“Let all be open,” Siveni cried, “let the way be prepared for us; we pass! We pass!” And Harran felt her lift the cup, to dash it against the written marble and open the way; and he felt her hesitate; and he felt her sway.
His eyes were working again, much against their will. There was moonlight where there should not have been, and Siveni stood bemused, looking at her wounded arm, watching the blood run down.
“It’s wrong,” she said. “It shouldn’t hurt.”
And she fell to the floor, and the cup went flying out of the circle and crashed in the wrong spot, all its virtue spilled in a black pool under the moon.
Harran fell down beside her. The edges of the wound were dark and inflamed. He looked at Mriga in horror. “The knife…”
“Poison,” she said, her face in anguish. “But it never left me all day-“
“Yesterday,” Harran said.
In Mriga’s shocked mind he saw the young man, with his knife with death in it.
One of the Torchholder’s spies.
They started up in horror together, neither sparing more than a look for the fair young form of Siveni, that had lived thousands of years as an Ilsig goddess, and had now had those thousands of years catch up with her in one withering second.
That was when the silvertipped arrows came whistling in, and feathered them both. They fell.
When the backwash of the spell had died down a bit, in behind his men came Molin
Torchholder, who missed nothing in this city, especially nothing done by those whom mere silly love made careless. Stormbringer, too, was not quite settled yet, and had spoken a word in his ear about rogue deities climbing over his walls, in one direction or another. Molin carefully broke the circle, kicked the shattered glass of the cup of blood and wine about, and nudged with his toe the skin-and-bones body of his erstwhile architect.