He had not wanted this. He had no wish to be in command. He was, somehow. Somehow it had fallen on him. The Band fought phantoms, confounded them with the living and mage-illusions. Sync was missing. Lyncaeos was dead. Kama had not been heard from. The bay horse had damn near broken his leg when an arrow found it. He had had to kill it. Stepsons and commandos killed with terrible efficiency and the Ilsigi guerrillas who thought they knew what side they were on and thought they knew all about war might see things differently this morning. And change alliances again. In a situation like this alliances might change twice in a morning.

And Kadakithis sat in his palace and the Guard and the mercs held it. Strat limped to the window and entertained treasonous thoughts, hating thoughts, staring up toward the palace through the pall of smoke.

DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE by Diane Duane

... But who could ever tell of all the daring

in the stubborn hearts of women, the hard will,

how the female force crams its resisted way

through night, through death, taking no "no" for answer?

Yet still Right's anvil stands staunch on the ground,

and there smith Destiny hammers out the sword.

Should that force, that fierce gift, be used for ill,

delayed in glory, pensive through the murk,

Vengeance comes home. Yet odd the way of life,

for if the power's used for good, then still

She comes; though in far other form, and strange ...

In Sanctuary that day the smoke rose up to heaven, a sooty sideways-blowing banner against the blue of early winter. Some of that smoke rose up from altars to attract the attention of one god or another, and failed. Most of the immortals were too busy looking on in horror or delight or divine remoteness as their votaries went to war against one another, tearing the town into pieces and setting the pieces afire. A god or two even left town. Many non-gods tried to: some few succeeded. Of those who remained, many non-immortals died, slaughtered in the riots or burned in the firestorms that swept through the city. No one tried or bothered to count them all, not even the gods.

One died in Sanctuary that day who was not mortal (quite), and not a god (quite). His death was unusual in that it was noticed-not just once but three times.

He noticed it himself, of course. Harran had worked close to death much of his life, both as apprentice healer-priest of Siveni Gray-Eyes and as the barber and leech to the ersatz Stepsons. He knew the inevitable results of the kind of swordcut that the great dark shape a-horseback swung at him. No hope, he thought clinically, while he ducked staggering away with a boy's weight slung over his shoulder. That's an expert handling that sword, that is. Past that mere thought, and a flash of pained concern for the arrow-shot boy he'd been trying to save, there was no time for anything but confusion.

The confusion had been a fixture in his mind lately. For one thing, the real Stepsons had come back, and Harran was not finding their return as funny as he'd once thought he would. He hadn't reckoned on being counted a traitor for supporting the false Stepsons in the true ones' absence. But he also hadn't reckoned on having so much trouble with his lost goddess Siveni when he summoned her up. Her manifestation, and her attempt to level Sanctuary-foiled by the clubfooted beggar-girl he'd been using as idiot labor and "mattress"-had left him confused to a standstill. Now Mriga the idiot was Mriga the goddess, made so by the same spell that had brought Siveni into the streets of Sanctuary. And, involved in the spell himself, Harran had briefly become a god too.

But his short bout of divinity had made the world no plainer to him. Suddenly bereft of Mriga, who had taken Siveni and gone wherever gods go-stricken by the loss of a hand during the spell, and by its abrupt replacement (with one of Mriga's)-Harran had retreated to the fake Stepsons' barracks. He had taken to wearing gloves and drinking a great deal while he tried to think out what to do next with his life. Somehow he never seemed to get much thinking done.

And then the real Stepsons stormed their old barracks, slaughtering in Vashanka's name the "traitors" who had impersonated them with such partial success. They were evidently particularly enraged about dogs being kept in the barracks. Harran didn't understand it. What was Vashanka's problem with dogs? Had one bit Him once? In any case, when Harran fled to a Maze-side garret to escape the sack of the barracks, he made sure to take little brown Tyr with him.

She was yipping and howling unseen behind him now, as that sword descended, and there was nothing he could do. It hit him hard in the temple, and there was surprisingly little pain. He was faintly horrified to feel the top of his head crumple and slide sideways; and out of the corner of his left eye he saw half his skull and its contents come away clean on the edge of the sword. Harran fell-he knew he fell, from feeling his face and chest smash into the bloody dirt-but his vision, until it darkened, was frozen on that sidewise look. He became bemused; brains were usually darker. Evidently the typical color of the other ones he had examined was due to clotting of blood in the tissues. His had not yet had time, that was all. The next time he ... the next time ... but this was wrong. Where was Siveni? Where was Mriga? They always said that when ... you died, your god or goddess ... met you....

... and night descended upon Harran, and his spirit fled far away.

Tyr didn't know she was a dog. She didn't know anything in the way people do. Her consciousness was all adjectives, hardly any nouns-affect without association. Things happened, but she didn't think of them that way; she hardly thought at all. She just was.

There was also something else. Not a person-Tyr had no idea what persons were but a presence, with which the world was as it should be, and without which her surroundings ceased to be a world. A human looking through Tyr's mind would have perceived such a place as hell-all certainties gone, all loves abolished, nothing left but an emotional void through which one fell sickeningly, forever. It had been that way long ago. In Tyr's vague way she dreaded that hell's return. But since the Presence came into the world, knitting everything together, hell had stayed far away.

There were also familiar shapes that moved about in her life. One was thin and gangly with a lot of curly straggly fur on top, and shared one or another of Tyr's sleeping spots with her. The other was a tall, blond-bearded shape that had been with her longer and had acquired more importance. Tyr dimly understood that the presence of this second shape had something to do with her well-being or lack of it, but she wasn't capable of working out just what, or of caring that she couldn't. When the tall shape held her, when in its presence food manifested itself, or sticks flew and she ran and brought them back, Tyr was ecstatically happy. Even when the skinny shape subtracted itself from her universe, she wasn't upset for long. Both the Presence and the tall shape, though surprised, seemed to approve; so it must have been all right. And the shape that counted hadn't gone away. It was when that shape was missing, or she smelled trouble about it, that Tyr's world went to pieces.