Wings of Omen tw-6

by Robert Lynn Asprin

  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.