Blood Ties tw-9

by Robert Lynn Asprin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He looked dubious. "How much?"

  "Let's see."

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

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

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

  "Two."

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

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

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

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

  "What?"

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Cull?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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