Robert Asprin - Wings of Omen

Instantly the root began to glow... faintly at first; but it would not be faint for long. Harran scrambled to his feet, rolled the book along to the last part of the spell, and began to read. It was in the vernacular, the easiest part of the spell; but his heart beat harder than ever. "By my blood here spilt, and by these names invoked; by the dread signs of deep night inclining toward the morning, and the potent figures here drawn; by the souls of the dead and the yet unborn..."

It was getting warm. Harran hazarded a glance, as he read, down at the light growing at his feet. The mandrake was burning such a hue as no one ever saw save while dreaming or dead. To call the color "red" would have been to exalt red far past its station, and insult the original. There was heat in the color, but of a sort that had nothing to do with flame. This was the original shade of heart's passion, of blood burning in a living being possessed by rage or desire. It was dark; yet there was nothing intrinsically evil about it, and it blinded. In that light Harran could barely see the book he read from, the stone walls around him; they seemed ephemeral as things dreamed. Only that light was real, and the image it stirred in his mind. His heart's desire, whose very name he had denied himself for so many years now-and now within his grasp, the longed-for, the much-loved, wise and fierce and fair-

"... By all these signs and bindings, and most of all by Thy own name, 0 Lady Siveni, do I adjure and command Thee! Present Thyself here before me-" -in comely form and such as will do me no harm, said the spell, but Harran would not have dreamed of saying that: as if Siveni could ever be uncomely, or would harm her priest? And then the triple invocation, while he gasped, and everything reeled, and his heart raced in his chest as if he labored in the act of love: "Come Thou, Lady of the Battles, who smites and binds up again. Builder, Defender, Avenger; come Thou, come Thou, 0 come!"

No lightning this time, no thunder. Nothing but a shock that knocked Harran flying in one direction and the knife and book in two others-a hurtless shock that was nevertheless as final and terrible as dreaming of falling out of bed. Harran lay still for quite some while, afraid to move- then groaned softly once and sat himself up on the stone, wondering what had gone wrong.

"Nothing," someone said to him.

The voice made the walls of the temple vibrate. Harran trembled and held his head against the singing in it.

"Well, don't sit there, Harran," said the voice. "Get on with it. We've business to attend to."

He rolled to his knees and looked up.

She was there. Harran staggered; his heart did too, missing beats. The eyes those were what struck him first: literally struck him, with physical force. Afterward, he realized this should have been no surprise. "Flashing-Eyed," was after all her chief epithet. His best imaginations proved insufficient to the reality. Eyes like lightning-clear, pitilessly illuminating, keen as a spear in the heart-those were Siveni's. They didn't glow; they didn't need to. None of her needed to. She was simply there, so there that everything physical seemed vague beside her. A great chill of fear went through Harran then at the thought that perhaps there were good reasons why the gods didn't usually walk the realms of men.

But not even fear could live long, fixed by that silvery regard, that ferocious beauty. For she was beautiful, and again Harran's old imaginations fell down in the face of the truth. It was a spare, severe, unselfconscious beauty, too busy with other things to notice itself... definitely the face of the patroness of the arts and sciences. There was wildness in that face, as well as wisdom; thoughtlessness as well as handsomeness in those rich robes-for the blazing under-tunic was tucked casually and hurriedly up above the knee, and the great loose overtunic was a man's, probably Ils's, borrowed for the greater freedom of motion it allowed. The hand that held the great spear she leaned on was graceful as a lady's; but the slender arm still spoke of shattering strength. Siveni as she now appeared was not much taller than mortal womankind. But as he looked at her, and she bent those cool, terrible, considering eyes on him, Harran felt very small indeed. She pushed her high-crested helm back a bit from that coolly beautiful face and said impatiently, "Do get up, man. Finish what you're doing so we can get to business." Siveni lifted the raven that perched on her left hand, moving it to her shoulder.

He got up, still very confused. "Madam," he managed to croak, and then tried it again, rather embarrassed at making such a poor showing. "Lady, I am finished...."

"Of course you're not," she said, reaching out with that blazing spear and using its point to flick the book-roll up into her free hand. "Don't go lackwitted on me, Harran. It says right here: 'the hand of a brave and living man, the same to be offered up at the spell's end by the celebrant.'" She turned the scroll toward him, showing him the words.

Harran glanced down at the middle of the circle, where in the skeletal hand the mandrake still burned dully bright as a coal. But Siveni's voice brought his glance up again. "Not that hand, Harran!" She said, sounding annoyed now. "That one!"

And she pointed at the knife, which he had forgotten he was clutching-and at his left hand, which clutched it.

Harran went as cold all over as he had in the graveyard. "Oh my G-"

"Goddess?" she said, as Harran caught himself as usual. "Sorry. That is the price written here. If the gateway you seek to open is to be fully opened-and even as I am not fully here yet, neither would the others be-the price must be paid." She looked at him coolly for several moments, then said with less asperity and some sadness, "I would have expected my priests to read better than that, Harran.... You do read?"

He gave her no answer for a moment. He thought of Sanctuary, and the Rankans, and the Beysib, and briefly, irrationally, of Shal. Then he stepped over to the center of the circle, and the hand. The bones of it were charred. The ring of base metal was a brass-scummed silver puddle on the floor. The mandrake glowed under his glance like a coal that had been breathed on.

He knelt down again and lifted his eyes briefly to the unmerciful loveliness before him; then squeezed his left hand until the blood flowed fresh, and with it pried the mandrake away from the hand's blackened bones.

In the hours that intervened until Harran got up again- a few minutes later-he came belatedly to understand a great deal; to understand Shal, and many of the other Stepsons, and some of the poor and sick he'd treated while still in the temple. There was no describing the pain of a maiming. It was a thing as without outward color as the burning of the mandrake; and even worse, more blinding, was the horror that came after. When Harran stood again, he had no left hand anymore. The stump's scorching pain throbbed and died away; Siveni's doing, probably. But the horror, he knew, would never go away. It would be fed anew, every day, by those who refused to look at the place where a hand had once been. Harran abruptly understood that payment is not later, is never later, but is always now. It would be now all his life.

He got to his feet and found Siveni, as she had said, even more there than she had been before. He wasn't sure this was a good thing. None of this was working out as it should have. And there were other things peculiar as well. Where was the light coming from that filled the temple suddenly? Not from Siveni; she was striding around the place with the dissatisfied air of a housewife who comes home and has to deal with her husband's housekeeping- poking her spear into comers, frowning at the broken glass. "All this will be put to rights soon enough," she said. "After business. Harran, what are you scowling at?"