She watched them haul the stone in question into place and wrap the crane's ropes around it. While they were grunting and straining she let herself go unfocused for a moment, and listened. Knife-grinding, she "heard"; and someone screaming, while sure hands worked over them and other hands held them down; and more faintly than the first two impressions, a clear sense came of being rubbed in the good place behind the ears. Siveni smiled to herself. She had always been a single goddess, being too busy inventing things to bother splitting off alternate personae, dyads and trinities and whatever. Now, after Harran's spell, and their trek past hell's gate, she was not only a trinity, but one with four members. Interesting, it was. And very unsettling.
And was it worth it... ?
A shadow fell over her as she leaned on the last-laid stone. "Molin," she said.
"How do you do that, mistress? Know how someone's coming behind you, I mean."
She stiffened a bit. "In sun like this," she said, "it would take a blind woman not to see your shadow's shape. Has that new stone come in yet? We'll need the softer stuff for the arrowshot wall."
"It's in. Come take a cup of something cold with me."
She stepped down from the stone, wondering about the odd tone in his voice, schooling herself to show no reaction. Carelessly she walked in front of him to the tent he'd had set up at the site, so that he could watch the workers, and her, in comfort. She flung one flap on its door aside. Silk, she thought. And not because it makes the best tents, either.
There were only two chairs, too close together for her taste. She took the better of the two and sat waiting for Molin to pour for her. Massive and splendid, he sat down in the other chair and looked at her for a long moment before reaching out to the decanter and glasses on its table between the chairs. Alarm, his mind sang to Siveni. Curiosity growing. Thought winding around itself, choking like ivy growing up sheer cold stone....
"Why do you live in that little hole in the Maze?" Molin said, pouring, and passing her the cup. "You could certainly afford better, with what I'm paying you."
She took the cup and looked at him, unsmiling, wishing she had her spear with the lightnings sizzling around it; he would not be daring to ask her questions. "It'd be too much bother to move in the middle of a work like this," she said.
"Ah, yes. Another question I wish you would answer, with your obvious expertise. What other jobs have you done?"
Better ones than you're doing now, Siveni thought as she lifted the cup and smelled, very deep in the bouquet of the wine, an herb she recognized. She had invented it; and this was one use for it that she had never approved. "Stibium," she said, answering his question and naming the drug, both at once. "Torchholder, for shame. The preparation has to be started weeks in advance if you intend to have someone drink it and then spill out their life's secrets to you. Though perhaps you just mean my next flux to be painless. A kind thought. But I manage that for myself. And I'm pained that you don't trust me."
"You live with a common barber and a woman who was an idiot once," said Molin. "She's whole now. How did that happen?"
"Good company?" Siveni said. Oh, for my lightnings; oh, for one good crack of thunder out of a clear sky, to back this impertinent creature down! "I'm no sorceress, if that's what you're thinking. Even if I were, what good would it do me these days? Most magicians are lucky if they can turn milk into cheese now. Your problem," she said, "is that I seem to have come out of nowhere, and you have no hold over me ... and at the same time, no choice but to trust me; for I've saved your wall from the rotten ground it stands on four times now, and will keep doing so until it's whole."
He gazed at her as levelly as he could, and made a point of drinking from his own cup. "You've taken arthicum, I imagine," she said. "Mind that you don't eat anything made with sheep's milk for the next day or so; the results would be unfortunate. At least, inconvenient, for a man who has to spend more than an hour without running off to ease himself."
"Who are you?" he said, very conversationally.
"I am a builder," Siveni said. "And the daughter of a builder. If it pleases me to do a masterwork while living in a slum, that's my business. Think, if you like, that I'm making this city safe for my family to live in in future years. Have you had anything to complain of about my work so far?"
"Nothing," said Molin. He sounded as if he would rather have had complaints.
"And have you not been checking the actual building against the plans each day and each night? And have you or your spies found one stone out of place, or anything not just as it should be?"
Molin Torchholder stared at her.
"Then let me do my work and take my wage in peace." She looked at him merrily. "Which reminds me," she said; "there are stones out there waiting for our attention at the laying. Come on." And Siveni drank off the cup and set it down appreciatively.
"It does add something to the flavor," she said, and got up. "Come, sir."
She went out into the bright hot day, Molin following. Alarm was still singing in his mind; and now in hers, too.
He suspects something... even though there's nothing to suspect. He'll do Harran and Mriga some harm if he must, to find out the truth. Wretched mortal! Why can't he leave off meddling?
I must think of something to do.
I never had these problems when I was single!
"Yai, Gray-Eyes! You ready?"
"Coming, Kivan," she called, and headed down along the stone course, feeling the Torchholder's eyes in her back, like spears without lightning.
"I'm sorry I couldn't have let you sleep through that," Harran said to the man he had been cutting. "But with the wound so deep in the hand, if you were asleep and I hit a nerve, we would never have known it, and the hand might have been useless an hour later, though the poison was out."
The joiner-Harran had forgotten his name, as he always forgot his patients' names-groaned a little and eased himself up to sit, his wife helping him. Harran turned away for a moment, busying himself with cleaning his tools and not noticing his surroundings. He had been a priest, used to clean, open temples, fresh air, scrubbed tables, light. Cutting someone on a kitchen table that until five minutes ago had had chicken dung on it was not unusual-not anymore-but he would never like it.
The few chickens in the mean little hut walked about the floor, scratching and singing, oblivious to the blood and pain of the last half hour. The joiner had driven a nail through his hand while working, and had yanked the thing out and thrown it away, going on with what he had been doing. Then the wound had festered, and there were signs of the beginning of lockjaw when Harran had finally been called in. He had had to run like a madman down to the flats by the river for the plant to make the lockjaw potion; luckily, even now, the small medicinal magics seemed to work-and then, once that was in the joiner, and the poor man was flushed and sweating from its effects, then came the cutting. He had never been terribly fond of that part of any surgery, but the suppurating wound had to be drained. It was drained, though it nearly turned his stomach, which was saying something.
Now the hand was bound with clean linen, and Harran's tools were clean and in their satchel. The man's head was lolling to one side, an aftereffect of the lockjaw remedy. Timidly, his wife came to Harran and offered him a handful of coppers. She tried to be nonchalant about it, but it was too plain from her eyes that they were all she and her man had. Harran considered, took one, for form's sake, and then professed great interest in one of the chickens, a rather scrawny red hen that looked good for soup, if nothing else. "How about her, eh?" he said. "Looks like there's nice pickings on her."
The joiner's wife saw instantly what Harran was trying to do, and began protesting. But the protests were feeble, and after a while Harran walked out of the hut with a copper, and a copper-colored chicken, and blessings raining on his back. He walked as fast as he could out of that particular comer of the Maze. It was always the blessings that embarrassed him the most.
The only good thing about them, H
arran thought as he made his way toward the Bazaar, was that they made it unnecessary for him to cry his wares like a streethawker. In the old days, as Siveni's priest, people had known where to come for healing, and had done so without any fuss. Even in the Stepsons' barracks, they had known. It had galled him, after the return from hell, to have to go hunting the sick and injured like some grave robber in a hurry....
Graves.... It was a thought. There was an old friend he had not seen since shortly after he got back from hell. He began a detour, and stopped in a wine shop for a pot of cheap red, then headed across town toward the chamel house.
The day was leaning toward noon; the sun bumed down and the streets stank under it. What did I ever see in this foul place? he wondered as he went. The answer was plain enough; Siveni's priesthood, which had been all the life he wanted. But then the priesthood was banished as Molin Torchholder went systematically about making the smaller Ilsig gods unwelcome. Then he had started making the best of things, working with the Stepsons, and with their poor replacements, until the real ones came down on the stand-ins' barracks and slaughtered them wholesale.
And Harran with them.
Alive again now, in a new body, he had rather hoped that the memory of being dead would go away. Instead it got stronger. Images of hell laid themselves pale and chill over daylight Sanctuary-the cold-smoking river, the silences broken only by the abstracted moaning of the sleepwalking damned. More remotely, through the bond he shared with Siveni and Mriga, and even with Tyr, he saw things he had never seen himself. The great black pile of the palace of hell's rulers; hell's gate burst inward by a spear that sizzled with lightnings; Ischade the terrible, coolly leading them down the path into darkness; Tyr flying in splendid rage at the throat of a monster ten times her size. And one image, brief but clear, of the cold black marble floor of that dark palace seen as if by one who groveled upon it... while just out of eyeshot, Siveni's bright helm rolled on the floor where it had slipped off her as she bowed her proud power down, begging for Harran's life.
For him... all that done for him. He could never get used to it. And no matter how many times Mriga and Siveni protested that it was nothing, that they would do it again, he could not believe them. Oh, they believed it when they said it. But their faces from day to day, as Siveni came home looking drawn and grim from the job she had made for herself, as Mriga looked at her goddess-sister with pity, and at Harran with helpless, slightly sorrowful love-their faces betrayed them. They were exiled from the heaven where they belonged, and condemned to this wretched hole of a town, for his sake.
There must be something I could do, he thought.
The breath went out of him in annoyance as he sighted the enamel house not far away. He had been something of a sorcerer once; most of the priests of Siveni had been, since there was as much use for magic in the healing and building arts as anywhere else. But since Stonnbringer arrived, all other gods' powers were diminished-that was half his problem-and after the globes were destroyed, spells tended to fall to pieces or produce unlikely results.
Just ahead of him, a small ragged man crouched in an alleyway, wearing a furtive look. He glanced up at Harran, looked very cautiously around him, and whispered, "Dust? You want some dust, mister?"
Harran stopped and glared at the dustmonger, who shifted uneasily under the stare. "I don't want anything of Storm-bringer's," he said. "As if that stuff does anything ... which it doesn't." And he brushed past and made for the chamel house.
The amazing smell of the place briefly drove everything, even his annoyance at the dustmonger, out of his head. Farmers came from all over to get at its muckheap, and barbers and surgeons came here for corpses to practice on. Harran had other reasons. He choked his way through the long low building and prayed for his nose to turn itself off quickly.
Close to the end of the building, by the big pickling vats where innards were thrown until they could be buried, he found Grian. Grian had worked with Siveni's priests in the old days, supplying corpses for their anatomy classes, and he knew the last of Siveni's priests in Sanctuary rather better than Harran wanted to admit. He looked Harran up and down, noted the winepot under one arm and the chicken under the other, and a look of dull delight came into his eye. He tossed the paunching knife he was using to the slab where his present project lay, and said, "Lad, where you been this month and more? Thought you'd died. Again."
Harran had to laugh. "Not sure I could."
Grian moved his big red-headed bulk over to a bench where jars with secondhand stomachs and intestines were waiting for the sausagemakers. He pushed the jars off to the side, and Harran sat down next to him and offered him the winepot. The chicken, released, fell to scratching with great interest in the straw on the floor.
They spent a little while just drinking in companionable silence. Finally: "Home life keeping you busy?" Grian said.
"Not home so much. Work. There are too many sick people in this town, and only one of me." He took another drink. "Same as usual. You?"
"Business, business." Grian waved around him, where ten other men and women were handling the day's supply of dead bodies. "Had to hire on more help for the summer. Putting in a new muckpit, too, 'n' a new ossuary. Old one's full up. Muckpit kept overflowing. Neighbors complained." Grian laughed, a rough cheerful sound, though Harran noticed that his friend didn't breathe too deeply in the process. "They piffles, they're ruffling about trying to get the better of things again. No good. They kill somebody now and the noble-folk, the Imperials, everybody 'n' his brother comes down on 'em like bricks. Half the people in here are piffles this morning. Arrowshot, knifed, you name it. People in the city gettin' tired of them. About time, I say."
Harran agreed, passed the winepot back. Grian took a long one. "This new body," he said, elbowing Harran genially in the ribs, "working OK? Eh? Be interesting to get inside it one day, see what makes it tick."
Harran smiled again. Grian's humor never strayed far from his work. "I wonder myself, sometimes."
"Don't hold with such things myself," Grian said in cheerful disapproval. "Magic, eh, who needs it? Hear it's gone sour, and good riddance to it. So many magicians in this town, man can't spit without hittin' one. Unnatural. City should have done something long time ago. But now they don't have to, eh? They got other problems." Grian swigged at the pot again. "They puttin' less in these than they used to. Your gray-eyed lady-hear she and Molin are getting friendly. Work crew brought down some more heart-seizes from the Wall today, saw her sitting there in his fine tent, drinking his wine."
Harran's heart turned over in him. Not jealousy-of course not-but concern. Through the bond among them she could feel, too often, a clear cool regard turned on Molin Torchholder, a sense of vast amusement, vast satisfaction. And Siveni held a grudge better than anyone else alive. "Eh," Grian said, nudging him again. "You be careful, huh? Life's hard enough."
"Grian," Harran said, surprising himself-perhaps it was the wine-"have you ever been in a situation where you got everything you wanted, everything-and then you found out it's no good?"
Grian looked in mild perplexity at Harran and scratched his head. "Been so long since I got anything I wanted," he said softly, "I couldn't say, I'm sure. You got trouble at home?"
"Sort of," said Harran, and held himself quiet by main force for several minutes, letting Grian drink. He had started this whole thing. The thought of bringing an Ilsig goddess back into the world to set things to rights, that had been his idea. And the later, crazier idea of serving that goddess personally the stuff of fantasies-had been his idea, too. His idea it had been to bring a little knife-whetting idiot-stray home from the Bazaar as servant and casual bedwarmer. Now the idiot was sane, and not very happy; and the goddess was here, and mortal, and even less happy; and his dog was in hell, and though she was fairly happy, she missed him-and he missed her fiercely. And Harran himself was not completely mortal any more, and was also the cause of all of them having the promise of heaven snatched out from under their nos
es. 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?"
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