"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 beginning to be upset. He knew this spell by reputation, though it was one that the younger priests had never been let near. He knew perfectly well that even now, at the first invocation, terrible quiet should have fallen around them, all light should have been extinguished, even the cold moonfire falling through the window should have hit the en-sorcelled marble and gone dark. But none of that was happen-ing.
"... 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..."
They all three took up their loaves of bread and began to eat them. Harran reassured himself that there was not too much honey in the bread. In fact, it had risen rather nicely. In the great silence left after he had eaten the little cake, he noticed abruptly how very silent it was getting-
"And likewise behold ye this wine of my age, burning under the sun in the grape as my blood has burned in lifelight in my veins all my days of this world, and turned to wine of its own virtue as the blood and thought of mortalkind tumeth to the divine of its virtue and in its time. Now do I drink and make it so part of me, and myself part of it, both alike immortal ..."
Harran drank the lovely old vintage, reassured, feeling it slide down his throat like velvet fire as the spell took, made it more than wine, in token of his and the others being more than merely mortal. Across the circle, Siveni made a face at the taste of wine only nine months old; Harran was hard put not to grin and spill his own. The silence was thick. At the sides of the great room, frozen eyes shone dulled in the spell-light that was rising about them. Harran's heart grew fierce inside him. It was going to work. Those bright fields that he had glimpsed, that long peace, that eternity to love in, to work in, to be more than mortal in-his, theirs, at last-
"... and these tokens offered up, these rites enacted," Siveni said, her voice becoming temfyingly clear though she had not raised it a whit, "as last sign of my intent I offer up my blood, come of gods in the olden time, returned to them at last; wherein godhead resides past time or loss, and wherein it may be regained..."
They stepped forward, all three. The night held its breath as Mriga picked up the cup, half full of a mixture of the three wines of their age. From her belt she slipped out her leaner knife. It gleamed like a live thing in the spellfire, and throbbed as if it had a heart. Siveni put up her arm.
"... that we may drink of it, as the law has always been, as I have made it, and so be restored to our own. By this token let gates be opened to us..." She never flinched as the knife slit her wrist the short way, as the blood ran down and into the wine. "... let night and day part for us, let time die for us; let it be done!"
She passed Harran the cup. He drank, thinking to ignore the taste, and finding that it was more as if the taste ignored him; the liquid in the cup was full of such power that his senses drowned in it. He staggered, seeking light or balance, finding neither. He felt as transparent as its glass. Blindly he reached out, felt Mriga take the cup from him. He felt her own drowning as if it were his. Then Siveni took it, and drained it; the great uprushing clarity that leapt into her mind was a blinding thing, and Harran nearly fell to his knees. He thought he had seen the heavens. He saw now how wrong he was. Something clutched at him: Mriga. He held onto her slender arms as if she were the last connection to reality. He was seeing things now, though not with the eyes. Other eyes there were, that watched them all from within the circle; not dull beasts' eyes like the stupefied rats', but eyes that danced and were glad, and glowed in a small dog's head, waiting for them to break through to touch the owner-
"Let all be open," Siveni cried, "let the way be prepared for us; we pass! We pass!" And Harran felt her lift the cup, to dash it against the written marble and open the way; and he felt her hesitate; and he felt her sway.
His eyes were working again, much against their will. There was moonlight where there should not have been, and Siveni stood bemused, looking at her wounded arm, watching the blood run down.
"It's wrong," she said. "It shouldn't hurt."
And she fell to the floor, and the cup went flying out of the circle and crashed in the wrong spot, all its virtue spilled in a black pool under the moon.
Harran fell down beside her. The edges of the wound were dark and inflamed. He looked at Mriga in horror. "The knife..."
"Poison," she said, her face in anguish. "But it never left me all day-"
"Yesterday," Harran said.
In Mriga's shocked mind he saw the young man, with his knife with death in it. One of the Torchholder's spies.
They started up in horror together, neither sparing more than a look for the fair young form of Siveni, that had lived thousands of years as an Ilsig goddess, and had now had those thousands of years catch up with her in one withering second.
That was when the silvertipped arrows came whistling in, and feathered them both. They fell.
When the backwash of the spell had died down a bit, in behind his men came Molin Torchholder, who missed nothing in this city, especially nothing done by those whom mere silly love made careless. Stormbringer, too, was not quite settled yet, and had spoken a word in his ear about rogue deities climbing over his walls, in one direction or another. Molin carefully broke the circle, kicked the shattered glass of the cup of blood and wine about, and nudged with his toe the skin-and-bones body of his erstwhile architect.