Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

Mriga sat up in bed, wrapped a sheet around her, and swung her legs over the edge. “Siveni,” she said, very quietly, “has it occurred to you that maybe we’re not really goddesses anymore?”

Siveni looked up, not at Mriga, but at the poor mouldering mural, where Eshi danced in her gauze, and Us was godly-splendid, and everything was youth and luxury and divine merriment. The look was deadly. “Then why,” Siveni said, just as quietly, “do we share this wretched heartbond, like good trinities do, so that all day I can hear you both thinking how unhappy you are, and how sorry for me you are, and how you miss the dog, and how we’re trapped here forever?”

Harran sat up, too, tossing the other end of the sheet across his lap. “We’re something new, I think,” he said. “A mixture. Divine without being in heaven, mortal without-“

“I want to go back.”

The words fell into silence.

“After this job,” she said. “Harran, I’m sony. I’m not one of those dying-and rebom gods who makes the corn come up, and shuttles back and forth between being mortal and divine; I’m just not! It’s not working for me! I’ve been fighting it, but the truth is that I was made for a place where my thought becomes fact in a second, where I shine, where I’m worth praying to. I was made to have power. And now I don’t have it, and you’re all suffering for my lack.” She sat down against the table. It shifted under her weight, and the broken bit of dish propping the short leg crunched and broke with a sound that made them all start.