Siveni writing with a bit of yellow chalk inside one of the areas that Mriga had cleaned off. At one point she stopped and looked critically at one graceful phrase. “I never did like that letter after I invented it,” she said, “but after
Us sent it out to men, it was too late to call the wretched thing back.”
Mriga sat back on her heels and laughed at her almost-sister. “Is there anything you didn’t invent?”
“The rotgut they distill in the back of the Unicorn. That’s all Anen’s fault.”
A few minutes’ more work and they stood up, finished. “Well enough,” Siveni said. “Are you sure of the words?”
They could hardly avoid it, being in some ways Siveni themselves, and hearing her mind nearly as clearly as their own, at the moment.
“Then let’s be about it. The sooner I see the inside of my house again, the happier I’ll be.”
“Our house,” said Mriga, in a warning tone.
Siveni began to laugh. “Harran, we used to have the best fights-the house would change its nature every other minute. How the neighbor gods stared….” Her eyes flashed, even in that light so dim as to make expression impossible. For a moment Harran looked at her and saw again the crazed hoyden goddess he had fallen in love with; and Mriga smiled, remembering many fights won best two falls out of three, while the noise scandalized the divine neighbors. “If this works…” she said.
“If?” Siveni reached out for the bread. “Give me that.”
They took their places. The diagram was a triangle within a hexagon within a circle, and other lesser figures were traced in the apertures. At each point of the triangle they stood, each with a cup and a small round loaf of bread in front of them- the cup washed in wine and upended, the bread baked in a fire struck by the same flints that ground its grain. In the center stood an empty cup, this one of glass. If all went well, at the end of all this it would be cracked and they would never hear the sound; the heavens would have cracked open for them at the same moment.