever more..."

They all three took up their loaves of bread and began to eat them. Harran reassured himself that there was not too much honey in the bread. In fact, it had risen rather nicely. In the great silence left after he had eaten the little cake, he noticed abruptly how very silent it was getting-

"And likewise behold ye this wine of my age, burning under the sun in the grape as my blood has burned in lifelight in my veins all my days of this world, and turned to wine of its own virtue as the blood and thought of mortalkind tumeth to the divine of its virtue and in its time. Now do I drink and make it so part of me, and myself part of it, both alike immortal ..."

Harran drank the lovely old vintage, reassured, feeling it slide down his throat like velvet fire as the spell took, made it more than wine, in token of his and the others being more than merely mortal. Across the circle, Siveni made a face at the taste of wine only nine months old; Harran was hard put not to grin and spill his own. The silence was thick. At the sides of the great room, frozen eyes shone dulled in the spell-light that was rising about them. Harran's heart grew fierce inside him. It was going to work. Those bright fields that he had glimpsed, that long peace, that eternity to love in, to work in, to be more than mortal in-his, theirs, at last-

"... and these tokens offered up, these rites enacted," Siveni said, her voice becoming temfyingly clear though she had not raised it a whit, "as last sign of my intent I offer up my blood, come of gods in the olden time, returned to them at last; wherein godhead resides past time or loss, and wherein it may be regained..."

They stepped forward, all three. The night held its breath as Mriga picked up the cup, half full of a mixture of the three wines of their age. From her belt she slipped out her leaner knife. It gleamed like a live thing in the spellfire, and throbbed as if it had a heart. Siveni put up her arm.

"... that we may drink of it, as the law has always been, as I have made it, and so be restored to our own. By this token let gates be opened to us..." She never flinched as the knife slit her wrist the short way, as the blood ran down and into the wine. "... let night and day part for us, let time die for us; let it be done!"

She passed Harran the cup. He drank, thinking to ignore the taste, and finding that it was more as if the taste ignored him; the liquid in the cup was full of such power that his senses drowned in it. He staggered, seeking light or balance, finding neither. He felt as transparent as its glass. Blindly he reached out, felt Mriga take the cup from him. He felt her own drowning as if it were his. Then Siveni took it, and drained it; the great uprushing clarity that leapt into her mind was a blinding thing, and Harran nearly fell to his knees. He thought he had seen the heavens. He saw now how wrong he was. Something clutched at him: Mriga. He held onto her slender arms as if she were the last connection to reality. He was seeing things now, though not with the eyes. Other eyes there were, that watched them all from within the circle; not dull beasts' eyes like the stupefied rats', but eyes that danced and were glad, and glowed in a small dog's head, waiting for them to break through to touch the owner-

"Let all be open," Siveni cried, "let the way be prepared for us; we pass! We pass!" And Harran felt her lift the cup, to dash it against the written marble and open the way; and he felt her hesitate; and he felt her sway.

His eyes were working again, much against their will. There was moonlight where there should not have been, and Siveni stood bemused, looking at her wounded arm, watching the blood run down.

"It's wrong," she said. "It shouldn't hurt."

And she fell to the floor, and the cup went flying out of the circle and crashed in the wrong spot, all its virtue spilled in a black pool under the moon.

Harran fell down beside her. The edges of the wound were dark and inflamed. He looked at Mriga in horror. "The knife..."

"Poison," she said, her face in anguish. "But it never left me all day-"

"Yesterday," Harran said.

In Mriga's shocked mind he saw the young man, with his knife with death in it. One of the Torchholder's spies.

They started up in horror together, neither sparing more than a look for the fair young form of Siveni, that had lived thousands of years as an Ilsig goddess, and had now had those thousands of years catch up with her in one withering second.

That was when the silvertipped arrows came whistling in, and feathered them both. They fell.

When the backwash of the spell had died down a bit, in behind his men came Molin Torchholder, who missed nothing in this city, especially nothing done by those whom mere silly love made careless. Stormbringer, too, was not quite settled yet, and had spoken a word in his ear about rogue deities climbing over his walls, in one direction or another. Molin carefully broke the circle, kicked the shattered glass of the cup of blood and wine about, and nudged with his toe the skin-and-bones body of his erstwhile architect.

"I do wish people wouldn't try to cheat me," he said. "Idiots, anyway, trying spells anymore. Nothing of this intensity works right."

With a sigh he turned. "Clean up this mess," he said to one of his men, "and tomorrow detach a work detail and raze this place. We can use the stone."

Then he went away to get some sleep. He had a long day tomorrow, on Stormbringer's business.

His men took the bodies away to the chamel house and left the place in darkness. One thing they did not take: one small form, wholly there now, in the darkness of the shadows beyond the moon; a shape like a small delicate dog, with too many lives sitting behind her eyes.

Tyr snarled, and got up, and walked out into the night to consider her vengeance.