Blood Ties

"He's doing all right. Word's been getting about that there's a good barber to be had in the Maze. We haven't even been robbed yet.... They let us be, seeing as how it might be Harran that has to patch one of them up some night after a job goes sour."

"Doesn't do to have the barber mad at you, no indeed; pots! Pots to sell!" Rahi shouted suddenly, as a housewife with a thumbsucking child in tow went by the stall. "Other lady, the tall one, she leams that too? No? 'Spose not, doesn't seem the 'prenticing type, too proud, she."

Mriga silently agreed. While still active in the Ilsig pantheon, Siveni had invented many a craft and passed them on to men. Medicine, the sciences, the fine arts, the making and using of weapons, all had been hers. Trapped in the world Siveni might be, but what she knew of the spells and arts of medicine was far more than the best of her priest-healers had known; and Harran had been only a minor one of those. "No," Mriga said, "she's on the wall. She does well enough."

She took out a favorite knife, a little black-handled thing already fine-edged enough to leave the wind bleeding, wiped it with oil, and began absently to whet it. More people were coming into the Bazaar. In front of them Yark the fuller went by with his flat cart. On top of it one of the Bazaar's two big calked straw pisspots lurched precariously, making ominous sloshing noises. "Any last minute contributions?" said Yark, gri

Mriga shook her head and gri

He looked dubious. "How much?"

"Let's see."

He stepped closer, reached under his worn tunic and pulled out a shortsword. Mriga looked at him covertly as she turned over the sword in her hands. Young, in his mid-twenties, perhaps. Not too well dressed, nor too poorly. Well, that might be a relief. People had been doing better lately; the Beyfolk's money was making a difference. The sword was of a steel that had forge patterns like those in Enlibrite, and it was dark-bladed with rust, and had notches in it. Mriga tsked at the poor thing, while sorting other impressions ... for even though swathed in flesh and trapped away from heaven, a goddess has senses a mortal has not. A dubious blade, this, with the memory or the intention of blood on it. But in this town, what weapon hadn't killed someone?... That was after all what they were for. "Dark or bright?" she said.

"What?" The young man's voice was very raw and light, as if it might still tend to crack at times.

"I can polish it bright for you, if it needs to be seen," she said. "Or leave it dark in the blade, if it needs not." She had learned that delicate phrasing quickly, after accidentally scaring away a few potential customers whose work required that their blades be inconspicuous. "Either way, the edge is the same. Four in copper."

"Two."

"You think you're dealing with a scissors grinder? The Stepsons brought their blades to me, and the Prince's guard do still. The thing'll be able to slice one thought from the next when I'm done with it. Always assuming that you can keep it out of the tables at the Unicorn after this." That got his attention; that much Mriga had been able to pick up from the blade itself, though it wasn't talkative as steel went. "Three and a half, because 1 like your looks. No more."

The young man screwed up his face a little, slightly ruining those looks. "All right, do it dark. How long?"

"Half an hour. Take mine," she said, and handed him her "leaner," a plain, respectable longknife with quillons of browned steel. "Don't 'lose' it," Mriga said then, "so I don't have to give you a demonstration with this one."

The young man ducked his head and slipped into the growing crowd. Rahi said something not in a bellow, and it got lost in the increasing noise of people crying fish and cloth and ashsoap.

"What?"

"You ever have to demonstrate?" he wheezed in her ear.

Mriga smiled. Siveni, so long unprayed-to by mortals, had been losing her attributes. And as such things will, one attribute-the affinity for things with edges-had slipped across into mortality and into the person best equipped to handle it: Mriga. "Not personally," she said. "Last time, the knife did it itself. Just lost its balance all of a sudden... slipped out of the thief's hand and stuck her right-well, whatever. Word got around. It's not a problem now."

Yark the fuller went by with the cart again. This one was sloshing. "Last chance!" he said.

"Pots," Rahi bellowed beside her, "pots! Buy pots! You, madam! Even a fish sorry-even a Beysib needs a pot!"

Mriga rolled her eyes and began to whet the new knife.

When Molin Torchholder let it be known that he was going to complete the walls of Sanctuary, the noise of merriment about the new jobs that would become available was almost as loud as Stormbringer's fireworks had been. There were, of course, quieter conversations about what the old fox was up to this time. Some dared to say that his sudden industriousness on the Empire's behalf had less to do with his desire to keep Sanctuary safe for the Imperials, as to keep it safe from them. Some day, not too far off, when Sanctuary's own trade was well enough established, when it had enough of its own gold, and was secure in its gods again... then the gates could swing shut, and Molin and others would stand on the walls and laugh in the Empire's face....

Of course those who said such things said them in whispers, behind bolted doors. Those who did not lost the tongues that had spoken them. Molin didn't bother himself with such small business; his spies tended to it. He had too many things to take care of himself. There was his new god to placate, old ones to assist out of existence, Kadakithis and (in a different fashion) the Beysa to manage. And there was the wall.

As an exercise in logistics alone it was trouble enough. First the plans, argued over for weeks, changed, changed again, changed back; then ordering the stone, and having it quarried; then hiring people enough to move such weights, others to work on the roughed-out stones, trimming them to size. Overseers, stonemasons, mortarers, caterers, spies to make sure everything was working.... Money was fortunately no problem; but time, all the things that could go wrong, were riding on Molin's mind. The vision of what it would be if all went well security against enemies, against the Empire, power for himself and those he chose to share it-that vision was barely enough to counter the murderous work of it all. He took any help he could find, and didn't scruple to use it to the utmost thereafter.

He hadn't scrupled on the morning several months or so back when the first courses of stone were being laid on the southern perimeter, and there was trouble with the foundations, dug too deep and uneven to boot. The plans were spread out on a block on undressed northern granite, and he was speaking to his engineers in that soft voice that made it plain to them that if they didn't set things to rights shortly, they would be very dead. And in the middle of the quiet tirade, he had become aware of someone looking over his shoulder. He didn't move. The someone snorted. Then a slender arm poked down between his shoulder and the chief architect's and said, "Here's where you went wrong. The ground's prone to settling all along this rise; using that for your level strings threw all your other measurements off. You can still save it, with cement enough. But you won't have time if you stand here gaping. That ground dries out, a whole city's worth of cement on top of it won't hold firm. And mind you put enough sand in it."