But pity was another of the old habits. "Shal," Harran said. "You know what I have to do."
"Noooooo!!"
Harran paused... finally shook his head. "Now," he said to the others, and lifted the knife. "Hold him tight."
The hand gave him trouble. Yuri lost his grip, and the man writhing on the table jerked the arm about wildly, spraying them all.
"I told you to hold him," Harran said. He knocked Raik's hands away from Shal's face, took hold of Shal's head, lifted it, and struck it hard against the tabletop. The screaming, which Harran had refused to hear, abruptly stopped. "Idiots," he said. "Raik, give me the poker."
Raik bent to the fire, straightened again. Harran took the poker away from him, pinned the forearm to the table, and slowly rolled the red-hot iron over the torn flesh and broken vessels, being careful of their sealing. The stink in the air pushed Raik away from the table like a hand.
The rest of the work was five minutes labor with a bone needle and catgut. Then Harran went rooting about among the villainous pots and musty jars on the high shelf in the wall.
"Here," he said, throwing a packet to the poor retching Raik. "This in his wine when he wakes up... it may be a while. Don't waste the stuff; it's scarcer than meat. Yuri, they're roofing in the next street over. Go over there and beg a pipkin of tar from them-when it's just cool enough to touch, paint the stump with it. Stitches and all." Harran stood, his nose wrinkling. "And when you get him out of here, change his britches."
"Harran," Raik said bitterly, holding the unconscious Shal to him. "You could have made it easier on him. - You and I, we're going to have words as soon as Shal's well enough to be left alone."
"Bright, Raik. Threatening the barber who just saved his life." Harran turned away. "Idiot. Just pray the razor doesn't slip some morning."
The Stepsons went away, swearing. Harran busied himself cleaning up the mess throwing sawdust on the table to sop up the blood and urine, and scraping Raik's hangover remedy into a spare pot. Assuredly he'd be back for it; if not today, then tomorrow, after Raik had tried to drink his way out of his misery.
The sound of feet thudding on the floor eventually drew Harran's attention. Mriga was still pedaling earnestly away on a grindstone she wasn't touching, holding out to it a knife she didn't have. "Stop it," Harran said. "Come on, stop that. Go do something else."
"Ghh," said Mriga, ecstatically involved, not hearing him. Harran grabbed Mriga and stood her up and shoved her, blinking, out into the sunlight. "Go on," he said at her back. "Go in the stable and clean the tack. The bridles, Mriga. The shinies."
She made a sound of agreement and stumbled off into the light and stink of the Stepsons' stableyard. Harran went back inside to finish his cleaning. He scraped the sawdust off the table, threw the poker back in the fire, and picked up the last remnant of the unpleasant morning from the spattered dish into which he'd thrown it: a brave man's hand.
And lightning struck.
I could do it, he thought. At last, I could do something.
Harran sank down on the bench beside the table, speechless, almost sightless. There was a whimper at the door. Tyr stood in the doorway with her big pointed ears going up and down in uncertainty, and finally decided that Har-ran's silence meant it was all right for her to come in again.
She slipped softly up beside her master, put her nose under one of his hands, and nudged him for attention.
Without really noticing her, he began scratching her behind the ears. Harran wasn't even seeing the walls of the hut. It was both yesterday and tomorrow for him, and the present was suddenly charged with frightful possibility....
Yesterday looked as little like today as could be imagined. Yesterday was white and gold, a marble and chryselephantine glory-the colors of Siveni's little Sanctuary temple, in the days before the Rankans. Why do I look back on it with such longing? he wondered. / was even less successful there than I am here. But all the same, it had been his home. The faces had been familiar, and if he was a minor priest, he was also a competent one.
Competent-. The word had a sting to it yet. Not that it was anything to be ashamed of. But they'd told him often enough, in the temple, that there were only two ways to do the priestly magics. One was offhand, by instinct, as a great cook does; a whispered word here, an ingredient there, all done by knowledge and experience and whim-an effortless manipulation by the natural and supernatural senses of the materials at hand. The other way was like that of the beginning cook, one not expert enough to know what spices went with what, what spells would make space curdle. The merely competent simply did magic by the book, checking the measurements and being careful not to substitute, in case a demon should rise or a loaf should fail to.
Siveni's priests had looked down on the second method; it produced results, but lacked elegance. Harran could have cared less about elegance. He'd never gotten further than the strict reading and following of "recipes"-in fact, he had just about decided that maybe it would be wiser for him to stick to Siveni's strictly physical arts of apothecary and surgery and healing. At that point in his career the Rankans had arrived, and many temples fell, and priestcraft in all but the mightiest liturgies became politically unsafe. That was when Harran, for the first time since his parents had sold him into Siveni's temple at the age of nine, had gone looking for work. He had frantically taken the first job he found, as the Stepsons' leech and barber.
The memory of finding his new job brought back too clearly that of how he had lost the old one. He had been there to see the writ delivered into the shaking hands of the old Master-Priest by the hard-faced Molin Torchholder, while the Imperial guards looked on with bored hostility; the hurried packing of the sacred vessels, the hiding of other, less valuable materials in the crypts under the temple; the flight •of the priesthood into exile....
Harran stared at the poor, blood-congested hand in its dish on the table while beside him Tyr slurped his fingers and poked him for more attention. Why did they do it? Siveni is only secondarily a war-goddess. More ever than that, She was-is-Lady of Wisdom and Enlightenment-a healer more than a killer.
Not that She couldn't kill if the fancy took Her....
Harran doubted that the priests of Vashanka and the rest were seriously worried about that. But for safety's sake they had exiled Siveni's priesthood and those of many "lesser" gods-leaving the Ilsigs only Ils and Shipri and the great names of the pantheon, whom even the Rankans dared not displace for fear of rebellion.
Harran stared at the hand. He could do it. He had never considered doing it before-at least, not seriously. For a long time he had held down this job by being valuable-a competent barber and surgeon-and by otherwise attracting no undue attention, discouraging questions about his past. He burned no incense openly, frequented no fane, swore by no god either Rankan or Ilsigi, and rolled his eyes when his customers did. "Idiots," he growled at the god-worshippers, and mocked them mercilessly. He drank and whored with the Stepsons. His old bitterness made it easy to seem cruel. Sometimes it was no seeming; sometimes he enjoyed it. He had in fact gotten something of a reputation among the Stepsons for callousness. That suited him.
And then, some time ago, there had been a change in the Stepson barracks. All the old faces had suddenly vanished; new ones, hastily recruited, had replaced them. In the wake of this change, Harran had abruptly become indispensable-for (first of all) he was familiar with the Stepsons' wonted ways as the newcomers were not; and (second) the newcomers were incredibly clumsy, and got themselves chopped up with abysmal regularity. Harran looked forward to the day when the real Stepsons should come back and set their house in order. It would be funny as hell.