Blood ties-- Thieves World 09 (27 page)

"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 clarity 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.

"I do wish people wouldn't try to cheat me," he said. "Idiots, anyway, trying spells anymore. Nothing of this intensity works right." With a sigh he turned. "Clean up this mess," he said to one of his men, "and tomorrow detach a work detail and raze this place. We can use the stone." Then he went away to get some sleep. He had a long day tomorrow, on Stormbringer's business.

His men took the bodies away to the chamel house and left the place in darkness. One thing they did not take: one small form, wholly there now, in the darkness of the shadows beyond the moon; a shape like a small delicate dog, with too many lives sitting behind her eyes.

Tyr snarled, and got up, and walked out into the night to consider her vengeance.

Lynn Abbey

Walegrin had his back to Sanctuary-vulnerable, unconcerned. One foot rested on a broken-off piling; his folded forearms rested on his upraised knee. His eyes were empty, staring at the still, starlit harbor, watching for the faint ripple that might mean a breeze coming up.

A thick blanket of sun-steamed air had clung to the city these last four days. Last winter they-the powers in the palace-had told him to paint false plague signs along the streets. Then, in a dry spring, pestilence had erupted from the stagnant sewers and only luck, or divine intervention, had saved Sanctuary from a purging. Now, as the dank, foul air leeched vitality from every living creature, plague season had come in earnest and the nabobs were worried. Worried so much that they fled from the palace and their townhouses to outlying estates, some no more than Ilsigi ruins, to await a change in the wind. Improvements to the city's long-neglected ramparts had ground to a halt, as stone, brick, and work-gangs were openly diverted to providing comfort and security to those rich enough, or powerful enough, to afford it.

But if plague did break out, their walls, atriums, and shaded verandas wouldn't protect them. So they told him, the garrison commander, to keep the guards out and alert. His men grumbled, preferring to slouch over a desultory dice game in the barracks, but he welcomed a chance to get away from the walls that trapped the heat of summer as surely as they did the frigid dampness of winter. Sanctuary itself was quiet. No one was moving an unnecessary muscle. The Street of Red Lanterns, which he had patrolled, had been almost deserted. Few men would pay to touch sweat-slicked flesh on a night like this.

It was ironic, in a way, that after a year or more of wizard-witched weather, the Street talk was about the failure of magic. Most of the brothels-the big houses like the Aphrodisia, anyway-usually bought cool night breezes from the journeymen up at the Mageguild, but this summer (a summer that was really no worse than any other) the big magic-banded doors stayed shut and the Hazard mages, when they were seen at all, were sweating through their robes like any common laborer.

Rumor said the worst was over and the magic was coming back, though only to the strongest, or the cursed, and as yet too unpredictable to sell at any price. Rumor said a lot of things, but Walegrin, who did Molin Torchholder's direct bidding, got the truth of them sometimes. Stormbringer's pillar, which had purged Sanctuary of its dead and deadly, had sucked away the ether that made magic work. It would be a dog's year before Sanctuary's Mageguild sold anything but charlatan spells or prestidigitation regardless of the hazardous ranking of its residents.

The black harbor water diffracted into diamonds of starlight; a breeze moved whisper-weak across the wharf. The ragged-eared cats with slitted sickly green eyes were stretched out along the damp planks. A mouse, or young rat, skittered up a mooring rope past a cat that didn't care enough to twitch its tail. If a man held still, like the cats-breathing slow, keeping his mind as calm as the water-he could forget the .heat and slip into a timeless daze that was almost pleasant.

Walegrin sought that oblivion and it eluded him. He was a Rankan soldier, the garrison commander, self-charged with patrolling the city. Such pride as he had stemmed from his ability to fulfill his duties. So his mind churned forward, pursuing the thoughts he'd lost before sunset. He had an appointment to keep: the true reason why tonight, more than any other, he rather than one of his men was making the rounds of Sanctuary's alleys.

The summer had seen a change in the city's social fabric that was as profound as it had been unexpected: Official protection had been extended to, and accepted by, the besieged remnants of the PFLS after their leader was betrayed and nearly killed within the palace walls. Gutter-fighters like Zip, whose lives had been measured in hours and minutes at the season's beginning, now dwelt in the Stepson barracks beyond Downwind and sweated hot and cold under the tutelage of Tempus's lieutenants.

And the cause of this change? None other than Prince Kadakithis's once-favorite cousin and Molin's never-favored niece: Chenaya Vigeles, a young woman of considerable talent and little sense. A young woman who had propositioned him with treason and upon whom, with the knowledge and permission of his superiors, Walegrin now spied.

Once, not so long ago, he had discounted the influence of women both in his own life and in the greater realities of the universe; then he had returned to Sanctuary. In this gods-and magic-cursed place, the worst always came from a woman's hand. He'd learned to hold his tongue and his liquor with women whose naked breasts stared back at him; women whose eyes glowed red with immortal anger and women whose love-play left a man dead in the dawn light-and all of them were saner than Chenaya.

Rumor said, and the Torch confirmed, that she was favored of Savankala himself. Rumor said she couldn't lose, whatever that meant, because she and the few frightened remnants of an unlamented Imperial dynasty had fled the Rankan capital after Theron's takeover and wound up here in Sanctuary which had never been known to attract anything or anyone but losers. But it meant something Walegrin knew that personally. And out at the Land's End estate, where she lived with her father, a small horde of gladiators, and the disaffected members of what had been the city's Rankan upper crust, there was a god-bugged priest who was determined to make a mortal goddess of her.

He'd seen the shrine Rashan was building, with stones pilfered not only from the ramparts but from long-neglected, best-forgotten altars. He'd passed the word along to Molin and watched his mentor seethe with rage, but he hadn't managed to pass along the danger-the awesomeness-he felt when Rashan made his Daughter-of the-Sun speeches or when Chenaya took him into her confidence and arms. The water diffracted again, broken as a school of minnows scattered through a larger, slow-spreading circular ripple. Walegrin shed his reverie and stretched himself erect. His leather baldric, all he wore above the waist, slimed across his spine; the illusion of equilibrium between his flesh and the air vanished. He wiped the sweat-sheen from his forehead then wiped his hand on the limp homespun of his kilt. A nya-fish spread its fins, arching above the water to outrace the fleeing minnows. Walegrin slid the baldric into position and turned back to the city.