Blood Ties tw-9

by Robert Lynn Asprin

  Siveni looked up, not at Mriga, but at the poor mouldering mural, where Eshi danced in her gauze, and Us was godly-splendid, and everything was youth and luxury and divine merriment. The look was deadly. "Then why," Siveni said, just as quietly, "do we share this wretched heartbond, like good trinities do, so that all day I can hear you both thinking how unhappy you are, and how sorry for me you are, and how you miss the dog, and how we're trapped here forever?"

  Harran sat up, too, tossing the other end of the sheet across his lap. "We're something new, I think," he said. "A mixture. Divine without being in heaven, mortal without-"

  "I want to go back."

  The words fell into silence.

  "After this job," she said. "Harran, I'm sony. I'm not one of those dying-and rebom gods who makes the corn come up, and shuttles back and forth between being mortal and divine; I'm just not! It's not working for me! I've been fighting it, but the truth is that I was made for a place where my thought becomes fact in a second, where I shine, where I'm worth praying to. I was made to have power. And now I don't have it, and you're all suffering for my lack." She sat down against the table. It shifted under her weight, and the broken bit of dish propping the short leg crunched and broke with a sound that made them all start.

  "I've got to go back," she said; Mriga looked unhappily at her. "How?" she said. "Nothing's working. You can't make so much as heat lightning these days."

  "No," Siveni said. "But have we tried anything really large?"

  "After what happened to Ischade..."

  Siveni shrugged, a cold gesture. "She has her own problems. They don't necessarily apply to us."

  "And Stormbringer..." Harran said.

  Siveni cursed. The dust on the table began to smoke slightly with the vehemence of it. Siveni noticed it and smiled, approving. "Come on, Harran," she said. "The situation was no different when you called me out of heaven, and Savankala and the wretched Rankene gods were running things. You brought me out in their despite. This new god is too busy chasing Mother Bey to care a whit about us hedge-gods." The smile took on a bitter cast. "And why should He care what we're doing? We'd be leaving his silly city, not meddling with it further. I think He'll be glad to see the back of us."

  "We," Harran said, and looked sober all of a sudden.

  Both Mriga and Siveni looked at him in shock. "Surely you'd be coming with us," Mriga said.

  Harran said nothing for a moment.

  "Harran!"

  "There is nothing here for you," Siveni said. "You've thought it a hundred times, you've cried about it when you thought we don't notice. You've seen hell, you've glimpsed heaven through us; how can mortal things possibly satisfy you anymore? Any more than they satisfy me? Or you," she said, looking at Mriga.

  Mriga stared at the floor.

  "Come on!" Siveni said, sounding a touch desperate. "You were bom a clubfooted idiot, you went through a whole life being used as a slave or a pincushion, living like a beast-and what do you do that's better now? You grind knives in the Bazaar as you always did, and take a little copper for it, but where's the joy in that? Where's the life you were going to lead with him in the Fields Beyond? All the peace, the joy? You expect that in Sanctuary?"

  Harran and Mriga looked at each other. "There's something to be said for life," Harran said, as if doubting the words as they came out. "In heaven everything bends to suit you. Here, you bend-but you come back stronger sometimes-"

  "Or you break," said Siveni.

  Silence. The firelight and candlelight wavered on the mural; Eshi seemed to sway a little.

  "I'm going back," Siveni said. "I know the spells. I wrote them. And you two-are you going to sit here and be miserable for all your short lives, on the off chance that it'll make you stronger?"

  Mriga let out a long breath. "Harran?"

  His eyes were for Siveni, as they had been so many times before, in statuary or the flesh. "I wanted you," he said.

  They waited.

  "It does seem selfish to want it all my way," he said. "All right. We'll try it."

  Mriga sat back down on the bed. Siveni shifted her weight again, and again the table crunched and sagged.

  "When will the Wall be done?" Harran said.

  "Weeks yet," Siveni said, looking thoughtful. "It must be done before the frost sets in, or the mortar won't set. But they have the plans. They hardly need me to complete them." And she began to laugh softly, so that the table creaked.

  Harran and Mriga exchanged looks. "You have to have known," Siveni said. "There are passages hidden in those walls already, alterations I made in the building that don't show in the plans. The wall is as full of holes as a bubble-cheese. No one knows-not even Molin. I was most careful. He'll think himself all secure, and until I choose to put the word in some oracle's ear, he will be. But that day-let Sanctuary look to its walls."

  "Well," Harran said, "one thing only. What about Tyr? She's in hell. No one can go there anymore, from what I hear."

  "But people can come out," Siveni said. "She's of us. Where we go, she'll go also, if she wants."

  It seemed likely enough. "At any rate," said Siveni, "I shan't wait for the walls. All the work that I needed to handle myself is done. Let's get together the things we need and be gone tomorrow night. Not the mandrake spell, Harran. The older one, that you didn't have materials for the last time- the one that uses bread and wine and a god's blood. There'll be no accidents this time. We'll storm heaven, and settle down once and for all, and leave this poxhole to its own devices."

  Harran shuddered once.

  Mriga sighed and climbed back into the bed. "Come and get some rest, then," she said.

  "Oh, all right," said Siveni, looking at them both with a lighter expression. It became apparent that rest was suddenly not on her mind.

  Harran's ironic young face got lighter, too. He slid under the sheet and said, "Well, since it is my last night on earth..."

  Siveni threw her chlamys over his head and put the candles out.

  The old Temple of Siveni Gray-Eyes, near one end of the Avenue of Temples, was not what it once had been. Its brazen doors, struck down by its annoyed patroness's spear, had been taken away and melted down as scrap. Its old storerooms had been looted, first by its last priest, then by everyone in Sanctuary who could not resist an open door. Even the great gold-and-ivory statue of Siveni, armed and armored in splendor, had been stolen. Glass lay in bright shards on the dirty floor, fallen from the high windows; spiders wrought in every comer, and rats rustled here and there. There were fire-scorches in the comers from squatters' fires, and the bones of roast pigeons and cats.

  Also still there, visible by the light of their one shuttered lamp, was an old round diagram traced on the floor in something black-bitumen, to judge by the scrape marks where curious feet had kicked at it through a year's time. Curious signs and letters and numbers in old languages were scribed smudgily there, and there was a brownish mark in the middle on the white marble, as if blood had been shed.

  Harran put the lamp down, being sure its shutter was open no more than a hairsbreadth, and turned away from the street. "I wish the doors were still here," he said.

  Siveni sniffed, putting down the bag she had been carrying. "Late for that now," she said. "Let's be about our business; it will take a while as is."

  Mriga stepped up behind them and put down another bag, quietly beginning to son through its contents. "The wine was something of a problem," she said. "Siveni, you owe me two in silver."

  "What?"

  "I thought we were splitting this expense three ways." Siveni somehow managed to look indignant, even when there was no light to do it in. "You goose, we don't need money where we're going! I'll make you a whole house out of silver when we get there."

  "Deadbeat."

  Harran began to laugh softly. "Stop it. What kind did you get?"

  "Wizardwall red," she said. "A half-bottle each of wine of our age. Enough?"

  "Plenty. The wineseller say anything?" />
  "I told him it was for a birthday party. What about the bread?"

  "It rose. You needn't have worried about the yeast. The worst part was grinding the wretched stuff. I think it's going to have pebbles in it from the flints."

  The gongs of one of the temples down the way spoke midnight, a somber word that echoed in the summer-night stillness. There was no breath of wind tonight, and the heat seemed to have gotten greater after the sun sent down, rather than less. A fat bloated moon, gibbous and a day from full, was riding high, its pallid light slanting down through the shattered windows and striking gemlights from the broken glass on the floor. Echoes tinkled down from the high ceiling as Siveni kicked the stuff aside.

  Harran looked up, brushing away a piece of glass that Siveni had kicked at him. "Siveni-are you really sure this is going to work?"

  She looked at him haughtily. "All those spells that have gone awry have been done by mere practitioners of magic. Not authors of it. I helped Father Us write this spell; I taught the bread and wine what to mean. All the dying gods who come back to heaven on a regular basis swear by it. Really, Harran, we'll never make a decent mage out of you if you don't learn to trust your materials."

  "Have you ever actually done the spell? Yourself?" Mriga said under her breath as she got a rag out of her bag and began scrubbing some of the old markings off the floor.

  "Not myself. I gave it to Shils to test; it worked all right. In fact, they started to wish in heaven that I hadn't given it to him. He's a terrible bore, and now there's no getting rid of him. Throw him out of heaven and a second later he's back."

  They worked in silence for a few minutes, Harran laying out the bread, Mriga finishing her scrubbing, then uncorking the wine and setting out the various cups into which it would have to be poured by thirds and mixed with blood, Siveni writing with a bit of yellow chalk inside one of the areas that Mriga had cleaned off. At one point she stopped and looked critically at one graceful phrase. "I never did like that letter after I invented it," she said, "but after Us sent it out to men, it was too late to call the wretched thing back."

  Mriga sat back on her heels and laughed at her almost-sister. "Is there anything you didn't invent?"

  "The rotgut they distill in the back of the Unicorn. That's all Anen's fault."

  A few minutes' more work and they stood up, finished. "Well enough," Siveni said. "Are you sure of the words?"

  They could hardly avoid it, being in some ways Siveni themselves, and hearing her mind nearly as clearly as their own, at the moment.

  "Then let's be about it. The sooner I see the inside of my house again, the happier I'll be."

  "Our house," said Mriga, in a warning tone.

  Siveni began to laugh. "Harran, we used to have the best fights-the house would change its nature every other minute. How the neighbor gods stared...." Her eyes flashed, even in that light so dim as to make expression impossible. For a moment Harran looked at her and saw again the crazed hoyden goddess he had fallen in love with; and Mriga smiled, remembering many fights won best two falls out of three, while the noise scandalized the divine neighbors. "If this works..." she said.

  "If?" Siveni reached out for the bread. "Give me that."

  They took their places. The diagram was a triangle within a hexagon within a circle, and other lesser figures were traced in the apertures. At each point of the triangle they stood, each with a cup and a small round loaf of bread in front of them- the cup washed in wine and upended, the bread baked in a fire struck by the same flints that ground its grain. In the center stood an empty cup, this one of glass. If all went well, at the end of all this it would be cracked and they would never hear the sound; the heavens would have cracked open for them at the same moment.

  "I call, who have the right to call," Siveni said, not too loudly. "Powers above and below, hear me; powers of every bourne; shapes and strengths unshapen. Night and Day Her sister; steeds of mom and evening, you forces that clip the great world round about; all thoughts and knowledges that live in elements; hear now my words, the law laid down, the rule enforced, the balance set aright..."

  Harran was beginning to be upset. He knew this spell by reputation, though it was one that the younger priests had never been let near. He knew perfectly well that even now, at the first invocation, terrible quiet should have fallen around them, all light should have been extinguished, even the cold moonfire falling through the window should have hit the en-sorcelled marble and gone dark. But none of that was happen-ing.

  "... new law, part with the Worlds and parcel; for I that was of times beyond and fields beyond, now go again unto my own. Death has taken hold on me, and failed; life has run my veins, and failed; and having conquered both, now I will to journey once again where time moves not, where the Bright Mansions stand, and my place is prepared me among the Deathless as of old..."

  There were rats watching them from the walls. No living thing outside the circle should have been able to be so close to the wards without falling unconscious. Harran sweated harder. Did I put too much honey in the bread? Did one of them misdraw something... ?

  "... and all Powers I call to witness as I open the gates for my going, by the means ordained of Them of old. By this bread baked in its own fires, as my body lives and is fueled of its own burning, I do call Them to witness; that by its eating, it becomes of me, and myself of it, in the old circle that is the way of gods, and both become immortal forever more..."

  They all three took up their loaves of bread and began to eat them. Harran reassured himself that there was not too much honey in the bread. In fact, it had risen rather nicely. In the great silence left after he had eaten the little cake, he noticed abruptly how very silent it was getting-

  "And likewise behold ye this wine of my age, burning under the sun in the grape as my blood has burned in lifelight in my veins all my days of this world, and turned to wine of its own virtue as the blood and thought of mortalkind tumeth to the divine of its virtue and in its time. Now do I drink and make it so part of me, and myself part of it, both alike immortal ..."

  Harran drank the lovely old vintage, reassured, feeling it slide down his throat like velvet fire as the spell took, made it more than wine, in token of his and the others being more than merely mortal. Across the circle, Siveni made a face at the taste of wine only nine months old; Harran was hard put not to grin and spill his own. The silence was thick. At the sides of the great room, frozen eyes shone dulled in the spell-light that was rising about them. Harran's heart grew fierce inside him. It was going to work. Those bright fields that he had glimpsed, that long peace, that eternity to love in, to work in, to be more than mortal in-his, theirs, at last-

  "... and these tokens offered up, these rites enacted," Siveni said, her voice becoming temfyingly clear though she had not raised it a whit, "as last sign of my intent I offer up my blood, come of gods in the olden time, returned to them at last; wherein godhead resides past time or loss, and wherein it may be regained..."

  They stepped forward, all three. The night held its breath as Mriga picked up the cup, half full of a mixture of the three wines of their age. From her belt she slipped out her leaner knife. It gleamed like a live thing in the spellfire, and throbbed as if it had a heart. Siveni put up her arm.

  "... that we may drink of it, as the law has always been, as I have made it, and so be restored to our own. By this token let gates be opened to us..." She never flinched as the knife slit her wrist the short way, as the blood ran down and into the wine. "... let night and day part for us, let time die for us; let it be done!"

  She passed Harran the cup. He drank, thinking to ignore the taste, and finding that it was more as if the taste ignored him; the liquid in the cup was full of such power that his senses drowned in it. He staggered, seeking light or balance, finding neither. He felt as transparent as its glass. Blindly he reached out, felt Mriga take the cup from him. He felt her own drowning as if it were his. Then Siveni took it, and drained it; the great uprushing cla
rity that leapt into her mind was a blinding thing, and Harran nearly fell to his knees. He thought he had seen the heavens. He saw now how wrong he was. Something clutched at him: Mriga. He held onto her slender arms as if she were the last connection to reality. He was seeing things now, though not with the eyes. Other eyes there were, that watched them all from within the circle; not dull beasts' eyes like the stupefied rats', but eyes that danced and were glad, and glowed in a small dog's head, waiting for them to break through to touch the owner-

  "Let all be open," Siveni cried, "let the way be prepared for us; we pass! We pass!" And Harran felt her lift the cup, to dash it against the written marble and open the way; and he felt her hesitate; and he felt her sway.

  His eyes were working again, much against their will. There was moonlight where there should not have been, and Siveni stood bemused, looking at her wounded arm, watching the blood run down.

  "It's wrong," she said. "It shouldn't hurt."

  And she fell to the floor, and the cup went flying out of the circle and crashed in the wrong spot, all its virtue spilled in a black pool under the moon.

  Harran fell down beside her. The edges of the wound were dark and inflamed. He looked at Mriga in horror. "The knife..."

  "Poison," she said, her face in anguish. "But it never left me all day-"

  "Yesterday," Harran said.

  In Mriga's shocked mind he saw the young man, with his knife with death in it. One of the Torchholder's spies.

  They started up in horror together, neither sparing more than a look for the fair young form of Siveni, that had lived thousands of years as an Ilsig goddess, and had now had those thousands of years catch up with her in one withering second.

  That was when the silvertipped arrows came whistling in, and feathered them both. They fell.

  When the backwash of the spell had died down a bit, in behind his men came Molin Torchholder, who missed nothing in this city, especially nothing done by those whom mere silly love made careless. Stormbringer, too, was not quite settled yet, and had spoken a word in his ear about rogue deities climbing over his walls, in one direction or another. Molin carefully broke the circle, kicked the shattered glass of the cup of blood and wine about, and nudged with his toe the skin-and-bones body of his erstwhile architect.