So Siveni walked the mortal world without her armor, without her army-conquering spear, and built city walls, and pondered vengeance on Molin Torchholder. Some ways, this was all his fault. Harran would never have been moved to summon her out of the terrible calm of the Ilsig heaven had not the Torchholder banished her priesthood from Sanctuary. And now, she thought-looking down between the fourth and fifth courses of new stone at a little tunnel being built between them-now he would pay for it. Or perhaps not now; but as gods reckon time, soon enough.
“Yai there, Gray-Eyes,” came a shout up to her from one of the stonemasons.
“We’re ready for the next one!”
She grimaced, a look she was glad the mason couldn’t see through the kicked-up dust of the hot day’s work. Gray-eyes, they all called her; but it was a joke.
There was no telling them who she was. It hadn’t been too long ago that she sat cool and calm in her house in heaven, hearing her name called in reverence, smelling the uprising savor of good sacrifices, stepping down in power to help those who called on her. No more of that.
Love she had now, yes; she had never had that before- certainly nothing so immediate. But was it as good… ?
“Right,” she shouted back. “Kivan,” she shouted in another direction, “get the crane around, man, the mortar’s wet! It’s three in a row here. Yes, those three.
Get them up on the hoist. Where the hell are the draggers?”
She watched them haul the stone in question into place and wrap the crane’s ropes around it. While they were grunting and straining she let herself go unfocused for a moment, and listened. Knife-grinding, she “heard”; and someone screaming, while sure hands worked over them and other hands held them down; and more faintly than the first two impressions, a clear sense came of being rubbed in the good place behind the ears. Siveni smiled to herself. She had always been a single goddess, being too busy inventing things to bother splitting off alternate personae, dyads and trinities and whatever. Now, after Harran’s spell, and their trek past hell’s gate, she was not only a trinity, but one with four members. Interesting, it was. And very unsettling.