Wings of Omen

THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU by Diane Duane

The ephemerals have no help to give.

Look at them!

They are deedless and cripple,

strengthless as dreams. All mortalkind

is bound with a chain;

all their eyes are darkened....

The sound of screaming slowly aroused Harran from the mechanical business of pounding out the Stepson Raik's hangover remedy in the old stone mortar. Raik scrambled to his feet, his face ashen, staring toward the gates of the Stepsons' barracks compound. "Just a little more business for the barber," Harran said, not looking up. "More serious than your head, from the sound of it."

"Shal," Raik said, sounding wounded himself. "Harran, that's Shal-"

"Knew the damned careless fool would get himself chopped up one day," Harran said. He measured the last ounce or so of grain spirits into his mortar and picked up the pestle again.

"Harran, you son of a-"

"A moment ago you didn't care about anything, including where your partner was," Harran said. "Now you know... Mriga!"

Over in the comer of the rough stone hut someone sat in the shadows on the packed dirt floor, hitting two rocks together-grinding a third rock to powder between them in a steady, relentless rhythm. The hut's small windows let in only a couple of dust-dancing arrows of sun; neither came near the bundle of skinny arms and legs and filthy rags that sat there and went pound, pound, pound with the rocks, ignoring Harran.

"Mriga!" Harran said again.

Pound, pound, pound.

Another scream strung itself on the air, closer. From under Harran's worktable, by his feet, came a different sound: an eager whimper, and then the thumping of a dog's wagging tail.

Harran huffed in annoyance and shoved the mortar and pestle aside. "You start one thing around here," he said, getting up without looking anywhere near Raik's wild eyes, "and there's no finishing it. Never fails. -Mriga!"

This time there was a grunt from the pile of rags, though certainly not in response to anything Harran was saying- just a kind of bark or groan of animal pleasure in the rhythm. Harran reached down and grabbed Mriga's hands. They jerked and spasmed in his grasp, as they always did when someone tried to stop anything she was doing. "No more, Mriga. Knives now. Knives."

The hands kept jerking. "Knives," Harran said, louder, shaking her a bit. "Come on! Knives...."

"Nhrm," she said. It was as close as Mriga ever got to the word. From under the tangle of matted, curly hair, from out of the bland, barren face, eyes flashed briefly up at Harran-empty, but very much alive. There was no intelligence there, but there was passion. Mriga loved knives better than anything.

"Good girl," he said, dragging her more or less to her feet by one arm, and shaking her to make sure of her attention. "The long knife, now. The long knife. Sharp."

"Ghh," Mriga said, and she shambled across the hut toward Harran's grindstone oblivious of the disgusted Raik, who nearly kicked her in passing until he saw Harran's eyes on him. "Vashanka's blazing balls, man," Raik said in the voice of a man who wants to spit, "why're you waiting till now to do your damned knife grinding?!"

Harran set about clearing his herbs and apothecary's tools off the table. "Barracks cook 'borrowed' it for his joint last night," said Harran, bending to stir the fire and dropping the poker back among the coals. "Didn't just slice up that chine you were all gorging on, either. He used the thing to cut through the thighbone for the marrow, instead of just cracking it. Thought it'd be neater." Harran spat at Raik's feet, missing them with insolent accuracy. "Ruined the edge. Fool. None of you understands good steel; not one of you-"

Yet another scream, weaker, ran up and down the scale just outside the door. Shal was running out of breath. "Bring him in," said Harran; and in they came lean blond Lafen, and towering Yuriden, and between them, slack as a half-empty sack of flour, Shal.

The two unhurt Stepsons eased Shal up onto the table, with Raik trying to help, and mostly getting in the way. The man's right hand was bound up brutally tight with a strip of red cloth slashed from Lafen's cloak; the blood had already soaked through the red of it and was dripping on the floor. From under the table came more thumping, and a whine.

'Tyr, go out," said Harran. The dog ran out of the room. "Hold him," Harran said to the three, over the noise of the grindstone.

He pulled a penknife out of his pocket, slit the tourniquet's sodden knot, peeled the sticking cloth away, and stared at the ruin of Shal's lower arm.

"What happened?" Raik was demanding of the others, his voice thick with something Harran noticed but did not care to analyze.

"By the bridge over the White Foal," Yuriden said, his usually dark face even darker suffused with blood. "Those damned Piffles, may they all-"

"This isn't swordwork," Harran said, slipping the penknife into what was left of Shal's wrist and using the blade to hold aside a severed vein.

The paired bones of Shal's lower arm were shattered and stuck out of the wound. The outermost large bone was broken right at the joint, where it met the many small bones of the wrist which were jutting up through the skin; the smooth white capsule of gristle at its end was ruptured like a squashed fruit. Oozing red marrow and blood were smeared all over the pale, iridescent shimmer of sliced and mangled tendons. The great artery of the lower arm dangled loose, momentarily clotted shut, a frayed, livid little tube.

"No sword would do this. Cart drove over him while he was swiving in the dirt again, eh Yuri?"

"Harran, damn you-"

"Yuri, shut up!" Raik cried. "Harran, what are you going to do?"

Harran turned away from the man moaning on the table, and faced Raik's horror and rage squarely. "Idiot," he said. "Look at the hand." Raik did. The fingers were curled like clenched talons, the torn, retracted tendons making no other shape possible. "What do you think I'm going to do? Mriga-"

"But his sword-hand-"

"Fine," Harran said. "I'll sew it up. You explain matters to him when it rots, and he lies dying of it."

Raik moaned, a sound of denial as bitter as any of Shal's screams. Harran wasn't interested. "Mriga," he said again, and went over to the grindstone to stop her. "Enough. It's sharp."

The grindstone kept turning. Harran gently kicked Mriga's feet off the pedals. They kept working, absurdly, on the stone floor. He pried the knife out of her grasp and wiped the film of dirty oil off the edge. Sharp indeed; a real hairsplitter. Not that it needed to be for this work. But some old habits were hard to break....

The three at the table were holding Shal down; Raik was holding Shal's face between his hands. Harran stood over Shal for a moment, looking down at the drawn, shock-paled face. In a way it was sad. Shal was no more accomplished than any of the other Stepsons around here these days, but he was the bravest; always riding out to his duties joking, riding back at day's end tired, but ready to do his job again the next day. A pity he should be maimed....

But pity was another of the old habits. "Shal," Harran said. "You know what I have to do."

"Noooooo!!"

Harran paused... finally shook his head. "Now," he said to the others, and lifted the knife. "Hold him tight."

The hand gave him trouble. Yuri lost his grip, and the man writhing on the table jerked the arm about wildly, spraying them all.

"I told you to hold him," Harran said. He knocked Raik's hands away from Shal's face, took hold of Shal's head, lifted it, and struck it hard against the tabletop. The screaming, which Harran had refused to hear, abruptly stopped. "Idiots," he said. "Raik, give me the poker."

Raik bent to the fire, straightened again. Harran took the poker away from him, pinned the forearm to the table, and slowly rolled the red-hot iron over the torn flesh and broken vessels, being careful of their sealing. The stink in the air pushed Raik away from the table like a hand.

The rest of the work was five minutes labor with a bone needle and catgut. Then Harran went rooting about among the villainous pots and musty jars on the high shelf in the wall.

"Here," he said, throwing a packet to the poor retching Raik. "This in his wine when he wakes up... it may be a while. Don't waste the stuff; it's scarcer than meat. Yuri, they're roofing in the next street over. Go over there and beg a pipkin of tar from them-when it's just cool enough to touch, paint the stump with it. Stitches and all." Harran stood, his nose wrinkling. "And when you get him out of here, change his britches."

"Harran," Raik said bitterly, holding the unconscious Shal to him. "You could have made it easier on him. - You and I, we're going to have words as soon as Shal's well enough to be left alone."

"Bright, Raik. Threatening the barber who just saved his life." Harran turned away. "Idiot. Just pray the razor doesn't slip some morning."

The Stepsons went away, swearing. Harran busied himself cleaning up the mess throwing sawdust on the table to sop up the blood and urine, and scraping Raik's hangover remedy into a spare pot. Assuredly he'd be back for it; if not today, then tomorrow, after Raik had tried to drink his way out of his misery.

The sound of feet thudding on the floor eventually drew Harran's attention. Mriga was still pedaling earnestly away on a grindstone she wasn't touching, holding out to it a knife she didn't have. "Stop it," Harran said. "Come on, stop that. Go do something else."

"Ghh," said Mriga, ecstatically involved, not hearing him. Harran grabbed Mriga and stood her up and shoved her, blinking, out into the sunlight. "Go on," he said at her back. "Go in the stable and clean the tack. The bridles, Mriga. The shinies."

She made a sound of agreement and stumbled off into the light and stink of the Stepsons' stableyard. Harran went back inside to finish his cleaning. He scraped the sawdust off the table, threw the poker back in the fire, and picked up the last remnant of the unpleasant morning from the spattered dish into which he'd thrown it: a brave man's hand.

And lightning struck.

I could do it, he thought. At last, I could do something.

Harran sank down on the bench beside the table, speechless, almost sightless. There was a whimper at the door. Tyr stood in the doorway with her big pointed ears going up and down in uncertainty, and finally decided that Har-ran's silence meant it was all right for her to come in again.

She slipped softly up beside her master, put her nose under one of his hands, and nudged him for attention.

Without really noticing her, he began scratching her behind the ears. Harran wasn't even seeing the walls of the hut. It was both yesterday and tomorrow for him, and the present was suddenly charged with frightful possibility....

Yesterday looked as little like today as could be imagined. Yesterday was white and gold, a marble and chryselephantine glory-the colors of Siveni's little Sanctuary temple, in the days before the Rankans. Why do I look back on it with such longing? he wondered. / was even less successful there than I am here. But all the same, it had been his home. The faces had been familiar, and if he was a minor priest, he was also a competent one.

Competent-. The word had a sting to it yet. Not that it was anything to be ashamed of. But they'd told him often enough, in the temple, that there were only two ways to do the priestly magics. One was offhand, by instinct, as a great cook does; a whispered word here, an ingredient there, all done by knowledge and experience and whim-an effortless manipulation by the natural and supernatural senses of the materials at hand. The other way was like that of the beginning cook, one not expert enough to know what spices went with what, what spells would make space curdle. The merely competent simply did magic by the book, checking the measurements and being careful not to substitute, in case a demon should rise or a loaf should fail to.

Siveni's priests had looked down on the second method; it produced results, but lacked elegance. Harran could have cared less about elegance. He'd never gotten further than the strict reading and following of "recipes"-in fact, he had just about decided that maybe it would be wiser for him to stick to Siveni's strictly physical arts of apothecary and surgery and healing. At that point in his career the Rankans had arrived, and many temples fell, and priestcraft in all but the mightiest liturgies became politically unsafe. That was when Harran, for the first time since his parents had sold him into Siveni's temple at the age of nine, had gone looking for work. He had frantically taken the first job he found, as the Stepsons' leech and barber.

The memory of finding his new job brought back too clearly that of how he had lost the old one. He had been there to see the writ delivered into the shaking hands of the old Master-Priest by the hard-faced Molin Torchholder, while the Imperial guards looked on with bored hostility; the hurried packing of the sacred vessels, the hiding of other, less valuable materials in the crypts under the temple; the flight •of the priesthood into exile....

Harran stared at the poor, blood-congested hand in its dish on the table while beside him Tyr slurped his fingers and poked him for more attention. Why did they do it? Siveni is only secondarily a war-goddess. More ever than that, She was-is-Lady of Wisdom and Enlightenment-a healer more than a killer.

Not that She couldn't kill if the fancy took Her....

Harran doubted that the priests of Vashanka and the rest were seriously worried about that. But for safety's sake they had exiled Siveni's priesthood and those of many "lesser" gods-leaving the Ilsigs only Ils and Shipri and the great names of the pantheon, whom even the Rankans dared not displace for fear of rebellion.

Harran stared at the hand. He could do it. He had never considered doing it before-at least, not seriously. For a long time he had held down this job by being valuable-a competent barber and surgeon-and by otherwise attracting no undue attention, discouraging questions about his past. He burned no incense openly, frequented no fane, swore by no god either Rankan or Ilsigi, and rolled his eyes when his customers did. "Idiots," he growled at the god-worshippers, and mocked them mercilessly. He drank and whored with the Stepsons. His old bitterness made it easy to seem cruel. Sometimes it was no seeming; sometimes he enjoyed it. He had in fact gotten something of a reputation among the Stepsons for callousness. That suited him.

And then, some time ago, there had been a change in the Stepson barracks. All the old faces had suddenly vanished; new ones, hastily recruited, had replaced them. In the wake of this change, Harran had abruptly become indispensable-for (first of all) he was familiar with the Stepsons' wonted ways as the newcomers were not; and (second) the newcomers were incredibly clumsy, and got themselves chopped up with abysmal regularity. Harran looked forward to the day when the real Stepsons should come back and set their house in order. It would be funny as hell.

Meanwhile, there was still the hand in its dish on the table. Hands might have no eyes, but this one stared at him.

"Piffles," Lafen had said.

That was one of the kinder of the various nasty names for the PFLS, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Sanctuary. At first there had only been rumors of the Front- shadowy mentions of a murder here, a robbery there, all in aid of throwing out Sanctuary's conquerors, the whole lot of them. Then the Front had become more active, striking out at every military or religious body its leaders considered an oppressor. The pseudo-Stepsons had come to hate the Front bitterly-not only because they had been ambushing Stepsons with frightening success, but for the rational (though unpublishable) reason that most of the present "Stepsons" were native Sanctuarites, and hardly felt themselves to be oppressors. Indeed, there was some supportive sentiment for the Front among them. Or there had been, until the Front had started putting acid in their winepots, and snipers on neighboring rooftops, and had started teaching gutter children to smash stones down on hands resting innocently on walls at lunch hour....

Harran himself had agreed fiercely with the aims of the Front, though that wasn't a sentiment he ever allowed anyone to suspect. Damn Rankans, he thought now, with their snotnosed new gods. Appearing and disappearing temples, lightning bolts in the streets. And then the damned Fish-Eyes with their snakes. Miserable wetback mother-goddesses, manifesting as birds and flowers. Oh, Siveni-! For just a moment his fists clenched, he shook, his eyes stung. The image of Her filled him.. .bright-eyed Siveni, the spear-bearer, the defender goddess, lady of midnight wisdoms and truths that kill. Ils's crazy daughter, to whom He could never say no: the flashing-glanced hoyden, fierce and fair and wise-and lost. 0 my own lady, come! Come and put things to rights! Take back what's yours again-

The moment passed, and the old hopelessness reasserted itself. Harran let out his breath, looking down at Tyr, whose head had suddenly moved under his hand to look up at the nearer window.

A raven perched in it. Harran stared, and his hand closed on the scruff of Tyr's neck to keep her from chasing it. For the raven was Siveni's bird: Her messenger of old, silver-white once, but once upon a time caught lying to Her, and in a brief fit of rage, cursed black. The black bird looked down at them sidelong, out of a bright black eye. Then it glanced at the table, where the hand lay in its dish; and the raven spoke.

"Now," it said.

Tyr growled.

"No," he said in a whisper. The raven turned, lifted its wings, and flew away in a storm of whistling flapping noises. Tyr got loose from Harran's grip, spun around once in a tight circle for sheer excitement, and then hurtled out the door across the stableyard, barking at the vanished bird.

Harran was so shocked he found it hard to think. Did it speak? Or did I imagine it? For a moment that seemed likely, and Harran leaned back against the table, feeling weak and annoyed at his own stupidity. One of the old trained ravens from Siveni's temple, still somehow alive, blundering into his window-

This window? At this moment? Saying that word?

And there was the hand....

The picture of old smiling-eyed Irik, the Master-Priest, came back to him. Fair hatred, graying Irik in his white robes, leaning with Harran and several others over a pale marble table in the students' courts, his thin brown finger tracing a line on a tattered linen roll-book. "Here's another old one," Irik was saying. "The Upraising of the Lost. You would use this only on the very newly dead someone gone less than twenty slow breaths. It's infallible-but the ingredients, as you see, aren't something you can keep on hand." There was muted snickering and groaning among the novices; Irik was an irrepressible punster. "The charm has other applications. Since it can retrieve anything lost- including time, which the dead lose-you can lay restless ghosts with it; though as usual you have to raise them first. And since it can similarly retrieve timelessness, which mortals lose, the charm's of use as a mystagogue-spell, an initiator. But again, the problem of getting the ingredients comes up-the mandrake, for one. Also, brave men are generally as unwilling as cowards are to give up a perfectly good hand. The spell is mostly valuable nowadays in terms of technique; that middle passage, about the bones, is a little textbook in taxidermy all by itself. If you have to lay ghosts, this next one is usually more useful...."

The white-and-gold memory turned to shadows and mud again. Harran sat and stared at the stained earthenware dish and its contents.

It would work. He would need those other ingredients. The mandrake would take some finding, but it wasn't too dangerous. And he would need that old linen book-roll. He was fairly sure where it was....

Harran got up and poked the fire; then poured water from a cracked clay ewer into an iron pot and put the pot on the fire. He picked up his surgeon's knife again and the dish with the hand.

Tyr ran back into the house, stared at him with her big dark doe-eyes, and realized that he was holding a dish. She immediately stood up on her hind legs, dancing and bouncing a little to keep her balance, and craned her-neck, trying to see what was on the plate.

Harran had to laugh at her. She was a stray he'd found beaten and whimpering in an alley over by the Bazaar two years ago... when he was new to his job and had considerable sympathy toward strays. Tyr had grown up pretty- a short-furred, clean-bodied, sharp-faced little bitch, brown and delicate as a deer. But she was still thin, and that troubled him. The war on Wizardwall, and then the coming of the Beysib, had driven prices up on beef as on everything else. The pseudo-Stepsons swore at the three-times-weekly porridge, and bolted their meat, when it arrived, like hungry beasts-leaving precious little in the way of scraps for Tyr to cadge. Harran didn't dare let her out of the barracks compound, either; she would end up in someone's stewpot within an hour. So she ate half of Harran's dinner most of the time. He didn't mind; he would have paid greater prices yet. Unlike the old days, when he had constantly been busy administering Siveni's love to her worshippers and so needed very little for himself, Harran now needed all of the love he could get....

He watched her dancing, and became aware of the smell in the room-more than could be accounted for by Shal's pissing on the table. "Tyr," he said, faking anger, "have you been rooting in the kitchen midden again?"

She stopped dancing... then very, very slowly sat down, with her ears dejected flat. She did not stop staring at the dish.

He gazed at her ruefully. "Oh, well," he said. "I only need the bones anyway. Just this once, you hear?"

Tyr leaped up and began bouncing again.

Harran went over to the sideboard and boned the hand in nine or ten sure motions. "All right," he said at last, holding out the first scrap of meat for Tyr. "Come on, sweetheart. Sit up! Up!"

Oh, my Lady, he thought, your servant hears. Arm Yourself. Get Your spear. You'll soon be lost no more. I shall bring You back....

Preparation occupied Harran for a while thereafter. He kept it quiet. No use alerting the Stepsons to what he was planning, or giving Raik any reason to come after him- Raik, who spat at Harran every time he saw him now, promising to "take care of him" after Shal was better. Harran ignored him. The Piffles were keeping busy out there, and made it easy for Harran to go about his usual routine of stitching and splinting and cauterizing. And in between, when he grew bored, there was always Mriga.

She had been another stray, a clubfooted beggar-child found sitting half-starved in a Downwind dungheap, mindlessly whetting a dull scrap of metal on a cobblestone. Harran had taken her home on impulse, not quite sure what he would do with her. He discovered quite soon that he'd found himself a bargain. Though she seemed to have no mind now-if she'd ever had one-she was clever with her hands. She would do any small task endlessly until stopped; even in her sleep, those restless hands would move, never stopping. You never had to show her anything more than once. She was especially good with edged things; the Stepsons brought their swords to her to sharpen, one and all. Tyr had come to positively worship her-which was saying a great deal; Tyr didn't take to everyone. If Mriga was lame and plain-well, less chance that she would leave or be taken from Harran; if she couldn't speak, well, a silent woman was considered a miracle wasn't that what they said?

And since Harran was not rich enough to afford whores very often, having Mriga around offered other advantages. He had needs, which, with a kind of numbness of heart, he used Mriga to satisfy. In some moods he knew he was doing a dark thing, again and again; and Harran knew that the price was waiting to be paid. But he didn't need to think of that just now. Payment, and eternity, were a long way from the sordid here-and-now of Sanctuary and a man with an itch that needed scratching. Harran scratched that itch when he felt like it, and spent the rest of his time working on the Stepsons, and the charm.

He would have preferred to leave the hand in a bin of toothwing beetles for some days-the industrious little horrors would have stripped the bones dry of every remaining dot of flesh and eaten the marrow too; but toothwing beetles and clean temple workrooms and all the rest were forever out of his reach. Harran made do with burying the bones in a box of quicklime for a week, then steeping it in naphtha for an afternoon to get the stink and the marrow out. Tyr yipped and danced excitedly around Harran as he worked over the pot. "Not for you, baby," he said absently, fishing the little fingerbones out of the kettle and putting them to cool on an old cracked plate. "You'd choke for sure. Go 'way."

Tyr looked up hopefully for another moment, found nothing forthcoming, and then caught sight of a rat ambling across the stableyard, and ran out to catch it.

Finding the mandrake root was a slightly more difficult business. The best kind grew from a felon's grave, preferably a felon who had been hanged. If there was anything Sanctuary wasn't short on, it was felons. The major problem was that they were easier to identify live than dead and buried. Harran went to visit his old comrade Grian down at the Chamel House, and inquired casually about the most recent hangings.

"Aah, you want corpses," Grian said in mild disgust, elbow-deep in the chest cavity of a floater. "We're havin' a plague of 'em. And the Shalpa-be-damned murderers hain't even got the courtesy to be half-decent quiet about it. Look at this poor soul. Third one in the last two days. A few stones around his feet and into the White Foal with him. Didn't the body who threw him in know that a few cobbles won't keep 'em down when the rot sets in and the bloatin' and bubblin' starts? You'd think they wanted the body t' be found. It's these damn Piffles, that's what it is. Public Liberation Front, they call themselves? Public nuisance, I call 'em. City ought to do somethin'."

Harran nodded, keeping his retches to himself. Grian had supplied Siveni's priests with many an alley-rolled corpse for anatomy instruction, back in the white-and-gold times. He was the closest thing Harran had to a friend these days- probably the only man in Sanctuary who knew what Harran had been before he'd been a barber.

Grian paused to take a long swig out of the wine jar Harran had brought for him, "liberated" from the Stepsons' store. "Stuffy in here today," he said, wiping his forehead and waving a hand vaguely in front of him.

Harran nodded, holding his breath hard as the stench went by his face. "Stuffy" was a mild word for the Chamel House at noon on a windless day. Grian drank again, put the jug down with a satisfied thump between the corpse's splayed legs, and picked up a rib-spreader. "No lead in that" Grian said with relish, eyeing the wine. "Watch you don't get caught."

"I'll be careful," Harran said, without inhaling.

"You want nice fresh corpses quietlike," Grian said, bending close and forcing his wine-laden growl down to a rumble, "you go try that vacant lot over by the old Downwind gravepit. The lot just north of there, by th' empty houses. Put a few in there myself just the other night. Been puttin' all the bad 'uns in there, all the hangings, for the last fortnight. Ran out of space in the old gravepit. Damn Fish-Faces have been busy 'cleaning up the city' for their fine ladies."

The last two words were pronounced with infinite scorn; Grian might be a corpse-cutter and part-time gravedigger, but he had been "brought up old -fashioned," and did not approve of women, fish-faced or otherwise, who went around in broad daylight wearing nothing above the waist but paint. By his lights, there were more appropriate places for that kind of thing.

"You give it a try," Grian said, hauling out a lung like a sodden, reeking sponge, and tossing it with a grimace into the pail on the floor. "Take a shovel, boy. But you needn't dig deep; we been in a hurry to get all the customers handled; they none of them more'n two foot down, just 'nough to hide the smell. Here now, look at this...."

Harran pleaded a late night's work and made his escape.

The hour before midnight found him slipping through the shadows, down that dismal Downwind street. He went armed with knife and short sword, and (to any assailant's probable confusion) with a trowel; but he turned out not to need more than one of the three. Grian had been wrong about the smell.

The hour before midnight, one death-knell stroke on the gongs of Ils's temple, was Harran's signal. He got to work, going about on hands and knees on the uneven ground, which felt lumpy as a coverlet with many unwilling bedfellows under it-brushing his hands through the dirt, feeling for the small stiff shoot he wanted.

In the comer of the yard he found one. For fear of losing it in the dark (since he might show no light if the root was to work) he sat down by it, and waited. The wind came up. Midnight struck, and with it came the mandrake's swift flower, white as a dead man's turned-up eye. It blossomed, and shed its cold sweet fragrance on the air, and died. Harran began to dig.

How long he knelt there in the wretched stink and the cold, blindfolded with silk and tugging at the struggling root, Harran wasn't sure. And he stopped caring about the time as he heard something drawing near in the darkness another rustle of silk, not his. The rustle paused. Hard after the silken susurrus came another sort of whisper, the sound of a breath of wind sinking down around him and dying away.

Harran couldn't take off the blindfold-no man may see the unharmed mandrake root and live. By itself, that was reassuring to him; any assailant would not survive the attempt. So, though the sweat broke out on him and chilled him through, Harran hacked away at the root with the leaden trowel, and finally cut through it, pulling the mandrake free. The maimed root shrieked, a sound so bizarre that the huddled wind leaped up in panic and blundered about among the graves for a few moments-then dove for cover again, leaving Harran twice as cold as he had been before.

He yanked off his blindfold, stared around him, and saw two sights. One was the twitching, writhing, man-shaped root, its scream dying to a whisper as it stiffened. The other stood across the cemetery from him, a form robed and hooded all in black. That form stared at him silently from the darkness of the hood, a long look; and Harran understood quite well what had frightened even the cold night wind into going to ground.

The black shape slipped pale arms out of the graceful draping of the robe, raised them to put the hood back. She looked at him-the lovely, olive-skinned, somber face with black eyes aslant, raven-dark hair a second, more silken hood over her. He did not die of the look, as uninformed rumor said he might; but Harran wasn't yet sure this in itself was a good thing. He knew Ischade by reputation, if never before by sight. His friends down at the Chamel House had dealt with her handiwork often enough.

He waited, sweating. He had never seen anything so dangerous in his life, not Tempus on a rampage, or thunderous Vashanka striking the city, lightning fashion, with testy miracles.

She tilted that elegant head, finally, and blinked. "Rest easy," she said ridiculous reassurance, delivered in a quiet voice laced with lazy mockery. "You're not even nearly my type. But brave-digging that root here, at this hour, with your own hand, instead of using some dog to pull it for you. Brave-or desperate. Or very, very foolhardy."

Harran swallowed. "The latter, madam," he said at last, "most definitely bandying words with you. And as for the root-foolhardy there too. Yes. But the other way, it's barely a third as effective. I could send away to an herb-dealer or magician for the man-dug root. But who knows when it would get here? And at any rate-in gold or some other currency-the price of the danger would still have to be paid."

She regarded him a moment more, than laughed very softly. "A knowledgeable practitioner," she said. "But this... commodity... has most specific uses. In this time, this place, only three. There are cheaper cures for impotence-not that your present bedfellow would even notice it. And murder is far more easily done with poison. The third use-"

She paused, waited to see what he would do. Harran snatched up the mandrake and clutched it in a moment's irrationality-then realized that the worst that could happen would be that she would kill him. Or not. He dropped the mandrake into his simple-bag, and dusted off his hands. "Madam," Harran said, "I've no fear of you taking it from me. A thief you may be, but you're far beyond the need for such crude tools."

"Have a care," Ischade whispered, the soft mockery still in her voice.

"Madam, I do." He was shaking as he said it. "I know you don't care much for priests. And I know you protect your prerogatives-all Sanctuary remembers that night-" He swallowed. "But I have no plans to raise the dead. Or-not dead men."

She looked at him out of those oblique eyes, the amusement in them becoming drier by the moment. "A sophist! Beware, lest I ask you who shaves the barber. Whom then are you planning to raise, master sophist? Women?"

"Madam," he said all at once, for the air was getting deadly still again, "the old Gods of Ilsig have been had. Had like a blind Rankan in the Bazaar. And it's their idiot mortal worshippers who've sold them this bill of goods. They've fooled them into thinking that the things mortals do have to matter to the powers of gods! Corpses buried under thresholds, necklaces cast in bells or forged into swords, a cow sacrificed here or a bad set of entrails there- It's rubbish! But the Ilsig gods sit languishing in their Otherworld because of it all, thinking they're powerless, and the Rankan gods swagger around and hit things with lightning bolts and sire clandestine children on poor mortal maids, and think they own the world. They don't!"

Ischade blinked again, just once, that very conscious gesture.

Harran swallowed and kept going. "The Ilsigi gods have started believing in time, lady. The worship of mortals has bound them into it. Sacrifices at noon, savory smokes going up at sunset, the Ten-Slaying once a year-every festival that happens at a regular interval, every scheduled thing- has bound them. Gods may have made eternity, but mortals made clocks and calendars and tied little pieces of eternity up with them. Mortals have bound the gods! Rankan and Ilsigi both. But mortals can also free them." He took a long breath. "If they've lost timelessness-then this spell can find it for Them again. For at least one of them, who can open the way for the others. And once the Ilsig gods are wholly free of our world-"

"-They will drive out the Rankan gods, and the Beysib goddess too, and take back their own again?..." Ischade smiled-slow cool derision-but there was interest behind it. "Mighty work, that, for a mortal. Even for one who spends so much of his time wielding those powerful sorcerer's tools, the cautery and the bone-saw. But one question, Harran. Why?"

Harran stopped. Some vague image of Ils stomping all over Savankala, of Shipri punching Sabellia's heart out, and his own crude satisfaction at the fact, was all he had. At least, besides the image of maiden Siveni, warlike, impetuous, triumphing over her rivals-and later settling down again to the arts of peace in her restored temple-

And Ischade smiled, and sighed, and put her hood up. "No matter," she said. There was vast amusement in her voice-probably, Harran suspected, at the prospect of a man who didn't know what he wanted, and would likely die of it. Nothing confounds the great alchemies and magics so thoroughly as unclear motives. "No matter at all," Ischade said. "Should you succeed at what you intend, there'll be merry times hereabouts, indeed there will. I should enjoy watching the proceedings. And should you fail..." The slim dark shoulders lifted in the slightest shrug. "At least I know where good quality mandrake's to be had. Good evening to you, master barber. And good fortune-if there is such a thing."

She was gone. The wind got up again, and whining, ran away....

Of the greater sorceries, one of the elder priests had long ago said to Harran, in warning, "Notice is always taken." The still, dark-eyed notice that had come upon Harran in the graveyard troubled him indeed. He went home that night shivering with more than cold; and, once in bed, kicked Tyr perfunctorily out of it and pulled Mriga in- using her with something more than his usual impersonal effectiveness. No mere scratching of the itch tonight. He was looking, hopelessly, for something more-some flicker of feeling, some returning pressure of arms. But the lousiest Downwind whore would have suited his purposes a hundred times better than the mindless, compliant warmth that lay untroubled under him or which jerkily, aimlessly wound its limbs about his. Afterward Harran pushed her out too, leaving Mriga to crawl to the hearth and curl in the ashes while he tossed and turned. For all the sleep he found in bed, Harran might as well have been lying in ashes himself, or embers.

Ischade.... No good could come of her attention. Who knew if, for her own amusement, she might not sell to some interested party-Molin Torchholder, say the information that one lone, undefended man was going to bring back one of the old Ilsig gods in a few days? "Oh, Siveni..." he whispered. He would have to move quickly, before something happened to stop him.

Tonight.

Not tonight, he thought in a kind of reluctant horror. That same horror made him stop and wonder, in a priest's self-examination, about its source. Was it just the familiar repulsion he always felt at the thought of the old ruin on the Avenue of Temples? Or was it something else?

-A shadow on the edge of his mind's vision, a feeling that something was about to go wrong. Someone. Someone who had been watching him-

Raik?

All the more reason for it to be tonight, then. He was sure he had seen Raik staggering into the barracks-probably to snore off another night of wineshops. Harran had thought to go back twice to the temple-once to retrieve the old roll book, and then, after studying it, once to perform the rite. But even that would be attracting too much attention. It would have to be tonight.

Harran lay there, postponing getting up into the cold for just a few seconds more. Since that day five years ago when the Rankans served the writ on Irik, he had not been inside Siveni's temple. For so long now I've been done with temples. Going into one, now-and hers-do I truly want to reopen that old wound?

He stared at the skinny, twitching shape curled up in the ashes, and wondered. "Every temple needs an idiot," the old master-priest had once said to Harran in creaky jest. Harran had laughed and agreed with him, being just then in the middle of an unmasterable lesson, and feeling himself idiot enough for any twelve temples. Now-in exile- Harran briefly wondered whether he was still living in a temple; whether he had accepted the idiot because she was so like the mad and poor who had frequented Siveni's fane in the days when there was still wisdom dispensed there, and healing, and food. Of wisdom and healing he had little enough. And Mriga never complained about the food. Or anything else....

He swore softly, got up, got dressed. There, in the wooden box shoved under his sideboard, were the bones of the hand, wired and mounted into the correct gesture, with the ring of base metal on the proper finger; there was the mandrake, hastily bound in cord twisted of silk and lead, with a silvered steel pin through its "body" to hold it harmless. Both hairpin and ring had come from a secondhand whore that Yuri had recently brought home for the barracks. Harran, last in line and mildly concerned that the woman might notice when her things went missing, had "considerately" brought her a stoup of drugged wine. Then he swived her until the wine took, lifted ring and pin, and slipped away-first leaving her a largish tip where no one but she would be likely to find it.

So-almost set. He picked up the box, went over to the comer by the table for a few more things-a small flask, a little bag of grain, and another of salt, a lump of bitumen. Then he checked around one last time. Mriga lay snoring in the ashes. Tyr was curled nose-to-tail in a compact brown package under the bed, snoring too, a note higher than Mriga. Harran mussed the meager bedclothes and lumpy bolster more or less into a body shape, snatched up and flung over him his old soot-black cloak, and made his way silently through the Stepsons' stableyard.

There was a way over the wall by the comer of the third stall down. Up the shingles, a one-handed grip on a drainpipe, a few moments scrambling to find footholds on old bricks that stuck out just so. Then up to the wall's top, and the hard drop down on the other side. Breathing hard, just before that drop, Harran paused, looking back the way he'd come-and just barely saw the vague shape by the barracks door, standing motionless.

Harran froze. The night was moonless; the torches by the door were burned down to blue. There was nothing to see but the faint flash of eyes catching that light sidewise for a second as the shadow crouched and moved into deeper shadow, and was lost.

Harran jumped, held still only long enough to get his breath, and ran. If he got to the temple in time to do what he intended, no number of pursuers would matter; the whole Rankan Empire, and the Beysibs too, would flee before what would follow.

If he had time....

The Temple of Siveni Grey-Eyes was the second-to-last one at the shabby southern end of the Avenue of Temples. At least, it was shabby now. There had been a time when Siveni's temple had had respectable neighbors: on one side, the fane and priests of Anen Wineface, the harvest-god, master of vine and corn; on the other, that of Anen's associate Dene Blackrobe, the somber mistress of sleep and death. Between them, Anen's polished sandstone and Dene's dark granite, Siveni's temple had risen in its white and gold. There had been a certain rightness to the way they stood together. Work and Wine and Sleep; and Siveni's temple, as was appropriate for a craft-goddess, had looked out over that guilds' quarter. Businessmen made deals on its broad steps, paid a coin or two to buy luck and a cake for Siveni's ravens, then went next door to Anen's to seal their deals with poured libations. Small ones; Anen's wine was generally considered too good to waste on the floor.

Those days were all done now. Anen's temple was dark except for one red light over the altar; his priests' annuity was reduced to almost nothing, and Anen's old patrons, knowing Him out of favor, tended to do their libation-pouring elsewhere. As for Dene's temple, the Rankans, possibly considering Her too contemplative (or too unimportant) to do anything about it, had demolished the building... leaving the merchants and guildsmen to quarrel over the newly available parcel of real estate.

And as for Siveni's temple... Harran stood across from it now, hiding himself in the shallow doorway of a night-shuttered mercantile establishment. He could have wept. Those white columns all smeared with city grime, the white steps leading up to the portico broken, littered, stained.... A slow cold wind swept down the Avenue of Temples toward Ils's fane, a dim shape no more clearly seen than the moon behind clouds. Near it reared up Savankala's upstart temple, and Vashanka's hard by it-both great ungainly piles, and as dark tonight as Ils's. No one walked the street. It was far past the hour for devotions.

Harran held still in that doorway for a long time, unable to shake the feeling that he had been followed. The gongs of Ils's temple rang the third hour after midnight. The sound wavered in the wind like Harran's heart, blowing away down the avenue toward the Governor's Palace and the estates. Something flapped nearby-a sound like a flag snapping in the wind. He jerked around, looked. Nothing but the shadowy shape of a bird on the right, flying heavily in the crosswind, coming to perch on the high cupola of Siveni's temple, becoming another shadow that loomed there among the carvings. A black bird, bigger than a crow....

He unswallowed his courage, looked both ways, and hurried across the street. The strength of the wind, as Harran reached the middle of the avenue, was ominous. If ever there was a night to be home in bed, this was it....

He dashed up the stairs where he had lingered so many times before, tripping now and again over some dislodged stone, some crack that hadn't been there when he was young. On the portico he paused to get his breath and look back the way he had come. Nothing coming, no one passing in the street.... And there, the motion again, something dark; not in the street, but next door in the cloddy, vacant lot that was all that remained of Dene's temple. Harran felt under his cloak for the long knife....

Eyes caught the reflection of the pale stone of Siveni's stairs. Harran found himself looking at the largest rat he had ever seen, in Sanctuary or elsewhere. It was the size of a dog, at least. The thought of Tyr catching up with it made him shudder. As if sensing Harran's fear, the rat turned about and waddled back into the vacant lot, going about its nightly business. Other shadows, just as large, stirred about the pillars of the portico, unconcerned.

Harran swallowed and thought about business. If I feel I'm being followed, the thing to do is start the spell-draw the outer circle. No one can get through it once it's closed. He put down the box and the flask and fumbled about his clothes for the lump of bitumen. Slowly he made his way around the great open square of pillars, all of which bore the sledgehammer marks of attempted demolition. The marks were futile, of course-any temple built by the priests of the goddess who invented architecture might be expected to last-but they scarred Harran's heart just looking at them. Right around the portico, as he'd been taught-four hundred eighty paces exactly-Harran went, bent over, his back aching. Dark shapes fled again and again at his passing. He refused to look at them. By the time he came around to the middle of the stairs again and drew the diagram-knot that tied the circle closed, his back was one long creaking bar of iron with smiths working on it; but he felt much safer. He picked up his box again and made his way inward.

The great doors within the portico were long since barred shut from inside, but that would hardly stop anyone who had served Siveni past the novitiate. Harran traced the door's carved raven-and-olive-tree motif just below eye level until he found the fourth raven past the second tree with no olives on it, and pushed in the raven's eye. The bird's whole head fell in after it, revealing the little catch and valve that opened the priests' door. The catch was stiff, but after a couple of tries the door swung open wide enough to admit Harran. He slipped in and swung it silently to behind him.

Harran lifted the dark lantern he had brought with him and unshuttered it. And then he did begin to weep; for the statue was gone-the image toward which Harran had once bowed affectionately so many times a day, having eventually learned to see and bow to the immortal beauty behind the mortal symbol. Siveni's great statue in her aspect as Defender, seated, armed and helmed, holding her battalion-vanquishing spear in one hand and her raven perched on the other. The great work, the statue that the artist Rahen had spent five years fashioning of marble, gold, and ivory, afterward putting down his sculptor's tools forever and saying he knew his life's masterwork when he saw it, and would make no other.... All gone. Harran could have understood it if they had stripped the gold and ivory off, pried the gems out of the mighty shield. He knew as well as any other Sanctuarite that not even nailing things down could keep them safe here. But he had never thought to have the fact brought home to him so brutally as this. The pediment on which the statue had stood was bare except for bits of rubble, chunks and splinters of shattered marble... but those were eloquent even in ruin. Here, a fat pyramidal lump was one corner of the statue's pedestal; there, a long slim shard, smooth and faintly grooved at one end, broken off sharp as a flint at the other-a feather from a raven's outstretched wing.... Harran's brain roiled with rage. Where did they-why-A whole statue, a statue thirty feet high! Stolen, destroyed, lost.

He dashed the tears out of his eyes, put the lantern down, flung his cloak down on the dusty marble, and picked up his box. One more circle he would need in which to work the sorcery itself. If his back still hurt him, Harran didn't notice it now. Round the vacant pediment he went with the bitumen, not counting paces this time, rather fighting down his bitter anger enough to remember the words that needed to be thought again and again to confine within this inner circle the forces that would soon break loose. It was not easy work, fighting down both his anger and the growing, restless power of the circle-spell; so that as Harran tied the second circle closed he was gasping like a man who'd run a race, and had to stand for some moments bowed over like a spent runner, hands on thighs.

He straightened up as quickly as he could, for there was worse to come. Simple this spell might be, but that wouldn't keep it from being strenuous; and first he needed the rite. Breaking and resealing the circle according to procedure, he went to get it.

Normally the location of the safe-crypt was not information that would have been entrusted to a junior priest, but in the haste surrounding the exile of Siveni's priesthood, quite a few secrets had slipped out. Harran had been one of those conscripted to help old Irik hide away the less important documents, old medical and engineering texts and spells. "We may yet find a use for these, in a better hour," Irik had said to Harran. Just then he had had his arms full of parchments, his nose full of dust, and his mind full of fear; the words had meant nothing. But now Harran blessed Irik as he went around to behind where the statue had been, stepped on the proper pieces of flooring in the proper order, and saw the single block by the rear wall fall slowly away into darkness.

The stair was narrow and steep, with no banister. Harran held up the lantern at the bottom of it and went rummaging, sneezing a lot as he did. Parchments, book rolls, and wax tablets were piled and scattered every which way. It was the rolls he went for. Again and again Harran undid linen cords, spread a roll out in a cloud of dust and sneezes, to find nothing but a spare copy of the temple's bookkeeping for the third month of such and such a year, or some tired old philosophical treatise, or a cure for the ague (ox-fat rubbed together with mustard and ground red-beetle casings, the same applied to the chest three times a day). This went on till his eyes began to water, rebelling against the poor light, and Harran's mind stopped seeing what he read and kept wandering away to worry about the time. Night was leaning toward morning; this was the time to do the spell, if ever-before dawn, herald of new beginnings-and if he didn't find it soon-

He blinked and read the words again. It wasn't hard; they were beautifully written in an Old Ilsig hieratic script. "... of the Lost, that is to say, an infallible spell for finding the lost and strayed and stolen. The spell needeth first the hand of a brave and living man, the same to be offered up in the spell's working by the celebrant; and it needeth also a mandrake root, called by some peristupe, dug of a night without moon or star, and treated according to the disciplines, also to be so offered; and needeth as well some small deal of salt and wheat and wine, and a knife for blood to propitiate the Ones Below; and lastly those instruments by which the boundary for the spell shall be made.

"First dig your mandrake..."

Harran scrambled to his feet in the dust and the dark, sneezing wildly and not caring. Up the stairs, back into the circle-cutting the knot to let himself in, sealing it shut again behind him. He sat down on the vacant pediment amid the rubble and began to read. It was all here, much as he remembered it, with the little thumbnail sketch of the diagram to be drawn inside the circle, and the rite itself. Part in a very old Ilsig indeed, part in the vernacular. Simple words, but oh, the power in them. Harran's heart began to hammer.

Something moaned, and Harran started-then realized it was only the wind, building now to such a crescendo that he could hear it even inside the temple's thick stone. Good, he thought, picking up the piece of bitumen again and rising to his feet, let it storm. Let them think that something's about to happen. For it is!

He set to work. The diagram was complex, seemingly a picture of some kind of geometrical solid, though one in which the number of sides seemed to change each time one counted them. The finished diagram made an uneasy flickering in the mind, a feeling that got worse as Harran started setting the necessary runes and words into the pattern's angles. Then came the salt, cast to the cardinal points with the usual purifacatory rhyme; and the wheat-two grains at the primary point, four at the next, eight at the one after that, and so on around the seven. Harran chuckled a little, light-headed with excitement. That particular symbol of plenitude had always been a joke among the student priests; a sixty -four point pattern would have emptied every granary in the world. Nothing left now but the wine, the knife, the mandrake, the hand....

The wind was whining through the pillars outside like a dog that wanted in. Harran shivered. It's the cold, he thought, and then swallowed again and silently took it back; to lie during a spell could be fatal. He went to the diagram's heart, feeling as he went the small uncomfortable jolts of power that came of passing over it. Forces besides his were moving tonight, lending what he did abnormal power. Just as well, he thought. Harran opened the wine-flask and set it beside the center-point, then put the hand in one of his pockets and the mandrake in the other. In his left hand he held the book-roll, open to the right spot. With the right he drew his knife.

It was his best, Mriga's favorite. He had set her at it that afternoon, and not stopped her for a long while. Now its edge caught the dim lantern-light with a flicker as live as an eye's. He held it up in salute to the four directions and their Guardians above and below, faced northward, and began to pronounce the spell's first passage.

Resistance began immediately; it became an effort to push the words out of his throat. His tongue went leaden. Still Harran spoke the words, though more and more slowly; stopping in mid-spell could be as fatal as lying. The wind outside rose to a malevolent scream, drowning him out. He was reduced to struggling one word out, drawing several rasping breaths, then starting another. Harran had never thought that just fifty words, a few sentences, would seem long. They did now. Ten words remained, every one of them looking as long as a whole codex and as heavy as stone. At the fifth one he stammered, and outside the screaming wind scaled up into an insane yell of triumph. In a burst of fear he choked out two words very fast, one after another. Then the second -to-last, more slowly, with a wrenching effort like passing a stone. And the last, that went out of him like life leaving and smote him down to the floor.

With his falling came the light, blazing in through the temple's high narrow windows like the sky splitting; and the thundercrack, one deafening bolt that reverberated over the roofs of Sanctuary-breaking what glass remained unbroken in the temple's windows, and jolting loose what was already shattered, raining it all down on the marble floor in a storm of razory chimings. Then stillness again. Harran lay on his face, tasting marble and bitumen against his tongue and blood in his mouth, smelling ozone, hearing the last few drops of the glass rain.

I think it's working....

Harran got to his knees, felt around with shaking hands until he found the knife which he had dropped, and then took the skeletal hand out of his pocket. He put it down exactly at the diagram's center-point, palm-up; the outstretched index and middle fingers pointing northward, the others curled in toward the palm, the thumb angled toward the east. Then Harran began the second passage of the spell.

As he read-slowly, being careful of the pronunciation-he became aware of being watched. At first, though he could see nothing, the sensation was as if just one set of eyes dwelt on him-curious eyes, faintly angry, faintly hungry, willing to wait for something. But the number of eyes grew. Harran's words seemed loud as thunder, and his hurrying breath louder than any wind; and the eyes grew more and more numerous. It was not as if he could see them. He could not. But he could feel them, a hungry crowd, a hostile multitude, growing greater by the second, waiting, watching him. And when the silence became so total that he could no longer stand it, then came the sound; a faint rustling, a jostling and creaking and gibbering at the edge of hearing-a sound like the wings and cries of bats in their thousands, their millions, a benighted flock hanging, waiting, hungry for blood.

The sound, rather than frightening Harran worse, reassured him somewhat; for it told him who they were. The spell was working indeed. The shades of the nameless dead were about him, those who had been dead so long that they of all things made were most truly lost. All they remembered of life was what an unthinking, newbom child remembers- heat, warmth, pulsebeats, blood. Harran began to sweat as he picked up the wine-flask and made his way around to the edge of the circle. At the pattern's northern point he took Mriga's favorite knife and cut the heel of his left hand with it, wide but not deep, for the best bleeding. The horror of cutting himself left him weak and shaking. But there was no time to waste. On the northern point, and on all the others, he shed his blood in a fat dollop on the grain, and poured wine over it all, then retreated to the center of the circle and said the word that would let the shades past the fringes of the pattern, though no further.

They came flocking in, crowding to the blood, eyes that he could not see squeezed shut in pleasure, tiny cries withering the silence. They drank their fill, slowly-tiny bat-sips were all they could manage through those parched soul-mouths. And then, satisfied, they milled about gibbering for a little while, forgot why they had come, and faded away. Harran felt slightly sorry for them-the poor strengthless dead, reduced to a shadowy eternity of wistful hunger-but he wasn't sorry to see them go. They would not trouble the spell again; he could get on with the real business now.

He paused just long enough to wipe the cold sweat out of his eyes, then put the book-roll aside, took the mandrake out of his pocket, and started undoing its bindings. When they were off he laid the mandrake carefully in the palm of the skeleton hand, "head" up toward the fingers, and then paused again; the next maneuver was tricky, and he briefly wished for three hands. There was a way to manage it, though. He squatted down, pinned both hand and mandrake securely in place on the floor with the toe of one boot. Then with one hand he plucked the silvered pin out of the mandrake's torso; with the other he squeezed his blood out onto the root's pinprick wound.

Instantly the root began to glow... faintly at first; but it would not be faint for long. Harran scrambled to his feet, rolled the book along to the last part of the spell, and began to read. It was in the vernacular, the easiest part of the spell; but his heart beat harder than ever. "By my blood here spilt, and by these names invoked; by the dread signs of deep night inclining toward the morning, and the potent figures here drawn; by the souls of the dead and the yet unborn..."

It was getting warm. Harran hazarded a glance, as he read, down at the light growing at his feet. The mandrake was burning such a hue as no one ever saw save while dreaming or dead. To call the color "red" would have been to exalt red far past its station, and insult the original. There was heat in the color, but of a sort that had nothing to do with flame. This was the original shade of heart's passion, of blood burning in a living being possessed by rage or desire. It was dark; yet there was nothing intrinsically evil about it, and it blinded. In that light Harran could barely see the book he read from, the stone walls around him; they seemed ephemeral as things dreamed. Only that light was real, and the image it stirred in his mind. His heart's desire, whose very name he had denied himself for so many years now-and now within his grasp, the longed-for, the much-loved, wise and fierce and fair-

"... By all these signs and bindings, and most of all by Thy own name, 0 Lady Siveni, do I adjure and command Thee! Present Thyself here before me-" -in comely form and such as will do me no harm, said the spell, but Harran would not have dreamed of saying that: as if Siveni could ever be uncomely, or would harm her priest? And then the triple invocation, while he gasped, and everything reeled, and his heart raced in his chest as if he labored in the act of love: "Come Thou, Lady of the Battles, who smites and binds up again. Builder, Defender, Avenger; come Thou, come Thou, 0 come!"

No lightning this time, no thunder. Nothing but a shock that knocked Harran flying in one direction and the knife and book in two others-a hurtless shock that was nevertheless as final and terrible as dreaming of falling out of bed. Harran lay still for quite some while, afraid to move- then groaned softly once and sat himself up on the stone, wondering what had gone wrong.

"Nothing," someone said to him.

The voice made the walls of the temple vibrate. Harran trembled and held his head against the singing in it.

"Well, don't sit there, Harran," said the voice. "Get on with it. We've business to attend to."

He rolled to his knees and looked up.

She was there. Harran staggered; his heart did too, missing beats. The eyes those were what struck him first: literally struck him, with physical force. Afterward, he realized this should have been no surprise. "Flashing-Eyed," was after all her chief epithet. His best imaginations proved insufficient to the reality. Eyes like lightning-clear, pitilessly illuminating, keen as a spear in the heart-those were Siveni's. They didn't glow; they didn't need to. None of her needed to. She was simply there, so there that everything physical seemed vague beside her. A great chill of fear went through Harran then at the thought that perhaps there were good reasons why the gods didn't usually walk the realms of men.

But not even fear could live long, fixed by that silvery regard, that ferocious beauty. For she was beautiful, and again Harran's old imaginations fell down in the face of the truth. It was a spare, severe, unselfconscious beauty, too busy with other things to notice itself... definitely the face of the patroness of the arts and sciences. There was wildness in that face, as well as wisdom; thoughtlessness as well as handsomeness in those rich robes-for the blazing under-tunic was tucked casually and hurriedly up above the knee, and the great loose overtunic was a man's, probably Ils's, borrowed for the greater freedom of motion it allowed. The hand that held the great spear she leaned on was graceful as a lady's; but the slender arm still spoke of shattering strength. Siveni as she now appeared was not much taller than mortal womankind. But as he looked at her, and she bent those cool, terrible, considering eyes on him, Harran felt very small indeed. She pushed her high-crested helm back a bit from that coolly beautiful face and said impatiently, "Do get up, man. Finish what you're doing so we can get to business." Siveni lifted the raven that perched on her left hand, moving it to her shoulder.

He got up, still very confused. "Madam," he managed to croak, and then tried it again, rather embarrassed at making such a poor showing. "Lady, I am finished...."

"Of course you're not," she said, reaching out with that blazing spear and using its point to flick the book-roll up into her free hand. "Don't go lackwitted on me, Harran. It says right here: 'the hand of a brave and living man, the same to be offered up at the spell's end by the celebrant.'" She turned the scroll toward him, showing him the words.

Harran glanced down at the middle of the circle, where in the skeletal hand the mandrake still burned dully bright as a coal. But Siveni's voice brought his glance up again. "Not that hand, Harran!" She said, sounding annoyed now. "That one!"

And she pointed at the knife, which he had forgotten he was clutching-and at his left hand, which clutched it.

Harran went as cold all over as he had in the graveyard. "Oh my G-"

"Goddess?" she said, as Harran caught himself as usual. "Sorry. That is the price written here. If the gateway you seek to open is to be fully opened-and even as I am not fully here yet, neither would the others be-the price must be paid." She looked at him coolly for several moments, then said with less asperity and some sadness, "I would have expected my priests to read better than that, Harran.... You do read?"

He gave her no answer for a moment. He thought of Sanctuary, and the Rankans, and the Beysib, and briefly, irrationally, of Shal. Then he stepped over to the center of the circle, and the hand. The bones of it were charred. The ring of base metal was a brass-scummed silver puddle on the floor. The mandrake glowed under his glance like a coal that had been breathed on.

He knelt down again and lifted his eyes briefly to the unmerciful loveliness before him; then squeezed his left hand until the blood flowed fresh, and with it pried the mandrake away from the hand's blackened bones.

In the hours that intervened until Harran got up again- a few minutes later-he came belatedly to understand a great deal; to understand Shal, and many of the other Stepsons, and some of the poor and sick he'd treated while still in the temple. There was no describing the pain of a maiming. It was a thing as without outward color as the burning of the mandrake; and even worse, more blinding, was the horror that came after. When Harran stood again, he had no left hand anymore. The stump's scorching pain throbbed and died away; Siveni's doing, probably. But the horror, he knew, would never go away. It would be fed anew, every day, by those who refused to look at the place where a hand had once been. Harran abruptly understood that payment is not later, is never later, but is always now. It would be now all his life.

He got to his feet and found Siveni, as she had said, even more there than she had been before. He wasn't sure this was a good thing. None of this was working out as it should have. And there were other things peculiar as well. Where was the light coming from that filled the temple suddenly? Not from Siveni; she was striding around the place with the dissatisfied air of a housewife who comes home and has to deal with her husband's housekeeping- poking her spear into comers, frowning at the broken glass. "All this will be put to rights soon enough," she said. "After business. Harran, what are you scowling at?"

"Lady, the light-"

"Think, man," she said, not unkindly, as she stepped over to the circle, examining it, gently kicking a bit of her statue's rubble aside with one sandaled foot. "The spell retrieves timelessness as well as time. The light of yesterday, and tomorrow, is available to us both."

"But I-"

"You included the whole temple inside the outer circle, Harran, and you were in the temple. The spell worked on you too. How not? It retrieved my physicality and your godhead...."

Harran stared at her. Siveni caught the look, and smiled.

Harran's heart came near to melting. She might be a hoyden, but she was a winning one.

'Wow what are you-oh, godhead? Harran, my little priest, it's in your blood. This world isn't old enough for anyone to be removed by more than six degrees of blood from anyone else. Gods included. Haven't you people got far enough in mathematics to have realized that yet? I must do something about that." She reached up with her spear, and somehow, without getting any taller, or her spear getting any longer, knocked down a huge cobweb from a ceiling comer. "So you see as a god sees, for this short while. And permanently, after we do the spell again-"

"Again?" Harran said in shock, staring at his other hand.

"Of course. To open the way for the other Ilsig gods. It's only partially open now, for merely physical manifestation, as I said, and I doubt they've noticed. They're all off feasting beyond the Isles of the North again, getting plastered on Anen's latest batch, I shouldn't wonder." Siv-eni actually sniffed. "Not an honest day's work in the lot of them. But once I do the spell again, it'll open the gate wholly-and this place will be fit for gods to live in, as it never was even in the old days. Meanwhile"-she glanced around her-"meanwhile, before we do that, we have a few calls to pay. It would be abysmal tactics to give up the advantage of the ground, now we've got it...."

Harran said nothing. This entire encounter was misfiring. "We'll go down to Savankala's high-and-mighty temple," Siveni said, "and have a word with him. A temple bigger than my father's-!" She was indignant, but in a pleased way-like someone looking forward to a good fight. "And after that, we'll stop into Vashanka's place and just kill off that godchild he's got squirreled away in there. Then, af-terward-this much talked-about Bey. Two pantheons in one night save ourselves a lot of trouble later. Come on, Harran! The night's a-wasting, and we need to do the second Opening before dawn." And she swept across the barren inner precinct of the temple and smote the great brazen doors with her spear.

They promptly fell outward and down the steps with a sound that Harran reckoned would wake all Sanctuary- though he much doubted that anyone would be crazy enough to stir out of doors and see what made it. Down the stairs and down the Avenue of Temples they went, the immortal goddess and the mortal man, the goddess leading, peering about her with some interest, and the one-handed man behind, suffering more and more from terrible misgivings. No question that Siveni was all Harran had imagined, and more. It was the "more" that was bothering him. Siveni's wisdom was usually tempered by compassion. Where was that tonight? Had he done something'wrong in the spell? Certainly Siveni was an impetuous goddess, resolute, swift when she decided to act. But somehow I didn't expect this kind of action....

Harran shivered. There was something wrong with him too. He was seeing much more clearly than he should have been able to at this time of night. And he felt entirely too fit for a man who had gone digging in a graveyard, screwed himself blind, worked a sorcery, and lost a hand, all in one night. Was this more of what Siveni had mentioned as side effects of the sorcery, the uprising of his godhead in him? It was a distressing thought. Men should not be gods. That was what gods were for....

Harran glanced over at the goddess and found her aspect somewhat easier to bear than it had been before. She was looking over toward the Maze and Downwind in a way that suggested she had no trouble seeing through things. "This place is a mess," she said, turning as she went to look at Harran in reproof.

"We've had some hard times," Harran said, feeling a little defensive. "Wars, invasions..."

"We'll mend that soon enough," said Siveni. "Starting with invasions." They came to a stop in front of the great temple of Savankala. Siveni glared at it, drew herself up to her full height-which somehow managed to be both about three cubits, and about fifty-and shouted in a voice loud enough to rival the thunderstroke, "Savankala, come out!"

The echoes repeated the challenge all over the city. Siveni's brows knitted as long moments passed and there was no response. "Come forth, Savankala!" she shouted again. "Or I will tear this ill-built pile of stone down around your ears and reduce your statue to cobbles and stick my spear into an interesting place in the statue of your darling wife!"

There was a long, long silence-followed by a soft rumble of thunder that was more contemplative than threatening. "Siveni," the great voice came from the temple before them - or seemed to, "what do you want?"

"Best two falls out of three with you, Sungod," Siveni shouted triumphantly, as if she had already won the match. "And then you and yours get out of my father's city!"

"Your father. Yes. And where is your father, Siveni?"

Harran held quite still, trying to understand what was going on inside him. He hated the Rankan gods, he knew he did. But the sheer slow weight of power stirring around Savankala's voice somehow terrified him much less than the slightly ragged defiance of Siveni's. And there, too, was a problem. How am I hearing anything but perfection in a goddess's voice? Five minutes ago, ten, she was all beauty, all power, unsurpassable. Now-

"My father!" Siveni cried. "You leave him out of this! I don't need his permission to use the thunderbolt! I can handle you by myself. I can handle the whole lot of you! For Vashanka Loudmouth is without a grown avatar. You're short a wargod. Father of the Rankans. I shall ruin your temples one by one, if you don't come out and face me, and meet the defeat you've got coming to you!"

The silence might have been long, but Harran was past noticing. What has happened to my lady? In eternity she should be as she always has been-a calm power, not this cocksure violence. And anyway-why did I call her up, after all? Anger at Ranke and the Beysib? Really? Or something else?

Love? I-

He dared take that thought no further. Yet, if what she had said to him was true, then he was himself in the process of becoming a god. The thought gave him a moment's wild jubilation. If he could dissuade her from this silliness and get her to do the spell the second time, it would be forever. The very thought of eternity spent in company with this blasting beauty, this wild, daring power-

The memory of soft laughter and of Ischade's voice gently mocking a man who did not know his own heart brought Harran back to his senses, hard. Impulse, impetuousness- that had brought him to this spot, this night, just as it had brought him to the Stepsons long ago. And impulse was blind. Though his body was screaming at its transformation at being dragged into godhead, his mind was now seeing more clearly. He had described the situation to Ischade even better than he knew. Siveni the impetuous, the lightning-swift, had accepted time and its bitterness more thoroughly than any of the other gods. Here in the mortal world, where time was at its strongest, so was her bitterness and rage. She would have no wisdom, no time, no love for him here. And elsewhere-

Siveni was a maiden-goddess. Elsewhere would not work either.

"Come out!" Siveni was shouting into Savankala's silence. "Coward god, come out and fight me, or I will smite your temple to rubble, and kill every Rankan in this city! Does that mean nothing; are your worshippers so little to you?"

"I hear your challenge," he heard Savankala saying. "Do you not understand that I may not honor it? Destiny has determined that these conflicts among us will be settled by mortals, not by gods. Are you not at all afraid of destiny- of the Power of Many Names that sits in darkness above the houses of all the gods, Rankan and Ilsig and Beysib alike? Will you defy that power?"

"Yes!"

"That is sad. You as a goddess, and supposedly a wise one, should know that you cannot...."

"Wisdom! Wisdom has gotten me nowhere!"

"Yes," Savankala remarked drily, "I can see that...."

Harran was trapped in a terrible serenity, a clarity that refused to admit fear. He knew he would have to sacrifice that clarity shortly. But in the meantime Savankala and Siveni sounded exactly like any two people arguing in the Bazaar, and Harran could tell that Savankala was stalling for time, waiting for Harran to do something. The message had been clear enough. These conflicts among us will be settled by mortals....

His hand, or the loss of it, had taught him well and quickly. No hatred was worth pain-not so much as a cut finger's worth. And certainly no hatred was worth death. Not his hatred... not Siveni's.

"Then, hide in your hole, old god," Siveni said bitterly. "There's no honor in winning this way, but I can put honor aside for winning's sake. Your temple first. Then your precious people."

She raised her spear, and lightnings wreathed the spearhead.

"No," someone said behind her.

She turned in amazement, stared at him. Harran stared back as best he could, equally astonished that he had spoken and that those ferocious gray eyes didn't blast him down where he stood. What is she staring at? he thought, and suspected the answer-while at the same time refusing to think of it. The less memory of his own almost-godhood he carried away with him into either life or death, the better. "Goddess," Harran said, "You are my own good lady, but I tell you that if you move against Sanctuary's people, I'll

stop you."

Siveni swung on him. "With what?" she cried, enraged, and swung the spear at him. Harran had no idea what to do. Against the first blow he raised the maimed arm, and the lightnings went crackling away around him to strike the paving stones. But the second blow and the third came immediately, and then more, a flurry of blows that swiftly beat down Harran's feeble guard. And after them came the bolt that struck him to the street-a blow enough like death to be mistaken for it. Harran's last thought as he went down burned and blinded, was that she would have been something to see with a sword. Then thought departed from him, and his soul fled far away.

Somewhere in Sanctuary, a dog howled.

And an odd dark shape that had skulked along through the shadows behind the man and the goddess leapt shrieking out of those shadows, and full onto Siveni.

The sound of crashing in the street was what woke Harran finally. A hellish sound it was, enough to wake the dead, as he certainly reckoned himself; stones cracking, lightning frying the air, angry cries-and a hoarse voice he knew. In that moment, before he managed to open his eyes, it became perfectly plain who trailed him here from the Stepsons' barracks; what dark form had slipped away from him as he drew the circle around Siveni's temple, and had been trapped within the spell-so that it had worked on her as well.

Harran raised himself up from the stones to see the image that, ever after, would make him turn away from companions or leave crowded rooms when he thought of it.

There was the goddess in her radiant robes-but those robes had dirt on them, from falls she had taken in the street; and four hands were struggling on the haft of her spear. Even as Harran looked up, the wiry shape wrestling with Siveni wrenched the spear out of her grasp and threw it clattering down the Avenue of Temples, spraying random lightning bolts around it. Then Mriga sprang on Siveni again, all skinny arms and legs as always-but with something added: a frightening, quick grace about her movements. Purpose, Harran thought in fascination and shock. She knows what she's doing! And he smiled... seeing another aspect of the spell that he might have suspected if he were an artiste rather than merely competent. The spell infallibly retrieved what was lost... even lost wits.

The goddess and the mortal girl rolled on the ground together, and there was little difference between them. They both shone, blazing lightlessly with rage and godhead. The goddess had more experience fighting, perhaps, but Mriga had the advantage of a strength not only divine but insane. And there might be other advantages to a life's worth of insanity as well. Mriga's absorption of godhead would not be hampered by ideas about gods, or about mortals not being gods. She took what power came to her, and used it, uncaring. She was using it now; she had Siveni pinned. Their struggle brought her around to where she suddenly saw Harran looking at her. That look did strike him like lightning, though he would not have traded the pain of it for anything. Mriga saw him. And in four quick, economical gestures, she stripped Siveni's bright helm off, flung it clanging down the avenue, and then took hold of Siveni's head by the long dark hair and whacked it hard against the stones. Siveni went limp.

He never had needed to show her anything more than once....

The street fell blessedly silent. Harran sat up on the stones-it was the best he could manage at the moment; his night was catching up to him. More than just his night. For there was Mriga, limping over to him, still halt as before-but there was a kind of grace even to that, now. He wanted to hide his face. But he was still enough of a god not to.

"Harran," she said in the soft husky voice that he had never heard do anything but grunt.

Harran was still mortal enough not to be able to think of a thing to say.

"I want to stay like this," she said. "I'll have to go back with her before dawn, if the change is to take."

"But-it was only supposed to be temporary-"

"For an ordinary mortal, I suppose so. But I'm not ordinary. It will take for me." She smiled at him with a merry serenity that made Harran's heart ache; for it was very like what he had expected, dreamed of, from Siveni. "If you approve, that is...."

"Approve?!" He stared at her-at Her, rather; there was no doubt of it anymore. Moment by moment she was growing more divine, and looking at her hurt his eyes as even Siveni had only at the beginning. "What in the worlds do you need my approval for?!"

Mriga looked at him with somber pleasure. "You are my love," she said, "and my good lord."

"Good-" He would have sickened with the irony, had the terrible, growing glory of her presence not made such a response impossible. "I used you-"

"You fed me," Mriga said. "You took care of me. I came to love you. The rest didn't matter then; and it doesn't now. If I loved you as a mortal-how should I stop as a goddess?"

"You're still crazy!" Harran cried, almost in despair.

"It would probably look that way," said Mriga, "to those who didn't know the truth. You know better."

"Mriga, for pity's sake, listen to me! I took advantage of you, again and again! I used a goddess-"

She reached out, very slowly, and touched his face; then took the hand back again. "As for that business," she said, "I alone shall judge the result. I alone am qualified. If you've done evil... then you've also paid. Payment is now, is it not? Would you believe you've spent five years paying for what you were doing during those five years? Or would you put it down to a new goddess's craziness?"

"Time..." Harran whispered.

"It has an inside and an outside," Mriga said. "Outside is when you love. Inside is everything else. Don't ask me more." She looked up at the paling sky. "Help me with poor Siveni."

Between the two of them they got the goddess sitting up again. She was in a sorry state; Mriga brushed at her rather apologetically. "She hurt you," Mriga said. "If I hadn't been crazy already, I would have gone that way."

After a few moments ministration, the gray eyes opened and looked at Harran and Mriga with painful admiration for them both. One of the fierce eyes was blackened, and Siveni had a bump rising where Mriga had acquainted her with the cobbles. "The disadvantage of physicality," she said. "I don't think I care for it." She glanced at Mriga, looking very chastened. "Not even my father ever did that to me. I think we're going to be friends."

"More than that," Mriga said, serenely merry. Harran found himself wondering very briefly about some old business ... about the old Mriga's love for edged things, and her strength, and her skill with her hands... and her gray eyes. Those eyes met his, and Mriga nodded. "She'd lost some attributes into time," Mriga said. "But I held them for her. She'll get them back from me... and lend me a few others. We'll do well enough between us."

The three of them got up together, helping one another. "Harran-" Siveni said.

He looked at her tired, wounded radiance, and for the first time really saw her, without his own ideas about her getting in the way. She could not apologize; apology wasn't her way. She just stood there like some rough, winning child, a troublemaker at the end of yet another scrap. "It's all right," he said. "Go home."

She smiled. The smile was almost as lovely as Mriga's.

"We will," Mriga said. "There's a place where gods can go when they need a rest. That's where we'll be. But'one thing remains." She reached out and laid her head on the burned place where Harran's hand had been... then slowly leaned in and touched her lips to his.

Somewhere in the eternity that followed, he noticed that her left hand seemed to be missing.

When the dazzle unknotted itself from around him, they were gone. He stood alone in false dawn in the Avenue of Temples, looking down toward where a pair of twisted brass doors lay in the middle of the street. He wondered while he stood there whether some years from now there might be a small new temple in Sanctuary... raised for an addition to the Ilsig pantheon; a mad goddess, a maimed and crippled goddess, fond of knives, and possessing a peculiar crazed wisdom that began and ended in love. A goddess who right now had only two worshippers; her single priest, and a dog....

Harran stood there wondering-then started at a sudden touch. His left hand-the hand he hadn't had, and now had-a woman's hand-reached up without his willing it to touch his face.

Payment is now....

Harran bowed ever so briefly to Ils's temple: and with grudging respect, to Savankala's-and went on home.

Elsewhere in the false dawn, a soft, rough cry from the windowsill attracted the attention of a dark-clad woman in a room scattered with a mad profusion of treasures and rich stuffs. Ischade leisurely went to the window, gazed with a slow smile at the silvery raven that stood there, watching her out of eyes of gray... and silently considering both messenger and message, took it up on her arm and went to find it something to eat....