A raven perched in it. Harran stared, and his hand closed on the scruff of Tyr's neck to keep her from chasing it. For the raven was Siveni's bird: Her messenger of old, silver-white once, but once upon a time caught lying to Her, and in a brief fit of rage, cursed black. The black bird looked down at them sidelong, out of a bright black eye. Then it glanced at the table, where the hand lay in its dish; and the raven spoke.
"Now," it said.
Tyr growled.
"No," he said in a whisper. The raven turned, lifted its wings, and flew away in a storm of whistling flapping noises. Tyr got loose from Harran's grip, spun around once in a tight circle for sheer excitement, and then hurtled out the door across the stableyard, barking at the vanished bird.
Harran was so shocked he found it hard to think. Did it speak? Or did I imagine it? For a moment that seemed likely, and Harran leaned back against the table, feeling weak and annoyed at his own stupidity. One of the old trained ravens from Siveni's temple, still somehow alive, blundering into his window-
This window? At this moment? Saying that word?
And there was the hand....
The picture of old smiling-eyed Irik, the Master-Priest, came back to him. Fair hatred, graying Irik in his white robes, leaning with Harran and several others over a pale marble table in the students' courts, his thin brown finger tracing a line on a tattered linen roll-book. "Here's another old one," Irik was saying. "The Upraising of the Lost. You would use this only on the very newly dead someone gone less than twenty slow breaths. It's infallible-but the ingredients, as you see, aren't something you can keep on hand." There was muted snickering and groaning among the novices; Irik was an irrepressible punster. "The charm has other applications. Since it can retrieve anything lost- including time, which the dead lose-you can lay restless ghosts with it; though as usual you have to raise them first. And since it can similarly retrieve timelessness, which mortals lose, the charm's of use as a mystagogue-spell, an initiator. But again, the problem of getting the ingredients comes up-the mandrake, for one. Also, brave men are generally as unwilling as cowards are to give up a perfectly good hand. The spell is mostly valuable nowadays in terms of technique; that middle passage, about the bones, is a little textbook in taxidermy all by itself. If you have to lay ghosts, this next one is usually more useful...."
The white-and-gold memory turned to shadows and mud again. Harran sat and stared at the stained earthenware dish and its contents.
It would work. He would need those other ingredients. The mandrake would take some finding, but it wasn't too dangerous. And he would need that old linen book-roll. He was fairly sure where it was....
Harran got up and poked the fire; then poured water from a cracked clay ewer into an iron pot and put the pot on the fire. He picked up his surgeon's knife again and the dish with the hand.
Tyr ran back into the house, stared at him with her big dark doe-eyes, and realized that he was holding a dish. She immediately stood up on her hind legs, dancing and bouncing a little to keep her balance, and craned her-neck, trying to see what was on the plate.
Harran had to laugh at her. She was a stray he'd found beaten and whimpering in an alley over by the Bazaar two years ago... when he was new to his job and had considerable sympathy toward strays. Tyr had grown up pretty- a short-furred, clean-bodied, sharp-faced little bitch, brown and delicate as a deer. But she was still thin, and that troubled him. The war on Wizardwall, and then the coming of the Beysib, had driven prices up on beef as on everything else. The pseudo-Stepsons swore at the three-times-weekly porridge, and bolted their meat, when it arrived, like hungry beasts-leaving precious little in the way of scraps for Tyr to cadge. Harran didn't dare let her out of the barracks compound, either; she would end up in someone's stewpot within an hour. So she ate half of Harran's dinner most of the time. He didn't mind; he would have paid greater prices yet. Unlike the old days, when he had constantly been busy administering Siveni's love to her worshippers and so needed very little for himself, Harran now needed all of the love he could get....
He watched her dancing, and became aware of the smell in the room-more than could be accounted for by Shal's pissing on the table. "Tyr," he said, faking anger, "have you been rooting in the kitchen midden again?"
She stopped dancing... then very, very slowly sat down, with her ears dejected flat. She did not stop staring at the dish.
He gazed at her ruefully. "Oh, well," he said. "I only need the bones anyway. Just this once, you hear?"
Tyr leaped up and began bouncing again.
Harran went over to the sideboard and boned the hand in nine or ten sure motions. "All right," he said at last, holding out the first scrap of meat for Tyr. "Come on, sweetheart. Sit up! Up!"
Oh, my Lady, he thought, your servant hears. Arm Yourself. Get Your spear. You'll soon be lost no more. I shall bring You back....
Preparation occupied Harran for a while thereafter. He kept it quiet. No use alerting the Stepsons to what he was planning, or giving Raik any reason to come after him- Raik, who spat at Harran every time he saw him now, promising to "take care of him" after Shal was better. Harran ignored him. The Piffles were keeping busy out there, and made it easy for Harran to go about his usual routine of stitching and splinting and cauterizing. And in between, when he grew bored, there was always Mriga.
She had been another stray, a clubfooted beggar-child found sitting half-starved in a Downwind dungheap, mindlessly whetting a dull scrap of metal on a cobblestone. Harran had taken her home on impulse, not quite sure what he would do with her. He discovered quite soon that he'd found himself a bargain. Though she seemed to have no mind now-if she'd ever had one-she was clever with her hands. She would do any small task endlessly until stopped; even in her sleep, those restless hands would move, never stopping. You never had to show her anything more than once. She was especially good with edged things; the Stepsons brought their swords to her to sharpen, one and all. Tyr had come to positively worship her-which was saying a great deal; Tyr didn't take to everyone. If Mriga was lame and plain-well, less chance that she would leave or be taken from Harran; if she couldn't speak, well, a silent woman was considered a miracle wasn't that what they said?
And since Harran was not rich enough to afford whores very often, having Mriga around offered other advantages. He had needs, which, with a kind of numbness of heart, he used Mriga to satisfy. In some moods he knew he was doing a dark thing, again and again; and Harran knew that the price was waiting to be paid. But he didn't need to think of that just now. Payment, and eternity, were a long way from the sordid here-and-now of Sanctuary and a man with an itch that needed scratching. Harran scratched that itch when he felt like it, and spent the rest of his time working on the Stepsons, and the charm.
He would have preferred to leave the hand in a bin of toothwing beetles for some days-the industrious little horrors would have stripped the bones dry of every remaining dot of flesh and eaten the marrow too; but toothwing beetles and clean temple workrooms and all the rest were forever out of his reach. Harran made do with burying the bones in a box of quicklime for a week, then steeping it in naphtha for an afternoon to get the stink and the marrow out. Tyr yipped and danced excitedly around Harran as he worked over the pot. "Not for you, baby," he said absently, fishing the little fingerbones out of the kettle and putting them to cool on an old cracked plate. "You'd choke for sure. Go 'way."