Blood Ties

Siveni threw her chlamys over his head and put the candles out.

The old Temple of Siveni Gray-Eyes, near one end of the Avenue of Temples, was not what it once had been. Its brazen doors, struck down by its a

Also still there, visible by the light of their one shuttered lamp, was an old round diagram traced on the floor in something black-bitumen, to judge by the scrape marks where curious feet had kicked at it through a year's time. Curious signs and letters and numbers in old languages were scribed smudgily there, and there was a brownish mark in the middle on the white marble, as if blood had been shed.

Harran put the lamp down, being sure its shutter was open no more than a hairsbreadth, and turned away from the street. "I wish the doors were still here," he said.

Siveni sniffed, putting down the bag she had been carrying. "Late for that now," she said. "Let's be about our business; it will take a while as is."

Mriga stepped up behind them and put down another bag, quietly begi

"What?"

"I thought we were splitting this expense three ways." Siveni somehow managed to look indignant, even when there was no light to do it in. "You goose, we don't need money where we're going! I'll make you a whole house out of silver when we get there."

"Deadbeat."

Harran began to laugh softly. "Stop it. What kind did you get?"

"Wizardwall red," she said. "A half-bottle each of wine of our age. Enough?"

"Plenty. The wineseller say anything?"

"I told him it was for a birthday party. What about the bread?"

"It rose. You needn't have worried about the yeast. The worst part was grinding the wretched stuff. I think it's going to have pebbles in it from the flints."

The gongs of one of the temples down the way spoke midnight, a somber word that echoed in the summer-night stillness. There was no breath of wind tonight, and the heat seemed to have gotten greater after the sun sent down, rather than less. A fat bloated moon, gibbous and a day from full, was riding high, its pallid light slanting down through the shattered windows and striking gemlights from the broken glass on the floor. Echoes tinkled down from the high ceiling as Siveni kicked the stuff aside.

Harran looked up, brushing away a piece of glass that Siveni had kicked at him. "Siveni-are you really sure this is going to work?"

She looked at him haughtily. "All those spells that have gone awry have been done by mere practitioners of magic. Not authors of it. I helped Father Us write this spell; I taught the bread and wine what to mean. All the dying gods who come back to heaven on a regular basis swear by it. Really, Harran, we'll never make a decent mage out of you if you don't learn to trust your materials."

"Have you ever actually done the spell? Yourself?" Mriga said under her breath as she got a rag out of her bag and began scrubbing some of the old markings off the floor.

"Not myself. I gave it to Shils to test; it worked all right. In fact, they started to wish in heaven that I hadn't given it to him. He's a terrible bore, and now there's no getting rid of him. Throw him out of heaven and a second later he's back."

They worked in silence for a few minutes, Harran laying out the bread, Mriga finishing her scrubbing, then uncorking the wine and setting out the various cups into which it would have to be poured by thirds and mixed with blood, Siveni writing with a bit of yellow chalk inside one of the areas that Mriga had cleaned off. At one point she stopped and looked critically at one graceful phrase. "I never did like that letter after I invented it," she said, "but after Us sent it out to men, it was too late to call the wretched thing back."

Mriga sat back on her heels and laughed at her almost-sister. "Is there anything you didn't invent?"

"The rotgut they distill in the back of the Unicorn. That's all Anen's fault."

A few minutes' more work and they stood up, finished. "Well enough," Siveni said. "Are you sure of the words?"

They could hardly avoid it, being in some ways Siveni themselves, and hearing her mind nearly as clearly as their own, at the moment.

"Then let's be about it. The sooner I see the inside of my house again, the happier I'll be."

"Our house," said Mriga, in a warning tone.

Siveni began to laugh. "Harran, we used to have the best fights-the house would change its nature every other minute. How the neighbor gods stared...." Her eyes flashed, even in that light so dim as to make expression impossible. For a moment Harran looked at her and saw again the crazed hoyden goddess he had fallen in love with; and Mriga smiled, remembering many fights won best two falls out of three, while the noise scandalized the divine neighbors. "If this works..." she said.

"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 begi

"... 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..."