Harran raised himself up from the stones to see the image that, ever after, would make him turn away from companions or leave crowded rooms when he thought of it.
There was the goddess in her radiant robes-but those robes had dirt on them, from falls she had taken in the street; and four hands were struggling on the haft of her spear. Even as Harran looked up, the wiry shape wrestling with Siveni wrenched the spear out of her grasp and threw it clattering down the Avenue of Temples, spraying random lightning bolts around it. Then Mriga sprang on Siveni again, all skinny arms and legs as always-but with something added: a frightening, quick grace about her movements. Purpose, Harran thought in fascination and shock. She knows what she's doing! And he smiled... seeing another aspect of the spell that he might have suspected if he were an artiste rather than merely competent. The spell infallibly retrieved what was lost... even lost wits.
The goddess and the mortal girl rolled on the ground together, and there was little difference between them. They both shone, blazing lightlessly with rage and godhead. The goddess had more experience fighting, perhaps, but Mriga had the advantage of a strength not only divine but insane. And there might be other advantages to a life's worth of insanity as well. Mriga's absorption of godhead would not be hampered by ideas about gods, or about mortals not being gods. She took what power came to her, and used it, uncaring. She was using it now; she had Siveni pinned. Their struggle brought her around to where she suddenly saw Harran looking at her. That look did strike him like lightning, though he would not have traded the pain of it for anything. Mriga saw him. And in four quick, economical gestures, she stripped Siveni's bright helm off, flung it clanging down the avenue, and then took hold of Siveni's head by the long dark hair and whacked it hard against the stones. Siveni went limp.
He never had needed to show her anything more than once....
The street fell blessedly silent. Harran sat up on the stones-it was the best he could manage at the moment; his night was catching up to him. More than just his night. For there was Mriga, limping over to him, still halt as before-but there was a kind of grace even to that, now. He wanted to hide his face. But he was still enough of a god not to.
"Harran," she said in the soft husky voice that he had never heard do anything but grunt.
Harran was still mortal enough not to be able to think of a thing to say.
"I want to stay like this," she said. "I'll have to go back with her before dawn, if the change is to take."
"But-it was only supposed to be temporary-"
"For an ordinary mortal, I suppose so. But I'm not ordinary. It will take for me." She smiled at him with a merry serenity that made Harran's heart ache; for it was very like what he had expected, dreamed of, from Siveni. "If you approve, that is...."
"Approve?!" He stared at her-at Her, rather; there was no doubt of it anymore. Moment by moment she was growing more divine, and looking at her hurt his eyes as even Siveni had only at the beginning. "What in the worlds do you need my approval for?!"
Mriga looked at him with somber pleasure. "You are my love," she said, "and my good lord."
"Good-" He would have sickened with the irony, had the terrible, growing glory of her presence not made such a response impossible. "I used you-"
"You fed me," Mriga said. "You took care of me. I came to love you. The rest didn't matter then; and it doesn't now. If I loved you as a mortal-how should I stop as a goddess?"
"You're still crazy!" Harran cried, almost in despair.
"It would probably look that way," said Mriga, "to those who didn't know the truth. You know better."
"Mriga, for pity's sake, listen to me! I took advantage of you, again and again! I used a goddess-"
She reached out, very slowly, and touched his face; then took the hand back again. "As for that business," she said, "I alone shall judge the result. I alone am qualified. If you've done evil... then you've also paid. Payment is now, is it not? Would you believe you've spent five years paying for what you were doing during those five years? Or would you put it down to a new goddess's craziness?"
"Time..." Harran whispered.
"It has an inside and an outside," Mriga said. "Outside is when you love. Inside is everything else. Don't ask me more." She looked up at the paling sky. "Help me with poor Siveni."
Between the two of them they got the goddess sitting up again. She was in a sorry state; Mriga brushed at her rather apologetically. "She hurt you," Mriga said. "If I hadn't been crazy already, I would have gone that way."
After a few moments ministration, the gray eyes opened and looked at Harran and Mriga with painful admiration for them both. One of the fierce eyes was blackened, and Siveni had a bump rising where Mriga had acquainted her with the cobbles. "The disadvantage of physicality," she said. "I don't think I care for it." She glanced at Mriga, looking very chastened. "Not even my father ever did that to me. I think we're going to be friends."
"More than that," Mriga said, serenely merry. Harran found himself wondering very briefly about some old business ... about the old Mriga's love for edged things, and her strength, and her skill with her hands... and her gray eyes. Those eyes met his, and Mriga nodded. "She'd lost some attributes into time," Mriga said. "But I held them for her. She'll get them back from me... and lend me a few others. We'll do well enough between us."
The three of them got up together, helping one another. "Harran-" Siveni said.
He looked at her tired, wounded radiance, and for the first time really saw her, without his own ideas about her getting in the way. She could not apologize; apology wasn't her way. She just stood there like some rough, winning child, a troublemaker at the end of yet another scrap. "It's all right," he said. "Go home."
She smiled. The smile was almost as lovely as Mriga's.
"We will," Mriga said. "There's a place where gods can go when they need a rest. That's where we'll be. But'one thing remains." She reached out and laid her head on the burned place where Harran's hand had been... then slowly leaned in and touched her lips to his.
Somewhere in the eternity that followed, he noticed that her left hand seemed to be missing.
When the dazzle unknotted itself from around him, they were gone. He stood alone in false dawn in the Avenue of Temples, looking down toward where a pair of twisted brass doors lay in the middle of the street. He wondered while he stood there whether some years from now there might be a small new temple in Sanctuary... raised for an addition to the Ilsig pantheon; a mad goddess, a maimed and crippled goddess, fond of knives, and possessing a peculiar crazed wisdom that began and ended in love. A goddess who right now had only two worshippers; her single priest, and a dog....
Harran stood there wondering-then started at a sudden touch. His left hand-the hand he hadn't had, and now had-a woman's hand-reached up without his willing it to touch his face.
Payment is now....