The gongs of one of the temples down the way spoke midnight, a somber word that echoed in the summer-night stillness. There was no breath of wind tonight, and the heat seemed to have gotten greater after the sun sent down, rather than less. A fat bloated moon, gibbous and a day from full, was riding high, its pallid light slanting down through the shattered windows and striking gemlights from the broken glass on the floor. Echoes tinkled down from the high ceiling as
Siveni kicked the stuff aside.
Harran looked up, brushing away a piece of glass that Siveni had kicked at him.
“Siveni-are you really sure this is going to work?”
She looked at him haughtily. “All those spells that have gone awry have been done by mere practitioners of magic. Not authors of it. I helped Father Us write this spell; I taught the bread and wine what to mean. All the dying gods who come back to heaven on a regular basis swear by it. Really, Harran, we’ll never make a decent mage out of you if you don’t learn to trust your materials.”
“Have you ever actually done the spell? Yourself?” Mriga said under her breath as she got a rag out of her bag and began scrubbing some of the old markings off the floor.
“Not myself. I gave it to Shils to test; it worked all right. In fact, they started to wish in heaven that I hadn’t given it to him. He’s a terrible bore, and now there’s no getting rid of him. Throw him out of heaven and a second later he’s back.”
They worked in silence for a few minutes, Harran laying out the bread, Mriga finishing her scrubbing, then uncorking the wine and setting out the various cups into which it would have to be poured by thirds and mixed with blood,