Blood Ties

"This is unusual?" Harran said, picking up a much-worn shirt and shaking it hard. Rock dust snapped out of the folds.

"It should be," Mriga said rather sadly. She sat down on one of their pieces of furniture, a large bed with multiple sword hacks in it. "I remember the way things were for her when she was a goddess for real. A thought was all it took to make the best things to wear, anything she wanted to eat, a god's house to live in. She didn't have to be angry then. But now..." She looked rather wistfully to one side, where a huge old mural clung faded and mouldering to the wall. It was a scene of Us and Shipri creating the first harvest from nothing. Everywhere there was a wealth of grain and flowers and fruit, and dancing nymphs and gauzy drapery and ewers of outpoured wine. The wood on which the mural was painted was warped, and Shipri had wormholes in her, in embarrassing places.

Harran sat down beside her for a moment. "Do you regret it?"

Mriga looked at him out of big hazel eyes. "Me myself? Or she and I?"

"Both."

Mriga put out a hand to touch Harran's cheek. "You? Never. I would become a goddess a hundred times over and give it up every time, to be where I am now. But Siveni..."

She trailed off, having no answer for Harran that he would want to hear. Perhaps he knew it. "We'll make it work," he said. "Gods have survived being mortals before."

"Yes," Mriga said. "But that's not the way she had it pla

She looked at a bar of sunlight that was inching across the bare wood floor toward the other piece of furniture, a table of blond wood with one leg shorter than the three others. "Time to be heading out, love. Do we all eat together today?"

"She said she might not be able to make it... there's something going on at the wall that may take extra time. An arch of some kind."

"We should take her something, then."

"Always assuming that I get paid."

"You should hit them with lightning if they renege on you."

"That's Siveni's department."

"I wish it were," Mriga said. She kissed Harran goodbye and left as he was looking for a hasp to rehang the door.

Mriga walked slowly toward her own work, threading the streets with the unconscious care of a lifelong city dweller. It had been a busy year for all of them ... for her in particular. One day Mriga had been just another madwoman... Harran's bedwarmer and house servant, good for nothing but mindless knife sharpening and mindless sex. The next, she had been awake, and aware, and divine-caught in the backwash of a spell Harran had performed to bring back Siveni from whatever oblivious heaven she and the other Ilsig gods had been inhabiting. Harran had been one of Siveni's priests, the healer-servants of the divine patroness of war and crafts. He had thought he would remain so. But the spell had caught him, too, binding him and Siveni and Mriga together through life, past death. That was no mere phrase, either, for the three of them had been in hell together, and had come back again to what should have been a cheerful, delighted life together... long years rich with joy.

Mriga stepped over the sewer ru

Mriga walked across the bridge over the White Foal (briefly holding her breath against the morning smell) and headed into the Bazaar from the south side. Most of the stall-keepers were setting up their canopies, muttering to one another about prices, wholesalers, arguments at home: the usual morning gossip. She made her way over to the side near the north wall.

There was Rahi, her stallmate, setting up as usual... a large, florid, corpulent man, fighting with the canopy poles, sweating and swearing. Rahi was a tinker who did a small side business in small arms, knives, and the like. He boasted that he had sold knives to Hanse himself, but Mriga doubted this; anyone who really had would be too cautious to cry the man's name aloud. At any rate, apart from his boasting, Rahi was that astonishing phenomenon, an honest tradesman. He didn't mark up his wares more than a hundred percent or so, he didn't scrape true gilt off hilts or scabbards and substitute brass, and his scales had trustworthy weights to them. Why he chose to be such an exception, he usually refused to explain ... though one night, over a stoup of wine, he whispered one word to Mriga, looking around him as if the Prince's men were waiting to take him away. "Religion," he had said, and then immediately drank himself drunk.

Their association, odd though it might be, satisfied Mriga. When she had been job hunting and had passed through the Bazaar one day, Rahi had recognized her as the crippled former idiot-girl who used to sit there and hone broken bits of metal on the cobbles until they could split hairs, until Harran took her home to sharpen Stepsons' swords and his surgical tools. Rahi had offered her a spot in his stall-for a small cut of her profits, of course-and Mriga had accepted, more than willing to take up her old trade. Swords got dull or notched quickly in Sanctuary. A good "polisher" never starved... and Mriga was the best, being (these days) an avatar of the goddess who invented swords in the first place.

"'Bout time you got here," Rahi bellowed at her. Various people close by, sweetmeat sellers and clothiers, winced at the noise, and off in the cattle pens various steers lifted up their voices in mournful answer. "Day's half gone, where you been, how you go

Mriga just smiled at him and unslung her pouch, which contained all her tools: oil, rags, and five grades of whetstones. Others in the city worked with more tools, and charged more, but Mriga didn't need to. "There's no one up but us and the birds, Rahi," she said. "Don't make me laugh. Who's been here with a sword this morning that I've missed?"

"Eh, laugh, sure, sometime some big guy from the palace, you'll laugh then, charge him big, but no, he'll be uptown and you, not a copper, out on the stones again, you be careful!" He rammed the last canopy pole into its spot and glared at her, sweating, smiling.

Mriga shrugged. Rahi traditionally spoke in a long gasp with a laugh at the end, and dropped out words as if he was afraid to run out of them some day. "Hey, Rahi, if it gets slow over here I can always go over to the wall and sharpen the chisels, eh?"

Rahi was shaking out the canopy, a six-foot rectangle of light cotton with some long-faded pattern just barely visible in the weave. "No good'll come of that, mark," he said, "didn't need the wall until now, what for? But to hold out armies, or hold people in. Put a lock on a door and people start thinking there's things to steal, sure. That-the Torch-" He was plainly unwilling to say Molin Torchholder's name aloud. That was no surprise; many people were. Sanctuary was full of ears, and there was frequently no telling who they belonged to. "Playing kingmaker, that one. If he doesn't get us burnt in our beds ..." Rahi trailed off into grumbling. "Your man, how about him, eh?"