Wings of Omen

She looked at him out of those oblique eyes, the amusement in them becoming drier by the moment. "A sophist! Beware, lest I ask you who shaves the barber. Whom then are you pla

"Madam," he said all at once, for the air was getting deadly still again, "the old Gods of Ilsig have been had. Had like a blind Rankan in the Bazaar. And it's their idiot mortal worshippers who've sold them this bill of goods. They've fooled them into thinking that the things mortals do have to matter to the powers of gods! Corpses buried under thresholds, necklaces cast in bells or forged into swords, a cow sacrificed here or a bad set of entrails there- It's rubbish! But the Ilsig gods sit languishing in their Otherworld because of it all, thinking they're powerless, and the Rankan gods swagger around and hit things with lightning bolts and sire clandestine children on poor mortal maids, and think they own the world. They don't!"

Ischade blinked again, just once, that very conscious gesture.

Harran swallowed and kept going. "The Ilsigi gods have started believing in time, lady. The worship of mortals has bound them into it. Sacrifices at noon, savory smokes going up at sunset, the Ten-Slaying once a year-every festival that happens at a regular interval, every scheduled thing- has bound them. Gods may have made eternity, but mortals made clocks and calendars and tied little pieces of eternity up with them. Mortals have bound the gods! Rankan and Ilsigi both. But mortals can also free them." He took a long breath. "If they've lost timelessness-then this spell can find it for Them again. For at least one of them, who can open the way for the others. And once the Ilsig gods are wholly free of our world-"

"-They will drive out the Rankan gods, and the Beysib goddess too, and take back their own again?..." Ischade smiled-slow cool derision-but there was interest behind it. "Mighty work, that, for a mortal. Even for one who spends so much of his time wielding those powerful sorcerer's tools, the cautery and the bone-saw. But one question, Harran. Why?"

Harran stopped. Some vague image of Ils stomping all over Savankala, of Shipri punching Sabellia's heart out, and his own crude satisfaction at the fact, was all he had. At least, besides the image of maiden Siveni, warlike, impetuous, triumphing over her rivals-and later settling down again to the arts of peace in her restored temple-

And Ischade smiled, and sighed, and put her hood up. "No matter," she said. There was vast amusement in her voice-probably, Harran suspected, at the prospect of a man who didn't know what he wanted, and would likely die of it. Nothing confounds the great alchemies and magics so thoroughly as unclear motives. "No matter at all," Ischade said. "Should you succeed at what you intend, there'll be merry times hereabouts, indeed there will. I should enjoy watching the proceedings. And should you fail..." The slim dark shoulders lifted in the slightest shrug. "At least I know where good quality mandrake's to be had. Good evening to you, master barber. And good fortune-if there is such a thing."

She was gone. The wind got up again, and whining, ran away....

Of the greater sorceries, one of the elder priests had long ago said to Harran, in warning, "Notice is always taken." The still, dark-eyed notice that had come upon Harran in the graveyard troubled him indeed. He went home that night shivering with more than cold; and, once in bed, kicked Tyr perfunctorily out of it and pulled Mriga in- using her with something more than his usual impersonal effectiveness. No mere scratching of the itch tonight. He was looking, hopelessly, for something more-some flicker of feeling, some returning pressure of arms. But the lousiest Downwind whore would have suited his purposes a hundred times better than the mindless, compliant warmth that lay untroubled under him or which jerkily, aimlessly wound its limbs about his. Afterward Harran pushed her out too, leaving Mriga to crawl to the hearth and curl in the ashes while he tossed and turned. For all the sleep he found in bed, Harran might as well have been lying in ashes himself, or embers.

Ischade.... No good could come of her attention. Who knew if, for her own amusement, she might not sell to some interested party-Molin Torchholder, say the information that one lone, undefended man was going to bring back one of the old Ilsig gods in a few days? "Oh, Siveni..." he whispered. He would have to move quickly, before something happened to stop him.

Tonight.

Not tonight, he thought in a kind of reluctant horror. That same horror made him stop and wonder, in a priest's self-examination, about its source. Was it just the familiar repulsion he always felt at the thought of the old ruin on the Avenue of Temples? Or was it something else?

-A shadow on the edge of his mind's vision, a feeling that something was about to go wrong. Someone. Someone who had been watching him-

Raik?

All the more reason for it to be tonight, then. He was sure he had seen Raik staggering into the barracks-probably to snore off another night of wineshops. Harran had thought to go back twice to the temple-once to retrieve the old roll book, and then, after studying it, once to perform the rite. But even that would be attracting too much attention. It would have to be tonight.

Harran lay there, postponing getting up into the cold for just a few seconds more. Since that day five years ago when the Rankans served the writ on Irik, he had not been inside Siveni's temple. For so long now I've been done with temples. Going into one, now-and hers-do I truly want to reopen that old wound?

He stared at the ski

He swore softly, got up, got dressed. There, in the wooden box shoved under his sideboard, were the bones of the hand, wired and mounted into the correct gesture, with the ring of base metal on the proper finger; there was the mandrake, hastily bound in cord twisted of silk and lead, with a silvered steel pin through its "body" to hold it harmless. Both hairpin and ring had come from a secondhand whore that Yuri had recently brought home for the barracks. Harran, last in line and mildly concerned that the woman might notice when her things went missing, had "considerately" brought her a stoup of drugged wine. Then he swived her until the wine took, lifted ring and pin, and slipped away-first leaving her a largish tip where no one but she would be likely to find it.

So-almost set. He picked up the box, went over to the comer by the table for a few more things-a small flask, a little bag of grain, and another of salt, a lump of bitumen. Then he checked around one last time. Mriga lay snoring in the ashes. Tyr was curled nose-to-tail in a compact brown package under the bed, snoring too, a note higher than Mriga. Harran mussed the meager bedclothes and lumpy bolster more or less into a body shape, snatched up and flung over him his old soot-black cloak, and made his way silently through the Stepsons' stableyard.