Robert Asprin - Wings of Omen

Those days were all done now. Anen's temple was dark except for one red light over the altar; his priests' annuity was reduced to almost nothing, and Anen's old patrons, knowing Him out of favor, tended to do their libation-pouring elsewhere. As for Dene's temple, the Rankans, possibly considering Her too contemplative (or too unimportant) to do anything about it, had demolished the building... leaving the merchants and guildsmen to quarrel over the newly available parcel of real estate.

And as for Siveni's temple... Harran stood across from it now, hiding himself in the shallow doorway of a night-shuttered mercantile establishment. He could have wept. Those white columns all smeared with city grime, the white steps leading up to the portico broken, littered, stained.... A slow cold wind swept down the Avenue of Temples toward Ils's fane, a dim shape no more clearly seen than the moon behind clouds. Near it reared up Savankala's upstart temple, and Vashanka's hard by it-both great ungainly piles, and as dark tonight as Ils's. No one walked the street. It was far past the hour for devotions.

Harran held still in that doorway for a long time, unable to shake the feeling that he had been followed. The gongs of Ils's temple rang the third hour after midnight. The sound wavered in the wind like Harran's heart, blowing away down the avenue toward the Governor's Palace and the estates. Something flapped nearby-a sound like a flag snapping in the wind. He jerked around, looked. Nothing but the shadowy shape of a bird on the right, flying heavily in the crosswind, coming to perch on the high cupola of Siveni's temple, becoming another shadow that loomed there among the carvings. A black bird, bigger than a crow....

He unswallowed his courage, looked both ways, and hurried across the street. The strength of the wind, as Harran reached the middle of the avenue, was ominous. If ever there was a night to be home in bed, this was it....

He dashed up the stairs where he had lingered so many times before, tripping now and again over some dislodged stone, some crack that hadn't been there when he was young. On the portico he paused to get his breath and look back the way he had come. Nothing coming, no one passing in the street.... And there, the motion again, something dark; not in the street, but next door in the cloddy, vacant lot that was all that remained of Dene's temple. Harran felt under his cloak for the long knife....

Eyes caught the reflection of the pale stone of Siveni's stairs. Harran found himself looking at the largest rat he had ever seen, in Sanctuary or elsewhere. It was the size of a dog, at least. The thought of Tyr catching up with it made him shudder. As if sensing Harran's fear, the rat turned about and waddled back into the vacant lot, going about its nightly business. Other shadows, just as large, stirred about the pillars of the portico, unconcerned.

Harran swallowed and thought about business. If I feel I'm being followed, the thing to do is start the spell-draw the outer circle. No one can get through it once it's closed. He put down the box and the flask and fumbled about his clothes for the lump of bitumen. Slowly he made his way around the great open square of pillars, all of which bore the sledgehammer marks of attempted demolition. The marks were futile, of course-any temple built by the priests of the goddess who invented architecture might be expected to last-but they scarred Harran's heart just looking at them. Right around the portico, as he'd been taught-four hundred eighty paces exactly-Harran went, bent over, his back aching. Dark shapes fled again and again at his passing. He refused to look at them. By the time he came around to the middle of the stairs again and drew the diagram-knot that tied the circle closed, his back was one long creaking bar of iron with smiths working on it; but he felt much safer. He picked up his box again and made his way inward.

The great doors within the portico were long since barred shut from inside, but that would hardly stop anyone who had served Siveni past the novitiate. Harran traced the door's carved raven-and-olive-tree motif just below eye level until he found the fourth raven past the second tree with no olives on it, and pushed in the raven's eye. The bird's whole head fell in after it, revealing the little catch and valve that opened the priests' door. The catch was stiff, but after a couple of tries the door swung open wide enough to admit Harran. He slipped in and swung it silently to behind him.

Harran lifted the dark lantern he had brought with him and unshuttered it. And then he did begin to weep; for the statue was gone-the image toward which Harran had once bowed affectionately so many times a day, having eventually learned to see and bow to the immortal beauty behind the mortal symbol. Siveni's great statue in her aspect as Defender, seated, armed and helmed, holding her battalion-vanquishing spear in one hand and her raven perched on the other. The great work, the statue that the artist Rahen had spent five years fashioning of marble, gold, and ivory, afterward putting down his sculptor's tools forever and saying he knew his life's masterwork when he saw it, and would make no other.... All gone. Harran could have understood it if they had stripped the gold and ivory off, pried the gems out of the mighty shield. He knew as well as any other Sanctuarite that not even nailing things down could keep them safe here. But he had never thought to have the fact brought home to him so brutally as this. The pediment on which the statue had stood was bare except for bits of rubble, chunks and splinters of shattered marble... but those were eloquent even in ruin. Here, a fat pyramidal lump was one corner of the statue's pedestal; there, a long slim shard, smooth and faintly grooved at one end, broken off sharp as a flint at the other-a feather from a raven's outstretched wing.... Harran's brain roiled with rage. Where did they-why-A whole statue, a statue thirty feet high! Stolen, destroyed, lost.

He dashed the tears out of his eyes, put the lantern down, flung his cloak down on the dusty marble, and picked up his box. One more circle he would need in which to work the sorcery itself. If his back still hurt him, Harran didn't notice it now. Round the vacant pediment he went with the bitumen, not counting paces this time, rather fighting down his bitter anger enough to remember the words that needed to be thought again and again to confine within this inner circle the forces that would soon break loose. It was not easy work, fighting down both his anger and the growing, restless power of the circle-spell; so that as Harran tied the second circle closed he was gasping like a man who'd run a race, and had to stand for some moments bowed over like a spent runner, hands on thighs.

He straightened up as quickly as he could, for there was worse to come. Simple this spell might be, but that wouldn't keep it from being strenuous; and first he needed the rite. Breaking and resealing the circle according to procedure, he went to get it.

Normally the location of the safe-crypt was not information that would have been entrusted to a junior priest, but in the haste surrounding the exile of Siveni's priesthood, quite a few secrets had slipped out. Harran had been one of those conscripted to help old Irik hide away the less important documents, old medical and engineering texts and spells. "We may yet find a use for these, in a better hour," Irik had said to Harran. Just then he had had his arms full of parchments, his nose full of dust, and his mind full of fear; the words had meant nothing. But now Harran blessed Irik as he went around to behind where the statue had been, stepped on the proper pieces of flooring in the proper order, and saw the single block by the rear wall fall slowly away into darkness.

The stair was narrow and steep, with no banister. Harran held up the lantern at the bottom of it and went rummaging, sneezing a lot as he did. Parchments, book rolls, and wax tablets were piled and scattered every which way. It was the rolls he went for. Again and again Harran undid linen cords, spread a roll out in a cloud of dust and sneezes, to find nothing but a spare copy of the temple's bookkeeping for the third month of such and such a year, or some tired old philosophical treatise, or a cure for the ague (ox-fat rubbed together with mustard and ground red-beetle casings, the same applied to the chest three times a day). This went on till his eyes began to water, rebelling against the poor light, and Harran's mind stopped seeing what he read and kept wandering away to worry about the time. Night was leaning toward morning; this was the time to do the spell, if ever-before dawn, herald of new beginnings-and if he didn't find it soon-