No lightning this time, no thunder. Nothing but a shock that knocked Harran flying in one direction and the knife and book in two others-a hurtless shock that was nevertheless as final and terrible as dreaming of falling out of bed. Harran lay still for quite some while, afraid to move- then groaned softly once and sat himself up on the stone, wondering what had gone wrong.
"Nothing," someone said to him.
The voice made the walls of the temple vibrate. Harran trembled and held his head against the singing in it.
"Well, don't sit there, Harran," said the voice. "Get on with it. We've business to attend to."
He rolled to his knees and looked up.
She was there. Harran staggered; his heart did too, missing beats. The eyes those were what struck him first: literally struck him, with physical force. Afterward, he realized this should have been no surprise. "Flashing-Eyed," was after all her chief epithet. His best imaginations proved insufficient to the reality. Eyes like lightning-clear, pitilessly illuminating, keen as a spear in the heart-those were Siveni's. They didn't glow; they didn't need to. None of her needed to. She was simply there, so there that everything physical seemed vague beside her. A great chill of fear went through Harran then at the thought that perhaps there were good reasons why the gods didn't usually walk the realms of men.
But not even fear could live long, fixed by that silvery regard, that ferocious beauty. For she was beautiful, and again Harran's old imaginations fell down in the face of the truth. It was a spare, severe, unselfconscious beauty, too busy with other things to notice itself... definitely the face of the patroness of the arts and sciences. There was wildness in that face, as well as wisdom; thoughtlessness as well as handsomeness in those rich robes-for the blazing under-tunic was tucked casually and hurriedly up above the knee, and the great loose overtunic was a man's, probably Ils's, borrowed for the greater freedom of motion it allowed. The hand that held the great spear she leaned on was graceful as a lady's; but the slender arm still spoke of shattering strength. Siveni as she now appeared was not much taller than mortal womankind. But as he looked at her, and she bent those cool, terrible, considering eyes on him, Harran felt very small indeed. She pushed her high-crested helm back a bit from that coolly beautiful face and said impatiently, "Do get up, man. Finish what you're doing so we can get to business." Siveni lifted the raven that perched on her left hand, moving it to her shoulder.
He got up, still very confused. "Madam," he managed to croak, and then tried it again, rather embarrassed at making such a poor showing. "Lady, I am finished...."
"Of course you're not," she said, reaching out with that blazing spear and using its point to flick the book-roll up into her free hand. "Don't go lackwitted on me, Harran. It says right here: 'the hand of a brave and living man, the same to be offered up at the spell's end by the celebrant.'" She turned the scroll toward him, showing him the words.
Harran glanced down at the middle of the circle, where in the skeletal hand the mandrake still burned dully bright as a coal. But Siveni's voice brought his glance up again. "Not that hand, Harran!" She said, sounding annoyed now. "That one!"
And she pointed at the knife, which he had forgotten he was clutching-and at his left hand, which clutched it.
Harran went as cold all over as he had in the graveyard. "Oh my G-"
"Goddess?" she said, as Harran caught himself as usual. "Sorry. That is the price written here. If the gateway you seek to open is to be fully opened-and even as I am not fully here yet, neither would the others be-the price must be paid." She looked at him coolly for several moments, then said with less asperity and some sadness, "I would have expected my priests to read better than that, Harran.... You do read?"
He gave her no answer for a moment. He thought of Sanctuary, and the Rankans, and the Beysib, and briefly, irrationally, of Shal. Then he stepped over to the center of the circle, and the hand. The bones of it were charred. The ring of base metal was a brass-scummed silver puddle on the floor. The mandrake glowed under his glance like a coal that had been breathed on.
He knelt down again and lifted his eyes briefly to the unmerciful loveliness before him; then squeezed his left hand until the blood flowed fresh, and with it pried the mandrake away from the hand's blackened bones.
In the hours that intervened until Harran got up again- a few minutes later-he came belatedly to understand a great deal; to understand Shal, and many of the other Stepsons, and some of the poor and sick he'd treated while still in the temple. There was no describing the pain of a maiming. It was a thing as without outward color as the burning of the mandrake; and even worse, more blinding, was the horror that came after. When Harran stood again, he had no left hand anymore. The stump's scorching pain throbbed and died away; Siveni's doing, probably. But the horror, he knew, would never go away. It would be fed anew, every day, by those who refused to look at the place where a hand had once been. Harran abruptly understood that payment is not later, is never later, but is always now. It would be now all his life.
He got to his feet and found Siveni, as she had said, even more there than she had been before. He wasn't sure this was a good thing. None of this was working out as it should have. And there were other things peculiar as well. Where was the light coming from that filled the temple suddenly? Not from Siveni; she was striding around the place with the dissatisfied air of a housewife who comes home and has to deal with her husband's housekeeping- poking her spear into comers, frowning at the broken glass. "All this will be put to rights soon enough," she said. "After business. Harran, what are you scowling at?"
"Lady, the light-"
"Think, man," she said, not unkindly, as she stepped over to the circle, examining it, gently kicking a bit of her statue's rubble aside with one sandaled foot. "The spell retrieves timelessness as well as time. The light of yesterday, and tomorrow, is available to us both."
"But I-"
"You included the whole temple inside the outer circle, Harran, and you were in the temple. The spell worked on you too. How not? It retrieved my physicality and your godhead...."
Harran stared at her. Siveni caught the look, and smiled.
Harran's heart came near to melting. She might be a hoyden, but she was a winning one.
'Wow what are you-oh, godhead? Harran, my little priest, it's in your blood. This world isn't old enough for anyone to be removed by more than six degrees of blood from anyone else. Gods included. Haven't you people got far enough in mathematics to have realized that yet? I must do something about that." She reached up with her spear, and somehow, without getting any taller, or her spear getting any longer, knocked down a huge cobweb from a ceiling comer. "So you see as a god sees, for this short while. And permanently, after we do the spell again-"
"Again?" Harran said in shock, staring at his other hand.
"Of course. To open the way for the other Ilsig gods. It's only partially open now, for merely physical manifestation, as I said, and I doubt they've noticed. They're all off feasting beyond the Isles of the North again, getting plastered on Anen's latest batch, I shouldn't wonder." Siv-eni actually sniffed. "Not an honest day's work in the lot of them. But once I do the spell again, it'll open the gate wholly-and this place will be fit for gods to live in, as it never was even in the old days. Meanwhile"-she glanced around her-"meanwhile, before we do that, we have a few calls to pay. It would be abysmal tactics to give up the advantage of the ground, now we've got it...."