Blood ties-- Thieves World 09 (26 page)

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

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

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

Something would be done. He would do it.

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

"Hey, hey, what about these cord-twins here I been saving in pickle for you?

Fastened together in the funniest place, now you come look a moment-" But Harran was already gone.

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

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

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

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

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

"I am not hungry," Siveni said.

"Then do come to bed," said Mriga.

"I don't want that either."

Harran and Mriga looked at one another in mild astonishment. "That's a first." Siveni shrugged off her goatskin and threw it over a chair. "What's the use of losing my virginity," she said, "if I keep getting it back every morning?"

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

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

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

Siveni looked up, not at Mriga, but at the poor mouldering mural, where Eshi danced in her gauze, and Us was godly-splendid, and everything was youth and luxury and divine merriment. The look was deadly. "Then why," Siveni said, just as quietly, "do we share this wretched heartbond, like good trinities do, so that all day I can hear you both thinking how unhappy you are, and how sorry for me you are, and how you miss the dog, and how we're trapped here forever?" Harran sat up, too, tossing the other end of the sheet across his lap. "We're something new, I think," he said. "A mixture. Divine without being in heaven, mortal without-"

"I want to go back."

The words fell into silence.

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

"I've got to go back," she said; Mriga looked unhappily at her. "How?" she said.

"Nothing's working. You can't make so much as heat lightning these days."

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

"After what happened to Ischade..."

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

"And Stormbringer..." Harran said.

Siveni cursed. The dust on the table began to smoke slightly with the vehemence of it. Siveni noticed it and smiled, approving. "Come on, Harran," she said.

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

"We," Harran said, and looked sober all of a sudden. Both Mriga and Siveni looked at him in shock. "Surely you'd be coming with us," Mriga said.

Harran said nothing for a moment.

"Harran!"

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

"Come on!" Siveni said, sounding a touch desperate. "You were bom a clubfooted idiot, you went through a whole life being used as a slave or a pincushion, living like a beast-and what do you do that's better now? You grind knives in the Bazaar as you always did, and take a little copper for it, but where's the joy in that? Where's the life you were going to lead with him in the Fields Beyond? All the peace, the joy? You expect that in Sanctuary?" Harran and Mriga looked at each other. "There's something to be said for life," Harran said, as if doubting the words as they came out. "In heaven everything bends to suit you. Here, you bend-but you come back stronger sometimes-"

"Or you break," said Siveni.

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

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

Mriga let out a long breath. "Harran?"

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

They waited.

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

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

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

"Weeks yet," Siveni said, looking thoughtful. "It must be done before the frost sets in, or the mortar won't set. But they have the plans. They hardly need me to complete them." And she began to laugh softly, so that the table creaked. Harran and Mriga exchanged looks. "You have to have known," Siveni said. "There are passages hidden in those walls already, alterations I made in the building that don't show in the plans. The wall is as full of holes as a bubble-cheese. No one knows-not even Molin. I was most careful. He'll think himself all secure, and until I choose to put the word in some oracle's ear, he will be. But that day-let Sanctuary look to its walls."

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

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

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

Harran shuddered once.

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

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

Harran's ironic young face got lighter, too. He slid under the sheet and said,

"Well, since it is my last night on earth..."

Siveni threw her chlamys over his head and put the candles out. The old Temple of Siveni Gray-Eyes, near one end of the Avenue of Temples, was not what it once had been. Its brazen doors, struck down by its annoyed patroness's spear, had been taken away and melted down as scrap. Its old storerooms had been looted, first by its last priest, then by everyone in Sanctuary who could not resist an open door. Even the great gold-and-ivory statue of Siveni, armed and armored in splendor, had been stolen. Glass lay in bright shards on the dirty floor, fallen from the high windows; spiders wrought in every comer, and rats rustled here and there. There were fire-scorches in the comers from squatters' fires, and the bones of roast pigeons and cats. Also still there, visible by the light of their one shuttered lamp, was an old round diagram traced on the floor in something black-bitumen, to judge by the scrape marks where curious feet had kicked at it through a year's time. Curious signs and letters and numbers in old languages were scribed smudgily there, and there was a brownish mark in the middle on the white marble, as if blood had been shed.

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

Siveni sniffed, putting down the bag she had been carrying. "Late for that now," she said. "Let's be about our business; it will take a while as is." Mriga stepped up behind them and put down another bag, quietly beginning to son through its contents. "The wine was something of a problem," she said. "Siveni, you owe me two in silver."

"What?"

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

"Deadbeat."

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

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

"Plenty. The wineseller say anything?"

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

"It rose. You needn't have worried about the yeast. The worst part was grinding the wretched stuff. I think it's going to have pebbles in it from the flints." The gongs of one of the temples down the way spoke midnight, a somber word that echoed in the summer-night stillness. There was no breath of wind tonight, and the heat seemed to have gotten greater after the sun sent down, rather than less. A fat bloated moon, gibbous and a day from full, was riding high, its pallid light slanting down through the shattered windows and striking gemlights from the broken glass on the floor. Echoes tinkled down from the high ceiling as Siveni kicked the stuff aside.

Harran looked up, brushing away a piece of glass that Siveni had kicked at him.

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

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

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

They worked in silence for a few minutes, Harran laying out the bread, Mriga finishing her scrubbing, then uncorking the wine and setting out the various cups into which it would have to be poured by thirds and mixed with blood, Siveni writing with a bit of yellow chalk inside one of the areas that Mriga had cleaned off. At one point she stopped and looked critically at one graceful phrase. "I never did like that letter after I invented it," she said, "but after Us sent it out to men, it was too late to call the wretched thing back." Mriga sat back on her heels and laughed at her almost-sister. "Is there anything you didn't invent?"

"The rotgut they distill in the back of the Unicorn. That's all Anen's fault." A few minutes' more work and they stood up, finished. "Well enough," Siveni said. "Are you sure of the words?"

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

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

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

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