The Dead of Winter

DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE by Diane Duane

... But who could ever tell of all the daring

in the stubborn hearts of women, the hard will,

how the female force crams its resisted way

through night, through death, taking no "no" for answer?

Yet still Right's anvil stands staunch on the ground,

and there smith Destiny hammers out the sword.

Should that force, that fierce gift, be used for ill,

delayed in glory, pensive through the murk,

Vengeance comes home. Yet odd the way of life,

for if the power's used for good, then still

She comes; though in far other form, and strange ...

In Sanctuary that day the smoke rose up to heaven, a sooty sideways-blowing banner against the blue of early winter. Some of that smoke rose up from altars to attract the attention of one god or another, and failed. Most of the immortals were too busy looking on in horror or delight or divine remoteness as their votaries went to war against one another, tearing the town into pieces and setting the pieces afire. A god or two even left town. Many non-gods tried to: some few succeeded. Of those who remained, many non-immortals died, slaughtered in the riots or burned in the firestorms that swept through the city. No one tried or bothered to count them all, not even the gods.

One died in Sanctuary that day who was not mortal (quite), and not a god (quite). His death was unusual in that it was noticed-not just once but three times.

He noticed it himself, of course. Harran had worked close to death much of his life, both as apprentice healer-priest of Siveni Gray-Eyes and as the barber and leech to the ersatz Stepsons. He knew the inevitable results of the kind of swordcut that the great dark shape a-horseback swung at him. No hope, he thought clinically, while he ducked staggering away with a boy's weight slung over his shoulder. That's an expert handling that sword, that is. Past that mere thought, and a flash of pained concern for the arrow-shot boy he'd been trying to save, there was no time for anything but confusion.

The confusion had been a fixture in his mind lately. For one thing, the real Stepsons had come back, and Harran was not finding their return as funny as he'd once thought he would. He hadn't reckoned on being counted a traitor for supporting the false Stepsons in the true ones' absence. But he also hadn't reckoned on having so much trouble with his lost goddess Siveni when he summoned her up. Her manifestation, and her attempt to level Sanctuary-foiled by the clubfooted beggar-girl he'd been using as idiot labor and "mattress"-had left him confused to a standstill. Now Mriga the idiot was Mriga the goddess, made so by the same spell that had brought Siveni into the streets of Sanctuary. And, involved in the spell himself, Harran had briefly become a god too.

But his short bout of divinity had made the world no plainer to him. Suddenly bereft of Mriga, who had taken Siveni and gone wherever gods go-stricken by the loss of a hand during the spell, and by its abrupt replacement (with one of Mriga's)-Harran had retreated to the fake Stepsons' barracks. He had taken to wearing gloves and drinking a great deal while he tried to think out what to do next with his life. Somehow he never seemed to get much thinking done.

And then the real Stepsons stormed their old barracks, slaughtering in Vashanka's name the "traitors" who had impersonated them with such partial success. They were evidently particularly enraged about dogs being kept in the barracks. Harran didn't understand it. What was Vashanka's problem with dogs? Had one bit Him once? In any case, when Harran fled to a Maze-side garret to escape the sack of the barracks, he made sure to take little brown Tyr with him.

She was yipping and howling unseen behind him now, as that sword descended, and there was nothing he could do. It hit him hard in the temple, and there was surprisingly little pain. He was faintly horrified to feel the top of his head crumple and slide sideways; and out of the corner of his left eye he saw half his skull and its contents come away clean on the edge of the sword. Harran fell-he knew he fell, from feeling his face and chest smash into the bloody dirt-but his vision, until it darkened, was frozen on that sidewise look. He became bemused; brains were usually darker. Evidently the typical color of the other ones he had examined was due to clotting of blood in the tissues. His had not yet had time, that was all. The next time he ... the next time ... but this was wrong. Where was Siveni? Where was Mriga? They always said that when ... you died, your god or goddess ... met you....

... and night descended upon Harran, and his spirit fled far away.

Tyr didn't know she was a dog. She didn't know anything in the way people do. Her consciousness was all adjectives, hardly any nouns-affect without association. Things happened, but she didn't think of them that way; she hardly thought at all. She just was.

There was also something else. Not a person-Tyr had no idea what persons were but a presence, with which the world was as it should be, and without which her surroundings ceased to be a world. A human looking through Tyr's mind would have perceived such a place as hell-all certainties gone, all loves abolished, nothing left but an emotional void through which one fell sickeningly, forever. It had been that way long ago. In Tyr's vague way she dreaded that hell's return. But since the Presence came into the world, knitting everything together, hell had stayed far away.

There were also familiar shapes that moved about in her life. One was thin and gangly with a lot of curly straggly fur on top, and shared one or another of Tyr's sleeping spots with her. The other was a tall, blond-bearded shape that had been with her longer and had acquired more importance. Tyr dimly understood that the presence of this second shape had something to do with her well-being or lack of it, but she wasn't capable of working out just what, or of caring that she couldn't. When the tall shape held her, when in its presence food manifested itself, or sticks flew and she ran and brought them back, Tyr was ecstatically happy. Even when the skinny shape subtracted itself from her universe, she wasn't upset for long. Both the Presence and the tall shape, though surprised, seemed to approve; so it must have been all right. And the shape that counted hadn't gone away. It was when that shape was missing, or she smelled trouble about it, that Tyr's world went to pieces.

It was in pieces now. It had been since the time she had been cheerfully rooting in the barracks' kitchen-midden, and suddenly a lot of horses came, and some of the buildings around got very bright. Tyr didn't identify as fire the light that sprang up among them, since fire as she understood it was something that stayed in a little stone place in the center of the world, and didn't bother you unless you got too close. So, unconcerned, she had gone on rooting in the midden until the tall thing came rushing to her and snatched her up. This annoyed Tyr; and she became more annoyed yet when her nose told her that there had begun to be meat lying all over. Tyr never got enough meat. But the tall one wouldn't let her at it. He took her to some dark place that wasn't the center of the world, and once there he wouldn't be still, and wouldn't hold her, and wouldn't let her out. This went on for some time. Tyr became distressed. The world was coming undone.

Then the tall one began to smell of fear-more so than usual. He ran out and left her, and the fraying of the world completed itself. Tyr cried out without knowing that she did, and danced and scrabbled at the hard thing that was sometimes a hole in the wall. But no matter what she did, it wouldn't be a hole. Then it occurred to her that there was another hole, up high. The tall one had been by it, and with some frantic thought of getting close to him by being where he had been, Tyr jumped up on things she did not know were tables and chairs, clambered her way onto the windowsill to perch there wobbling, and nosed the shutter aside.

She saw the tall shape lurching across the street, with something slung over its shoulder. Tyr's nose was full of the smell of burning and blood from below her. She added everything swiftly together-the tallness and the scorch and the meat down there-and realized that he was bringing her dinner after all. Wildly excited, she began to yip-Then horses came running at the tall one. Tyr's feelings about this were mixed. Horses kicked. But once one horse had stopped kicking, and the tall one had given her some, and it had been very good. More food? Tyr thought, as much as she ever thought anything. But the horses didn't stop when they got to the tall one and the meat. For a moment she couldn't see where the tall one was. Then the horses separated, and Tyr whimpered and sniffed the air. She caught the tall one's scent. But to her horror, the scent did something she had never smelled it do before: it cooled. It thinned, and vanished, and turned to meat. And the Presence, the something that made the world alive, the Presence went away....

When the universe is destroyed before one's eyes, one may well mourn. Tyr had no idea of what mourning was, but she did it. Standing and shaking there on the window-sill, anguished, she howled and howled. And when the horses got too close and the tall things on them pointed at her, she panicked altogether and fell out of the window, rolled bumping down the roof-gable and off it. The pain meant nothing to her: at the end of the world, who counts bruises? Tyr scrambled to her feet, in a pile of trash, limping, not noticing the limp. She fled down the dirty street, shied past the flaming barricade, ran past even the crushed meat that had been the tall thing. She ran, howling her terror and loss, for a long time. Eventually she found at least one familiar smell-a midden. Desperate for the familiar, she half buried herself in the garbage, but it was no relief. Footsore, too miserable even to nose through the promising bones and rinds she lay in, Tyr cowered and whimpered in restless anguish for hours. Finally weariness forced her, still crying, into a wretched sleep. Soon enough the sun would be up. But it would rise black, as far as Tyr was concerned. Joy was over forever. The tall thing was meat, and the Presence was gone.

As sleep took her, Tyr came her closest ever to having a genuine thought. Moaning, she wished she were meat too.

Sanctuary's gods, like most others, resided by choice in the timelessness which both contains all mortal time and space, and lies within them. That timelessness is impossible to understand-even the patron gods of the sciences shake their heads at its physics-and difficult to describe, especially to mortals, whose descriptions necessarily involve time, in the telling if nowhere else.

Light, overwhelming, is what most mortals remember who pass through those realms in dream or vision. The fortunate dead who come there, having given up time, see things differently. So do the gods. In that place where the absence of time makes space infinitely malleable, they rear their bright dwellings and demesnes with no tool but thought, and alter them at whim-changing, too, their own forms as mortals change clothes, for similar reasons: hygiene, courtesy, boredom, special occasions. Like mortals, too, they have their pet issues and favorite causes. There are collaborations and feuds, amours with mortals or other divinities, arguments between pantheons or within them. Some of the gods find this likeness to mortal behavior distressing. Most profess not to care, just as most profess to ignore the deeper light that often broods beyond and within the Bright Dwellings, watching what gods and mortals do.

Recently the neighborhood had seen the advent of one Dwelling that wasn't always bright. It tended to be either a high, chaste, white-columned temple of the kind aesthetically promising mortals built, or a low thatched hut of stone crouching defiantly in a rammed dirt yard. But either way, it always had a positively mortal look about it that passing deities variously found tasteless, deliciously primitive, or avant-garde. The dwelling's changes sometimes came several to the minute, then several to the second; and after such spasms lightningbolts tended to spray out the windows or doors, and thumps and shouting could be heard from inside. The neighbors soon discovered that the division of this house against itself was symptomatic. The goddess(es) living there were in the middle of a personality crisis.

"Do you ever think about anything but clothes?!"

"At least I do think about them now and then. You're a goddess, you can't go out in those-those rags!"

"I beg your pardon! This shift is just well broken in. It's comfortable. And it covers me ... instead of leaving half of me hanging out, like that old tunic of Ils's that you never take off. Or that raggy goatskin cape with the ugly face on it."

"I'll have you know that when my Father shakes 'that raggy goatskin' over the armies of men, they scatter in terror-"

"The way it smells, no wonder. And that's our Father. Oh, do put the vase down, Siveni! I'll just make another. Besides, when has Ils scattered an army lately? Better give him that thing back: He could probably use it just now."

"Why, you-"

Lightnings whipped the temple's marble, scarring it black. Screeching, a silver raven napped out from between a pair of columns and perched complaining in the topmost branches of a golden-appled tree a safe distance away. The lightning made a lot of noise as it lashed about, but even a casual observer would have noticed that it did little harm. Shortly it sizzled away to nothing, and the stagy thunder that had accompanied it faded to echoes and whispers, and died. The temple convulsed, squatted down, and got brown and gray, a beast of fieldstone and thatch. Then it went away altogether.

Two women were left standing there on the plain, which still nickered uncertainly between radiance and dirt. One of them stood divinely tall in shimmering robes, crested and helmed, holding a spear around which the restrained lightnings sulkily strained and hissed-a form coolly fair and bright, all godhead and maidenhead, seemingly unassailable. Just out of arms' reach of her stood someone not so tall, hardly so fair, dressed in grime and worn plain cloth with patches, crowned with nothing but much dark curly hair, somewhat snarled, and armed only with a kitchen knife. They stared at each other for a moment, Siveni and Mriga, warrior-queen of wisdom and idiot wench. It was the idiot who had the thoughtful, regretful look, and the Lady of Battles who had the black eye.

"It's got to stop," Mriga said, dropping the knife in the shining dust and turning away from her otherself. "We tear each other up for nothing. Our town is going to pieces, and our priest is all alone in the middle of it, and we don't dare try to help him until our own business is handled ..."

"You don't dare," Siveni said scornfully. But she didn't move.

Mriga sighed. While she had been insane just before she became a goddess, her madness had not involved multiple personalities-so that when she suddenly discovered that she was one with Siveni Gray-Eyes, there was trouble. Siveni was Ils's daughter, mistress of both war and the arts and sciences, the Ilsig gods' two-edged blade Herself: both Queen of cool wisdom, and hellion God-daughter who could take any god in the Ilsig pantheon, save her father, for best two falls out of three. Siveni had not taken kindly to losing parts of herself into time, or to seeing the Rankan pantheon raised to preeminence in Sanctuary, or to coming off a poor second in a street brawl with a mortal. But all of those had happened; and the first, though now mending in timelessness, irked her most.

When gods become snared in time and its usages-as had many of Sanctuary's gods their attributes tend to leach across the barrier, into time, and embed themselves in the most compatible mortal personality. In Siveni's case, that had been Mriga. Even as a starving idiot-beggar she had loved the edge on good steel. Sharpening swords and spears was the work to which Harran had most often put her, after he found her in the Bazaar, dully whetting a broken bit of metal on a rock. Clubfooted and feeble-willed as she was, she had somehow "managed" to be found by the last of Siveni's priests in Sanctuary, "managed" to be taken in by him as the poor and mad had always been taken into her temple before. And when Harran went out one night to work the spell that would set Siveni free of time and bring her back into the world, to the ruin of the Rankan gods, Mriga was drawn after him like steel to the magnet.

The spell he had used would infallibly bring back the lost. It did, not only bringing back Siveni to her temple, but also retrieving Harran's lost divinity and Mriga's lost wits. Harran, blindly in love with his goddess in her whole and balanced form, had been shocked to find himself dealing not with the gracious maiden mistress of the arts of peace, but with a cold fierce power made testy and irrational by the loss of vital attributes. Siveni had been quite willing to pull all Sanctuary down around all the gods' ears if the deities of Ranke would not meet her right in battle. Harran tried to stop her-for vile sink though it was, Sanctuary was his home-and Siveni nearly killed him out of pique.

Mriga, though, had stopped her. She had recovered the conscious godhead every mortal temporarily surrenders at birth, and was therefore in full control of the attributes of wise compassion and cool judgment that Siveni had lost into time. She and her otherself fought, and after Mriga won the fight, both saw swiftly that they were one, though crippled and divided. They needed union, and timeless-ness in which to achieve it. Neither was available in the world of mortals. With that knowledge they had turned, as one, to Harran. They took their leave of him, healing the hand maiming that Siveni had inflicted on him, and then departed for those fields mortals do not know. Of course they planned to come back to him-or for him-as soon as they were consolidated.

But even in timelessness, union was taking longer than either had expected. Siveni was arrogant in her recovered wisdom, angry about having lost it, and bitter that it had found nowhere better to lodge than an ignorant cinder-sitting house-slut. Mriga was annoyed at Siveni's snobbery, bored with her constant anecdotes about her divine lineage-she told the same ones again and again-and most of all tired of fighting. Unfortunately she too was Siveni: when challenged she had to fight. And being mortal and formerly mad, she knew something Siveni had never learned: how to fight dirty. Mriga always won, and that made things worse.

"If you just wouldn't-"

"Oh stop," Mriga said, waving her hand and sitting down on the crude bench that appeared behind her. In front of her appeared a rough table loaded down with meat and bread and watered wine of the kind Harran used to smuggle for them from the Stepsons' store. Now that she was a goddess, and not mad, Mriga could have had better; but old habits were hard to break, and the sour wine reminded her of home. "Want some?"

"Goddesses," Siveni said, looking askance at the table, "don't eat mortal food. They eat only-"

"'-the gods' food and drink only foaming nectar.' Yes, that's what I hear. So then how am I sitting here eating butcher's beef and drinking wine? Who could be here but us goddesses? Have some of this nice chine."

"No."

Mriga poured out a libation to Father Ils, then applied herself to a rack of back ribs. "The world of mortal men," she said presently, while wiping grease off one cheek, "mirrors ours, have you noticed? Or maybe ours mirrors theirs. Either way, have you noticed how preoccupied both of them are just now with cat fighting? The Beysa. Kama. Roxane. Ischade. If all that stopped-would ours stop too? Or if we stopped-"

"As if anything mortals do could matter to the gods," Siveni said, annoyed. She thumped the ground with her spear and an elegant marble bench appeared. She seated herself on it; a moment later a small altar appeared, on which the thigh bones of fat steers, wrapped attractively in fat and with wine poured over, were being burned in a brazier. She inhaled the savor and pointedly touched none of the meat.

"What a waste," Mriga said. "... That's just what Harran said, though. The gods became convinced that time could bind them-and so it did. They became convinced that other gods could drive them out-and so it happened. If we could convince men that the pantheons were willing to get along together, and that they should stop killing each other in gods' names ... then maybe the fighting would stop up here. Mirrors...."

Mriga was becoming better at omniscience-another attribute Siveni had lost to her-and so heard Siveni thinking that idiocy was one of those conditions that transcended even immortality. Mriga sighed. It was harder than she'd thought, this becoming one. Siveni didn't really want to share her attributes ... and Mriga didn't really want to give them up. Hopeless.... Then she caught herself staring at the rib bone in her hand, and by way of it became aware of an emptiness in the universe. "I miss my dog," Mriga said.

Siveni shrugged coolly. Most of her affections and alliances lay with the winged tribes, birds of prey or oracular ravens. But as the silence stretched out, she looked over at Mriga, and her face softened a bit.

"Goddess!-"

Mriga looked up at Siveni in surprise. The voice caught at both their hearts as if hooks had set deep there. Startled, the two of them looked around them and saw no one; then looked out of timelessness into time....

... and saw Harran go down under the hooves of Stepsons' horses, with half his head missing.

"My master," Mriga said, stricken. "My priest, my love-"

"Our priest," Siveni said, and sounded as if she could have said something else, but would not. She got up so quickly that the marble bench fell one way and the elegant brazier the other. Her spear leapt into her hand, sizzling. "I'll-"

"We'll," Mriga said, on her feet now. It was odd how eyes so icy with anger could still manage tears that flowed. "Come on."

Thunder cracked about them like sky ripping open. The neighbors all around turned in their direction and stared. Uncaring, two goddesses, or one, shot earthward from the bright floor of heaven, which, behind them, hesitated, then furtively turned to dirt.

The fire by the Maze-side street barricade had died down, and the street was empty except for the slain and the scavengers. Now and then someone passed by-a Stepson on one of their fierce horses, or a random member of some Nisi death squad, or one of Jubal's people just slipped out of the blue on business. No one noticed the grimy street idiot, sitting blank-eyed beside a trampled corpse; much less the sooty raven perched on a charred wagon and eyeing the same corpse, and the younger, arrow-shot one it lay on, with a cold and interested eye. Black birds were no unusual sight in Sanctuary these days.

"His soul's gone," Mriga whispered to the bird. "Long gone, and the poor body's cold. How? We came straight away-"

"Time here and there run differently," said the raven, voice hoarse and soft. "We might have done something while the tie between soul and body was still stretching thin. But it's too late now-"

"No," Mriga said.

"I should have leveled this place the last time I was here. This would never have happened!"

"Siveni, be still." Mriga sat by Harran's crushed remains, one hand stretched out to the awful ruin of his head; a purposeful gesture, for without actually touching the cold stiff flesh, she found herself unable to believe in death. That was one of the problems with being a god. Immortal, they often found it hard to take death seriously. But Mriga was taking it very seriously indeed.

She strained for omniscience; it obliged her a little. "We could get him back," she said. "There are ways...."

"And put him where? Back in this?" In her raven form, Siveni flapped down to the cold stiff mess of shattered bones and pulped muscle, and poked it scornfully with her beak. It didn't even bleed. "And if not here, where?"

"Another body? ..."

"Whose?"

Mriga's omniscience declined an answer. This didn't matter: she was getting an idea of her own ... one that scared her, but might work. "Let's not worry about it right now," she said. "We'll think of something."

"And even if we do ... who's to say his soul's survived what happened to him? Mortal souls are fragile. Sometimes death shatters them completely. Or for a long time ... long enough that by the time they've put themselves back together, it's no good putting them in a body; they've forgotten how to stay in one."

"He was a god for a little while," Mriga said. "That should count for something. And I don't think Harran was that fragile. Come on, Siveni, we have to try!"

"I'd sooner just burn the city down," the raven said, hopping and flapping up onto Mriga's shoulder as she stood up.

"A bit late for that, I fear." Mriga looked around her at the smoldering barricade, the scorched and soot-blackened faces of the surrounding buildings. "The cats have been busy setting one another's tails on fire, and not much caring what else catches and goes up as they run around screeching."

"Cats ..." Siveni said, sounding thoughtful.

"Yes: my thought exactly. We'll deal with one or two of them before we're done. But first things first. Where's my puppy?"

Tyr woke up with the upset feeling that usually meant she'd had a dream of the bad old days before the Presence came. But by the time she was fully awake, she had already realized that this time the feeling had nothing to do with any dream. For a few minutes that part of Sanctuary slammed its windows shut against the bitter howling that emanated from the garbage heap behind the Vulgar Unicorn. Tyr's throat was sore, though, with smoke and her long crying the day before, so that she coughed and retched and had to stop.

She lay there panting, deep in griefs apathy, not knowing it, not caring. The garbage all around her smelled wonderful, and she had no appetite for it. Inside the Unicorn there was the sound of people moving around, and from upstairs a cat wailed an enraged challenge, and Tyr couldn't even summon up the energy to get up and run away. She made a sound half whimper, half moan, and behind it a feeling that a human looking through her mind would instantly have recognized as a hopeless prayer. Oh, whatever there is that listens, please, please, make it didn't happen!....

... and suddenly there was someone there beside her, and old reflex took over. Tyr struggled to her feet, ready to run. But her nose countermanded her legs, and Tyr froze-then leaped up, whining madly, bouncing in a frenzy of relief, licking at the skinny figure that was crouched down next to her. The skinny one tasted better than usual. There was something else with her-a black bird of the kind Tyr usually liked to chase-but somehow the bird also smelled like the skinny one, so she let it be. She crowded into the skinny shape's arms, whimpering incredulous welcome, terror, reawakened hunger, sorrow and loss, the news of the world turned upside down ...

"I know, I know," Mriga said, and though the words meant nothing to Tyr, the dog was comforted. Mriga knew exactly how she felt, without omniscience being involved. Her own retarded mind, before the onslaught of divinity, had been the same nounless void, full of inexplicable presences and influences. Now the dog nosed at her, both vastly relieved and freshly wounded by the reminder of what was wrong with the world. She whimpered, and her stomach growled.

"Oh, poor child," Mriga said, and reached sideways into timelessness for the rib bones she'd been working on. Tyr leaped at the half-rack of ribs almost before they were entirely into time, and fell to gnawing on them.

"She thinks she's in hell," Mriga said to Siveni.

The raven laughed, one harsh bitter caw. "Would that she were, for he's certainly there. She could lead us to him...."

Mriga looked at the raven in swift admiration. "That lost wisdom's coming back to you, sister. So she might. Of course, we would have to find a way to get into hell ourselves."

"Then think of one," Siveni said, sounding both pleased and annoyed.

Mriga thought. Her omniscience stirred, though not precisely in the direction required. "I don't know how just yet," she said. "But there are experts in this town ... people who know the way. They've sent so many others down that road. And they bring them back again."

Tyr looked up and yipped. She had been bolting the meat and already looked somewhat better-not just from having eaten after a long fast. The food and drink of the gods work strangely in mortals. Tyr's eyes were already brighter and deeper than Mriga ever remembered having seen them; and the dog had abruptly stopped smelling like a garbage-heap.

"Yes," Mriga said. "It might just work. Finish that, little one. Then we'll go down by the White Foal ... and go to hell."

Tyr yipped again and went at the ribs with dispatch. The raven looked sidewise at Mriga. "What if she won't help us?" she said.

Omniscience spoke up again, and Mriga frowned, for it was no comfort. "She will," she said. "Always assuming that between here and there, we can figure out the right things to say...."

Even necromants need to sleep occasionally, and in the last few days Ischade had gotten less sleep than usual. Now, in this bright chill winter afternoon she had evidently counted Sanctuary deep enough in shock at its troubles that she might rest a little while. The shutters of the house by the White Foal were all closed. What black birds sat in the trees did so with heads under wing, mirroring their mistress. There was no sound there but the rattling of dry leaves and withered rose-hips in the thorny hedge.

"This place smells like death," said the raven perched on the shoulder of the skinny, ragged girl who stood by the little wicket gate.

"It should," said Mriga, and reached out sorrowfully to something that wasn't wholly there. At least her mortal senses refused to acknowledge it. Her godsight clearly showed her a big bay steed, still saddled, its reins hanging loose, standing forlornly by the gate and gazing at the rundown house. As Mriga reached out to it the bay rolled eye-whites at her and put its ears back, but the gesture was half-hearted. After a second it relented, whuffling, and put its nose in her hand, then swung its great head around to breathe of her breath by way of greeting.

"Poor, poor ..." Mriga said, stroking the shivering place just under the bay's jaw. Tyr looked on suspiciously, eyeing the horse's hooves. Siveni in her raven shape cocked a bright black eye. She was fond of horses: she had after all invented them, thereby winning a contest.

"One more ghost," she said. "And recent. The woman breeds them."

"Recently, yes." And the door at the top of the steps opened, and there was another ghost, more or less. At least the man was dead. Outwardly he merely looked scarred. One eye was covered with a patch and his face was a wealed ruin in which an old handsomeness lurked as sad and near-unseen as the ghost-bay. His carriage had ruin about it too. Mriga saw the ghost of it, straight and tall, under the present reality-a hunched posture, the stance of someone cowering under the lash of a fear that never went away.

The man stared at them, more with the patched eye than with the whole one, Mriga thought. "Stilcho," she said, "where's your mistress? Bring us to her."

He stared harder, then laughed. "Who shall I say is calling? Some guttersnipe, and her mangy cur, and ..." He noticed the black bird and grew more reserved. "Look ... get out of here," he said. "Who are you? Some Nisi witchling, one she missed last night? Get out. You're crazy to come here. You're just a kid, you're no match for her, whoever you think you are!"

"Not Nisi, at least," Mriga said, mildly nettled.

Siveni looked up at Stilcho from Mriga's shoulder and said, "Man, we are the goddess Siveni. And if you don't bring us to your mistress, and that speedily, you'll be spoiled meat in a minute. Now get out of our way, or show us in to her." The scorn was very audible.

Tyr growled.

"Stilcho you fool, shut that, the wind's like knives," said another voice from beyond the door. And there came a smaller, slimmer man, who wore a cold composure exactly the opposite of Stilcho's desolation; but under it, ghost to its solidity, dwelt the same impression of unrelenting fear. The man looked out and down at them, and his face went from surprise to amused contempt to uncertainty to shocked realization in the time it took him to take a breath and let it out in cloud.

"You at least have some idea what you're looking at, Haught," Mriga said, waving the wicket gate out of existence and walking through where it had been. Haught stared, as well he might have, for the deadly wards laid inside that gate unravelled themselves and died without so much as a whimper. "If I were you, I'd announce us."

With some difficulty Haught reassumed his look of threat and contempt. "My mistress is unavailable," he said.

Mriga looked at the raven. "Slugging abed again."

The raven snapped its beak in annoyance and napped away from Mriga's shoulder. Abruptly a helmeted woman in an oversized tunic stood there, a spear in her hand, and rapped with its butt on the ground. With a roar, the dry hedge and the barren trees all burst forth in foliage of green fire. Screeching, the black birds went whirling up out of the tree like scorched papers on the wind, leaving little trails of smoke and a smell of burnt feathers behind them.

"She's up now," said Siveni.

One last man came hurriedly to the door, swearing, a tall, fair, and broad man and Tyr launched herself at him, stiff-legged, snarling. "No, Tyr!" Mriga said hurriedly, and grabbed at the dog, just catching her by the scruff of the neck ... a good thing, for a knife had appeared as if by magic in the man's hand, and was a fraction of a second from being first airborne and then in Tyr's throat. Tyr stood on her hind legs and growled and fought to get loose, but Mriga held on to her tight. "This is no time to indulge in personalities," she hissed. "We've got business." The dog quieted: Mriga let her stand, but watched her carefully. "Straton, is the lady decent?"

He stared at them, as dumbfounded by the outrageous question as by the simple sight of them-the armed and radiant woman, fierce-eyed and divinely tall: the ragged skinny beggar girl who somehow shone through her grime: and the delicate, deer-slim, bitter-eyed brown dog wearing a look such as he had seen on Stepsons about to avenge a lost partner. "Haught," he said, "go inquire."

"No need," said a fourth voice behind him in the doorway's darkness: a voice soft and sleepy and dangerous. "Haught, Stilcho, where are your manners? Let the ladies in. Then be off for a while. Straton, perhaps you'll excuse us. They're only goddesses, I can handle them."

The men cleared out of the doorway one by one as the three climbed the stair. First came the dog with her lip curled, showing a fang or two; then the gray eyed spear-bearer, looking around her with the cool unnoticing scorn of a great lady preparing to do some weighty business in a sty. Last came the beggar, at whom Straton looked with relaxed contempt. "Curb that," he said, glancing at Tyr, then back at Mriga, in calmest threat.

Mriga eyed him. "The bay misses you," she said, low-voiced, and went on past, into the dark.

She ignored the hating look he threw into her back like a knife as he turned away. If her plan worked, vengeance would not be necessary. And she was generally not going to be a vengeful goddess. But in Straton's case, just this once, she would make an exception.

Ischade's downstairs living room was much bigger than it should have been, considering the outside dimensions of the house. It was a mad scattering of rich stuffs in a hundred colors, silks and furs thrown carelessly over furniture, piled in corners. Here were man's clothes, a worn campaigning cloak, muddy boots, sitting on ivory silk to keep them off the hardwood floor; over there was a sumptuous cloak of night-red velvet scorching gently where it lay half in the hearth, half out of it, wholly unnoticed by the hostess.

Ischade was courteous. She poured wine for her guests, and set down a bowl of water and another of neatly chopped meat for Tyr. Once they were settled, she looked at them out of those dark eyes of hers and waited. To mortal eyes she would have seemed deadly enough, even without the flush of interrupted lovemaking in her face. But Mriga looked at her and simply said, "We need your help."

"Destroying my property, and my wards, and upsetting my servants," said Ischade, "strikes me as a poor way to go about getting it."

Siveni laid her spear aside. "Your wards and your gate are back," she said, "and as for your servants ... they're a bit slow. One would think that a person of your ... talents ... might be better served."

Ischade smiled, that look that Mriga knew was dreaded upwind and down, in high houses and alleys and gutters. "Flattery?" she said. "Do goddesses stoop to such? Then you need me indeed. Well enough." She sipped from her own goblet, regarding them over the edge; a long look of dark eyes with a glint of firelight in them, and a glint of something else: mockery, interest, calculation. Siveni scowled and began to reach for her spear again. Mriga stopped her with a glance.

"Now is it goddesses, truly?" Ischade said, lowering the cup. "Or 'goddess' in the singular? Gray-Eyes, if I remember rightly, was never a twofold deity."

"Until now," Mriga said. "Madam, you had some small part in what happened. May I remind you? A night not too long ago, about midnight, you came across a man digging mandrake-"

"Harran the barber. Indeed."

"I got caught in the spelling. It bound all three of us together in divinity for a while. But one of the three is missing. Harran is dead."

Those dark eyes looked over the edge of the cup again. "I had thought he escaped the ... unpleasantness ... at the barracks. At least there was no sign of him among the slain."

"Last night," Siveni said, and the look she turned on Ischade was cruel. "Your lover did it."

Tyr growled.

"My apologies," said Ischade. "But how cross fate is ... that your business, whatever it is, brings you to deal with me ... and precludes your vengeance against anyone under my roof." She sipped her wine for a moment. "Frustration is such a mortal sort of problem, though. I must say you're handling it well."

Mriga frowned. The woman was unbearable ... but had to be borne, and knew it. There was no way to force her to help them. "I have some experience with mortality," Mriga said. "Let's to business, madam. I want to see what kind of payment you would require for a certain service."

One of those dark brows lifted in gentle scorn. "The highest possible, always. But the service has to be one I wish to render ... and the coin of payment must be such as will please me. I have my own priorities, you see. But you haven't told me clearly what the service is."

"We want to go to hell," Siveni said.

Ischade smiled, tastefully restraining herself from the several obvious replies. "It's easily enough done," she said. "Those gates stand open night and day, to one who knows their secrets. But retracing your steps, finding your way to the light again ... there's work, there's a job indeed. And more of a job than usual for you two." She looked over at Siveni. "You've never been mortal at all; you can't die. And though you've had experience at being mortal, you apparently haven't died yet. And only the dead walk in hell."

Mriga's omniscience spoke in her mind's ear. "Gods have gone there before," she said. "It's not as if it's never been done."

"Some gods," Siveni said, "have gone and not come back." She looked at Mriga in warning, silently reminding her of the daughter of Dene Blackrobe, merry Sostreia: once maiden goddess of the spring, and now the queen and bride of hell, awful and nameless.

"Yes," Ischade said, "there is always some uncertainty about the travels of gods in those regions." Yet her eyes were inward-turned, musing; and a tick of time later, when they focused on Mriga again, the goddess knew she had won. There was interest there, and the hope that something would happen to relieve the terrible tedium that assails the powerful. The interest hid behind Ischade's languid pose the way Stilcho's old handsomeness haunted his scars.

"A pretty problem," she said, musing out loud now. "Mortal souls I could simply send there-a knife would be sorcery enough for that-and then recall. Though the bodies would still be dead. But that won't work for you two; your structure's the problem. Gods' souls enclose and include the body, instead of the other way around. Killing the bodies won't work. Killing a soul ... is a contradiction in terms: impossible." She sighed a little. "A pity, sometimes; this place has been getting crowded of late."

Then firelight stirred and glittered in Ischade's eyes as for a moment they became wider. "Yet I might reduce that crowding, at least temporarily ..."

Siveni's eyes glittered too. "You're going to use the ghosts," she said. "You're going to borrow their mortality."

"Why, you're a quick pupil indeed," Ischade said, all velvet mockery. "Not their mortality exactly. But their fatality ... their deadness. One need not die to go to hell. One need only have died. I can think of ways to borrow that. And then hell will have two more inmates for the night."

"Three," said Mriga.

"Four," said Siveni.

They looked at each other, then at Ischade.

Ischade raised her eyebrows. "What, the dog too?"

Tyr yipped.

"And who else, then?"

"Madam," Siveni said, "the best way to be sure we come back from this venture is to have with us the guide who opens the way. Especially if the way back is as difficult as you claim."

Ischade held quite still for a moment, then began to laugh, and laughed long and loud. A terrible sound it was. "These are hard times," she said, "when even gods are so suspicious."

"Treachery is everywhere," said Mriga, wondering swiftly how the thought had escaped her before.

"Oh indeed," Ischade said, and laughed again, softly, until she lost her breath. "Very well. But what coin do you plan to use to pay the ones below? Even I only borrow souls, then send them back; and believe me, there's a price. To get your barber back in the flesh and living, the payment to those below will have to be considerable. And there's the problem of where you'll put him-"

"That will be handled," Mriga said, "by the time the deed's done. Meanwhile we shouldn't waste time, madam. Even in hell time flows, and souls forget how to stay in bodies."

Ischade looked lazily at Mriga, and once again there was interest behind the look, and calculation. "You haven't yet told me what you'll do with your barber once you've got him," she said. "Besides the predictable divine swiving."

"You haven't yet told us what payment you'll require," said Mriga. "But I'll say this. Last time you met my lord, you told him that if he brought Siveni back among the living, you'd find the proceedings merry to watch. And did you not?"

Ischade smiled, small and secret. "I watched them take away the temple doors that she smashed down into the street," she said softly, "and I saw the look on Molin Torchholder's face while they carted them off. He was most distressed at the sudden activity of Ilsig gods. So he began to pull what strings he could to deal with that problem ... and one of the strings he pulled was attached to Tempus and his Stepsons, and the Third Commando."

"And to you," Mriga said. "So that the barracks burned, and then the city burned, and Harran and a thousand others died. All so that the town will keep on being too divided against itself to care that you go about in it, manipulating the living and doing your pleasure on the dead ... to alleviate your boredom."

"The gods are wise," Ischade said, quietly.

"Sometimes not very. But I don't care. My business is to see what I love brought somewhere safe. After that- this town needs its own gods. Not Rankan, or Beysib, or even Ilsigi. I'm one of the new ones. There are others, as you know. Once the 'divine swiving' is out of the way. I intend to see those new young gods settled, for this place's good, and its people's good. That may take mortal years, but while it's going on, there'll be 'merry times' enough for even you without you having to engineer them. There'll be war in heaven ... which is always mirrored on earth."

"Or the other way around," Ischade said.

"Either way, you'll find it very interesting. Which is what you desire. Isn't it?"

Ischade looked at Mriga. "Very well. This business is apparently in my interests. We'll discuss payment after-ward; it will be high. And I shall go with you ... to watch the 'merry times' begin." She smiled. Mriga smiled too. Ischade's velvet, matter-of-fact malice was wide awake, hoping disaster would strike and make things even more 'interesting,' perhaps even considering how to help it strike. The woman was shameless, insufferable-and so much herself that Mriga suddenly found herself liking Ischade intensely.

"Excellent," Mriga said. "What needs to be done?"

"If you haven't buried him already," Ischade said, "do so. Otherwise we would find him on the wrong side of the frontier ... and matters would become even more complicated than they are at the moment."

"Very well. When will we be leaving?"

"Midnight, of course: from a place where three roads meet. Ideally, there should be dogs howling-"

Tyr gave Ischade an ironic look, tilted up her head and let out a single long note, wavering down through halftones into silence.

"So that's handled," Siveni said, reaching for her spear. "And as for three roads meeting, what about the north side of that park by the Governor's Walk and the Avenue of Temples? The 'Promise of Heaven,' I think it's called."

Ischade chuckled, and they all rose. "How apt. Till midnight, then. I will provide the equipment."

"That's gracious of you, madam. Till midnight, or a touch before."

"That will do very well. Mind the second step. And the hedge: it has thorns."

Mriga walked through the open gate with satisfaction, patted the bay's neck, and stepped sidewise toward midnight. Siveni came after her, her spear shouldered and sizzling merrily, and went the same way. Only Tyr delayed for a moment, staring at the bay-then nipped it neatly in the left rear fetlock, scrambled sideways to avoid the kick, and dove past Mriga into night.

Ischade also looked at the bay; then, more wryly, at her yard's trees and bushes, still full of green fire that burned but did not consume. She waved the godfire out of existence and shut the door, thinking of old stories about hell.

"Haught," she called toward one of the back rooms. "Stilcho."

They were there in a hurry: It never did to keep Ischade waiting. "Jobs for you both," she said, shutting the door. "Stilcho, I need a message taken to the uptown house. And on your way back, pick me up a corpse."

Dead as he was, Stilcho blanched. Haught watched him out of the corner of his eye, looking slightly amused.

"And for you," she said to Haught, watching amused in turn as he stiffened slightly, "something to exercise those talents you've been so busy improving to please me. Fetch me a spare ghost. A soldier, I think, and one without any alliances. Be off, now."

She watched them go, both of them hurrying, both of them trying to look as if they weren't. Ischade smiled and went off to look for Straton.

All it took was the sight of a slender woman-shape, cloaked in black and strolling sedately down the Avenue of Temples, to clear the midnight street to a windscoured pavement desert. Behind her followed a bizarre little parade. First came a dead man, hauling a bleating black ram and black ewe along behind him on ropes: then a live man, small and scared-looking, leading a cowed donkey with a long awkward bundle strapped across its back. He stank of wine, Mor-am did: anyone but the donkey would have been revolted. Behind him and the beast came a slight-built man whose Nisi heritage showed in his face, a man bearing a small narrow silk-wrapped package and another bulkier one, and looking as if he would rather have been elsewhere. Last of all, more or less transparent from moment to moment, came a ghost dressed in Hell-Hounds' harness. It was Razkuli, dead a long time, stealing wistful glances at the old, living Hell-Hound haunts.

The Promise of Heaven was even falser to its name than usual tonight. Word of the procession had run up the street half an hour before, and the panic-stricken ladies of the night had abandoned their usual territory in favor of one more deserving of the title. Ischade strolled in past the stone pillar-gates of the park, looking with cool amusement at the convenient bowers and bushes scattered about for those who wished to begin their huggermuggering as soon as their agreements with the park ladies were struck. The cover, copses of cypress and downhanging willow, suited Ischade well. So did the little empty altar to Eshi in the middle of the park. Once there had been a statue of her there, but naturally the statue and its pediment had been stolen, leaving only a long boxlike slab of marble much carved with PFLS graffiti and inscriptions such as Petronius Loves Sulla.

She paused by the stone and ran gentle fingers along it. A dog's howl went wavering up into the cloudy night. Ischade looked up and smiled.

"You're prompt," she said. "It's well. Haught, bring me what you carry. Stilcho, fasten them here."

Standing by the altar, Mriga and Siveni looked around them-Mriga with interest, Siveni with wry distaste, for she was after all a maiden goddess. Ischade put her hood back and gazed at the goddesses with her beautiful oblique eyes full of silent laughter as the frightened Stilcho tethered the ram and ewe by the altar. Haught held out one of his silken bundles. Ischade put the wrappings aside and drew forth a long curved knife of bronze, half sword and half sickle, with an edge that even in the little, dim light from the torches of the Governor's Palace still glittered wickedly keen. The flat of the blade was stained dark.

"Blood sacrifice, then," Siveni said.

"There's always sacrifice where the ones below are concerned." Ischade reached absently down to caress the ram's head. It held still in terror. "But first other business. Stilcho, I will need your service tonight, and Razku-li's. I go on a journey."

"Mistress-"

"To hell. You are going to lend me your death, and Razkuli will lend his to this warrior-lady, and this poor creature-" she reached out to touch the wrapped bundle on the shying donkey "-as soon as I fetch him back, will lend his to the lady who limps. But you understand that while we're using those parts of your life-or death, rather-you will have to be elsewhere."

Mriga bit her lip and turned away from the sight of a dead man going pale. "Souls need containers ... so I'll provide some till dawn; we'll be back then, and you'll find yourselves back to normal. Haught and Mor-am will stand guard till then." She stepped away from the altar, gliding past Haught and throwing him a cool look.

"Mistress-"

"Guard them well, Haught," Ischade said, not looking back at him. "I will take a dim view of any 'accidents.' I'm not done with them yet." She paced away, turning after a few seconds and beginning to walk a circle, setting wards. There was no outward sign, no fire, no sound. But Mriga felt the air grow tight, and when Ischade came about at last and gestured the circle closed, the mortals in it looked at each other in still terror, like beasts in a new-snapped trap.

"No god or man will cross that line," she said. "Goddesses, your last word. Will you do this?"

"Get on with it," Siveni said. Her spear sizzled.

Mriga nodded and looked down at Tyr. The dog put her head up and howled again, softly, an eager sound.

"Very well," Ischade said, and paused by the altar, and looked over her shoulder at the donkey. There was a wheeze, the terrible sound a corpse makes when it's rolled over and the last breath leaves its lungs-only this breath went in. The tethered donkey plunged and screamed as its burden abruptly began to move, a slow underwater struggling. Ischade reached out leisurely and stripped the covering from around the body. It crumpled toward the ground, collapsing to its knees, then slowly, slowly stood. It was a young woman, terribly wounded about the breast and neck; her tunic and flounced skirts were blood-blackened and her head had a tendency to slew to one side, trying to come undone from the half severed neck.

"Well, well," Ischade said, calm-voiced, "not 'he,' but 'she.' Some poor nightwalker caught in the Stepsons' barracks, where she shouldn't have been. Pity. Haught, uncover the lantern."

The Nisi lifted up a lantern from the ground and unshuttered it. There seemed no light in it at all; yet when Mriga looked from it to Ischade and the corpse, and the altar, they all were throwing shadows that showed impossibly blacker against the ground than the midnight they all stood in. "This won't hurt, child," said Ischade. She lifted up the sickle, and swung it at the ground. A scream followed that Mriga thought would have frozen any mortal's brain. She was irrationally satisfied to glance sideways and see Siveni's knuckles going white on the haft of her spear as the corpse fell down again.

"Well, maybe it will hurt," Ischade said, not sounding particularly moved. She straightened, holding in her free hand what looked like a wavering, silken scrap of night. It was the shadow she had cut loose. Delicately, with one hand, she crumpled it till nothing of it showed but a fistful of darkness. Ischade held out her hand to Mriga. "Take it," she said. Mriga did. "When I tell you, swallow it. Now, then ..."

She moved to Razkuli, who stood leaning on the ghost of a sword, and watched her without eyes, and without a face, looking taut and afraid. "That one is nothing to me," said Ischade. "Her soul can go where it pleases. But yours might have some use. So ... something alive ..." She looked around her. "That tree will do nicely. Hold still, Razkuli."

The second scream was harder, not easier, to bear. Ischade straightened, shook the severed shadow out, eyed it clinically, and sliced it neatly about midway down its writhing length. One of the halves she stuffed into the rotting bole of a nearby willow, and even as she turned away toward Siveni, the willow's long bare branches put out numberless leaves of thin, trembling darkness. "Here," Ischade said. Siveni put out her hand and took the crumpled half-shadow as if she were being handed a scorpion.

"Stilcho," Ischade said.

Stilcho backed away a pace. Behind him, with a small, terrible smile on his face, Haught held up the lantern. The third scream was the worst of all.

"Maybe you have been suffering too much in my service," Ischade said, as she sliced his soul-shadow too and draped half of it over the branches of a shrub hard by the altar. "Maybe I should let you go back to being quite dead ..." The shrub came out in leaves and little round berries of blackness, trembling.

"We'll talk about it when I come back," said Ischade. She tucked the crumpled shadow into her dark robes. "Mor-am, Haught, guard this spot until an hour before dawn. We won't be coming back this way. Look for us at the house, by the back gate. And don't forget Stilcho's body." She glided over to the altar, lifting the dark-stained sickle again. "Be ready, goddesses."

"What about Tyr?" said Siveni.

"She'll ride this soul," said Ischade. Her hand had fallen on the ram's head again. It looked up at her, and up, and helplessly, up; and Ischade swung the sickle. In the unlight of the dark lantern, the ram's eyes blazed horribly, then emptied, and the black blood gushed out on the altar's white stone. "Now," said Ischade, a slow warm smile in her voice, and reached out to the ewe.

Mriga swallowed the little struggling darkness, in horror, and felt it go down fighting like something itself horrified and helpless. Its darkness rose behind her eyes for a moment and roared in her ears. The ewe cried out and bubbled into silence. When her vision cleared, she found herself looking at an Ischade truly dressed in shadows and grinning like one of the terrible gods who avenge for the joy of it, and at a Siveni robed and helmed in dark, only the spearhead bright. Even Tyr had gone black-furred, but her eyes burned as a beast's will when a sudden light in darkness finds them. Tyr threw back her head and howled in good earnest. The earth beneath their feet buckled and heaved like a disturbed thing, as if in answer, and then shrugged away its paving and split.

"Call up your courage," said Ischade softly, "for now you'll need it." And she walked down into the great crack in the earth, into the fuming, sulfur-smelling dark.

Tyr dashed after her, barking; other howls echoed hers, above the earth and below it. Mriga and Siveni looked at each other and followed.

Groaning, the earth closed behind them.

Mor-am and Haught looked at each other and swallowed.

They did this again later, when the donkey, frightened and hungry past caring, stretched to the end of its tether and started browsing on the nearest shrub. It had shied away when the shrub screamed, and its broken branches began to bleed.

The donkey stood there for a while shaking, then looked hungrily over at the next nearest food, a downhanging willow with oddly dark leaves.

The willow began to weep....

The road down was a steep one. That alone would make return difficult, if the slope on hell's far side were the same. But Mriga knew there would be other problems, judging by the sounds floating up through the murky darkness. Dim distant screams, and howls of things that were not only dogs, and terrible thick coughing grunts like those of hunting beasts all mingled in the fumy air until the ears ached, and the eyes stung not just from smoke but from trying to see the sounds' sources. For once Mriga was glad of the sharp ozone smell that came of the lightnings crackling about Siveni's spearhead; it was something familiar in the terror. And even if the lightnings were burning blue, they were better than no light at all. Ischade seemed to need no light: she went ahead sure as a cat, always with a slight smile on her face.

The way wasn't always broad, or easy, no matter what the poets said. After a long, long walk down, the sound of their footsteps began echoing back more and more quickly, until Mriga could put out her hands and touch both walls. "Here is the strait part of the course," said Ischade. One after another they had to get down on their knees and crawl-even Siveni, who grumbled and hissed at the indignity. Mriga was used to dirt and had less trouble; though the dank smell, and the way the cold, sour clods of earth seemed to press in against her, made her shudder. Right before her, Tyr's untroubled breathing and little whimpers of excitement were a comfort. At least they were until Tyr began to growl as she crawled.

The tunnel grew smaller and smaller until Mriga had to haul herself along completely flat, and swore she couldn't bear another second of it. The fifth or sixth time she swore that, the echoes suddenly widened out again. Tyr leaped out into the space; Siveni almost speared her from behind in her haste to follow.

Tyr was still growling. Ischade stood in the dimness, still wearing that wickedly interested smile. Mriga looked around, dusting herself off, and could see little until Siveni came out and held the spear aloft-

A growl like an earthquake answered Tyr's. Mriga looked up. Hoary, huge, and bloodstained, filling almost the whole stone-columned cavern where they stood, a Hound crouched, slavering at the sight of them. It was the same Hound that the Ilsigs said ate the moon every month, and sometimes the sun when it could catch it; though usually Ils or Siveni would drive it away. Here, though, the Hound was on its own ground, and Mriga's omniscience informed her that Siveni would be badly outmatched if she tried conclusions with it.

"Aren't you supposed to give it something?" Siveni said from behind Ischade, sounding quite casual, and fooling no one. "A cake, or some such-?"

"Do I own the moon?" Ischade said. "It wouldn't be interested in anything less, I fear." And she stood there in calm interest, as if waiting to see what would happen.

Siveni stared at the Hound. It looked at her out of hungry eyes, growled again, and licked its chops. Where its saliva dripped, the stone underfoot bubbled and smoked.

The answering growl startled Mriga as Tyr shouldered past her and Siveni. "Tyr !" she said, but Tyr, bristling, walked straight up to the Hound and snarled in its face.

The Hound reared up, its jaws wide....

"Tyr, no!" Siveni cried, and slipped forward, raising her spear. Too late: Tyr had already leapt. But the growling and snarling and roaring that began, the rolling around and scrabbling and biting, didn't have quite the sound any of them expected. And it all stopped quite suddenly to reveal the Hound on its back, its belly showing, its tail between its legs, and Tyr, flaming-eyed, holding it by the throat. It was as if a rabbit held a lion pinned, but the rabbit seemed unconcerned with such details. Tyr snarled again and somehow seized that throat, as wide and heavy as a treetrunk, in her teeth; lifted the Hound and shook it, snarling, as she would have shaken a rat; then flung the whole huge monster away. "Yi, yi, yi, yi, yi!" shrieked the chief of the Hounds of Hell, the Eater of the Sun, as it scrambled desperately to its feet, away from the little dark-furred dog, and ran for the walls. It went right into one, and through it, and was gone.

Tyr panted for a moment, then shook herself all over, sat down, and scratched.

Mriga and Siveni stared at each other, then at Ischade. "I don't understand it," Mriga said to her. "Perhaps you do."

Ischade smiled and held her peace. "Well," Siveni said, "she is a bitch ..."

Tyr swung her head around-she was washing, with one leg up-and favored Siveni with a reproachful look.

"An extraordinary one," Ischade said, "but still a bitch; and as such no male dog, even a supernatural one, would fight with her under any circumstances. I suppose that even here, dogs will be dogs ... Canny of you to bring her. Shall we go on?" And she swept on into the darkness that the Hound had blocked. Mriga followed, thoughtful.

On down they went, the light of Siveni's spear burning bluer and brighter. The sound of moaning and screaming grew less distant. Goddess or not, Mriga shook. The voices were lifted less in rage or anguish than in a horrible dull desperation. They sounded like beasts in a trap, destined to the knife, but not for ages yet-and knowing it. A horrible place to spend eternity, Mriga thought. For a moment she was filled with longing for her comfortable, dirty hut in heaven, or even for the real thing of which it was the image-the rough hut in the Stepsons' barracks, and her own old hearth, and Harran busy on the other side of it. At least one of us will get out of here, Mriga thought. The sunlight for him, if for no one else.... ,

Siveni glanced over at Mriga with a curious look and opened her mouth, just as Ischade glanced lazily over her shoulder at them. "We're close to the ferry," she said. "I trust you brought the fare?"

Mriga shook her head, shocked. Her omniscience hadn't warned her of this. But Siveni's mouth quirked. She went rummaging about in her great oversized tunic and came out with a handful of money: not modern coin, but the old Ilsigi golden quarter-talent pieces. One she handed to Ischade with exaggerated courtesy, and one to Tyr, who took it carefully in her teeth; another went to Mriga. Mriga turned the quarter over, looked at it, and shot her sister an amused look. The coin had Siveni's head on it.

Ischade took the coin with a courteous nod, drew her cloak about her, and continued down the path. "They will be thick about here," she said as they descended, and the darkness opened out around them. "The unburied may not cross over."

"Neither would we, if we'd left all the preparations to you," Siveni said. "Trying to make things more 'interesting,' madam?"

"Mind the slope," Ischade said, stepping downward into the shadows and putting her hood up.

The ground was ditch-steep for a few steps, and they came down among shadows that moved, like the struggling scraps of darkness they had swallowed. These shadows, though, strode and slunk and walked aimlessly about, cursing, whining, weeping. Their voices were thin and faint, their gestures feeble, their faces all lost in the great darkness. Only here and there the blue-burning lightnings of Siveni's spear struck sparks from some hidden eye; and every eye turned away, as if ashamed of light, or ashamed to beg for it.

They made their way through the crowd, having to push sometimes. Tyr ranged ahead, her gold piece still in her mouth, snuffing the ground every now and then, peering into this face or that one. Following her, Mriga shuddered often at the dry-leaf brush of naked, unbodied souls against her immortal's skin. No wonder the gods hate thinking about death, she thought, as the ground leveled out. It's an ... undressing ... that somehow shouldn't happen. It embarrasses them. Embarrasses us....

"Careful," Ischade said. Mriga glanced down and saw that just a few steps would take her into black water. Where they stood, and other souls milled, the sour cold earth slanted down into a sort of muddy strand, good for a boat-landing. The water lapping it smoked with cold, where it hadn't rimed the bank with dirty ice. Tyr loped down along the riverbank, pursuing some interesting scent. Mriga looked out across the black river, and, through the curls of mist, saw the boat coming.

It was in sorry shape. It rode low, as if it were shipping a great deal of water-believable, since many of the clinker-boards along its sides were sprung. Steering it along with the oar that is also a blade, was the ferryman of whom so many songs circumspectly sing. He was old and gray and ragged, fierce-looking: too huge to be entirely human, and fanged as humans rarely are. He was managing the blade-oar one-handed. The other held a skeleton cuddled close, its dangling bones barely held together by old, dried strings of sinew and rags of ancient flesh. The ferryman sculled his craft to shore and ran it savagely aground. Ice cracked and clinker-rivets popped, and Mriga and Siveni and Ischade were pushed and crushed together by the press of souls that strained, crying out weakly, toward the boat.

"Get back, get back," the boatman said. He lisped and spat when he talked: understandable, considering the shape his teeth were in. "I've seen you lot before, and you none of you have the fare. And what's this? Na, na, mistress, get back with your pretty eyes. You're alive yet. You're not my type."

Ischade smiled, a look of acid-sweet irony that ran icewater in Mriga's bones. "It's mutual, I'm sure. But I have the fare." Ischade held up the gold quarter talent.

The ferryman took it and bit it. Mriga noticed with amusement that afterward, as he held it up to stare at it, the coin had been bit right through. "All right, in you get," he growled, and tossed the coin over his shoulder into the water. Where it fell ripples spread for a second, then were wiped out by a wild boiling and bubbling of the water. "Always hungry, those things," grumbled the ferryman, as Ischade brushed past him, holding her dark silks fastidiously high. "Get in, then. Mortals, why are they always in such a hurry? Coming in here, weighing down the boat, has enough problems just carrying ghosts. Nah, then! No gods! Orders from her. You all come shining in here, hurt everyone's eyes, tear up the place, go marching out again dragging dead people after you, no respect for authority, ghosts and dead bodies walking around all over the earth, shameful! Someone ought to do something ..."

Mriga and Siveni looked at each other. Siveni glanced longingly at her spear, then sighed. Standing in the bows of the boat, Ischade watched them, silent, her eyes glittering with merriment or malice.

"... Never used to be that way in the old days. Live people stayed live and dead people stayed dead. You look at my wife now!-" and the ferryman bounced the skeleton against him. It rattled like an armful of castanets. "Wha'd'ye think of her?"

Siveni opened her mouth, and closed it. Mriga opened her mouth, and considered, and said, "I've never met anyone like her."

The ferryman's face softened a little, fangs and all. "There, then, you're a right-spoken young lady, even though you do be a goddess. Some people, they come up here and try to get in this boat, and they say the most frightful rude things about my wife."

"The nerve," Siveni said.

"True for you, young goddess," said the ferryman, "and that's it for them as says such things, for they're always hungry, as I say." He glanced at the water. "Never you mind, then, you just put your pretty selves in the boat, you and your friend, and give me your hard money. She don't really care what goes on out here, just so you be nice and don't tear things up, you hear? Speak her fair, that's the way. They do say she's a soft heart for a pretty face, remembering how she came to be down here; though we don't talk about that in front of her, if you take my meaning. In you get. Is that all of you?"

"One moment," Mriga said, and whistled for Tyr; then, when there was no answer, again. Tyr appeared after a moment, her gold piece still held in her teeth, and trotted to the boat, whining at it softly as it bobbed in the water. "Come on, Tyr," she said. "We have to go across. He's on the other side."

Tyr whined again, looking distrustfully at the boat, and finally jumped in.

"The little dog too?" said the ferryman. "Dogs go for half fare."

Tyr stood on her hind legs to give the ferryman the coin, then sat down on the boat's middle seat, grinning, and barked, thumping her tail on the gunwale.

"Why, thank you, missy, that's a kindness and so I shall," said the ferryman, hastily pocketing the second half of Tyr's coin, which he had bitten in two. "They don't overpay us down here, and times are hard all over, eh? It's much appreciated. Don't put your hands in the water, ladies. Anyone else? No? Cheap lot they must be up there these days. Off we go, then."

And off they went, leaving behind the sad, pushing crowd on the bank. Mriga sat by the gunwale with one arm around Tyr, who slurped her once, absently, and sat staring back the way they'd come, or looking suspiciously at the water. The air grew colder. Shuddering, Mriga glanced first at Siveni, who sat looking across the wide river at the far bank; then at Ischade. The necromant was gazing thoughtfully into the water. Mriga looked over the side, and saw no reflection ... at first. After a little while she averted her eyes. But Ischade did not raise her head until the boat grounded again; and when she looked up, some of that eternal assurance was missing from her eyes.

"There are the gates," the ferryman said. "I'll be leaving you here. Watch your step, the ground's much broken. And a word, ladies, by your leave: watch yourselves in there. So many go in and don't come out again."

Looking at the dark town crouching behind brazen gates, Mriga could believe it. Hell looked a great deal like Sanctuary.

One by one they got out of the boat and started up the slope. Siveni was last out, and so busy looking up at the rocky ground that she missed what was right under her feet. She lost her footing and almost fell, just managing to catch herself with her spear. "Hell," she said, a bitter joke: The spear spat lightnings.

The ferryman, watching her, frowned slightly. "We don't call it that here," he said. "Do we now, love?"

The bones rattled slightly. "Ah well. Off we go then...." And they were alone on the far shore.

The gates were exactly like those of the Triumph Gate not far from the Governor's Palace, but where those were iron, these were brazen, and locked and mightily barred. The four stood together, hearing more strongly than they had yet the sounds of lamentation from inside. It was beginning to sound less threatening, the way a horrible smell becomes less horrible with exposure. "Well," Siveni said, "what now? Is there some spell we need?"

Ischade shook her head, looking mildly surprised. "I don't normally use this route," she said. "And the few times I've bothered, hell's gates have been open. Very odd indeed. Someone has been making changes ..."

"Someone who's expecting us, I'll wager," Siveni said. "Allow me." She lifted up the spear, leaned back with it like a javelin-thrower, and threw it at the gates. For that moment, lightning turned everything livid and froze everything still. Thunder drowned out the cries of the damned inside. Then came a few seconds of violet afterimages and ears ringing; then the darkness, in which by the tamer light of Siveni's spearhead they could see hell gates lying twisted and shattered on the paving. Siveni picked up her spear, then swept through the opening and past the wreckage, looking most satisfied.

"She does that rather well," Ischade said as she and Mriga and Tyr followed after.

"Yes, she always has been good at tearing things up," Mriga said. She looked over her shoulder at the gates and willed them back in place, as she'd done earlier with Ischade's wards. To her great distress, they didn't reappear.

"We're on other gods' ground now," Ischade said as they turned away from the gates, moving past the shadows of empty animal pens and around the spur of the great wall that sheltered the Bazaar. "Nearly all powers but theirs will be muted here, I fear. If your otherself tries that stunt again inside, I suspect she'll be in for a surprise, for she was still outside hell while she did it this time."

Mriga nodded as they made their way through the streets that led to the Bazaar. Almost everything was as it should be-the trash, the stink, the garbage in the gutters, the crowds. But the dark shapes moving there had a look about them of not caring where they were-an upsetting contrast to those stranded on the far side of the river, who seemed to know quite well. Looking across the city for evidence of hellfire, Mriga found nothing but the same scattered plumes of smoke and the smouldering reek that prevailed in the Sanctuary of the daylit world. Yet the overhanging clouds were underlit as if with many fires.

As they walked further, Mriga got a chance to see why, and came to understand that there was a difference here between the dead and the damned. Many of the dark people going by carried their own hellfires with them- bright conflagrations of rage, coal-red frustrations, banked and bitter, the hot light sucking darknesses that were envy and greed, the blinding fire-shot smokes of lust and hunger for power that fed and fed and were never consumed. Some few of the passersby bore evidence of old burning, now long gone. They were burnt-out cinders, merely existing, neither living nor dead. But worst of all, to Mriga's thought, were those many, many dead who had never even lived enough to burn a little, who had given up both sin and passion as useless. They walked dully past the flaming damned, and past goddesses, and neither hellfire nor the cold clean light of Siveni's spear found anything in their eyes at all.

She soon enough found worse. There were places that seemed damned as surely as people; spots where murders or betrayals had taken place, and where they took place again and again, endlessly, the original participants dragging the passing dead in to re-enact the old horrors. Some shapes walking there were less dark than others, but wore their torments differently-serpents growing from their flesh and gnawing at it; animal heads on human bodies, or vice versa; limbs that went gangrenous, rotted, fell off, regrew, while their owners walked about with placid looks that said nothing was wrong, nothing at all-

Harran is down here now, Mriga thought. How will we find him? Roasting in his desire for Siveni, eaten away by his guilt over the way he used me once? Or were those passions so recent that they never quite took root in his soul-so that we might find him like one of the dull ones who don't care about anything? Suppose he... doesn't want to come back....

The four of them passed through the Bazaar. They went hurriedly, for they found it peopled with beasts that milled about with seeming purpose, crying out to one another in animals' voices, neighs and roars and screams. But the wares being hawked there were human beings, chained, dumb, with terrible pleading eyes. The four went quickly out into the south road that followed the walls of the Governor's Palace. "Since all this is mirroring Sanctuary somewhat," Siveni said, peering around her by the light of her spear, and looking harrowed, "I would suppose that the one we're looking for is in the Palace."

"So would I," Ischade said, quite calm. "The south gate is closed."

Mriga noticed that on Ischade's far side Tyr had dropped back to pace beside her, gazing up at her with a peculiar expression.

"What exactly is your arrangement with her?" Mriga said, as softly as she could and still be heard above the constant low rumor of pain that filled the streets. "You must have one."

Ischade was silent. "Please pardon me," Mriga said. "I shouldn't have asked. Power is a private thing."

"You need not come with us," Siveni said, without turning around, from ahead of them. "You've already fulfilled your part of the bargain. Though we haven't paid you yet-"

Ischade didn't stop walking, but there was a second's hard look in her eyes that was more than just the reflection of Siveni's lightnings. "Don't project your fears on me, young goddesses," she said, the voice silken, the eyes dark and amused. "I have no reason not to see her."

Mriga and Siveni both most carefully held their peace. Tyr, though, whined once and wagged her tail, and for the rest of the walk never once left Ischade's side. Ischade appeared not to notice.

"See," she said. "The gate."

The south gate looked much as it did in Sanctuary, and made it plain that some passions had not entirely died out here; the posts were splashed with PFLS and gang graffiti. But there were no guards, no Stepsons, nothing but iron gates that stood open. The great courtyard inside was drowned in shadow, and the wailings of hell seemed subdued here. On the far side of the courtyard lay what had looked like the Palace from a distance, but here proved itself to be an edifice not even Ranke in its flower could have built: all ebony porticoes and onyx colonnades, smoke-black pillars and porches, massive domes and shadowy towers, halls piled on mighty halls, rearing up in terrible somber grace till all was lost in the lowering overcast. Ischade never paused, but went right in toward the great pile-a graceful, dark-robed figure, small against the great expanse of dark, dusty paving: and trotting beside her went the little dog.

There on the threshold Siveni glanced at Mriga. "Mriga, quick," she said, "do all of us a favor. Let me do the talking in there."

Mriga stared. "Sister, what're you thinking of?"

"Prices," Siveni said. "Just as you are. Look. You've enough power to pay her off afterward-"

"And where are you planning to be?"

"Don't start," Siveni said, "we're losing her." And she went after Ischade.

Mriga went after Siveni, her heart growing cold. "Anyway, this is my priest we're talking about," Siveni was saying.

"'Your'-T. Siveni, don't you dare-"

The great steps up to the Palace loomed, and Ischade was a third of the way up them by the time the goddesses caught up with her and Tyr. Silently they went up the rest of the stairs together, and Mriga was aware of her heart beating hard and fast, not from the climb. They passed over a wide porch, floored in jet, and a doorway loomed up before them, containing great depths of still, blackness, silent, cold. Against that dark Siveni's spearhead sizzled faint and pitiful, the smoking wick of a lamp of lightnings, drowning in the immensity of night.

They slipped in.

Far, far down the long hall they had entered-miles and years down it-some pale light seethed, a sad ash-gray. It came from three sources, but details took much longer to see. The four of them had walked and walked through that silence that swallowed every sound and almost every thought before Mriga realized that the ashen light came from braziers. It was a long time more before the two onyx thrones set between two broad tripod-dishes became apparent. A few steps later Mriga's mouth turned dry, and she stopped, her courage failing her ... for there was a shape seated in the right-hand throne.

It was not as if Mriga was unprepared for the one she knew would be sitting there-the sweet young mistress of spring, who fell in love with the lord of the dead, and died of her love, the only way to escape heaven and rule hell by his side. But all Mriga's preparation now proved useless. Of all things in hell, only she wore white: a maiden's robe, radiant even in the sad light of the braziers. Beneath the maiden veil her beauty was searing, a fire of youth, a thing to break the heart, as Siveni's was-but there was no healing in it for the broken one afterward. Hell's Queen sat proud in the throne, cool, passionless, and terrible. She held a sword across her lap, but it was black of blade from much use; and the scales lay beside the throne, thick with dust. Hell had apparently made its Queen over in its own image, depriving her even of the passion that was the reason she had come ... and, like those she ruled, she was resigned to it. Mriga suddenly understood that the frightful resignation on ghost-Razkuli's face was a family resemblance.

Mriga looked over at Ischade. The necromant stood quite composed with Tyr beside her, and gracefully, slowly bowed to the still woman on the throne. The gesture was respectful enough, but the air of composure still smelled of Ischade's eternal cool arrogance. Even here there's no dominating her, Mriga thought, annoyed, and admiring Ischade all over again.

"Madam Ischade," said hell's Queen. Her voice was soft and somber, a low voice and a rich one. There was no believing it had ever laughed. "A long time it is since you last came visiting. And you never before brought friends."

"They are on business, madam," Ischade said, her bearing toward the Queen as frank and straightforward as to anyone else she perceived as peer. "Siveni Gray Eyes, whom you may remember. And Mriga, a new goddess- perhaps the same as Siveni: They're working it out." A secret smile here. "And Tyr."

Tyr sat down, her tail thumping, and looked with interest at the Queen of hell.

She did not say "Welcome." She said, "I know why you've come. I tried to stop you, several times, through one or another of my servants. Whatever happens to you now is on your own heads."

She looked at them, and waited.

Mriga swallowed. Beside her Siveni said, "Madam, what price will you ask for Harran's soul?"

The Queen gazed gravely down at her. "The usual. The one my husband demanded of the gods for my return, and the gods refused to pay. The soul of the one who asks to buy."

Mriga and Siveni looked at each other.

"The law is the law," she said. "A soul for a soul, always. No god would trade his life for my freedom. And it's as well, for I did not want to leave."

Ischade's mouth curved ever so slightly.

"Why would I, after I went to such trouble to come here?" said the Queen. "I gave up being spring's goddess in favor of something more worthwhile. Shipri handles spring now." She was still a moment. "Besides, even Death needs love," said the Queen at last.

Mriga could think of nothing to say.

"So." She looked down at them, grave, patient. "Choose. Will you pay the price? And which of you?"

"I will," said Siveni and Mriga simultaneously. Then they stared at each other.

"Best two falls out of three," Mriga said.

"No! You cheat!"

"You mean, I fight all-out!"

Siveni swung angrily on the Queen of hell. But anger could not survive that gaze. After a second of it, Siveni turned and said to Ischade, "This is all your fault!"

Ischade said nothing.

A hand shot from behind Siveni and snatched her spear out of her grasp. Siveni whirled, but not before Mriga had executed a neat reverse-twirl of the spea. ^haft and was holding the sizzling head of it leveled at her heart. "Don't be an idiot," she said. "Harran needs you. And this town is going to need all the aggressive gods it can field on its own behalf in the next year or so, with Ranke dying on the vine and the Beysib and Nisibis pushing in from two different directions. I'm mortal enough to die successfully. And with me gone, you'll get all your attributes back. Siveni, let go-!"

"Harran's right, you are still crazy! Suppose when you die, the attributes are lost forever-confined down here! Then what happens to Sanctuary? Haven't you noticed that I've got the fighting attributes, but you've got the winning ones? "

There were two sets of hands on the spear-haft now, wrestling for control; and no matter what Siveni said, they were very evenly matched. Back and forth the two of them swayed. But, "Peace," said the Queen's low voice, and both of them were struck still. Only their eyes moved and glittered as they looked at her sidewise.

"I would see this paragon over whom goddesses contend," she said. "Skotadi."

Between Mriga and Siveni and the throne, darkness folded itself together into a shadow-shape like that Ischade had cut loose from the girl-corpse and Razkuli and Stilcho. It seemed a maiden's shadow, vague around the edges, wavering but lingering in the dark air like a compact smoke. "Fetch me the shade of a man who was called Harran," said the Queen. "He will be within the walls; he was buried today."

Skotadi swayed like blown smoke, bowing, and attenuated into the paler dark. The hold on Siveni and Mriga loosened, so they could stand up. But the spear was missing. The Queen was leaning it against one arm of her throne, and its head was dead metal, smoking gently in the braziers' gray light. "Since you cannot decide," the Queen said, "he shall."

As she spoke, Skotadi came into being again and bowed before the Queen. "Majesty," she said, "there is no such man within the gates."

Even Ischade looked surprised at that. "Impossible!" Siveni cried. "We buried him!"

The Queen turned dark eyes on her. "If my handmaid says he is not here, he is not."

Mriga was out of her reckoning. "If he's not here, where else could he be?"

"Heaven?" Siveni said, plainly thinking of all the way they'd come, possibly for nothing.

Ischade looked wry. "Someone from Sanctuary'!" she said.

"Everyone who dies comes here," said the Queen. "How long they stay, and what they make of this place while they're here, is their business. But very few are the mortals who don't have something to expiate before they move on. Still ..." She pondered for a moment, looking interested. Mriga thought back to that look of weary interest on Ischade's face, and hope woke in her. "There is only one other possibility."

Tyr leaped up, barking excitedly, and ran a little way toward the great door: then turned and barked again, louder, dancing from foot to foot where she stood.

"Burial enables one to pass the frontier," said the Queen. "It does not compel one to pass ..."

Tyr ran for the door, yipping. Mriga looked in shock at Siveni, remembering how Tyr hadn't wanted to get into the boat ...

The Queen rose from her throne. "Skotadi! My Lord's chariot." Siveni abruptly found herself holding her spear: It was working again, but seemed much subdued. "Madam, goddesses," said the Queen, "let us see where the little one leads us."

Somehow or other the door was only a few steps away this time. Outside it stood a great iron chariot with four coalblack chargers already harnessed, and Skotadi stood on the driver's side, holding the reins. They climbed in and Skotadi whipped up the horses.

The chariot rolled through the courtyard and out the gates in utter silence. Outside in the streets, the cries and lamentation became muted too, and finally ceased in astonishment and dread-for not in many a decade, Mriga's omniscience told her, had the underworld's Queen come out of her dark halls. The only sound was Tyr's merry barking ahead of them as she led the way.

Mriga found it difficult to look at Siveni as they drove westward down Governor's Walk, and Siveni would not look at her at all. It needed no omniscience to hear the anger rumbling like suppressed thunder in her. "Look," she whispered to Siveni, "you know I'm right."

"No, I don't." Siveni paused a moment, watching the dark, familiar streets go by, and then said, "You wrecked it, you know that? You and he would have been out of here by now. And I would have managed: I always manage." She paused again. "Dammit, Mriga, I'm a maiden goddess! He's in love with me, and I can't give him what he wants of me! But you can. And if I stay down here, you get my attributes-all but that one. My priest gets what he wants-me. And you get him-"

Mriga looked long at Siveni, who would not look back, and began to love her crazily, in somewhat the same manner as she had crazily admired Ischade. "I thought you were the one claiming that the attributes would stay down here-"

Siveni ignored this. "I wasn't entirely myself when he called me back," she said. "I made him lose a hand for my sake. The least I could do is make sure he lives long enough to get some use out of his new one."

The chariot turned south, past the tanners' quarter. "You're a full immortal," said Mriga. "You can't die."

"If I really want to ... yes, I can," Siveni said, very quietly. "She did it, didn't she?"

There was no arguing with that, whatever Ischade's opinions on the subject might be. Mriga let out a pained breath.

Ahead of them Tyr was running excitedly past the town animal pens, toward a bridge. It looked exactly like the bridge over the White Foal, where corpses had so often been nailed and gangs had scuffled over their boundaries. Past the bridge crouched the Downwind's ramshackle houses, Ischade's neighborhood. But the river running under the old bridge was that cold, black river that smoked its mists into the thunder-gray day. The ferryman was nowhere to be seen. On the far shore, in the streets among the shanties and rotting houses, milled dark crowds of the dead, but none of them used the bridge.

Tyr galloped up the curved upstroke of the bridge and skidded and galumphed and almost fell down the down-stroke of it, yapping crazily. The chariot followed. Hooves that should have boomed on the planks did not. Tyr was already down off the bridge, arrowing through the crowds like a hound on a line, giving tongue. Confused, the dead parted before and behind her, leaving a road the chariot could follow. And then Tyr went no further, but they saw her jump almost up to head level once or twice, licking in overjoyed frenzy at the face of a dark form burdened with some long awkward object over his shoulders ...

"Harran!"

Mriga was out of the chariot and running without knowing quite how she'd managed it. Beside her Siveni was keeping pace, tucking her tunic up out of the way, the spear bobbing on one shoulder and spitting lightning like fireworks. The dead got hurriedly out of their way. Mriga shot Siveni a second glance: that tunic was more gray than black, suddenly. But Siveni didn't seem to notice or care. And there, there, confused-looking, grimy, shadowed, but tall and fair and bearded, dear and familiar, him ... They managed to slow down just enough to avoid knocking him over, but as soon as his eyes cleared he knew them, and their embrace was violent and prolonged.

"What-why-how are you-"

"Are you all right? Did it hurt much?"

"No, but- What's she doing here?"

"She showed us the way. No, Tyr, he means Ischade, don't look so hurt-"

"We buried you, why didn't you-"

"I couldn't leave him. He's hurt. Look, there's an arrow through his-"

"You ass, you're deadf"

"... Leg-yes, I know! But he's-"

Stillness fell all around them. The black chariot stood hard by, and as the white-robed figure stepped down from it, Harran looked up. Most carefully he sank to one knee in the dirty street, laid down the limp, bloodied young man he was carrying, and kneeling, bowed himself slowly double. He was a priest, and a healer, and had worked in Death's shadow before: he knew her when he saw her.

Siveni looked at him, and at Mriga, and tossed her spear away. It lay scorching the dirt, afire as if it lay yet in the furnace where the thunderbolts were forged. Her robes shimmered gray, and the Queen's blinding white, in its light. Quickly, and none too gracefully-for she had had little practice at this sort of thing-she went down on her knees in front of the Queen of hell, and bowed her bright head right down to the dirt. Her helmet slipped off and rolled aside; she ignored it. "Madam, please," she said, in a muffled voice, "take me. Let them go."

"What?" Harran said, looking up from Tyr, who was washing his face again.

"Your goddesses have come to beg your life of me," said the Queen. "But you know the ancient price for letting a soul go back up that road once it's come down."

"No!" Harran said, shocked. And then, remembering to whom he spoke, "Please, no! I'm dead-but my town's not. It needs her. Mriga, talk her out of this!"

Mriga could only look at him, and not steadily: Her eyes were blurring. "She also has offered to pay the price," said the Queen. "They almost came to blows over it. They cannot choose. I offer you the choice."

Harran's jaw moved as his teeth ground. "No," he said at last. "I won't go-not at that price. Send them home. But-"

"We're not leaving without him," Mriga said.

Siveni looked up from the dirt, her eyes flashing "Certainly not."

The place was becoming brighter. Was it Siveni's spear, Mriga wondered, or something else? The buildings seemed almost as bright as if Sanctuary's usual greasy sunlight shone on them. All around, the dead were blinking and staring. "Let him at least go," Mriga said. "We'll both stay."

"Yes," Siveni said.

Death's Queen looked somberly from one of them to the other.

Tyr slipped away from Harran's side and up next to Siveni-then jumped up and put her delicate, dusty forefeet right on the white robes of the Queen. She looked up into her face with big brown eyes.

"I'll stay too," Tyr said.

Mriga and Siveni and Harran all started violently. Only Ischade looked away and hid a smile.

The Queen looked down at the dog with astonishment, and finally reached out to scratch her behind one ear. She looked over at Ischade. "This orgy of self sacrifice," she said, with the slightest, driest smile, "comes on behalf of Sanctuary?"

"More or less, madam," said Ischade, matching the smile. "I question whether it deserves it."

"It does not. But how rarely any of us get what we deserve. Which may be for the best." The Queen looked at her supplicants-one mortal and one goddess kneeling, one goddess standing, and (apparently) one more leaning against her and having the good place behind her ears scratched. "No wonder you two have been having such trouble achieving union. It's a trinity you're part of, and without your third there's never agreement on anything. But with him-"

"Them," Tyr said.

The Queen looked wry. "A four-person trinity?- Assuredly, I must get rid of all of you somehow," she said. "There would be no peace for any of us with all of you walking around here shining and tearing up the place. And arguing." In this warming, melting light, she seemed much less grave and awful than she had. Mriga even thought that her eyes crinkled in amusement; but in the growing radiance, and the way it reflected dazzling from her veil, it was becoming hard to tell. "But the law is still the law. The price must be paid-"

There was a long pause.

"We could split it four ways," Harran said.

Siveni looked at him in shock, then smiled. "Why, you're my priest indeed. Each of us could spend a quarter of our time here," she said to the Queen. "We could take it in turns-"

The Queen was silent a while. "I believe I could defend that arrangement to my husband," she said at last. "But your priest is dead, goddesses. He has no body to go back to, any more than that poor child-"

"He's not a child really," Harran said, "he's about seventeen, and I keep trying to tell you all, he's not dead."

"Why ..." The Queen looked closely at the young man's soul-body in the growing light. "Indeed he's not," she said. "This soul is shattered."

Mriga stood there in shock, thinking of the young body underneath Harran's, stiff and still-but, she now remembered with amazement, not cold. "He was struck down in the attack that killed you, Harran," Ischade said, "but though his body survived the blow, apparently his mind didn't. It happens sometimes-a soul is too fragile to withstand the idea of its own demise and disintegrates. Leaving the body still breathing, but empty-"

"The arrow missed the main artery," Harran said. "The wound'll hurt, but it'll heal-"

"Go then," said the Queen, fondling Tyr's ears and smiling slightly at her. "Enough has happened for one day. Go, before my husband comes back and finds you here and starts an argument." There were nervous looks all around at this prospect. "But perhaps one of you would stay for now?" And the Queen looked down at Tyr.

Tyr slipped down, ran to Harran, collected a hug from him and slurped his face then bounced over to the iron chariot, jumped into it, and sat there grinning, with her tongue hanging out, waiting to be taken for a ride.

"I can manage the actual transfer to the new body easily enough," Ischade said, leading Mriga, Siveni, and the still slightly bewildered Harran away. "But you will all of you owe me large favors...."

"Well repay them twice over,'' Siveni said, sounding somewhat grim. It was apparent she didn't like the idea of owing anybody anything.

Harran was looking from one of them to the other. "You came to hell after me?"

Mriga looked with quiet joy at her lord and love as Ischade led them all back toward the upper world. "They don't call it that here," she said. She was beginning to understand why.

Behind them, Tyr had her ride-the first of many-and was off about her own business when Death came home from work. The Queen of hell rose up to greet him as always, went stately to the great doors, cool and grave and shining. There her husband dropped the bare bones that were his old joke with her, leaned the blade that is also an oar up against the dark doorsill, and went to her, laughing and shedding this one of his many forms. There was none to see the dark glory that hell's Queen took in her arms, or the way her gravity dropped away in the presence of that shadowy beauty which men dare not imagine; the way her light kindled at his touch, like day in night's embrace. They laughed together, madly delighted as first-time lovers, as they always had been; as they always would be.

"Dear heart," said the Queen of hell, "a dog followed me home. Can I keep it?"

"This isn't quite how I pictured hell," Harran was saying dubiously.

"Nor I," said Ischade, sounding almost cheerful as she led them on through the under-Downwind. Indeed the place looked very little like hell just now. Downwind or not, this place was looking remarkably good: the buildings less rotten, the shanties sounder, the people all around them shadowy still, but strong and fair and looking surprised at that. The sky had begun to blaze silver, and Siveni's robes and Mriga's own were back to normal. Mriga looked at Siveni and saw that even her 'smelly goatskin' looked fearsome and deadly-beautiful rather than ragged. Ischade's dark beauty burned more perilously than ever. And were her robes not quite as dark as they had been? And Harran ...

But no. Harran looked as marvelous as he always had when Mriga was crazy. She smiled at him. The prospect of life with him, some kind of life-though the details were vague yet-shone on everything, and from everything, in a patina of anticipation and joy. The world was beginning all over again.

"There's no garbage in the gutters," Harran said, astonished, as Ischade led them along a little Downwind street toward the river.

"No," Mriga said. Every minute the old decrepit houses were looking more like palaces, and every curbside weed had its flower. "It's as she said. One makes of this place what one chooses. Hell-or something else. And the upper world is the same ... just a little less amenable to the change. More of a challenge."

They walked down a slope, along the riverbank, being careful of their footing. The river had brightened from black to pewter-gray, though still it smoked silver in the predawn chill. Across it Sanctuary rose, a Sanctuary none of its habitues would have recognized-a Maze full of palaces, a Serpentine all snug townhouses and taverns, everywhere light, contentment, splendor: a promise, and a joke.

"It could be like this, the real world," Mriga said as Ischade led them along the riverside. "It will be, some day ... though maybe not until time stops. But it will, won't it?" She turned to Ischade, her eyes shining in the growing day.

"Not being a goddess," said Ischade, "I wouldn't like to say." She paused by a little gate, swung it open. "Here is the barrier, all. What is-will reassert itself. Beware the contrast."

"But this is what is," Mriga said, as first Siveni, then Harran, passed through the gate, and the silver day flowed past them into Ischade's weedy back yard. Every tree burst into white blossom; the dank riverside air grew warm and sweet as if spring and summer had rooted in that garden together. The black birds in the trees looked down, and one opened its beak and, in a voice deep and bittersweet as night and love, began to sing. The barren rosebush shook itself and came out in leaves, then in a splendor of roses of every color imaginable burning white, red like evening love, and the incomparable blue; silver and pink and green and violet and even black.

"This is," Mriga said, insisting, as Ischade paused by the gate and looked through it in cool astonishment. "The waking world doesn't need to be the way it is ... not for always. Neither do you. You could be more. You could be what you are now, and more yet...."

Ischade looked down silently at what the light, the silver morning, the irresistible joy beating in the air, had made of her. Long she looked down, and lifting her hands, gazed into them as if into a mirror. Finally she lowered them and said, calm as ever, "I prefer my way."

Mriga looked a long moment at her. "Yes. Anyway, thank you," she said.

"Believe me, you'll pay well enough for what I've done for Harran."

Mriga shook her head. "Down there-you knew everything that was going to happen, didn't you? But you were trying to spare us a disaster, trying to spare Sanctuary one. Without looking like it, of course, and spoiling your reputation."

"I should have hated to lose a goddess who will be creating such wonderful disturbances hereabouts in the near future," Ischade said, her voice soft and dangerous.

Mriga smiled at her. "You're not quite as you paint yourself, Lady Ischade. But your reputation is safe with me."

The necromant looked at her and smiled a slow, scornful smile. "The day it matters to me what anyone thinks of me, or doesn't think ... even the gods ... !" she said.

"Yes," said Mriga. "And whoever raises the dead but gods? Let's go in."

Ischade nodded, holding the gate. Mriga went in, and with true sunrise, the influences of the underworld died away and let day reassert itself: grimy, pallid dawn over Sanctuary, reeking with smoke and the faint taint of blood ghost-haunted, dismal, and bitter cold as befitted the first day of winter. At Ischade's back, the White Foal flowed and stank, filmed here and there with ice. But the joy hanging in the air still refused to go entirely away. She shut the gate behind her and looked up at the stairs to the house. Haught stood there, and Stilcho, swords drawn in their hands. Ischade waved them inside, assuming their obedience, and turned to regard the rosebush.

Stilcho went inside, unnerved. Haught lingered just past the doorsill. Ischade paid him no mind, if she knew he was there. Eventually she moved, and reached out to the hedge. And if Haught saw Ischade cast a long, thoughtful gaze at the whitest of the roses before reaching out to pluck the black one, he never mentioned it to her, then or ever.