-A shadow on the edge of his mind's vision, a feeling that something was about to go wrong. Someone. Someone who had been watching him-
Raik?
All the more reason for it to be tonight, then. He was sure he had seen Raik staggering into the barracks-probably to snore off another night of wineshops. Harran had thought to go back twice to the temple-once to retrieve the old roll book, and then, after studying it, once to perform the rite. But even that would be attracting too much attention. It would have to be tonight.
Harran lay there, postponing getting up into the cold for just a few seconds more. Since that day five years ago when the Rankans served the writ on Irik, he had not been inside Siveni's temple. For so long now I've been done with temples. Going into one, now-and hers-do I truly want to reopen that old wound?
He stared at the skinny, twitching shape curled up in the ashes, and wondered. "Every temple needs an idiot," the old master-priest had once said to Harran in creaky jest. Harran had laughed and agreed with him, being just then in the middle of an unmasterable lesson, and feeling himself idiot enough for any twelve temples. Now-in exile- Harran briefly wondered whether he was still living in a temple; whether he had accepted the idiot because she was so like the mad and poor who had frequented Siveni's fane in the days when there was still wisdom dispensed there, and healing, and food. Of wisdom and healing he had little enough. And Mriga never complained about the food. Or anything else....
He swore softly, got up, got dressed. There, in the wooden box shoved under his sideboard, were the bones of the hand, wired and mounted into the correct gesture, with the ring of base metal on the proper finger; there was the mandrake, hastily bound in cord twisted of silk and lead, with a silvered steel pin through its "body" to hold it harmless. Both hairpin and ring had come from a secondhand whore that Yuri had recently brought home for the barracks. Harran, last in line and mildly concerned that the woman might notice when her things went missing, had "considerately" brought her a stoup of drugged wine. Then he swived her until the wine took, lifted ring and pin, and slipped away-first leaving her a largish tip where no one but she would be likely to find it.
So-almost set. He picked up the box, went over to the comer by the table for a few more things-a small flask, a little bag of grain, and another of salt, a lump of bitumen. Then he checked around one last time. Mriga lay snoring in the ashes. Tyr was curled nose-to-tail in a compact brown package under the bed, snoring too, a note higher than Mriga. Harran mussed the meager bedclothes and lumpy bolster more or less into a body shape, snatched up and flung over him his old soot-black cloak, and made his way silently through the Stepsons' stableyard.
There was a way over the wall by the comer of the third stall down. Up the shingles, a one-handed grip on a drainpipe, a few moments scrambling to find footholds on old bricks that stuck out just so. Then up to the wall's top, and the hard drop down on the other side. Breathing hard, just before that drop, Harran paused, looking back the way he'd come-and just barely saw the vague shape by the barracks door, standing motionless.
Harran froze. The night was moonless; the torches by the door were burned down to blue. There was nothing to see but the faint flash of eyes catching that light sidewise for a second as the shadow crouched and moved into deeper shadow, and was lost.
Harran jumped, held still only long enough to get his breath, and ran. If he got to the temple in time to do what he intended, no number of pursuers would matter; the whole Rankan Empire, and the Beysibs too, would flee before what would follow.
If he had time....
The Temple of Siveni Grey-Eyes was the second-to-last one at the shabby southern end of the Avenue of Temples. At least, it was shabby now. There had been a time when Siveni's temple had had respectable neighbors: on one side, the fane and priests of Anen Wineface, the harvest-god, master of vine and corn; on the other, that of Anen's associate Dene Blackrobe, the somber mistress of sleep and death. Between them, Anen's polished sandstone and Dene's dark granite, Siveni's temple had risen in its white and gold. There had been a certain rightness to the way they stood together. Work and Wine and Sleep; and Siveni's temple, as was appropriate for a craft-goddess, had looked out over that guilds' quarter. Businessmen made deals on its broad steps, paid a coin or two to buy luck and a cake for Siveni's ravens, then went next door to Anen's to seal their deals with poured libations. Small ones; Anen's wine was generally considered too good to waste on the floor.
Those days were all done now. Anen's temple was dark except for one red light over the altar; his priests' annuity was reduced to almost nothing, and Anen's old patrons, knowing Him out of favor, tended to do their libation-pouring elsewhere. As for Dene's temple, the Rankans, possibly considering Her too contemplative (or too unimportant) to do anything about it, had demolished the building... leaving the merchants and guildsmen to quarrel over the newly available parcel of real estate.
And as for Siveni's temple... Harran stood across from it now, hiding himself in the shallow doorway of a night-shuttered mercantile establishment. He could have wept. Those white columns all smeared with city grime, the white steps leading up to the portico broken, littered, stained.... A slow cold wind swept down the Avenue of Temples toward Ils's fane, a dim shape no more clearly seen than the moon behind clouds. Near it reared up Savankala's upstart temple, and Vashanka's hard by it-both great ungainly piles, and as dark tonight as Ils's. No one walked the street. It was far past the hour for devotions.
Harran held still in that doorway for a long time, unable to shake the feeling that he had been followed. The gongs of Ils's temple rang the third hour after midnight. The sound wavered in the wind like Harran's heart, blowing away down the avenue toward the Governor's Palace and the estates. Something flapped nearby-a sound like a flag snapping in the wind. He jerked around, looked. Nothing but the shadowy shape of a bird on the right, flying heavily in the crosswind, coming to perch on the high cupola of Siveni's temple, becoming another shadow that loomed there among the carvings. A black bird, bigger than a crow....
He unswallowed his courage, looked both ways, and hurried across the street. The strength of the wind, as Harran reached the middle of the avenue, was ominous. If ever there was a night to be home in bed, this was it....
He dashed up the stairs where he had lingered so many times before, tripping now and again over some dislodged stone, some crack that hadn't been there when he was young. On the portico he paused to get his breath and look back the way he had come. Nothing coming, no one passing in the street.... And there, the motion again, something dark; not in the street, but next door in the cloddy, vacant lot that was all that remained of Dene's temple. Harran felt under his cloak for the long knife....
Eyes caught the reflection of the pale stone of Siveni's stairs. Harran found himself looking at the largest rat he had ever seen, in Sanctuary or elsewhere. It was the size of a dog, at least. The thought of Tyr catching up with it made him shudder. As if sensing Harran's fear, the rat turned about and waddled back into the vacant lot, going about its nightly business. Other shadows, just as large, stirred about the pillars of the portico, unconcerned.
Harran swallowed and thought about business. If I feel I'm being followed, the thing to do is start the spell-draw the outer circle. No one can get through it once it's closed. He put down the box and the flask and fumbled about his clothes for the lump of bitumen. Slowly he made his way around the great open square of pillars, all of which bore the sledgehammer marks of attempted demolition. The marks were futile, of course-any temple built by the priests of the goddess who invented architecture might be expected to last-but they scarred Harran's heart just looking at them. Right around the portico, as he'd been taught-four hundred eighty paces exactly-Harran went, bent over, his back aching. Dark shapes fled again and again at his passing. He refused to look at them. By the time he came around to the middle of the stairs again and drew the diagram-knot that tied the circle closed, his back was one long creaking bar of iron with smiths working on it; but he felt much safer. He picked up his box again and made his way inward.