Wings of Omen

He dashed the tears out of his eyes, put the lantern down, flung his cloak down on the dusty marble, and picked up his box. One more circle he would need in which to work the sorcery itself. If his back still hurt him, Harran didn't notice it now. Round the vacant pediment he went with the bitumen, not counting paces this time, rather fighting down his bitter anger enough to remember the words that needed to be thought again and again to confine within this i

He straightened up as quickly as he could, for there was worse to come. Simple this spell might be, but that wouldn't keep it from being strenuous; and first he needed the rite. Breaking and resealing the circle according to procedure, he went to get it.

Normally the location of the safe-crypt was not information that would have been entrusted to a junior priest, but in the haste surrounding the exile of Siveni's priesthood, quite a few secrets had slipped out. Harran had been one of those conscripted to help old Irik hide away the less important documents, old medical and engineering texts and spells. "We may yet find a use for these, in a better hour," Irik had said to Harran. Just then he had had his arms full of parchments, his nose full of dust, and his mind full of fear; the words had meant nothing. But now Harran blessed Irik as he went around to behind where the statue had been, stepped on the proper pieces of flooring in the proper order, and saw the single block by the rear wall fall slowly away into darkness.

The stair was narrow and steep, with no banister. Harran held up the lantern at the bottom of it and went rummaging, sneezing a lot as he did. Parchments, book rolls, and wax tablets were piled and scattered every which way. It was the rolls he went for. Again and again Harran undid linen cords, spread a roll out in a cloud of dust and sneezes, to find nothing but a spare copy of the temple's bookkeeping for the third month of such and such a year, or some tired old philosophical treatise, or a cure for the ague (ox-fat rubbed together with mustard and ground red-beetle casings, the same applied to the chest three times a day). This went on till his eyes began to water, rebelling against the poor light, and Harran's mind stopped seeing what he read and kept wandering away to worry about the time. Night was leaning toward morning; this was the time to do the spell, if ever-before dawn, herald of new begi

He blinked and read the words again. It wasn't hard; they were beautifully written in an Old Ilsig hieratic script. "... of the Lost, that is to say, an infallible spell for finding the lost and strayed and stolen. The spell needeth first the hand of a brave and living man, the same to be offered up in the spell's working by the celebrant; and it needeth also a mandrake root, called by some peristupe, dug of a night without moon or star, and treated according to the disciplines, also to be so offered; and needeth as well some small deal of salt and wheat and wine, and a knife for blood to propitiate the Ones Below; and lastly those instruments by which the boundary for the spell shall be made.

"First dig your mandrake..."

Harran scrambled to his feet in the dust and the dark, sneezing wildly and not caring. Up the stairs, back into the circle-cutting the knot to let himself in, sealing it shut again behind him. He sat down on the vacant pediment amid the rubble and began to read. It was all here, much as he remembered it, with the little thumbnail sketch of the diagram to be drawn inside the circle, and the rite itself. Part in a very old Ilsig indeed, part in the vernacular. Simple words, but oh, the power in them. Harran's heart began to hammer.

Something moaned, and Harran started-then realized it was only the wind, building now to such a crescendo that he could hear it even inside the temple's thick stone. Good, he thought, picking up the piece of bitumen again and rising to his feet, let it storm. Let them think that something's about to happen. For it is!

He set to work. The diagram was complex, seemingly a picture of some kind of geometrical solid, though one in which the number of sides seemed to change each time one counted them. The finished diagram made an uneasy flickering in the mind, a feeling that got worse as Harran started setting the necessary runes and words into the pattern's angles. Then came the salt, cast to the cardinal points with the usual purifacatory rhyme; and the wheat-two grains at the primary point, four at the next, eight at the one after that, and so on around the seven. Harran chuckled a little, light-headed with excitement. That particular symbol of plenitude had always been a joke among the student priests; a sixty -four point pattern would have emptied every granary in the world. Nothing left now but the wine, the knife, the mandrake, the hand....

The wind was whining through the pillars outside like a dog that wanted in. Harran shivered. It's the cold, he thought, and then swallowed again and silently took it back; to lie during a spell could be fatal. He went to the diagram's heart, feeling as he went the small uncomfortable jolts of power that came of passing over it. Forces besides his were moving tonight, lending what he did abnormal power. Just as well, he thought. Harran opened the wine-flask and set it beside the center-point, then put the hand in one of his pockets and the mandrake in the other. In his left hand he held the book-roll, open to the right spot. With the right he drew his knife.

It was his best, Mriga's favorite. He had set her at it that afternoon, and not stopped her for a long while. Now its edge caught the dim lantern-light with a flicker as live as an eye's. He held it up in salute to the four directions and their Guardians above and below, faced northward, and began to pronounce the spell's first passage.

Resistance began immediately; it became an effort to push the words out of his throat. His tongue went leaden. Still Harran spoke the words, though more and more slowly; stopping in mid-spell could be as fatal as lying. The wind outside rose to a malevolent scream, drowning him out. He was reduced to struggling one word out, drawing several rasping breaths, then starting another. Harran had never thought that just fifty words, a few sentences, would seem long. They did now. Ten words remained, every one of them looking as long as a whole codex and as heavy as stone. At the fifth one he stammered, and outside the screaming wind scaled up into an insane yell of triumph. In a burst of fear he choked out two words very fast, one after another. Then the second -to-last, more slowly, with a wrenching effort like passing a stone. And the last, that went out of him like life leaving and smote him down to the floor.

With his falling came the light, blazing in through the temple's high narrow windows like the sky splitting; and the thundercrack, one deafening bolt that reverberated over the roofs of Sanctuary-breaking what glass remained unbroken in the temple's windows, and jolting loose what was already shattered, raining it all down on the marble floor in a storm of razory chimings. Then stillness again. Harran lay on his face, tasting marble and bitumen against his tongue and blood in his mouth, smelling ozone, hearing the last few drops of the glass rain.