stop you."
Siveni swung on him. "With what?" she cried, enraged, and swung the spear at him. Harran had no idea what to do. Against the first blow he raised the maimed arm, and the lightnings went crackling away around him to strike the paving stones. But the second blow and the third came immediately, and then more, a flurry of blows that swiftly beat down Harran's feeble guard. And after them came the bolt that struck him to the street-a blow enough like death to be mistaken for it. Harran's last thought as he went down burned and blinded, was that she would have been something to see with a sword. Then thought departed from him, and his soul fled far away.
Somewhere in Sanctuary, a dog howled.
And an odd dark shape that had skulked along through the shadows behind the man and the goddess leapt shrieking out of those shadows, and full onto Siveni.
The sound of crashing in the street was what woke Harran finally. A hellish sound it was, enough to wake the dead, as he certainly reckoned himself; stones cracking, lightning frying the air, angry cries-and a hoarse voice he knew. In that moment, before he managed to open his eyes, it became perfectly plain who trailed him here from the Stepsons' barracks; what dark form had slipped away from him as he drew the circle around Siveni's temple, and had been trapped within the spell-so that it had worked on her as well.
Harran raised himself up from the stones to see the image that, ever after, would make him turn away from companions or leave crowded rooms when he thought of it.
There was the goddess in her radiant robes-but those robes had dirt on them, from falls she had taken in the street; and four hands were struggling on the haft of her spear. Even as Harran looked up, the wiry shape wrestling with Siveni wrenched the spear out of her grasp and threw it clattering down the Avenue of Temples, spraying random lightning bolts around it. Then Mriga sprang on Siveni again, all skinny arms and legs as always-but with something added: a frightening, quick grace about her movements. Purpose, Harran thought in fascination and shock. She knows what she's doing! And he smiled... seeing another aspect of the spell that he might have suspected if he were an artiste rather than merely competent. The spell infallibly retrieved what was lost... even lost wits.
The goddess and the mortal girl rolled on the ground together, and there was little difference between them. They both shone, blazing lightlessly with rage and godhead. The goddess had more experience fighting, perhaps, but Mriga had the advantage of a strength not only divine but insane. And there might be other advantages to a life's worth of insanity as well. Mriga's absorption of godhead would not be hampered by ideas about gods, or about mortals not being gods. She took what power came to her, and used it, uncaring. She was using it now; she had Siveni pinned. Their struggle brought her around to where she suddenly saw Harran looking at her. That look did strike him like lightning, though he would not have traded the pain of it for anything. Mriga saw him. And in four quick, economical gestures, she stripped Siveni's bright helm off, flung it clanging down the avenue, and then took hold of Siveni's head by the long dark hair and whacked it hard against the stones. Siveni went limp.
He never had needed to show her anything more than once....
The street fell blessedly silent. Harran sat up on the stones-it was the best he could manage at the moment; his night was catching up to him. More than just his night. For there was Mriga, limping over to him, still halt as before-but there was a kind of grace even to that, now. He wanted to hide his face. But he was still enough of a god not to.
"Harran," she said in the soft husky voice that he had never heard do anything but grunt.
Harran was still mortal enough not to be able to think of a thing to say.
"I want to stay like this," she said. "I'll have to go back with her before dawn, if the change is to take."
"But-it was only supposed to be temporary-"
"For an ordinary mortal, I suppose so. But I'm not ordinary. It will take for me." She smiled at him with a merry serenity that made Harran's heart ache; for it was very like what he had expected, dreamed of, from Siveni. "If you approve, that is...."
"Approve?!" He stared at her-at Her, rather; there was no doubt of it anymore. Moment by moment she was growing more divine, and looking at her hurt his eyes as even Siveni had only at the beginning. "What in the worlds do you need my approval for?!"
Mriga looked at him with somber pleasure. "You are my love," she said, "and my good lord."
"Good-" He would have sickened with the irony, had the terrible, growing glory of her presence not made such a response impossible. "I used you-"
"You fed me," Mriga said. "You took care of me. I came to love you. The rest didn't matter then; and it doesn't now. If I loved you as a mortal-how should I stop as a goddess?"
"You're still crazy!" Harran cried, almost in despair.
"It would probably look that way," said Mriga, "to those who didn't know the truth. You know better."
"Mriga, for pity's sake, listen to me! I took advantage of you, again and again! I used a goddess-"
She reached out, very slowly, and touched his face; then took the hand back again. "As for that business," she said, "I alone shall judge the result. I alone am qualified. If you've done evil... then you've also paid. Payment is now, is it not? Would you believe you've spent five years paying for what you were doing during those five years? Or would you put it down to a new goddess's craziness?"
"Time..." Harran whispered.
"It has an inside and an outside," Mriga said. "Outside is when you love. Inside is everything else. Don't ask me more." She looked up at the paling sky. "Help me with poor Siveni."
Between the two of them they got the goddess sitting up again. She was in a sorry state; Mriga brushed at her rather apologetically. "She hurt you," Mriga said. "If I hadn't been crazy already, I would have gone that way."
After a few moments ministration, the gray eyes opened and looked at Harran and Mriga with painful admiration for them both. One of the fierce eyes was blackened, and Siveni had a bump rising where Mriga had acquainted her with the cobbles. "The disadvantage of physicality," she said. "I don't think I care for it." She glanced at Mriga, looking very chastened. "Not even my father ever did that to me. I think we're going to be friends."
"More than that," Mriga said, serenely merry. Harran found himself wondering very briefly about some old business ... about the old Mriga's love for edged things, and her strength, and her skill with her hands... and her gray eyes. Those eyes met his, and Mriga nodded. "She'd lost some attributes into time," Mriga said. "But I held them for her. She'll get them back from me... and lend me a few others. We'll do well enough between us."
The three of them got up together, helping one another. "Harran-" Siveni said.
He looked at her tired, wounded radiance, and for the first time really saw her, without his own ideas about her getting in the way. She could not apologize; apology wasn't her way. She just stood there like some rough, winning child, a troublemaker at the end of yet another scrap. "It's all right," he said. "Go home."
She smiled. The smile was almost as lovely as Mriga's.
"We will," Mriga said. "There's a place where gods can go when they need a rest. That's where we'll be. But'one thing remains." She reached out and laid her head on the burned place where Harran's hand had been... then slowly leaned in and touched her lips to his.
Somewhere in the eternity that followed, he noticed that her left hand seemed to be missing.
When the dazzle unknotted itself from around him, they were gone. He stood alone in false dawn in the Avenue of Temples, looking down toward where a pair of twisted brass doors lay in the middle of the street. He wondered while he stood there whether some years from now there might be a small new temple in Sanctuary... raised for an addition to the Ilsig pantheon; a mad goddess, a maimed and crippled goddess, fond of knives, and possessing a peculiar crazed wisdom that began and ended in love. A goddess who right now had only two worshippers; her single priest, and a dog....
Payment is now....
Harran bowed ever so briefly to Ils's temple: and with grudging respect, to Savankala's-and went on home.
Elsewhere in the false dawn, a soft, rough cry from the windowsill attracted the attention of a dark-clad woman in a room scattered with a mad profusion of treasures and rich stuffs. Ischade leisurely went to the window, gazed with a slow smile at the silvery raven that stood there, watching her out of eyes of gray... and silently considering both messenger and message, took it up on her arm and went to find it something to eat....
WITCHING HOUR by C. J. Cherryh
The room was fine wood and river stone with brocade hangings, and opened onto an entry hall with a winding stair. Fire danced in the marble fireplace and at the tips of a score of white wax candles, and off the gold cups and fine pewter platters and plates; while Moria, at dinner in her hall, gave it all mistrusting glances, not unlike the look she paid her brother at his end of their long table-for none of Moria's life stayed stable. The gold was a dream in which she moved and lived, irony for a thief: she felt constantly she should snatch the plates and run, but there was nowhere to run to and the gold was hers, the house was hers, far too great a possession: she could no longer run at all, and this condition filled her heart with panic. Her brother's face was a dream of a different kind across the candle glow-at one moment familiar; at another, when he shifted slightly or the light fell unkindly on the scars-she felt another wrench of panic, perceiving another thing which she had loved and which had tangled her up like nightmare and held her bound.
One part of her would have run screaming and naked from this place.
"Mistress." A servant poured straw-colored wine into her cup and grinned a gap toothed grin that shattered other illusions, for the dress was brocade and finest linen, if rumpled from neglect, the hair bartered and immaculate; but the missing teeth, the broken nose, the voice with its Downwind twang-beggars and thieves waited on them. They were clean and flealess and without lice-she was adamant on that, but on no other thing had she authority with them, except they did their job and did not pilfer.
The Owner saw to that.
There was a shout, a shriek of gutter language from the stairs: Mor-am leaped up and shouted back into the hall in terms the Downwind understood, and her soul shrank at this small sign of fracture. "Out," she said to the servant. And when the servant lingered in his dull-witted way: "Out, fool!"
The servant put it together and scuttled out as Mor-am resumed his chair and picked up his wine-cup. His hand shook. The tic was back at the comer of his bum-scarred mouth, and the cup trembled on its way and spilled straw-colored wine. He glowered after he had drunk, and the tic diminished to a small shudder. "Won't learn," he said, plaintive as a child.
A beggar watched the house, outside. Was always there, a huddle of rags; and Mor-am had bad dreams, waked shrieking night after night.
"Won't leam," he muttered, and poured himself more wine with a knife-scarred hand that rattled the wine bottle against the cup rim.
"Don't."
"Don't what?" He set the bottle down and picked up the cup, leaving beads of wine on the table surface, spilling more on the way to his mouth.
"I went out today." She made a desperate attempt to fill the silence, the silence of long hours imprisoned in this house. "I bought a ham, some dates Shiey says she knows this way to cook it with honey-"
"Got no lousy cook, big house, we got a one-handed thief for cook-"
"Shiey was a cook."
"-if she'd done either decent she'd go right-handed. Where'd She find that sow?"
"Quiet!" Moria flinched and cast a glance toward the stairs. They listened, she knew they listened, every servant in the house, the beggar by the gates. "For Ils's sake, quiet-"
"Swear by Ils now, do we? Do us any good, you think?"
"Shut up!"
"Run, why don't you? Why don't you get out of here? You-"
A door came open in the hall, just-opened, with a gust of outside wind that stirred the candles.
"0 gods," Moria said, and swung her chair about with a scrape of wood on stone, another from Mor-am, a ringing impact of an overset cup that rolled across the floor.
But it was Haught stood in the hallway door, not Her, but only Haught, standing there with that doe-soft look in his eyes, that set to his well-formed mouth that betokened some vague satisfaction. A malicious child's satisfaction in startling them; a malicious child's innocence: she hoped it was nothing darker. The door closed. No servant was in evidence.
"New t-trick," Mor-am said. The tic had come back. The cup lay on the floor between them, with its scatter of straw-hued wine.
"I have a few," Haught said, walking to the side of the door where the cups resided on a table. He was well-dressed, was Haught, like themselves; wore a russet tunic and black cloak, fine boots, and a sword like a gentleman. He brought a cup to the table and wine poured with a whisper into the gold cup. He lifted it and drank.
"Well?" said Mor-am. "Well, do you just walk in and serve yourself?"
"No." There was always quiet in Haught. Always the downward glance, the bowed head: ex-slave. Moria remembered scars on his back and elsewhere, remembered other things, nights huddled beside a rough brick fireplace; bundled together beneath rough blankets; convulsed together in the only love there had been once. This too had changed. "She wants you to do that thing," Haught said, speaking to Mor-am. "Tonight." Sleight of hand produced a tiny packet and flung it to the table by the wine bottle.
"Tonight... .For Shalpa's sweet sake-"
"You'll find a way." Haught's eyes darted a quick, shy glance Mor-am's way, Moria's next, and flickered away again, somehow floorward: in such small ways he remained uncatchable. "It's very good, the wine."
"Damn you," Mor-am said with a tremor of his mouth. "Damn-"
"Hush," Moria said, "hush, Mor-am, don't." And to Haught: "There's food left-" It was reflex; there were times they had been hungry, she and Haught. They were not now, and she put on weight. She had drunk herself stupid then; and he had loved her when she had not loved herself. Now she was wise and sober and getting fat; and scared. "Won't you stay awhile?"
-Thinking of herself alone once Mor-am went out; and terrified; and wanting him this night (the servants she did not touch-her authority was scant enough; and they were crude). But Haught gave her that shy, cold smile that allied him with Her and ran his finger round the rim of the cup, never quite looking up.
"No," he said. He turned and walked away, into the dark hall. The door opened for him, swirling the dark cloak and whipping the candles into shadow.
"G-got to go," Mor-am said distractedly, "got to find my cloak, got to get Ero to go with me-gods, gods-"
The door closed, and sent the candles into fits.
"Ero!" Mor-am yelled.
Moria stood with her arms wrapped about herself, staring at nothing in particular.
It was another thing transmuted, like some malicious alchemy that left her strangling in wealth and utterly bereft. They lived uptown now, in Her house. And Haught was Hers too, like that dead man-Stilcho was his name-who shared Her bed-she was sure it was so. Perhaps Haught did, somehow and sorcerously immune to the curse attributed to Her. Mradhon Vis she had not seen since the morning he walked away. Perhaps Vis was dead. Perhaps the thing he feared most in all the world had happened and he had met Her in one of Her less generous moments.
"Ero!" Mor-am yelled, summoning his bodyguard, a thief of higher class.
The fire seemed inadequate, like the gold and the illusions that had become insane reality.
There was little traffic on the uptown street-the watcher at the gate, no more than that; and Haught walked the shadows, not alone from the habit of going unnoticed, but because in Sanctuary by night not to be noticed was always best; and in San
ctuary of late it was decidedly best. The houses here had barred windows, protecting Rankan nobles against unRankan pilferage, burglary, rapine, occasional murder at the hand of some startled thief; but nowadays there were other, political, visitors, stealthy in approach, leaving bloody results as public as might be.
It had begun with the hawkmasks and the Stepsons; with beggars and hawkmasks; priests and priests; and gods; and wizards; and nowadays murder crept uptown in small bands, to prove the cleverness of some small faction in reaching the unreachable; and striking the unstrikable; thus fomenting terror in the streets and convincing the terrorized that to join in bands was best, so that nowadays one went in Sanctuary with a mental map not alone of streets but of zones of allegiance and control, and planned to avoid certain places in certain sequences, not to be seen passing safely through a rival's territory.
Haught ignored most lines-by night. There were some foolhardy enough to touch him. Not many. He was accustomed to fear, and, truth, he felt less fear nowadays than previously. He was accustomed to horrors and that stood him in good stead.
He had been prenticed once, up by Wizardwall; and his last master had been gentle, for one of Wizardwall.
"Why do you stay?" his present teacher asked.
"Teach me," he had said that morning, with a yearning in him only the dance had halfway filled: he showed her the little magic that he had remembered. And she had smiled, had Ischade of no country at all: smiled in a very awful way. "Magus," she had said, "would you be?"
He had loved Moria at that time. Moria had been gentle with him when few had been. And he had thought (he tormented himself with the dread that it was not his thought at all, such were Ischade's powers) that it was well to please the witch, for Moria's sake. So he would protect Moria and himself: to be allied with power was safety. Experience had taught him that.
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