Blood Ties

Something had to be done.

Something would be done. He would do it.

"I have to go," he said. "Keep the wine."

"Hey, hey, what about these cord-twins here I been saving in pickle for you? Fastened together in the fu

But Harran was already gone.

"Here now," Grian shouted after him, rather hopelessly, "you forgot your chicken!"

Grian sighed, finished the wine, and picked up his paunch-ing knife again.

"Oh, well. Soup tonight. Eh, chickie?"

The three did not meet at lunchtime, and di

"Eat something, for pity's sake," Harran said from under the covers. "It's on the kettlehook."

"I am not hungry," Siveni said.

"Then do come to bed," said Mriga.

"I don't want that either."

Harran and Mriga looked at one another in mild astonishment. "That's a first."

Siveni shrugged off her goatskin and threw it over a chair. "What's the use of losing my virginity," she said, "if I keep getting it back every morning?"

"Some people would kill for that," said Mriga.

"Not me. It hurts, and it's getting to be a bore. If I'd known what being a virgin goddess was going to mean down here, I would have gone out for being a fertility deity instead."

Mriga sat up in bed, wrapped a sheet around her, and swung her legs over the edge. "Siveni," she said, very quietly, "has it occurred to you that maybe we're not really goddesses anymore?"

Siveni looked up, not at Mriga, but at the poor mouldering mural, where Eshi danced in her gauze, and Us was godly-splendid, and everything was youth and luxury and divine merriment. The look was deadly. "Then why," Siveni said, just as quietly, "do we share this wretched heartbond, like good trinities do, so that all day I can hear you both thinking how unhappy you are, and how sorry for me you are, and how you miss the dog, and how we're trapped here forever?"

Harran sat up, too, tossing the other end of the sheet across his lap. "We're something new, I think," he said. "A mixture. Divine without being in heaven, mortal without-"

"I want to go back."

The words fell into silence.

"After this job," she said. "Harran, I'm sony. I'm not one of those dying-and rebom gods who makes the corn come up, and shuttles back and forth between being mortal and divine; I'm just not! It's not working for me! I've been fighting it, but the truth is that I was made for a place where my thought becomes fact in a second, where I shine, where I'm worth praying to. I was made to have power. And now I don't have it, and you're all suffering for my lack." She sat down against the table. It shifted under her weight, and the broken bit of dish propping the short leg crunched and broke with a sound that made them all start.

"I've got to go back," she said; Mriga looked unhappily at her. "How?" she said. "Nothing's working. You can't make so much as heat lightning these days."

"No," Siveni said. "But have we tried anything really large?"

"After what happened to Ischade..."

Siveni shrugged, a cold gesture. "She has her own problems. They don't necessarily apply to us."

"And Stormbringer..." Harran said.

Siveni cursed. The dust on the table began to smoke slightly with the vehemence of it. Siveni noticed it and smiled, approving. "Come on, Harran," she said. "The situation was no different when you called me out of heaven, and Savankala and the wretched Rankene gods were ru

"We," Harran said, and looked sober all of a sudden.

Both Mriga and Siveni looked at him in shock. "Surely you'd be coming with us," Mriga said.

Harran said nothing for a moment.

"Harran!"

"There is nothing here for you," Siveni said. "You've thought it a hundred times, you've cried about it when you thought we don't notice. You've seen hell, you've glimpsed heaven through us; how can mortal things possibly satisfy you anymore? Any more than they satisfy me? Or you," she said, looking at Mriga.

Mriga stared at the floor.

"Come on!" Siveni said, sounding a touch desperate. "You were bom a clubfooted idiot, you went through a whole life being used as a slave or a pincushion, living like a beast-and what do you do that's better now? You grind knives in the Bazaar as you always did, and take a little copper for it, but where's the joy in that? Where's the life you were going to lead with him in the Fields Beyond? All the peace, the joy? You expect that in Sanctuary?"

Harran and Mriga looked at each other. "There's something to be said for life," Harran said, as if doubting the words as they came out. "In heaven everything bends to suit you. Here, you bend-but you come back stronger sometimes-"

"Or you break," said Siveni.

Silence. The firelight and candlelight wavered on the mural; Eshi seemed to sway a little.

"I'm going back," Siveni said. "I know the spells. I wrote them. And you two-are you going to sit here and be miserable for all your short lives, on the off chance that it'll make you stronger?"

Mriga let out a long breath. "Harran?"

His eyes were for Siveni, as they had been so many times before, in statuary or the flesh. "I wanted you," he said.

They waited.

"It does seem selfish to want it all my way," he said. "All right. We'll try it."

Mriga sat back down on the bed. Siveni shifted her weight again, and again the table crunched and sagged.

"When will the Wall be done?" Harran said.

"Weeks yet," Siveni said, looking thoughtful. "It must be done before the frost sets in, or the mortar won't set. But they have the plans. They hardly need me to complete them." And she began to laugh softly, so that the table creaked.

Harran and Mriga exchanged looks. "You have to have known," Siveni said. "There are passages hidden in those walls already, alterations I made in the building that don't show in the plans. The wall is as full of holes as a bubble-cheese. No one knows-not even Molin. I was most careful. He'll think himself all secure, and until I choose to put the word in some oracle's ear, he will be. But that day-let Sanctuary look to its walls."

"Well," Harran said, "one thing only. What about Tyr? She's in hell. No one can go there anymore, from what I hear."

"But people can come out," Siveni said. "She's of us. Where we go, she'll go also, if she wants."

It seemed likely enough. "At any rate," said Siveni, "I shan't wait for the walls. All the work that I needed to handle myself is done. Let's get together the things we need and be gone tomorrow night. Not the mandrake spell, Harran. The older one, that you didn't have materials for the last time- the one that uses bread and wine and a god's blood. There'll be no accidents this time. We'll storm heaven, and settle down once and for all, and leave this poxhole to its own devices."

Harran shuddered once.

Mriga sighed and climbed back into the bed. "Come and get some rest, then," she said.

"Oh, all right," said Siveni, looking at them both with a lighter expression. It became apparent that rest was suddenly not on her mind.

Harran's ironic young face got lighter, too. He slid under the sheet and said, "Well, since it is my last night on earth..."