Wings of Omen tw-6

by Robert Lynn Asprin

  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....