Now the hand was bound with clean linen, and Harran's tools were clean and in their satchel. The man's head was lolling to one side, an aftereffect of the lockjaw remedy. Timidly, his wife came to Harran and offered him a handful of coppers. She tried to be nonchalant about it, but it was too plain from her eyes that they were all she and her man had. Harran considered, took one, for form's sake, and then professed great interest in one of the chickens, a rather scrawny red hen that looked good for soup, if nothing else. "How about her, eh?" he said. "Looks like there's nice pickings on her."
The joiner's wife saw instantly what Harran was trying to do, and began protesting. But the protests were feeble, and after a while Harran walked out of the hut with a copper, and a copper-colored chicken, and blessings raining on his back. He walked as fast as he could out of that particular comer of the Maze. It was always the blessings that embarrassed him the most.
The only good thing about them, Harran thought as he made his way toward the Bazaar, was that they made it unnecessary for him to cry his wares like a streethawker. In the old days, as Siveni's priest, people had known where to come for healing, and had done so without any fuss. Even in the Stepsons' barracks, they had known. It had galled him, after the return from hell, to have to go hunting the sick and injured like some grave robber in a hurry....
Graves.... It was a thought. There was an old friend he had not seen since shortly after he got back from hell. He began a detour, and stopped in a wine shop for a pot of cheap red, then headed across town toward the chamel house.
The day was leaning toward noon; the sun bumed down and the streets stank under it. What did I ever see in this foul place? he wondered as he went. The answer was plain enough; Siveni's priesthood, which had been all the life he wanted. But then the priesthood was banished as Molin Torchholder went systematically about making the smaller Ilsig gods unwelcome. Then he had started making the best of things, working with the Stepsons, and with their poor replacements, until the real ones came down on the stand-ins' barracks and slaughtered them wholesale.
And Harran with them.
Alive again now, in a new body, he had rather hoped that the memory of being dead would go away. Instead it got stronger. Images of hell laid themselves pale and chill over daylight Sanctuary-the cold-smoking river, the silences broken only by the abstracted moaning of the sleepwalking damned. More remotely, through the bond he shared with Siveni and Mriga, and even with Tyr, he saw things he had never seen himself. The great black pile of the palace of hell's rulers; hell's gate burst inward by a spear that sizzled with lightnings; Ischade the terrible, coolly leading them down the path into darkness; Tyr flying in splendid rage at the throat of a monster ten times her size. And one image, brief but clear, of the cold black marble floor of that dark palace seen as if by one who groveled upon it... while just out of eyeshot, Siveni's bright helm rolled on the floor where it had slipped off her as she bowed her proud power down, begging for Harran's life.
For him... all that done for him. He could never get used to it. And no matter how many times Mriga and Siveni protested that it was nothing, that they would do it again, he could not believe them. Oh, they believed it when they said it. But their faces from day to day, as Siveni came home looking drawn and grim from the job she had made for herself, as Mriga looked at her goddess-sister with pity, and at Harran with helpless, slightly sorrowful love-their faces betrayed them. They were exiled from the heaven where they belonged, and condemned to this wretched hole of a town, for his sake.
There must be something I could do, he thought.
The breath went out of him in annoyance as he sighted the enamel house not far away. He had been something of a sorcerer once; most of the priests of Siveni had been, since there was as much use for magic in the healing and building arts as anywhere else. But since Stonnbringer arrived, all other gods' powers were diminished-that was half his problem-and after the globes were destroyed, spells tended to fall to pieces or produce unlikely results.
Just ahead of him, a small ragged man crouched in an alleyway, wearing a furtive look. He glanced up at Harran, looked very cautiously around him, and whispered, "Dust? You want some dust, mister?"
Harran stopped and glared at the dustmonger, who shifted uneasily under the stare. "I don't want anything of Storm-bringer's," he said. "As if that stuff does anything ... which it doesn't." And he brushed past and made for the chamel house.
The amazing smell of the place briefly drove everything, even his annoyance at the dustmonger, out of his head. Farmers came from all over to get at its muckheap, and barbers and surgeons came here for corpses to practice on. Harran had other reasons. He choked his way through the long low building and prayed for his nose to turn itself off quickly.
Close to the end of the building, by the big pickling vats where innards were thrown until they could be buried, he found Grian. Grian had worked with Siveni's priests in the old days, supplying corpses for their anatomy classes, and he knew the last of Siveni's priests in Sanctuary rather better than Harran wanted to admit. He looked Harran up and down, noted the winepot under one arm and the chicken under the other, and a look of dull delight came into his eye. He tossed the paunching knife he was using to the slab where his present project lay, and said, "Lad, where you been this month and more? Thought you'd died. Again."
Harran had to laugh. "Not sure I could."
Grian moved his big red-headed bulk over to a bench where jars with secondhand stomachs and intestines were waiting for the sausagemakers. He pushed the jars off to the side, and Harran sat down next to him and offered him the winepot. The chicken, released, fell to scratching with great interest in the straw on the floor.
They spent a little while just drinking in companionable silence. Finally: "Home life keeping you busy?" Grian said.
"Not home so much. Work. There are too many sick people in this town, and only one of me." He took another drink. "Same as usual. You?"
"Business, business." Grian waved around him, where ten other men and women were handling the day's supply of dead bodies. "Had to hire on more help for the summer. Putting in a new muckpit, too, 'n' a new ossuary. Old one's full up. Muckpit kept overflowing. Neighbors complained." Grian laughed, a rough cheerful sound, though Harran noticed that his friend didn't breathe too deeply in the process. "They piffles, they're ruffling about trying to get the better of things again. No good. They kill somebody now and the noble-folk, the Imperials, everybody 'n' his brother comes down on 'em like bricks. Half the people in here are piffles this morning. Arrowshot, knifed, you name it. People in the city gettin' tired of them. About time, I say."
Harran agreed, passed the winepot back. Grian took a long one. "This new body," he said, elbowing Harran genially in the ribs, "working OK? Eh? Be interesting to get inside it one day, see what makes it tick."