Wings of Omen - Thieves World 06 (20 page)

But not even fear could live long, fixed by that silvery regard, that ferocious beauty. For she was beautiful, and again Harran's old imaginations fell down in the face of the truth. It was a spare, severe, unselfconscious beauty, too busy with other things to notice itself... definitely the face of the patroness of the arts and sciences. There was wildness in that face, as well as wisdom; thoughtlessness as well as handsomeness in those rich robes-for the blazing under-tunic was tucked casually and hurriedly up above the knee, and the great loose overtunic was a man's, probably Ils's, borrowed for the greater freedom of motion it allowed. The hand that held the great spear she leaned on was graceful as a lady's; but the slender arm still spoke of shattering strength. Siveni as she now appeared was not much taller than mortal womankind. But as he looked at her, and she bent those cool, terrible, considering eyes on him, Harran felt very small indeed. She pushed her high-crested helm back a bit from that coolly beautiful face and said impatiently, "Do get up, man. Finish what you're doing so we can get to business." Siveni lifted the raven that perched on her left hand, moving it to her shoulder.

He got up, still very confused. "Madam," he managed to croak, and then tried it again, rather embarrassed at making such a poor showing. "Lady, I am finished...."

"Of course you're not," she said, reaching out with that blazing spear and using its point to flick the book-roll up into her free hand. "Don't go lackwitted on me, Harran. It says right here: 'the hand of a brave and living man, the same to be offered up at the spell's end by the celebrant.'" She turned the scroll toward him, showing him the words.

Harran glanced down at the middle of the circle, where in the skeletal hand the mandrake still burned dully bright as a coal. But Siveni's voice brought his glance up again. "Not that hand, Harran!" She said, sounding annoyed now. "That one!"

And she pointed at the knife, which he had forgotten he was clutching-and at his left hand, which clutched it.

Harran went as cold all over as he had in the graveyard. "Oh my G-"

"Goddess?" she said, as Harran caught himself as usual. "Sorry. That is the price written here. If the gateway you seek to open is to be fully opened-and even as I am not fully here yet, neither would the others be-the price must be paid." She looked at him coolly for several moments, then said with less asperity and some sadness, "I would have expected my priests to read better than that, Harran.... You do read?"

He gave her no answer for a moment. He thought of Sanctuary, and the Rankans, and the Beysib, and briefly, irrationally, of Shal. Then he stepped over to the center of the circle, and the hand. The bones of it were charred. The ring of base metal was a brass-scummed silver puddle on the floor. The mandrake glowed under his glance like a coal that had been breathed on. He knelt down again and lifted his eyes briefly to the unmerciful loveliness before him; then squeezed his left hand until the blood flowed fresh, and with it pried the mandrake away from the hand's blackened bones. In the hours that intervened until Harran got up again-a few minutes later-he came belatedly to understand a great deal; to understand Shal, and many of the other Stepsons, and some of the poor and sick he'd treated while still in the temple. There was no describing the pain of a maiming. It was a thing as without outward color as the burning of the mandrake; and even worse, more blinding, was the horror that came after. When Harran stood again, he had no left hand anymore. The stump's scorching pain throbbed and died away; Siveni's doing, probably. But the horror, he knew, would never go away. It would be fed anew, every day, by those who refused to look at the place where a hand had once been. Harran abruptly understood that payment is not later, is never later, but is always now. It would be now all his life.

He got to his feet and found Siveni, as she had said, even more there than she had been before. He wasn't sure this was a good thing. None of this was working out as it should have. And there were other things peculiar as well. Where was the light coming from that filled the temple suddenly? Not from Siveni; she was striding around the place with the dissatisfied air of a housewife who comes home and has to deal with her husband's housekeeping-poking her spear into comers, frowning at the broken glass. "All this will be put to rights soon enough," she said. "After business. Harran, what are you scowling at?"

"Lady, the light-"

"Think, man," she said, not unkindly, as she stepped over to the circle, examining it, gently kicking a bit of her statue's rubble aside with one sandaled foot. "The spell retrieves timelessness as well as time. The light of yesterday, and tomorrow, is available to us both."

"But I-"

"You included the whole temple inside the outer circle, Harran, and you were in the temple. The spell worked on you too. How not? It retrieved my physicality and your godhead...."

Harran stared at her. Siveni caught the look, and smiled. Harran's heart came near to melting. She might be a hoyden, but she was a winning one.

'Wow what are you-oh, godhead? Harran, my little priest, it's in your blood. This world isn't old enough for anyone to be removed by more than six degrees of blood from anyone else. Gods included. Haven't you people got far enough in mathematics to have realized that yet? I must do something about that." She reached up with her spear, and somehow, without getting any taller, or her spear getting any longer, knocked down a huge cobweb from a ceiling comer. "So you see as a god sees, for this short while. And permanently, after we do the spell again-"

"Again?" Harran said in shock, staring at his other hand.

"Of course. To open the way for the other Ilsig gods. It's only partially open now, for merely physical manifestation, as I said, and I doubt they've noticed. They're all off feasting beyond the Isles of the North again, getting plastered on Anen's latest batch, I shouldn't wonder." Siv-eni actually sniffed. "Not an honest day's work in the lot of them. But once I do the spell again, it'll open the gate wholly-and this place will be fit for gods to live in, as it never was even in the old days. Meanwhile"-she glanced around her-"meanwhile, before we do that, we have a few calls to pay. It would be abysmal tactics to give up the advantage of the ground, now we've got it...."

Harran said nothing. This entire encounter was misfiring. "We'll go down to Savankala's high-and-mighty temple," Siveni said, "and have a word with him. A temple bigger than my father's-!" She was indignant, but in a pleased way-like someone looking forward to a good fight. "And after that, we'll stop into Vashanka's place and just kill off that godchild he's got squirreled away in there. Then, af-terward-this much talked-about Bey. Two pantheons in one night save ourselves a lot of trouble later. Come on, Harran! The night's a-wasting, and we need to do the second Opening before dawn." And she swept across the barren inner precinct of the temple and smote the great brazen doors with her spear.

They promptly fell outward and down the steps with a sound that Harran reckoned would wake all Sanctuary-though he much doubted that anyone would be crazy enough to stir out of doors and see what made it. Down the stairs and down the Avenue of Temples they went, the immortal goddess and the mortal man, the goddess leading, peering about her with some interest, and the one-handed man behind, suffering more and more from terrible misgivings. No question that Siveni was all Harran had imagined, and more. It was the "more" that was bothering him. Siveni's wisdom was usually tempered by compassion. Where was that tonight? Had he done something'wrong in the spell? Certainly Siveni was an impetuous goddess, resolute, swift when she decided to act. But somehow I didn't expect this kind of action....

Harran shivered. There was something wrong with him too. He was seeing much more clearly than he should have been able to at this time of night. And he felt entirely too fit for a man who had gone digging in a graveyard, screwed himself blind, worked a sorcery, and lost a hand, all in one night. Was this more of what Siveni had mentioned as side effects of the sorcery, the uprising of his godhead in him? It was a distressing thought. Men should not be gods. That was what gods were for....

Harran glanced over at the goddess and found her aspect somewhat easier to bear than it had been before. She was looking over toward the Maze and Downwind in a way that suggested she had no trouble seeing through things. "This place is a mess," she said, turning as she went to look at Harran in reproof.

"We've had some hard times," Harran said, feeling a little defensive. "Wars, invasions..."

"We'll mend that soon enough," said Siveni. "Starting with invasions." They came to a stop in front of the great temple of Savankala. Siveni glared at it, drew herself up to her full height-which somehow managed to be both about three cubits, and about fifty-and shouted in a voice loud enough to rival the thunderstroke, "Savankala, come out!"

The echoes repeated the challenge all over the city. Siveni's brows knitted as long moments passed and there was no response. "Come forth, Savankala!" she shouted again. "Or I will tear this ill-built pile of stone down around your ears and reduce your statue to cobbles and stick my spear into an interesting place in the statue of your darling wife!"

There was a long, long silence-followed by a soft rumble of thunder that was more contemplative than threatening. "Siveni," the great voice came from the temple before them-< or seemed to, "what do you want?"

"Best two falls out of three with you, Sungod," Siveni shouted triumphantly, as if she had already won the match. "And then you and yours get out of my father's city!"

"Your father. Yes. And where is your father, Siveni?" Harran held quite still, trying to understand what was going on inside him. He hated the Rankan gods, he knew he did. But the sheer slow weight of power stirring around Savankala's voice somehow terrified him much less than the slightly ragged defiance of Siveni's. And there, too, was a problem. How am I hearing anything but perfection in a goddess's voice? Five minutes ago, ten, she was all beauty, all power, unsurpassable. Now"My father!" Siveni cried. "You leave him out of this! I don't need his permission to use the thunderbolt! I can handle you by myself. I can handle the whole lot of you! For Vashanka Loudmouth is without a grown avatar. You're short a wargod. Father of the Rankans. I shall ruin your temples one by one, if you don't come out and face me, and meet the defeat you've got coming to you!" The silence might have been long, but Harran was past noticing. What has happened to my lady? In eternity she should be as she always has been-a calm power, not this cocksure violence. And anyway-why did I call her up, after all?

Anger at Ranke and the Beysib? Really? Or something else?

Love? IHe dared take that thought no further. Yet, if what she had said to him was true, then he was himself in the process of becoming a god. The thought gave him a moment's wild jubilation. If he could dissuade her from this silliness and get her to do the spell the second time, it would be forever. The very thought of eternity spent in company with this blasting beauty, this wild, daring powerThe memory of soft laughter and of Ischade's voice gently mocking a man who did not know his own heart brought Harran back to his senses, hard. Impulse, impetuousness-that had brought him to this spot, this night, just as it had brought him to the Stepsons long ago. And impulse was blind. Though his body was screaming at its transformation at being dragged into godhead, his mind was now seeing more clearly. He had described the situation to Ischade even better than he knew. Siveni the impetuous, the lightning-swift, had accepted time and its bitterness more thoroughly than any of the other gods. Here in the mortal world, where time was at its strongest, so was her bitterness and rage. She would have no wisdom, no time, no love for him here. And elsewhereSiveni was a maiden-goddess. Elsewhere would not work either.

"Come out!" Siveni was shouting into Savankala's silence. "Coward god, come out and fight me, or I will smite your temple to rubble, and kill every Rankan in this city! Does that mean nothing; are your worshippers so little to you?"

"I hear your challenge," he heard Savankala saying. "Do you not understand that I may not honor it? Destiny has determined that these conflicts among us will be settled by mortals, not by gods. Are you not at all afraid of destiny-of the Power of Many Names that sits in darkness above the houses of all the gods, Rankan and Ilsig and Beysib alike? Will you defy that power?"

"Yes!"

"That is sad. You as a goddess, and supposedly a wise one, should know that you cannot...."

"Wisdom! Wisdom has gotten me nowhere!"

"Yes," Savankala remarked drily, "I can see that...." Harran was trapped in a terrible serenity, a clarity that refused to admit fear. He knew he would have to sacrifice that clarity shortly. But in the meantime Savankala and Siveni sounded exactly like any two people arguing in the Bazaar, and Harran could tell that Savankala was stalling for time, waiting for Harran to do something. The message had been clear enough. These conflicts among us will be settled by mortals....

His hand, or the loss of it, had taught him well and quickly. No hatred was worth pain-not so much as a cut finger's worth. And certainly no hatred was worth death. Not his hatred... not Siveni's.

"Then, hide in your hole, old god," Siveni said bitterly. "There's no honor in winning this way, but I can put honor aside for winning's sake. Your temple first. Then your precious people."

She raised her spear, and lightnings wreathed the spearhead.

"No," someone said behind her.

She turned in amazement, stared at him. Harran stared back as best he could, equally astonished that he had spoken and that those ferocious gray eyes didn't blast him down where he stood. What is she staring at? he thought, and suspected the answer-while at the same time refusing to think of it. The less memory of his own almost-godhood he carried away with him into either life or death, the better. "Goddess," Harran said, "You are my own good lady, but I tell you that if you move against Sanctuary's people, I'll