Mriga just smiled at him and unslung her pouch, which contained all her tools: oil, rags, and five grades of whetstones. Others in the city worked with more tools, and charged more, but Mriga didn't need to. "There's no one up but us and the birds, Rahi," she said. "Don't make me laugh. Who's been here with a sword this morning that I've missed?"
"Eh, laugh, sure, sometime some big guy from the palace, you'll laugh then, charge him big, but no, he'll be uptown and you, not a copper, out on the stones again, you be careful!" He rammed the last canopy pole into its spot and glared at her, sweating, smiling.
Mriga shrugged. Rahi traditionally spoke in a long gasp with a laugh at the end, and dropped out words as if he was afraid to run out of them some day. "Hey, Rahi, if it gets slow over here I can always go over to the wall and sharpen the chisels, eh?"
Rahi was shaking out the canopy, a six-foot rectangle of light cotton with some long-faded pattern just barely visible in the weave. "No good'll come of that, mark," he said, "didn't need the wall until now, what for? But to hold out armies, or hold people in. Put a lock on a door and people start thinking there's things to steal, sure. That-the Torch-" He was plainly unwilling to say Molin Torchholder's name aloud. That was no surprise; many people were. Sanctuary was full of ears, and there was frequently no telling who they belonged to. "Playing kingmaker, that one. If he doesn't get us burnt in our beds ..." Rahi trailed off into grumbling. "Your man, how about him, eh?"
"He's doing all right. Word's been getting about that there's a good barber to be had in the Maze. We haven't even been robbed yet.... They let us be, seeing as how it might be Harran that has to patch one of them up some night after a job goes sour."
"Doesn't do to have the barber mad at you, no indeed; pots! Pots to sell!" Rahi shouted suddenly, as a housewife with a thumbsucking child in tow went by the stall. "Other lady, the tall one, she leams that too? No? 'Spose not, doesn't seem the 'prenticing type, too proud, she."
Mriga silently agreed. While still active in the Ilsig pantheon, Siveni had invented many a craft and passed them on to men. Medicine, the sciences, the fine arts, the making and using of weapons, all had been hers. Trapped in the world Siveni might be, but what she knew of the spells and arts of medicine was far more than the best of her priest-healers had known; and Harran had been only a minor one of those. "No," Mriga said, "she's on the wall. She does well enough."
She took out a favorite knife, a little black-handled thing already fine-edged enough to leave the wind bleeding, wiped it with oil, and began absently to whet it. More people were coming into the Bazaar. In front of them Yark the fuller went by with his flat cart. On top of it one of the Bazaar's two big calked straw pisspots lurched precariously, making ominous sloshing noises. "Any last minute contributions?" said Yark, grinning.
Mriga shook her head and grinned back. Rahi made an improbable remark about Yark's mother, the last part of which Mriga lost as a young man passing by paused to watch her work. She lifted the knife, a friendly gesture. "Have anything that needs some work, sir?"
He looked dubious. "How much?"
"Let's see."
He stepped closer, reached under his worn tunic and pulled out a shortsword. Mriga looked at him covertly as she turned over the sword in her hands. Young, in his mid-twenties, perhaps. Not too well dressed, nor too poorly. Well, that might be a relief. People had been doing better lately; the Beyfolk's money was making a difference. The sword was of a steel that had forge patterns like those in Enlibrite, and it was dark-bladed with rust, and had notches in it. Mriga tsked at the poor thing, while sorting other impressions ... for even though swathed in flesh and trapped away from heaven, a goddess has senses a mortal has not. A dubious blade, this, with the memory or the intention of blood on it. But in this town, what weapon hadn't killed someone?... That was after all what they were for. "Dark or bright?" she said.
"What?" The young man's voice was very raw and light, as if it might still tend to crack at times.
"I can polish it bright for you, if it needs to be seen," she said. "Or leave it dark in the blade, if it needs not." She had learned that delicate phrasing quickly, after accidentally scaring away a few potential customers whose work required that their blades be inconspicuous. "Either way, the edge is the same. Four in copper."
"Two."
"You think you're dealing with a scissors grinder? The Stepsons brought their blades to me, and the Prince's guard do still. The thing'll be able to slice one thought from the next when I'm done with it. Always assuming that you can keep it out of the tables at the Unicorn after this." That got his attention; that much Mriga had been able to pick up from the blade itself, though it wasn't talkative as steel went. "Three and a half, because 1 like your looks. No more."
The young man screwed up his face a little, slightly ruining those looks. "All right, do it dark. How long?"
"Half an hour. Take mine," she said, and handed him her "leaner," a plain, respectable longknife with quillons of browned steel. "Don't 'lose' it," Mriga said then, "so I don't have to give you a demonstration with this one."
The young man ducked his head and slipped into the growing crowd. Rahi said something not in a bellow, and it got lost in the increasing noise of people crying fish and cloth and ashsoap.
"What?"
"You ever have to demonstrate?" he wheezed in her ear.
Mriga smiled. Siveni, so long unprayed-to by mortals, had been losing her attributes. And as such things will, one attribute-the affinity for things with edges-had slipped across into mortality and into the person best equipped to handle it: Mriga. "Not personally," she said. "Last time, the knife did it itself. Just lost its balance all of a sudden... slipped out of the thief's hand and stuck her right-well, whatever. Word got around. It's not a problem now."
Yark the fuller went by with the cart again. This one was sloshing. "Last chance!" he said.
"Pots," Rahi bellowed beside her, "pots! Buy pots! You, madam! Even a fish sorry-even a Beysib needs a pot!"
Mriga rolled her eyes and began to whet the new knife.
When Molin Torchholder let it be known that he was going to complete the walls of Sanctuary, the noise of merriment about the new jobs that would become available was almost as loud as Stormbringer's fireworks had been. There were, of course, quieter conversations about what the old fox was up to this time. Some dared to say that his sudden industriousness on the Empire's behalf had less to do with his desire to keep Sanctuary safe for the Imperials, as to keep it safe from them. Some day, not too far off, when Sanctuary's own trade was well enough established, when it had enough of its own gold, and was secure in its gods again... then the gates could swing shut, and Molin and others would stand on the walls and laugh in the Empire's face....
Of course those who said such things said them in whispers, behind bolted doors. Those who did not lost the tongues that had spoken them. Molin didn't bother himself with such small business; his spies tended to it. He had too many things to take care of himself. There was his new god to placate, old ones to assist out of existence, Kadakithis and (in a different fashion) the Beysa to manage. And there was the wall.