"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.
Meanwhile, there was still the hand in its dish on the table. Hands might have no eyes, but this one stared at him.
"Piffles," Lafen had said.
That was one of the kinder of the various nasty names for the PFLS, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Sanctuary. At first there had only been rumors of the Front- shadowy mentions of a murder here, a robbery there, all in aid of throwing out Sanctuary's conquerors, the whole lot of them. Then the Front had become more active, striking out at every military or religious body its leaders considered an oppressor. The pseudo-Stepsons had come to hate the Front bitterly-not only because they had been ambushing Stepsons with frightening success, but for the rational (though unpublishable) reason that most of the present "Stepsons" were native Sanctuarites, and hardly felt themselves to be oppressors. Indeed, there was some supportive sentiment for the Front among them. Or there had been, until the Front had started putting acid in their winepots, and snipers on neighboring rooftops, and had started teaching gutter children to smash stones down on hands resting innocently on walls at lunch hour....
Harran himself had agreed fiercely with the aims of the Front, though that wasn't a sentiment he ever allowed anyone to suspect. Damn Rankans, he thought now, with their snotnosed new gods. Appearing and disappearing temples, lightning bolts in the streets. And then the damned Fish-Eyes with their snakes. Miserable wetback mother-goddesses, manifesting as birds and flowers. Oh, Siveni-! For just a moment his fists clenched, he shook, his eyes stung. The image of Her filled him.. .bright-eyed Siveni, the spear-bearer, the defender goddess, lady of midnight wisdoms and truths that kill. Ils's crazy daughter, to whom He could never say no: the flashing-glanced hoyden, fierce and fair and wise-and lost. 0 my own lady, come! Come and put things to rights! Take back what's yours again-
The moment passed, and the old hopelessness reasserted itself. Harran let out his breath, looking down at Tyr, whose head had suddenly moved under his hand to look up at the nearer window.