Blood Ties

"It's in. Come take a cup of something cold with me."

She stepped down from the stone, wondering about the odd tone in his voice, schooling herself to show no reaction. Carelessly she walked in front of him to the tent he'd had set up at the site, so that he could watch the workers, and her, in comfort. She flung one flap on its door aside. Silk, she thought. And not because it makes the best tents, either.

There were only two chairs, too close together for her taste. She took the better of the two and sat waiting for Molin to pour for her. Massive and splendid, he sat down in the other chair and looked at her for a long moment before reaching out to the decanter and glasses on its table between the chairs. Alarm, his mind sang to Siveni. Curiosity growing. Thought winding around itself, choking like ivy growing up sheer cold stone....

"Why do you live in that little hole in the Maze?" Molin said, pouring, and passing her the cup. "You could certainly afford better, with what I'm paying you."

She took the cup and looked at him, unsmiling, wishing she had her spear with the lightnings sizzling around it; he would not be daring to ask her questions. "It'd be too much bother to move in the middle of a work like this," she said.

"Ah, yes. Another question I wish you would answer, with your obvious expertise. What other jobs have you done?"

Better ones than you're doing now, Siveni thought as she lifted the cup and smelled, very deep in the bouquet of the wine, an herb she recognized. She had invented it; and this was one use for it that she had never approved. "Stibium," she said, answering his question and naming the drug, both at once. "Torchholder, for shame. The preparation has to be started weeks in advance if you intend to have someone drink it and then spill out their life's secrets to you. Though perhaps you just mean my next flux to be painless. A kind thought. But I manage that for myself. And I'm pained that you don't trust me."

"You live with a common barber and a woman who was an idiot once," said Molin. "She's whole now. How did that happen?"

"Good company?" Siveni said. Oh, for my lightnings; oh, for one good crack of thunder out of a clear sky, to back this impertinent creature down! "I'm no sorceress, if that's what you're thinking. Even if I were, what good would it do me these days? Most magicians are lucky if they can turn milk into cheese now. Your problem," she said, "is that I seem to have come out of nowhere, and you have no hold over me ... and at the same time, no choice but to trust me; for I've saved your wall from the rotten ground it stands on four times now, and will keep doing so until it's whole."

He gazed at her as levelly as he could, and made a point of drinking from his own cup. "You've taken arthicum, I imagine," she said. "Mind that you don't eat anything made with sheep's milk for the next day or so; the results would be unfortunate. At least, inconvenient, for a man who has to spend more than an hour without ru

"Who are you?" he said, very conversationally.

"I am a builder," Siveni said. "And the daughter of a builder. If it pleases me to do a masterwork while living in a slum, that's my business. Think, if you like, that I'm making this city safe for my family to live in in future years. Have you had anything to complain of about my work so far?"

"Nothing," said Molin. He sounded as if he would rather have had complaints.

"And have you not been checking the actual building against the plans each day and each night? And have you or your spies found one stone out of place, or anything not just as it should be?"

Molin Torchholder stared at her.

"Then let me do my work and take my wage in peace." She looked at him merrily. "Which reminds me," she said; "there are stones out there waiting for our attention at the laying. Come on." And Siveni drank off the cup and set it down appreciatively.

"It does add something to the flavor," she said, and got up. "Come, sir."

She went out into the bright hot day, Molin following. Alarm was still singing in his mind; and now in hers, too.

He suspects something... even though there's nothing to suspect. He'll do Harran and Mriga some harm if he must, to find out the truth. Wretched mortal! Why can't he leave off meddling?

I must think of something to do.

I never had these problems when I was single!

"Yai, Gray-Eyes! You ready?"

"Coming, Kivan," she called, and headed down along the stone course, feeling the Torchholder's eyes in her back, like spears without lightning.

"I'm sorry I couldn't have let you sleep through that," Harran said to the man he had been cutting. "But with the wound so deep in the hand, if you were asleep and I hit a nerve, we would never have known it, and the hand might have been useless an hour later, though the poison was out."

The joiner-Harran had forgotten his name, as he always forgot his patients' names-groaned a little and eased himself up to sit, his wife helping him. Harran turned away for a moment, busying himself with cleaning his tools and not noticing his surroundings. He had been a priest, used to clean, open temples, fresh air, scrubbed tables, light. Cutting someone on a kitchen table that until five minutes ago had had chicken dung on it was not unusual-not anymore-but he would never like it.

The few chickens in the mean little hut walked about the floor, scratching and singing, oblivious to the blood and pain of the last half hour. The joiner had driven a nail through his hand while working, and had yanked the thing out and thrown it away, going on with what he had been doing. Then the wound had festered, and there were signs of the begi

Now the hand was bound with clean linen, and Harran's tools were clean and in their satchel. The man's head was lolling to one side, an aftereffect of the lockjaw remedy. Timidly, his wife came to Harran and offered him a handful of coppers. She tried to be nonchalant about it, but it was too plain from her eyes that they were all she and her man had. Harran considered, took one, for form's sake, and then professed great interest in one of the chickens, a rather scrawny red hen that looked good for soup, if nothing else. "How about her, eh?" he said. "Looks like there's nice pickings on her."

The joiner's wife saw instantly what Harran was trying to do, and began protesting. But the protests were feeble, and after a while Harran walked out of the hut with a copper, and a copper-colored chicken, and blessings raining on his back. He walked as fast as he could out of that particular comer of the Maze. It was always the blessings that embarrassed him the most.

The only good thing about them, Harran thought as he made his way toward the Bazaar, was that they made it u