The great doors within the portico were long since barred shut from inside, but that would hardly stop anyone who had served Siveni past the novitiate. Harran traced the door's carved raven-and-olive-tree motif just below eye level until he found the fourth raven past the second tree with no olives on it, and pushed in the raven's eye. The bird's whole head fell in after it, revealing the little catch and valve that opened the priests' door. The catch was stiff, but after a couple of tries the door swung open wide enough to admit Harran. He slipped in and swung it silently to behind him.
Harran lifted the dark lantern he had brought with him and unshuttered it. And then he did begin to weep; for the statue was gone-the image toward which Harran had once bowed affectionately so many times a day, having eventually learned to see and bow to the immortal beauty behind the mortal symbol. Siveni's great statue in her aspect as Defender, seated, armed and helmed, holding her battalion-vanquishing spear in one hand and her raven perched on the other. The great work, the statue that the artist Rahen had spent five years fashioning of marble, gold, and ivory, afterward putting down his sculptor's tools forever and saying he knew his life's masterwork when he saw it, and would make no other.... All gone. Harran could have understood it if they had stripped the gold and ivory off, pried the gems out of the mighty shield. He knew as well as any other Sanctuarite that not even nailing things down could keep them safe here. But he had never thought to have the fact brought home to him so brutally as this. The pediment on which the statue had stood was bare except for bits of rubble, chunks and splinters of shattered marble... but those were eloquent even in ruin. Here, a fat pyramidal lump was one corner of the statue's pedestal; there, a long slim shard, smooth and faintly grooved at one end, broken off sharp as a flint at the other-a feather from a raven's outstretched wing.... Harran's brain roiled with rage. Where did they-why-A whole statue, a statue thirty feet high! Stolen, destroyed, lost.
He dashed the tears out of his eyes, put the lantern down, flung his cloak down on the dusty marble, and picked up his box. One more circle he would need in which to work the sorcery itself. If his back still hurt him, Harran didn't notice it now. Round the vacant pediment he went with the bitumen, not counting paces this time, rather fighting down his bitter anger enough to remember the words that needed to be thought again and again to confine within this inner circle the forces that would soon break loose. It was not easy work, fighting down both his anger and the growing, restless power of the circle-spell; so that as Harran tied the second circle closed he was gasping like a man who'd run a race, and had to stand for some moments bowed over like a spent runner, hands on thighs.
He straightened up as quickly as he could, for there was worse to come. Simple this spell might be, but that wouldn't keep it from being strenuous; and first he needed the rite. Breaking and resealing the circle according to procedure, he went to get it.
Normally the location of the safe-crypt was not information that would have been entrusted to a junior priest, but in the haste surrounding the exile of Siveni's priesthood, quite a few secrets had slipped out. Harran had been one of those conscripted to help old Irik hide away the less important documents, old medical and engineering texts and spells. "We may yet find a use for these, in a better hour," Irik had said to Harran. Just then he had had his arms full of parchments, his nose full of dust, and his mind full of fear; the words had meant nothing. But now Harran blessed Irik as he went around to behind where the statue had been, stepped on the proper pieces of flooring in the proper order, and saw the single block by the rear wall fall slowly away into darkness.
The stair was narrow and steep, with no banister. Harran held up the lantern at the bottom of it and went rummaging, sneezing a lot as he did. Parchments, book rolls, and wax tablets were piled and scattered every which way. It was the rolls he went for. Again and again Harran undid linen cords, spread a roll out in a cloud of dust and sneezes, to find nothing but a spare copy of the temple's bookkeeping for the third month of such and such a year, or some tired old philosophical treatise, or a cure for the ague (ox-fat rubbed together with mustard and ground red-beetle casings, the same applied to the chest three times a day). This went on till his eyes began to water, rebelling against the poor light, and Harran's mind stopped seeing what he read and kept wandering away to worry about the time. Night was leaning toward morning; this was the time to do the spell, if ever-before dawn, herald of new beginnings-and if he didn't find it soon-
He blinked and read the words again. It wasn't hard; they were beautifully written in an Old Ilsig hieratic script. "... of the Lost, that is to say, an infallible spell for finding the lost and strayed and stolen. The spell needeth first the hand of a brave and living man, the same to be offered up in the spell's working by the celebrant; and it needeth also a mandrake root, called by some peristupe, dug of a night without moon or star, and treated according to the disciplines, also to be so offered; and needeth as well some small deal of salt and wheat and wine, and a knife for blood to propitiate the Ones Below; and lastly those instruments by which the boundary for the spell shall be made.
"First dig your mandrake..."
Harran scrambled to his feet in the dust and the dark, sneezing wildly and not caring. Up the stairs, back into the circle-cutting the knot to let himself in, sealing it shut again behind him. He sat down on the vacant pediment amid the rubble and began to read. It was all here, much as he remembered it, with the little thumbnail sketch of the diagram to be drawn inside the circle, and the rite itself. Part in a very old Ilsig indeed, part in the vernacular. Simple words, but oh, the power in them. Harran's heart began to hammer.
Something moaned, and Harran started-then realized it was only the wind, building now to such a crescendo that he could hear it even inside the temple's thick stone. Good, he thought, picking up the piece of bitumen again and rising to his feet, let it storm. Let them think that something's about to happen. For it is!
He set to work. The diagram was complex, seemingly a picture of some kind of geometrical solid, though one in which the number of sides seemed to change each time one counted them. The finished diagram made an uneasy flickering in the mind, a feeling that got worse as Harran started setting the necessary runes and words into the pattern's angles. Then came the salt, cast to the cardinal points with the usual purifacatory rhyme; and the wheat-two grains at the primary point, four at the next, eight at the one after that, and so on around the seven. Harran chuckled a little, light-headed with excitement. That particular symbol of plenitude had always been a joke among the student priests; a sixty -four point pattern would have emptied every granary in the world. Nothing left now but the wine, the knife, the mandrake, the hand....