happened; and the first, though now mending in timelessness, irked her most.
When gods become snared in time and its usages-as had many of Sanctuary’s gods
their attributes tend to leach across the barrier, into time, and embed
themselves in the most compatible mortal personality. In Siveni’s case, that had
been Mriga. Even as a starving idiot-beggar she had loved the edge on good
steel. Sharpening swords and spears was the work to which Harran had most often
put her, after he found her in the Bazaar, dully whetting a broken bit of metal
on a rock. Clubfooted and feeble-willed as she was, she had somehow “managed” to
be found by the last of Siveni’s priests in Sanctuary, “managed” to be taken in
by him as the poor and mad had always been taken into her temple before. And
when Harran went out one night to work the spell that would set Siveni free of
time and bring her back into the world, to the ruin of the Rankan gods, Mriga
was drawn after him like steel to the magnet.
The spell he had used would infallibly bring back the lost. It did, not only
bringing back Siveni to her temple, but also retrieving Harran’s lost divinity
and Mriga’s lost wits. Harran, blindly in love with his goddess in her whole and
balanced form, had been shocked to find himself dealing not with the gracious
maiden mistress of the arts of peace, but with a cold fierce power made testy
and irrational by the loss of vital attributes. Siveni had been quite willing to
pull all Sanctuary down around all the gods’ ears if the deities of Ranke would