"If you just wouldn't-"
"Oh stop," Mriga said, waving her hand and sitting down on the crude bench that appeared behind her. In front of her appeared a rough table loaded down with meat and bread and watered wine of the kind Harran used to smuggle for them from the Stepsons' store. Now that she was a goddess, and not mad, Mriga could have had better; but old habits were hard to break, and the sour wine reminded her of home. "Want some?"
"Goddesses," Siveni said, looking askance at the table, "don't eat mortal food. They eat only-"
"'-the gods' food and drink only foaming nectar.' Yes, that's what I hear. So then how am I sitting here eating butcher's beef and drinking wine? Who could be here but us goddesses? Have some of this nice chine."
"No."
Mriga poured out a libation to Father Ils, then applied herself to a rack of back ribs. "The world of mortal men," she said presently, while wiping grease off one cheek, "mirrors ours, have you noticed? Or maybe ours mirrors theirs. Either way, have you noticed how preoccupied both of them are just now with cat fighting? The Beysa. Kama. Roxane. Ischade. If all that stopped-would ours stop too? Or if we stopped-"
"As if anything mortals do could matter to the gods," Siveni said, annoyed. She thumped the ground with her spear and an elegant marble bench appeared. She seated herself on it; a moment later a small altar appeared, on which the thigh bones of fat steers, wrapped attractively in fat and with wine poured over, were being burned in a brazier. She inhaled the savor and pointedly touched none of the meat.
"What a waste," Mriga said. "... That's just what Harran said, though. The gods became convinced that time could bind them-and so it did. They became convinced that other gods could drive them out-and so it happened. If we could convince men that the pantheons were willing to get along together, and that they should stop killing each other in gods' names ... then maybe the fighting would stop up here. Mirrors...."
Mriga was becoming better at omniscience-another attribute Siveni had lost to her-and so heard Siveni thinking that idiocy was one of those conditions that transcended even immortality. Mriga sighed. It was harder than she'd thought, this becoming one. Siveni didn't really want to share her attributes ... and Mriga didn't really want to give them up. Hopeless.... Then she caught herself staring at the rib bone in her hand, and by way of it became aware of an emptiness in the universe. "I miss my dog," Mriga said.
Siveni shrugged coolly. Most of her affections and alliances lay with the winged tribes, birds of prey or oracular ravens. But as the silence stretched out, she looked over at Mriga, and her face softened a bit.
"Goddess!-"
Mriga looked up at Siveni in surprise. The voice caught at both their hearts as if hooks had set deep there. Startled, the two of them looked around them and saw no one; then looked out of timelessness into time....
... and saw Harran go down under the hooves of Stepsons' horses, with half his head missing.
"My master," Mriga said, stricken. "My priest, my love-"
"Our priest," Siveni said, and sounded as if she could have said something else, but would not. She got up so quickly that the marble bench fell one way and the elegant brazier the other. Her spear leapt into her hand, sizzling. "I'll-"
"We'll," Mriga said, on her feet now. It was odd how eyes so icy with anger could still manage tears that flowed. "Come on."
Thunder cracked about them like sky ripping open. The neighbors all around turned in their direction and stared. Uncaring, two goddesses, or one, shot earthward from the bright floor of heaven, which, behind them, hesitated, then furtively turned to dirt.
The fire by the Maze-side street barricade had died down, and the street was empty except for the slain and the scavengers. Now and then someone passed by-a Stepson on one of their fierce horses, or a random member of some Nisi death squad, or one of Jubal's people just slipped out of the blue on business. No one noticed the grimy street idiot, sitting blank-eyed beside a trampled corpse; much less the sooty raven perched on a charred wagon and eyeing the same corpse, and the younger, arrow-shot one it lay on, with a cold and interested eye. Black birds were no unusual sight in Sanctuary these days.
"His soul's gone," Mriga whispered to the bird. "Long gone, and the poor body's cold. How? We came straight away-"
"Time here and there run differently," said the raven, voice hoarse and soft. "We might have done something while the tie between soul and body was still stretching thin. But it's too late now-"
"No," Mriga said.
"I should have leveled this place the last time I was here. This would never have happened!"
"Siveni, be still." Mriga sat by Harran's crushed remains, one hand stretched out to the awful ruin of his head; a purposeful gesture, for without actually touching the cold stiff flesh, she found herself unable to believe in death. That was one of the problems with being a god. Immortal, they often found it hard to take death seriously. But Mriga was taking it very seriously indeed.
She strained for omniscience; it obliged her a little. "We could get him back," she said. "There are ways...."
"And put him where? Back in this?" In her raven form, Siveni flapped down to the cold stiff mess of shattered bones and pulped muscle, and poked it scornfully with her beak. It didn't even bleed. "And if not here, where?"
"Another body? ..."
"Whose?"
Mriga's omniscience declined an answer. This didn't matter: she was getting an idea of her own ... one that scared her, but might work. "Let's not worry about it right now," she said. "We'll think of something."
"And even if we do ... who's to say his soul's survived what happened to him? Mortal souls are fragile. Sometimes death shatters them completely. Or for a long time ... long enough that by the time they've put themselves back together, it's no good putting them in a body; they've forgotten how to stay in one."
"He was a god for a little while," Mriga said. "That should count for something. And I don't think Harran was that fragile. Come on, Siveni, we have to try!"
"I'd sooner just burn the city down," the raven said, hopping and flapping up onto Mriga's shoulder as she stood up.
"A bit late for that, I fear." Mriga looked around her at the smoldering barricade, the scorched and soot-blackened faces of the surrounding buildings. "The cats have been busy setting one another's tails on fire, and not much caring what else catches and goes up as they run around screeching."
"Cats ..." Siveni said, sounding thoughtful.
"Yes: my thought exactly. We'll deal with one or two of them before we're done. But first things first. Where's my puppy?"
Tyr woke up with the upset feeling that usually meant she'd had a dream of the bad old days before the Presence came. But by the time she was fully awake, she had already realized that this time the feeling had nothing to do with any dream. For a few minutes that part of Sanctuary slammed its windows shut against the bitter howling that emanated from the garbage heap behind the Vulgar Unicorn. Tyr's throat was sore, though, with smoke and her long crying the day before, so that she coughed and retched and had to stop.