The Dead of Winter- - Thieves World 07 (28 page)

Recently the neighborhood had seen the advent of one Dwelling that wasn't always bright. It tended to be either a high, chaste, white-columned temple of the kind aesthetically promising mortals built, or a low thatched hut of stone crouching defiantly in a rammed dirt yard. But either way, it always had a positively mortal look about it that passing deities variously found tasteless, deliciously primitive, or avant-garde. The dwelling's changes sometimes came several to the minute, then several to the second; and after such spasms lightningbolts tended to spray out the windows or doors, and thumps and shouting could be heard from inside. The neighbors soon discovered that the division of this house against itself was symptomatic. The goddess(es) living there were in the middle of a personality crisis.

"Do you ever think about anything but clothes?!"

"At least I do think about them now and then. You're a goddess, you can't go out in those-those rags!"

"I beg your pardon! This shift is just well broken in. It's comfortable. And it covers me ... instead of leaving half of me hanging out, like that old tunic of Ils's that you never take off. Or that raggy goatskin cape with the ugly face on it."

"I'll have you know that when my Father shakes 'that raggy goatskin' over the armies of men, they scatter in terror-"

"The way it smells, no wonder. And that's our Father. Oh, do put the vase down, Siveni! I'll just make another. Besides, when has Ils scattered an army lately?

Better give him that thing back: He could probably use it just now."

"Why, you-"

Lightnings whipped the temple's marble, scarring it black. Screeching, a silver raven napped out from between a pair of columns and perched complaining in the topmost branches of a golden-appled tree a safe distance away. The lightning made a lot of noise as it lashed about, but even a casual observer would have noticed that it did little harm. Shortly it sizzled away to nothing, and the stagy thunder that had accompanied it faded to echoes and whispers, and died. The temple convulsed, squatted down, and got brown and gray, a beast of fieldstone and thatch. Then it went away altogether.

Two women were left standing there on the plain, which still nickered uncertainly between radiance and dirt. One of them stood divinely tall in shimmering robes, crested and helmed, holding a spear around which the restrained lightnings sulkily strained and hissed-a form coolly fair and bright, all godhead and maidenhead, seemingly unassailable. Just out of arms' reach of her stood someone not so tall, hardly so fair, dressed in grime and worn plain cloth with patches, crowned with nothing but much dark curly hair, somewhat snarled, and armed only with a kitchen knife. They stared at each other for a moment, Siveni and Mriga, warrior-queen of wisdom and idiot wench. It was the idiot who had the thoughtful, regretful look, and the Lady of Battles who had the black eye.

"It's got to stop," Mriga said, dropping the knife in the shining dust and turning away from her otherself. "We tear each other up for nothing. Our town is going to pieces, and our priest is all alone in the middle of it, and we don't dare try to help him until our own business is handled ..."

"You don't dare," Siveni said scornfully. But she didn't move. Mriga sighed. While she had been insane just before she became a goddess, her madness had not involved multiple personalities-so that when she suddenly discovered that she was one with Siveni Gray-Eyes, there was trouble. Siveni was Ils's daughter, mistress of both war and the arts and sciences, the Ilsig gods'

two-edged blade Herself: both Queen of cool wisdom, and hellion God-daughter who could take any god in the Ilsig pantheon, save her father, for best two falls out of three. Siveni had not taken kindly to losing parts of herself into time, or to seeing the Rankan pantheon raised to preeminence in Sanctuary, or to coming off a poor second in a street brawl with a mortal. But all of those had happened; and the first, though now mending in timelessness, irked her most. When gods become snared in time and its usages-as had many of Sanctuary's gods their attributes tend to leach across the barrier, into time, and embed themselves in the most compatible mortal personality. In Siveni's case, that had been Mriga. Even as a starving idiot-beggar she had loved the edge on good steel. Sharpening swords and spears was the work to which Harran had most often put her, after he found her in the Bazaar, dully whetting a broken bit of metal on a rock. Clubfooted and feeble-willed as she was, she had somehow "managed" to be found by the last of Siveni's priests in Sanctuary, "managed" to be taken in by him as the poor and mad had always been taken into her temple before. And when Harran went out one night to work the spell that would set Siveni free of time and bring her back into the world, to the ruin of the Rankan gods, Mriga was drawn after him like steel to the magnet.

The spell he had used would infallibly bring back the lost. It did, not only bringing back Siveni to her temple, but also retrieving Harran's lost divinity and Mriga's lost wits. Harran, blindly in love with his goddess in her whole and balanced form, had been shocked to find himself dealing not with the gracious maiden mistress of the arts of peace, but with a cold fierce power made testy and irrational by the loss of vital attributes. Siveni had been quite willing to pull all Sanctuary down around all the gods' ears if the deities of Ranke would not meet her right in battle. Harran tried to stop her-for vile sink though it was, Sanctuary was his home-and Siveni nearly killed him out of pique. Mriga, though, had stopped her. She had recovered the conscious godhead every mortal temporarily surrenders at birth, and was therefore in full control of the attributes of wise compassion and cool judgment that Siveni had lost into time. She and her otherself fought, and after Mriga won the fight, both saw swiftly that they were one, though crippled and divided. They needed union, and timeless-ness in which to achieve it. Neither was available in the world of mortals. With that knowledge they had turned, as one, to Harran. They took their leave of him, healing the hand maiming that Siveni had inflicted on him, and then departed for those fields mortals do not know. Of course they planned to come back to him-or for him-as soon as they were consolidated. But even in timelessness, union was taking longer than either had expected. Siveni was arrogant in her recovered wisdom, angry about having lost it, and bitter that it had found nowhere better to lodge than an ignorant cinder-sitting house-slut. Mriga was annoyed at Siveni's snobbery, bored with her constant anecdotes about her divine lineage-she told the same ones again and again-and most of all tired of fighting. Unfortunately she too was Siveni: when challenged she had to fight. And being mortal and formerly mad, she knew something Siveni had never learned: how to fight dirty. Mriga always won, and that made things worse.

"If you just wouldn't-"

"Oh stop," Mriga said, waving her hand and sitting down on the crude bench that appeared behind her. In front of her appeared a rough table loaded down with meat and bread and watered wine of the kind Harran used to smuggle for them from the Stepsons' store. Now that she was a goddess, and not mad, Mriga could have had better; but old habits were hard to break, and the sour wine reminded her of home. "Want some?"

"Goddesses," Siveni said, looking askance at the table, "don't eat mortal food. They eat only-"

"'-the gods' food and drink only foaming nectar.' Yes, that's what I hear. So then how am I sitting here eating butcher's beef and drinking wine? Who could be here but us goddesses? Have some of this nice chine."

"No."

Mriga poured out a libation to Father Ils, then applied herself to a rack of back ribs. "The world of mortal men," she said presently, while wiping grease off one cheek, "mirrors ours, have you noticed? Or maybe ours mirrors theirs. Either way, have you noticed how preoccupied both of them are just now with cat fighting? The Beysa. Kama. Roxane. Ischade. If all that stopped-would ours stop too? Or if we stopped-"

"As if anything mortals do could matter to the gods," Siveni said, annoyed. She thumped the ground with her spear and an elegant marble bench appeared. She seated herself on it; a moment later a small altar appeared, on which the thigh bones of fat steers, wrapped attractively in fat and with wine poured over, were being burned in a brazier. She inhaled the savor and pointedly touched none of the meat.

"What a waste," Mriga said. "... That's just what Harran said, though. The gods became convinced that time could bind them-and so it did. They became convinced that other gods could drive them out-and so it happened. If we could convince men that the pantheons were willing to get along together, and that they should stop killing each other in gods' names ... then maybe the fighting would stop up here. Mirrors...."

Mriga was becoming better at omniscience-another attribute Siveni had lost to her-and so heard Siveni thinking that idiocy was one of those conditions that transcended even immortality. Mriga sighed. It was harder than she'd thought, this becoming one. Siveni didn't really want to share her attributes ... and Mriga didn't really want to give them up. Hopeless.... Then she caught herself staring at the rib bone in her hand, and by way of it became aware of an emptiness in the universe. "I miss my dog," Mriga said. Siveni shrugged coolly. Most of her affections and alliances lay with the winged tribes, birds of prey or oracular ravens. But as the silence stretched out, she looked over at Mriga, and her face softened a bit.

"Goddess!-"

Mriga looked up at Siveni in surprise. The voice caught at both their hearts as if hooks had set deep there. Startled, the two of them looked around them and saw no one; then looked out of timelessness into time....

... and saw Harran go down under the hooves of Stepsons' horses, with half his head missing.

"My master," Mriga said, stricken. "My priest, my love-"

"Our priest," Siveni said, and sounded as if she could have said something else, but would not. She got up so quickly that the marble bench fell one way and the elegant brazier the other. Her spear leapt into her hand, sizzling. "I'll-"

"We'll," Mriga said, on her feet now. It was odd how eyes so icy with anger could still manage tears that flowed. "Come on." Thunder cracked about them like sky ripping open. The neighbors all around turned in their direction and stared. Uncaring, two goddesses, or one, shot earthward from the bright floor of heaven, which, behind them, hesitated, then furtively turned to dirt.

The fire by the Maze-side street barricade had died down, and the street was empty except for the slain and the scavengers. Now and then someone passed by-a Stepson on one of their fierce horses, or a random member of some Nisi death squad, or one of Jubal's people just slipped out of the blue on business. No one noticed the grimy street idiot, sitting blank-eyed beside a trampled corpse; much less the sooty raven perched on a charred wagon and eyeing the same corpse, and the younger, arrow-shot one it lay on, with a cold and interested eye. Black birds were no unusual sight in Sanctuary these days.

"His soul's gone," Mriga whispered to the bird. "Long gone, and the poor body's cold. How? We came straight away-"

"Time here and there run differently," said the raven, voice hoarse and soft.

"We might have done something while the tie between soul and body was still stretching thin. But it's too late now-"

"No," Mriga said.

"I should have leveled this place the last time I was here. This would never have happened!"

"Siveni, be still." Mriga sat by Harran's crushed remains, one hand stretched out to the awful ruin of his head; a purposeful gesture, for without actually touching the cold stiff flesh, she found herself unable to believe in death. That was one of the problems with being a god. Immortal, they often found it hard to take death seriously. But Mriga was taking it very seriously indeed. She strained for omniscience; it obliged her a little. "We could get him back," she said. "There are ways...."

"And put him where? Back in this?" In her raven form, Siveni flapped down to the cold stiff mess of shattered bones and pulped muscle, and poked it scornfully with her beak. It didn't even bleed. "And if not here, where?"

"Another body? ..."

"Whose?"

Mriga's omniscience declined an answer. This didn't matter: she was getting an idea of her own ... one that scared her, but might work. "Let's not worry about it right now," she said. "We'll think of something."

"And even if we do ... who's to say his soul's survived what happened to him?

Mortal souls are fragile. Sometimes death shatters them completely. Or for a long time ... long enough that by the time they've put themselves back together, it's no good putting them in a body; they've forgotten how to stay in one."

"He was a god for a little while," Mriga said. "That should count for something. And I don't think Harran was that fragile. Come on, Siveni, we have to try!"

"I'd sooner just burn the city down," the raven said, hopping and flapping up onto Mriga's shoulder as she stood up.

"A bit late for that, I fear." Mriga looked around her at the smoldering barricade, the scorched and soot-blackened faces of the surrounding buildings.

"The cats have been busy setting one another's tails on fire, and not much caring what else catches and goes up as they run around screeching."

"Cats ..." Siveni said, sounding thoughtful.

"Yes: my thought exactly. We'll deal with one or two of them before we're done. But first things first. Where's my puppy?"

Tyr woke up with the upset feeling that usually meant she'd had a dream of the bad old days before the Presence came. But by the time she was fully awake, she had already realized that this time the feeling had nothing to do with any dream. For a few minutes that part of Sanctuary slammed its windows shut against the bitter howling that emanated from the garbage heap behind the Vulgar Unicorn. Tyr's throat was sore, though, with smoke and her long crying the day before, so that she coughed and retched and had to stop. She lay there panting, deep in griefs apathy, not knowing it, not caring. The garbage all around her smelled wonderful, and she had no appetite for it. Inside the Unicorn there was the sound of people moving around, and from upstairs a cat wailed an enraged challenge, and Tyr couldn't even summon up the energy to get up and run away. She made a sound half whimper, half moan, and behind it a feeling that a human looking through her mind would instantly have recognized as a hopeless prayer. Oh, whatever there is that listens, please, please, make it didn't happen!....