Robert Asprin - Blood Ties

Of course, every word you would have said would have been the truth. But in Sanctuary, who ever expects to hear the truth the first time... ?

"She hates the job," said the voice from inside the house.

"I know," said another voice, male.

The house was one of those left over from an earlier time when some misguided demi-noble, annoyed at the higher real-estate prices in the neighborhoods close to the palace, had tried to begin a "gentrification" project on the outskirts of the Maze. Sensibly, no other member of the nobility had bothered to sink any money in such a crazed undertaking. And the people in the mean houses all around had carefully waited until the nobleman in question had moved all his goods into the townhouse. Then the neighbors had begun carefully harvesting the house-never so many burglaries or so large a loss as to drive the nobleman away; just many careful pilfer-ings made easier by the fact that the neighbors had blackmailed the builders into putting some extra entrances into the house, entrances of which the property owner was unaware. The economy of the neighborhood took a distinct upward turn. It took the nobleman nearly three years to become aware of what was happening; and even then the neighbors got wind of his impending move through one of his servants, and relieved the poor gentleman of all his plate and most of his liquid assets. He considered himself lucky to get out with his clothes. After that the property fell into genteel squalor and was occupied by shift after shift of squatters. Finally it became too squalid even for them; which was when Harran bought it, and moved in with two goddesses and a dog. "Whose turn is it to fix the door?" Harran said. He was a young man, perhaps eighteen years of age, and dark-haired... a situation he found odd, having been born thirty years before, and blond at the time. His companion was a lean little rail of a woman with a tangle of dark curly hair and eyes that had a touch of madness to them, which was not surprising, since she had been born that way, and sanity was nearly as new to her as divinity was. They were standing in what had been the downstairs reception room, and was now a sort of bedroom since the upper floors were too befouled as yet to do anything with at all. Both of them were throwing on clothes, none of the best quality. "Mriga?" Harran said. "Huh?" She looked at him with an abstracted expression. "Whose turn is it to fix the door?... Oh, never mind, I'll do it. I don't have to be there for a bit."

"Sorry," Mriga said. "When she's angry, I get angry, too.... I have trouble, still, figuring out where she leaves off and I begin. She's out there wanting to throw thunderbolts at things."

"This is unusual?" Harran said, picking up a much-worn shirt and shaking it hard. Rock dust snapped out of the folds.

"It should be," Mriga said rather sadly. She sat down on one of their pieces of furniture, a large bed with multiple sword hacks in it. "I remember the way things were for her when she was a goddess for real. A thought was all it took to make the best things to wear, anything she wanted to eat, a god's house to live in. She didn't have to be angry then. But now..." She looked rather wistfully to one side, where a huge old mural clung faded and mouldering to the wall. It was a scene of Us and Shipri creating the first harvest from nothing. Everywhere there was a wealth of grain and flowers and fruit, and dancing nymphs and gauzy drapery and ewers of outpoured wine. The wood on which the mural was painted was warped, and Shipri had wormholes in her, in embarrassing places.

Harran sat down beside her for a moment. "Do you regret it?"

Mriga looked at him out of big hazel eyes. "Me myself? Or she and I?"

"Both."

Mriga put out a hand to touch Harran's cheek. "You? Never. I would become a goddess a hundred times over and give it up every time, to be where I am now. But Siveni..."

She trailed off, having no answer for Harran that he would want to hear. Perhaps he knew it. "We'll make it work," he said. "Gods have survived being mortals before."

"Yes," Mriga said. "But that's not the way she had it planned."

She looked at a bar of sunlight that was inching across the bare wood floor toward the other piece of furniture, a table of blond wood with one leg shorter than the three others. "Time to be heading out, love. Do we all eat together today?"

"She said she might not be able to make it... there's something going on at the wall that may take extra time. An arch of some kind."

"We should take her something, then."

"Always assuming that I get paid."

"You should hit them with lightning if they renege on you."

"That's Siveni's department."

"I wish it were," Mriga said. She kissed Harran goodbye and left as he was looking for a hasp to rehang the door.

Mriga walked slowly toward her own work, threading the streets with the unconscious care of a lifelong city dweller. It had been a busy year for all of them ... for her in particular. One day Mriga had been just another madwoman... Harran's bedwarmer and house servant, good for nothing but mindless knife sharpening and mindless sex. The next, she had been awake, and aware, and divine-caught in the backwash of a spell Harran had performed to bring back Siveni from whatever oblivious heaven she and the other Ilsig gods had been inhabiting. Harran had been one of Siveni's priests, the healer-servants of the divine patroness of war and crafts. He had thought he would remain so. But the spell had caught him, too, binding him and Siveni and Mriga together through life, past death. That was no mere phrase, either, for the three of them had been in hell together, and had come back again to what should have been a cheerful, delighted life together... long years rich with joy.

Mriga stepped over the sewer runnel in the middle of a street and reflected that even the gods were sometimes caught by surprise. The trouble had started with Stonnbringer's pillar of fire; the banner of a new power in Sanctuary, one that was going to diminish all others that were already there. She could still remember the night she woke in terrible shock to Siveni's anguished screams, and to the feeling of something fiercer than life seemingly running out of her bones, as godhead wavered and sank within them both like a smothered fire. And then the Globes of Power were destroyed, and what little innate power was left to the three of them began to go awry. She and Siveni had said they were willing to be mortal, to die, for Harran's sake. Now it appeared they would have a chance to find out just how willing. Meantime, a god (or goddess) without a temple needed a place to live, and food to eat....

Mriga walked across the bridge over the White Foal (briefly holding her breath against the morning smell) and headed into the Bazaar from the south side. Most of the stall-keepers were setting up their canopies, muttering to one another about prices, wholesalers, arguments at home: the usual morning gossip. She made her way over to the side near the north wall.

There was Rahi, her stallmate, setting up as usual... a large, florid, corpulent man, fighting with the canopy poles, sweating and swearing. Rahi was a tinker who did a small side business in small arms, knives, and the like. He boasted that he had sold knives to Hanse himself, but Mriga doubted this; anyone who really had would be too cautious to cry the man's name aloud. At any rate, apart from his boasting, Rahi was that astonishing phenomenon, an honest tradesman. He didn't mark up his wares more than a hundred percent or so, he didn't scrape true gilt off hilts or scabbards and substitute brass, and his scales had trustworthy weights to them. Why he chose to be such an exception, he usually refused to explain ... though one night, over a stoup of wine, he whispered one word to Mriga, looking around him as if the Prince's men were waiting to take him away. "Religion," he had said, and then immediately drank himself drunk.