He had turned around to see the ridiculous, the laughable. It was a tall young woman, surely no more than twenty-five, with cool clean features and long black hair, and a most peculiarly draped white linen robe with a goatskin slung over it. He looked at her with annoyance and amazement, but she was ignoring him which was also ridiculous; no one ignored him. She was looking at the plans as if they had been drawn in the mud with a stick. "Who designed this silly heap of blocks?" she said. "It'll fall down the first time an army hits it."

Beside him, Molin's chief architect had turned a ferocious shade of red, and then began shifting from foot to foot as his gout started to trouble him. Molin looked at the gray-eyed woman and said, in the deadly soft voice he had been using on the engineers, "Can you do better?"

The woman flicked eyebrows at him in the most scornful expression he had ever seen. "Of course."

"If you don't," he had said, "you know what will happen."

She gave him a look that made it plain that his threats amused her. "Parchment, please," she said, knocked the plans aside into the mud, and sat down on the block like a queen, waiting for the writing materials to be brought her. "And you'd better do something about that cement right now, before the ground dries. That much of your wall I'll keep. You-" She pointed at one of the engineers. "Send someone to the biggest glassmaker in town and ask for all the cull they've got."

"Cull?"

"Broken glass. Pound it up fine. It goes in the cement.... What's it for?! You want rats and coneys tunneling under and undermining the wall? Leaving holes for people to pour acid in, or something worse? Well, then!"

The engineer in question glanced at Molin for permission, then hurried away. He turned to her to say something, but the parchment and silverpoint had already been brought, and the woman was sketching with astonishing swiftness on the smooth side of the skin-drawing perfectly straight lines without rulers, perfect curves without tools. He had to fight to keep the scorn in his voice. "And who might you be?" he had said.

"You may call me Siveni," she had said, not looking up, as if she were royalty doing a beggar a favor. "Now look here. That curtain wall was all wrong; it would never bear crenella-tions. And of course you are going to crenellate at some point...."

He entreated her politely, for the moment, to speak quietly; crenellation was forbidden by the Empire except under very special circumstances, and he had been planning to do it... just not now, when it was important to seem not to be having any thoughts of autonomy. Even as he entreated her, though, he found himself becoming uneasy. It was not as if Siveni was an uncommon name in Sanctuary; it was not. But every now and then he was troubled by the memory of how the abandoned temple of the goddess of that name had had its bronze doors torn right off and thrown in the street a while back; and from all indications, they had been broken out from the inside. ...

Siveni, of course-knowing all these thoughts of Molin's, in a goddess's fashion, as if from the inside-was amused by the whole business. It amused her, the inventor of architecture, to be building for mortals; to be building for the man who had cast her priests out of Sanctuary; to be confusing him, and unnerving him, and at the same time doing something worthwhile with her time. Like many gods, she had a flair and taste for paradox. Siveni was indulging it to the point of surfeit.

Such indulgence was one of the few pleasures she had these days, since she and Mriga and Harran had come back from hell. Harran had been dead, killed by one of Straton's people in the raid on the Stepsons' old barracks. The two of them, with Harran's little dog Tyr, and Ischade as guide on the road, had gone down and begged his life of hell's dark Queen, and (rather to their surprise) had gotten it.

The arrangement was peculiar. Harran (playing the barber even past death) had picked up the wounded soul of a mind-dead body, so that his own soul had somewhere to live again. The Queen had let them all out of hell on condition that from now on they should divide Harran's hell-sentence among them, and take death in shifts. Tyr was in hell presently, enjoying herself a great deal, to judge by the vague impressions Siveni occasionally received. Hell's Queen had made a pet of her. But how the rest of the arrangement would function now -even if it was still intact-Siveni had no idea. Hell's gate was closed. The magics that had made Ischade free of the place were severely curtailed since the loss of the Globes of Power.

And heaven's gate, it seemed, was closed, too; the Ilsig gods were locked away from the world by Stonnbringer's sudden terrible assertion of power. Originally, Siveni's plan and Mriga's had been to take Harran straight back to heaven with them, to her tall, fair temple-house in the country beyond the world's time. But they had dallied too long in the mortal world, while Harran got his bearings and got used to his new body... and then one night had awakened to find that heaven's gate was shut on them, and no way back. They were marooned....

So Siveni walked the mortal world without her armor, without her army-conquering spear, and built city walls, and pondered vengeance on Molin Torchholder. Some ways, this was all his fault. Harran would never have been moved to summon her out of the terrible calm of the Ilsig heaven had not the Torchholder banished her priesthood from Sanctuary. And now, she thought-looking down between the fourth and fifth courses of new stone at a little tunnel being built between them-now he would pay for it. Or perhaps not now; but as gods reckon time, soon enough.

"Yai there, Gray-Eyes," came a shout up to her from one of the stonemasons. "We're ready for the next one!"

She grimaced, a look she was glad the mason couldn't see through the kicked-up dust of the hot day's work. Gray-eyes, they all called her; but it was a joke. There was no telling them who she was. It hadn't been too long ago that she sat cool and calm in her house in heaven, hearing her name called in reverence, smelling the uprising savor of good sacrifices, stepping down in power to help those who called on her. No more of that.

Love she had now, yes; she had never had that before- certainly nothing so immediate. But was it as good... ?

"Right," she shouted back. "Kivan," she shouted in another direction, "get the crane around, man, the mortar's wet! It's three in a row here. Yes, those three. Get them up on the hoist. Where the hell are the draggers?"

She watched them haul the stone in question into place and wrap the crane's ropes around it. While they were grunting and straining she let herself go unfocused for a moment, and listened. Knife-grinding, she "heard"; and someone screaming, while sure hands worked over them and other hands held them down; and more faintly than the first two impressions, a clear sense came of being rubbed in the good place behind the ears. Siveni smiled to herself. She had always been a single goddess, being too busy inventing things to bother splitting off alternate personae, dyads and trinities and whatever. Now, after Harran's spell, and their trek past hell's gate, she was not only a trinity, but one with four members. Interesting, it was. And very unsettling.

And was it worth it... ?

A shadow fell over her as she leaned on the last-laid stone. "Molin," she said.

"How do you do that, mistress? Know how someone's coming behind you, I mean."

She stiffened a bit. "In sun like this," she said, "it would take a blind woman not to see your shadow's shape. Has that new stone come in yet? We'll need the softer stuff for the arrowshot wall."