Sanctuary's gods, like most others, resided by choice in the timelessness which both contains all mortal time and space, and lies within them. That timelessness is impossible to understand-even the patron gods of the sciences shake their heads at its physics-and difficult to describe, especially to mortals, whose descriptions necessarily involve time, in the telling if nowhere else.
Light, overwhelming, is what most mortals remember who pass through those realms in dream or vision. The fortunate dead who come there, having given up time, see things differently. So do the gods. In that place where the absence of time makes space infinitely malleable, they rear their bright dwellings and demesnes with no tool but thought, and alter them at whim-changing, too, their own forms as mortals change clothes, for similar reasons: hygiene, courtesy, boredom, special occasions. Like mortals, too, they have their pet issues and favorite causes. There are collaborations and feuds, amours with mortals or other divinities, arguments between pantheons or within them. Some of the gods find this likeness to mortal behavior distressing. Most profess not to care, just as most profess to ignore the deeper light that often broods beyond and within the Bright Dwellings, watching what gods and mortals do.
Recently the neighborhood had seen the advent of one Dwelling that wasn't always bright. It tended to be either a high, chaste, white-columned temple of the kind aesthetically promising mortals built, or a low thatched hut of stone crouching defiantly in a rammed dirt yard. But either way, it always had a positively mortal look about it that passing deities variously found tasteless, deliciously primitive, or avant-garde. The dwelling's changes sometimes came several to the minute, then several to the second; and after such spasms lightningbolts tended to spray out the windows or doors, and thumps and shouting could be heard from inside. The neighbors soon discovered that the division of this house against itself was symptomatic. The goddess(es) living there were in the middle of a personality crisis.
"Do you ever think about anything but clothes?!"
"At least I do think about them now and then. You're a goddess, you can't go out in those-those rags!"
"I beg your pardon! This shift is just well broken in. It's comfortable. And it covers me ... instead of leaving half of me hanging out, like that old tunic of Ils's that you never take off. Or that raggy goatskin cape with the ugly face on it."
"I'll have you know that when my Father shakes 'that raggy goatskin' over the armies of men, they scatter in terror-"
"The way it smells, no wonder. And that's our Father. Oh, do put the vase down, Siveni! I'll just make another. Besides, when has Ils scattered an army lately? Better give him that thing back: He could probably use it just now."
"Why, you-"
Lightnings whipped the temple's marble, scarring it black. Screeching, a silver raven napped out from between a pair of columns and perched complaining in the topmost branches of a golden-appled tree a safe distance away. The lightning made a lot of noise as it lashed about, but even a casual observer would have noticed that it did little harm. Shortly it sizzled away to nothing, and the stagy thunder that had accompanied it faded to echoes and whispers, and died. The temple convulsed, squatted down, and got brown and gray, a beast of fieldstone and thatch. Then it went away altogether.
Two women were left standing there on the plain, which still nickered uncertainly between radiance and dirt. One of them stood divinely tall in shimmering robes, crested and helmed, holding a spear around which the restrained lightnings sulkily strained and hissed-a form coolly fair and bright, all godhead and maidenhead, seemingly unassailable. Just out of arms' reach of her stood someone not so tall, hardly so fair, dressed in grime and worn plain cloth with patches, crowned with nothing but much dark curly hair, somewhat snarled, and armed only with a kitchen knife. They stared at each other for a moment, Siveni and Mriga, warrior-queen of wisdom and idiot wench. It was the idiot who had the thoughtful, regretful look, and the Lady of Battles who had the black eye.
"It's got to stop," Mriga said, dropping the knife in the shining dust and turning away from her otherself. "We tear each other up for nothing. Our town is going to pieces, and our priest is all alone in the middle of it, and we don't dare try to help him until our own business is handled ..."
"You don't dare," Siveni said scornfully. But she didn't move.
Mriga sighed. While she had been insane just before she became a goddess, her madness had not involved multiple personalities-so that when she suddenly discovered that she was one with Siveni Gray-Eyes, there was trouble. Siveni was Ils's daughter, mistress of both war and the arts and sciences, the Ilsig gods' two-edged blade Herself: both Queen of cool wisdom, and hellion God-daughter who could take any god in the Ilsig pantheon, save her father, for best two falls out of three. Siveni had not taken kindly to losing parts of herself into time, or to seeing the Rankan pantheon raised to preeminence in Sanctuary, or to coming off a poor second in a street brawl with a mortal. But all of those had happened; and the first, though now mending in timelessness, irked her most.
When gods become snared in time and its usages-as had many of Sanctuary's gods their attributes tend to leach across the barrier, into time, and embed themselves in the most compatible mortal personality. In Siveni's case, that had been Mriga. Even as a starving idiot-beggar she had loved the edge on good steel. Sharpening swords and spears was the work to which Harran had most often put her, after he found her in the Bazaar, dully whetting a broken bit of metal on a rock. Clubfooted and feeble-willed as she was, she had somehow "managed" to be found by the last of Siveni's priests in Sanctuary, "managed" to be taken in by him as the poor and mad had always been taken into her temple before. And when Harran went out one night to work the spell that would set Siveni free of time and bring her back into the world, to the ruin of the Rankan gods, Mriga was drawn after him like steel to the magnet.
The spell he had used would infallibly bring back the lost. It did, not only bringing back Siveni to her temple, but also retrieving Harran's lost divinity and Mriga's lost wits. Harran, blindly in love with his goddess in her whole and balanced form, had been shocked to find himself dealing not with the gracious maiden mistress of the arts of peace, but with a cold fierce power made testy and irrational by the loss of vital attributes. Siveni had been quite willing to pull all Sanctuary down around all the gods' ears if the deities of Ranke would not meet her right in battle. Harran tried to stop her-for vile sink though it was, Sanctuary was his home-and Siveni nearly killed him out of pique.
Mriga, though, had stopped her. She had recovered the conscious godhead every mortal temporarily surrenders at birth, and was therefore in full control of the attributes of wise compassion and cool judgment that Siveni had lost into time. She and her otherself fought, and after Mriga won the fight, both saw swiftly that they were one, though crippled and divided. They needed union, and timeless-ness in which to achieve it. Neither was available in the world of mortals. With that knowledge they had turned, as one, to Harran. They took their leave of him, healing the hand maiming that Siveni had inflicted on him, and then departed for those fields mortals do not know. Of course they planned to come back to him-or for him-as soon as they were consolidated.
But even in timelessness, union was taking longer than either had expected. Siveni was arrogant in her recovered wisdom, angry about having lost it, and bitter that it had found nowhere better to lodge than an ignorant cinder-sitting house-slut. Mriga was annoyed at Siveni's snobbery, bored with her constant anecdotes about her divine lineage-she told the same ones again and again-and most of all tired of fighting. Unfortunately she too was Siveni: when challenged she had to fight. And being mortal and formerly mad, she knew something Siveni had never learned: how to fight dirty. Mriga always won, and that made things worse.