The Dead of Winter Part 17

"Roxane."

Stilcho laughed and grinned. He had a patched eye and was missing one tooth on the side, but in the dark when the scars showed less there was a ruined handsomeness about him. An elegance. He s.n.a.t.c.hed the skin from Haught and hurled it, spattering the cobbles. "Run!" he yelled at Haught, and laughed aloud.

"Stilcho, d.a.m.n you!"

"Try!" Stilcho yelled. Ghosts streamed and gibbered about them, swirled and whirled like bats, and Haught a.s.sessed the situation in an eyeblink and whipped his cloak about his arm and ran as if the fiends of h.e.l.l were on his track.

Stilcho howled. Slapped his knees. "Run, you friggin' b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Run, Nisi, run!"

He would pay for it in the morning. Haught would see to that. But he had Her orders, direct.

He jogged off in the direction of the bridge, where a shadowy troop needed help pa.s.sing running water. His old partner was in the lead and the company insignia was intact.

Behind him the ghosts did what everyone else in Sanctuary was busy doing: They chose sides and took cover and had at one another.

Stilcho turned his own troop up the riverside and through the streets-slower now, because they had a half-living man for a guide. But he would take them only so far. They would have no trouble with Walegrin's uptown barricades or the Stepsons' eastward; and they were not in a negotiating mood, having their murders recently in mind. Teach the uptowners their vulnerability -show the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who gave the orders that there were those who remembered their last orders and their last official mistakes- He jogged along, panting, limping-Ischade's repair work was thorough, but a long run still sent pain jolting through him.

Ghosts pa.s.sed them, headed where they wished to be. They were polyglot and headed for old haunts, former domiciles, old feuds. Sanctuary might get pragmatic about its haunts, but the ghosts grew bolder and nervier in these declining days of the Empire; and these were not the reasoning kind. These had been walking patrol in Ischade's service, or Roxane's; and a few luckless ones tried to go complain to Roxane about the matter.

Roxane cursed a blue streak (literally) and in a paroxysm of rage conjured a dozen snakes and a demon, an orange-haired, grayskinned being named Snapper Jo which ran rampaging up the riverside till it forgot quite what it was about and got to rampaging through a warehouse full of beer. It was not, all in all, one of Roxane's better nights: the attack was desultory, Ischade was definitely aiming at something else, and Roxane was willing to use the diversion while she took wing crosstown- "d.a.m.n!" Haught yelled. His sight picked that up, a pale blue arc headed across Sanctuary with only one target in mind. He was earthbound. He ran for the river and Ischade with all his might, and came pelting past the wards to find Ischade sitting on the bed wrapped in orange silk and the skirts of her black cloak and laughing like a lunatic.

Uptown the Lady Nuphtantei's door went wide open and the elegant Lady Nuphtantei, Harka Bey and not easily affrighted, went pelting down the street naked as she was born, for the drunken demon that had materialized in her house breaking porcelains and crunching silver underfoot was not a thing the servants or her daughter had stayed to deal with, not for a moment.

She ran straight into a company of Walegrin's guard and kept going, so fast the guard hardly had time to turn and stare.

Then what was behind her showed up, and the troops scattered.

Arrows flew. A barricade was afire over by the Maze edge where Jubal's gangs tried to hold against rooftop archers, mage-illusions, and a handful of paired riders who had the style and manner of the old Stepsons. And the fire spread to buildings, which doubled the chaos. Men threw water and ducked arrows. A frantic family scurried out with possessions and arrows pelted indiscriminate.

The physician Harran wrung his hands (one was a woman's) and paced his upstairs room and took another look out the window, in the little garrett where he had hidden his affliction-fortuitously hidden, considering what had befallen everyone else in the barracks. But he had no practice now, no home, no direction. Mriga gone. There was the little dog, which paced about after him panting and whuffing in mimic concern.

He was (whatever his affliction) still a doctor. The pain he spied on worried at him and gnawed his gut. "Oh, d.a.m.n," he muttered to himself, when a boy darted from cover, limned red in the firelight, and flung a torch. Tried to fling it.

An arrow took him. The boy fell, writhing, skewered through the leg, right near the great artery. "d.a.m.n."

Herran slammed the shutter, shut his eyes and suddenly turned and ran down the stairs, thundering down the hollow boards, into the smell of smoke and the glare outside. He heard shouting, wiped his eyes. Heard the boy screaming above the roar of the burning barricade, above the shouts of men in combat. Horses screamed. He heard the thunder of hooves and dashed out to reach the boy as the riders streaked past. "Lie still," he yelled at the screaming, thras.h.i.+ng youth.

"Shut up!" He grabbed him about the arm and hauled it over his shoulders, heard a frantic barking and another great shout as he stumbled to his feet, the oncoming thunder of riders on the return, a solid wall of hors.e.m.e.n.

"G.o.ddess-"

Strat met the shockwave of his own forces that had kept the way open: a moment of confusion while they swept about and followed him in a clatter on the pavings. The burning barricade was ahead, a sleet of stones. An uneven pair of figures blocked his path, dark against the light- Strat swept his sword in an arc that ended in the skull of the taller and took a good part of it away: he rode through. The rider behind him faltered as his horse hit the bodies and recovered; then the rest of the troop went over them, crus.h.i.+ng bone under steel-shod hooves, and swords swung as they met Jubal's men at the barricade, on their way back through.

There was a decided interest on the childrens' part. One boy kept climbing up to the window and gazing out, less talkative than his wont. The other never left it, and stared when Niko came and took both in his arms.

He saw the circling of something sorcerous that could not get in. Saw something dark stream up to fight it off, and that something was torn ragged and streamed on the winds. But what it had turned was dimmer fire now. He heard a forlorn cry, like a great hunting bird. Like a d.a.m.ned soul. A lost lover.

The wards about the place glowed blinding bright. And held.

Sanctuary was beset with fires, barricades, looting. The armed priests of the Storm G.o.d were no inconsiderable barrier themselves.

But they were ineffectual finally against a torn, b.l.o.o.d.y thing that haunted the halls and that tried the partners.h.i.+p that had been between them. He knew what had come streaking in to find him; he knew what faithful, vengeful wraith had held the line again. It pleaded with him in his dreams, forgetting that it was dead. He wept at such times, because he could not explain to it and it was not interested in listening.

"Get me out of here," he yelled down the hall, startling the children. A priest showed up in the hallway, spear in hand, eyes wide. "Dammit, get me out of this city!"

The priest kept staring. Niko kicked the door shut and sank down against it, child in either arm.

They crawled into his lap, hugged him round the neck. One wiped his face, and he stared past, longing for the dawn and the boat they promised would come.

A barge went down the White Foal, an uncommonly st.u.r.dy one by Sanctuary standards. Ischade watched it, arms about her, the hood of her black cloak back.

Her faithful were there: chastened Haught, smug Stilcho. The usual birds sat in the tree. Breath frosted on the wind-a cold morning, but that hardly stopped the looting and the sniping. There was a smoky taint to the air.

"They want war," Ischade said, "let them have war. Let them have it till they're full of it. Till this town's so confounded no force can hold it. Have you heard the fable of s.h.i.+pri's ring? The G.o.ddess was set on by three demons who plainly had rape in mind; she had a golden armlet, and she flung it to the first if he would fight off the other two and let her go. But the second s.n.a.t.c.hed at it and so did the third; the G.o.ddess walked away and there they stand to this day. No one devil can get it; and the other two won't let go till the world ends." She turned a dazzling smile on them both, in a merry humor quite unlike herself.

The barge pa.s.sed beneath the White Foal bridge. A black bird flew after it, sending forlorn cries down the wind.

The bay horse was dead. Strat limped when he walked, and persisted in walking, pacing the floor in the temporary headquarters the Band had set up deep within the mage quarter. A clutter of maps lay on the table. Plans that the ever changing character of the streets changed hourly. He wanted sleep. He wanted a bath. He reeked of smoke and sweat and blood, and he gave orders and drew lines and listened to the reports that began to come in.

He had not wanted this. He had no wish to be in command. He was, somehow.

Somehow it had fallen on him. The Band fought phantoms, confounded them with the living and mage-illusions. Sync was missing. Lyncaeos was dead. Kama had not been heard from. The bay horse had d.a.m.n near broken his leg when an arrow found it. He had had to kill it. Stepsons and commandos killed with terrible efficiency and the Ilsigi guerrillas who thought they knew what side they were on and thought they knew all about war might see things differently this morning. And change alliances again. In a situation like this alliances might change twice in a morning.

And Kadakithis sat in his palace and the Guard and the mercs held it. Strat limped to the window and entertained treasonous thoughts, hating thoughts, staring up toward the palace through the pall of smoke.

DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE.

Diane Duane

... But who could ever tell of all the daring in the stubborn hearts of women, the hard will, how the female force crams its resisted way through night, through death, taking no "no" for answer?

Yet still Right's anvil stands staunch on the ground, and there smith Destiny hammers out the sword.

Should that force, that fierce gift, be used for ill, delayed in glory, pensive through the murk, Vengeance comes home. Yet odd the way of life, for if the power's used for good, then still She comes; though in far other form, and strange ...

In Sanctuary that day the smoke rose up to heaven, a sooty sideways-blowing banner against the blue of early winter. Some of that smoke rose up from altars to attract the attention of one G.o.d or another, and failed. Most of the immortals were too busy looking on in horror or delight or divine remoteness as their votaries went to war against one another, tearing the town into pieces and setting the pieces afire. A G.o.d or two even left town. Many non-G.o.ds tried to: some few succeeded. Of those who remained, many non-immortals died, slaughtered in the riots or burned in the firestorms that swept through the city. No one tried or bothered to count them all, not even the G.o.ds.

One died in Sanctuary that day who was not mortal (quite), and not a G.o.d (quite). His death was unusual in that it was noticed-not just once but three times.

He noticed it himself, of course. Harran had worked close to death much of his life, both as apprentice healer-priest of Siveni Gray-Eyes and as the barber and leech to the ersatz Stepsons. He knew the inevitable results of the kind of swordcut that the great dark shape a-horseback swung at him. No hope, he thought clinically, while he ducked staggering away with a boy's weight slung over his shoulder. That's an expert handling that sword, that is. Past that mere thought, and a flash of pained concern for the arrow-shot boy he'd been trying to save, there was no time for anything but confusion.

The confusion had been a fixture in his mind lately. For one thing, the real Stepsons had come back, and Harran was not finding their return as funny as he'd once thought he would. He hadn't reckoned on being counted a traitor for supporting the false Stepsons in the true ones' absence. But he also hadn't reckoned on having so much trouble with his lost G.o.ddess Siveni when he summoned her up. Her manifestation, and her attempt to level Sanctuary-foiled by the clubfooted beggar-girl he'd been using as idiot labor and "mattress"-had left him confused to a standstill. Now Mriga the idiot was Mriga the G.o.ddess, made so by the same spell that had brought Siveni into the streets of Sanctuary. And, involved in the spell himself, Harran had briefly become a G.o.d too.

But his short bout of divinity had made the world no plainer to him. Suddenly bereft of Mriga, who had taken Siveni and gone wherever G.o.ds go-stricken by the loss of a hand during the spell, and by its abrupt replacement (with one of Mriga's)-Harran had retreated to the fake Stepsons' barracks. He had taken to wearing gloves and drinking a great deal while he tried to think out what to do next with his life. Somehow he never seemed to get much thinking done.

And then the real Stepsons stormed their old barracks, slaughtering in Vashanka's name the "traitors" who had impersonated them with such partial success. They were evidently particularly enraged about dogs being kept in the barracks. Harran didn't understand it. What was Vashanka's problem with dogs?

Had one bit Him once? In any case, when Harran fled to a Maze-side garret to escape the sack of the barracks, he made sure to take little brown Tyr with him.

She was yipping and howling unseen behind him now, as that sword descended, and there was nothing he could do. It hit him hard in the temple, and there was surprisingly little pain. He was faintly horrified to feel the top of his head crumple and slide sideways; and out of the corner of his left eye he saw half his skull and its contents come away clean on the edge of the sword. Harran fell-he knew he fell, from feeling his face and chest smash into the b.l.o.o.d.y dirt-but his vision, until it darkened, was frozen on that sidewise look. He became bemused; brains were usually darker. Evidently the typical color of the other ones he had examined was due to clotting of blood in the tissues. His had not yet had time, that was all. The next time he ... the next time ... but this was wrong. Where was Siveni? Where was Mriga? They always said that when ... you died, your G.o.d or G.o.ddess ... met you....

... and night descended upon Harran, and his spirit fled far away.

Tyr didn't know she was a dog. She didn't know anything in the way people do.

Her consciousness was all adjectives, hardly any nouns-affect without a.s.sociation. Things happened, but she didn't think of them that way; she hardly thought at all. She just was.

There was also something else. Not a person-Tyr had no idea what persons were but a presence, with which the world was as it should be, and without which her surroundings ceased to be a world. A human looking through Tyr's mind would have perceived such a place as h.e.l.l-all certainties gone, all loves abolished, nothing left but an emotional void through which one fell sickeningly, forever.

It had been that way long ago. In Tyr's vague way she dreaded that h.e.l.l's return. But since the Presence came into the world, knitting everything together, h.e.l.l had stayed far away.

There were also familiar shapes that moved about in her life. One was thin and gangly with a lot of curly straggly fur on top, and shared one or another of Tyr's sleeping spots with her. The other was a tall, blond-bearded shape that had been with her longer and had acquired more importance. Tyr dimly understood that the presence of this second shape had something to do with her well-being or lack of it, but she wasn't capable of working out just what, or of caring that she couldn't. When the tall shape held her, when in its presence food manifested itself, or sticks flew and she ran and brought them back, Tyr was ecstatically happy. Even when the skinny shape subtracted itself from her universe, she wasn't upset for long. Both the Presence and the tall shape, though surprised, seemed to approve; so it must have been all right. And the shape that counted hadn't gone away. It was when that shape was missing, or she smelled trouble about it, that Tyr's world went to pieces.

It was in pieces now. It had been since the time she had been cheerfully rooting in the barracks' kitchen-midden, and suddenly a lot of horses came, and some of the buildings around got very bright. Tyr didn't identify as fire the light that sprang up among them, since fire as she understood it was something that stayed in a little stone place in the center of the world, and didn't bother you unless you got too close. So, unconcerned, she had gone on rooting in the midden until the tall thing came rus.h.i.+ng to her and s.n.a.t.c.hed her up. This annoyed Tyr; and she became more annoyed yet when her nose told her that there had begun to be meat lying all over. Tyr never got enough meat. But the tall one wouldn't let her at it. He took her to some dark place that wasn't the center of the world, and once there he wouldn't be still, and wouldn't hold her, and wouldn't let her out. This went on for some time. Tyr became distressed. The world was coming undone.

Then the tall one began to smell of fear-more so than usual. He ran out and left her, and the fraying of the world completed itself. Tyr cried out without knowing that she did, and danced and scrabbled at the hard thing that was sometimes a hole in the wall. But no matter what she did, it wouldn't be a hole.

Then it occurred to her that there was another hole, up high. The tall one had been by it, and with some frantic thought of getting close to him by being where he had been, Tyr jumped up on things she did not know were tables and chairs, clambered her way onto the windowsill to perch there wobbling, and nosed the shutter aside.

She saw the tall shape lurching across the street, with something slung over its shoulder. Tyr's nose was full of the smell of burning and blood from below her.

She added everything swiftly together-the tallness and the scorch and the meat down there-and realized that he was bringing her dinner after all. Wildly excited, she began to yip-Then horses came running at the tall one. Tyr's feelings about this were mixed. Horses kicked. But once one horse had stopped kicking, and the tall one had given her some, and it had been very good. More food? Tyr thought, as much as she ever thought anything. But the horses didn't stop when they got to the tall one and the meat. For a moment she couldn't see where the tall one was. Then the horses separated, and Tyr whimpered and sniffed the air. She caught the tall one's scent. But to her horror, the scent did something she had never smelled it do before: it cooled. It thinned, and vanished, and turned to meat. And the Presence, the something that made the world alive, the Presence went away....

When the universe is destroyed before one's eyes, one may well mourn. Tyr had no idea of what mourning was, but she did it. Standing and shaking there on the window-sill, anguished, she howled and howled. And when the horses got too close and the tall things on them pointed at her, she panicked altogether and fell out of the window, rolled b.u.mping down the roof-gable and off it. The pain meant nothing to her: at the end of the world, who counts bruises? Tyr scrambled to her feet, in a pile of trash, limping, not noticing the limp. She fled down the dirty street, s.h.i.+ed past the flaming barricade, ran past even the crushed meat that had been the tall thing. She ran, howling her terror and loss, for a long time. Eventually she found at least one familiar smell-a midden. Desperate for the familiar, she half buried herself in the garbage, but it was no relief.

Footsore, too miserable even to nose through the promising bones and rinds she lay in, Tyr cowered and whimpered in restless anguish for hours. Finally weariness forced her, still crying, into a wretched sleep. Soon enough the sun would be up. But it would rise black, as far as Tyr was concerned. Joy was over forever. The tall thing was meat, and the Presence was gone.

As sleep took her, Tyr came her closest ever to having a genuine thought.

Moaning, she wished she were meat too.

Sanctuary's G.o.ds, like most others, resided by choice in the timelessness which both contains all mortal time and s.p.a.ce, and lies within them. That timelessness is impossible to understand-even the patron G.o.ds of the sciences shake their heads at its physics-and difficult to describe, especially to mortals, whose descriptions necessarily involve time, in the telling if nowhere else.

Light, overwhelming, is what most mortals remember who pa.s.s through those realms in dream or vision. The fortunate dead who come there, having given up time, see things differently. So do the G.o.ds. In that place where the absence of time makes s.p.a.ce infinitely malleable, they rear their bright dwellings and demesnes with no tool but thought, and alter them at whim-changing, too, their own forms as mortals change clothes, for similar reasons: hygiene, courtesy, boredom, special occasions. Like mortals, too, they have their pet issues and favorite causes. There are collaborations and feuds, amours with mortals or other divinities, arguments between pantheons or within them. Some of the G.o.ds find this likeness to mortal behavior distressing. Most profess not to care, just as most profess to ignore the deeper light that often broods beyond and within the Bright Dwellings, watching what G.o.ds and mortals do.

Recently the neighborhood had seen the advent of one Dwelling that wasn't always bright. It tended to be either a high, chaste, white-columned temple of the kind aesthetically promising mortals built, or a low thatched hut of stone crouching defiantly in a rammed dirt yard. But either way, it always had a positively mortal look about it that pa.s.sing deities variously found tasteless, deliciously primitive, or avant-garde. The dwelling's changes sometimes came several to the minute, then several to the second; and after such spasms lightningbolts tended to spray out the windows or doors, and thumps and shouting could be heard from inside. The neighbors soon discovered that the division of this house against itself was symptomatic. The G.o.ddess(es) living there were in the middle of a personality crisis.

"Do you ever think about anything but clothes?!"

"At least I do think about them now and then. You're a G.o.ddess, you can't go out in those-those rags!"

"I beg your pardon! This s.h.i.+ft is just well broken in. It's comfortable. And it covers me ... instead of leaving half of me hanging out, like that old tunic of Ils's that you never take off. Or that raggy goatskin cape with the ugly face on it."

"I'll have you know that when my Father shakes 'that raggy goatskin' over the armies of men, they scatter in terror-"

"The way it smells, no wonder. And that's our Father. Oh, do put the vase down, Siveni! I'll just make another. Besides, when has Ils scattered an army lately?

Better give him that thing back: He could probably use it just now."

"Why, you-"

Lightnings whipped the temple's marble, scarring it black. Screeching, a silver raven napped out from between a pair of columns and perched complaining in the topmost branches of a golden-appled tree a safe distance away. The lightning made a lot of noise as it lashed about, but even a casual observer would have noticed that it did little harm. Shortly it sizzled away to nothing, and the stagy thunder that had accompanied it faded to echoes and whispers, and died.

The temple convulsed, squatted down, and got brown and gray, a beast of fieldstone and thatch. Then it went away altogether.

Two women were left standing there on the plain, which still nickered uncertainly between radiance and dirt. One of them stood divinely tall in s.h.i.+mmering robes, crested and helmed, holding a spear around which the restrained lightnings sulkily strained and hissed-a form coolly fair and bright, all G.o.dhead and maidenhead, seemingly una.s.sailable. Just out of arms' reach of her stood someone not so tall, hardly so fair, dressed in grime and worn plain cloth with patches, crowned with nothing but much dark curly hair, somewhat snarled, and armed only with a kitchen knife. They stared at each other for a moment, Siveni and Mriga, warrior-queen of wisdom and idiot wench. It was the idiot who had the thoughtful, regretful look, and the Lady of Battles who had the black eye.

"It's got to stop," Mriga said, dropping the knife in the s.h.i.+ning dust and turning away from her otherself. "We tear each other up for nothing. Our town is going to pieces, and our priest is all alone in the middle of it, and we don't dare try to help him until our own business is handled ..."

"You don't dare," Siveni said scornfully. But she didn't move.

Mriga sighed. While she had been insane just before she became a G.o.ddess, her madness had not involved multiple personalities-so that when she suddenly discovered that she was one with Siveni Gray-Eyes, there was trouble. Siveni was Ils's daughter, mistress of both war and the arts and sciences, the Ilsig G.o.ds'

two-edged blade Herself: both Queen of cool wisdom, and h.e.l.lion G.o.d-daughter who could take any G.o.d in the Ilsig pantheon, save her father, for best two falls out of three. Siveni had not taken kindly to losing parts of herself into time, or to seeing the Rankan pantheon raised to preeminence in Sanctuary, or to coming off a poor second in a street brawl with a mortal. But all of those had happened; and the first, though now mending in timelessness, irked her most.

When G.o.ds become snared in time and its usages-as had many of Sanctuary's G.o.ds their attributes tend to leach across the barrier, into time, and embed themselves in the most compatible mortal personality. In Siveni's case, that had been Mriga. Even as a starving idiot-beggar she had loved the edge on good steel. Sharpening swords and spears was the work to which Harran had most often put her, after he found her in the Bazaar, dully whetting a broken bit of metal on a rock. Clubfooted and feeble-willed as she was, she had somehow "managed" to be found by the last of Siveni's priests in Sanctuary, "managed" to be taken in by him as the poor and mad had always been taken into her temple before. And when Harran went out one night to work the spell that would set Siveni free of time and bring her back into the world, to the ruin of the Rankan G.o.ds, Mriga was drawn after him like steel to the magnet.

The spell he had used would infallibly bring back the lost. It did, not only bringing back Siveni to her temple, but also retrieving Harran's lost divinity and Mriga's lost wits. Harran, blindly in love with his G.o.ddess in her whole and balanced form, had been shocked to find himself dealing not with the gracious maiden mistress of the arts of peace, but with a cold fierce power made testy and irrational by the loss of vital attributes. Siveni had been quite willing to pull all Sanctuary down around all the G.o.ds' ears if the deities of Ranke would not meet her right in battle. Harran tried to stop her-for vile sink though it was, Sanctuary was his home-and Siveni nearly killed him out of pique.

Mriga, though, had stopped her. She had recovered the conscious G.o.dhead every mortal temporarily surrenders at birth, and was therefore in full control of the attributes of wise compa.s.sion and cool judgment that Siveni had lost into time.

She and her otherself fought, and after Mriga won the fight, both saw swiftly that they were one, though crippled and divided. They needed union, and timeless-ness in which to achieve it. Neither was available in the world of mortals. With that knowledge they had turned, as one, to Harran. They took their leave of him, healing the hand maiming that Siveni had inflicted on him, and then departed for those fields mortals do not know. Of course they planned to come back to him-or for him-as soon as they were consolidated.

But even in timelessness, union was taking longer than either had expected.

Siveni was arrogant in her recovered wisdom, angry about having lost it, and bitter that it had found nowhere better to lodge than an ignorant cinder-sitting house-s.l.u.t. Mriga was annoyed at Siveni's sn.o.bbery, bored with her constant anecdotes about her divine lineage-she told the same ones again and again-and most of all tired of fighting. Unfortunately she too was Siveni: when challenged she had to fight. And being mortal and formerly mad, she knew something Siveni had never learned: how to fight dirty. Mriga always won, and that made things worse.

"If you just wouldn't-"

"Oh stop," Mriga said, waving her hand and sitting down on the crude bench that appeared behind her. In front of her appeared a rough table loaded down with meat and bread and watered wine of the kind Harran used to smuggle for them from the Stepsons' store. Now that she was a G.o.ddess, and not mad, Mriga could have had better; but old habits were hard to break, and the sour wine reminded her of home. "Want some?"

"G.o.ddesses," Siveni said, looking askance at the table, "don't eat mortal food.

They eat only-"

"'-the G.o.ds' food and drink only foaming nectar.' Yes, that's what I hear. So then how am I sitting here eating butcher's beef and drinking wine? Who could be here but us G.o.ddesses? Have some of this nice chine."

"No."

Mriga poured out a libation to Father Ils, then applied herself to a rack of back ribs. "The world of mortal men," she said presently, while wiping grease off one cheek, "mirrors ours, have you noticed? Or maybe ours mirrors theirs.

Either way, have you noticed how preoccupied both of them are just now with cat fighting? The Beysa. Kama. Roxane. Ischade. If all that stopped-would ours stop too? Or if we stopped-"