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bringing fire and sword, to tear down the old and build it all anew. And now she was old, while he, a man, aged less swiftly, and being a wizard, less swiftly still. He might yet have only the first grey in his hair.
    Old Lady wept, and the sisters she had summoned to prayer eyed her sidelong at their own empty devotions. But she was not going to be weak, she could not afford to be. The body was nothing; it was the Old Great Gods, the future, she served. In times to come she would be a saint, a servant who had shown not only her folk but her goddess the way back to the Gods. And all she and Tamghat had planned, lighthearted, a lovers’ game, over wine and books in his rumpled bed in a Marakander inn, lay before her. First was to stop the needless fighting. But Spear Lady and the Blackdog were narrow-minded, tradition-bound, and they had turned the sullen child of this incarnation against her. No support there. Let them suffer, then. Fire would cleanse the temple, and she could build it anew, if not as Tamghat's consort (and such thoughts showed that even she must look deeper into her soul, where the desires of the world yet lingered), then as his partner in all else. Attalissa would thank her for her vision in the end, when in sharing power with the wizard she stretched beyond the limitations of place that shackled all the gods, and understood the freedom she had gained to seek her own soul's purification and to lead her folk to true knowledge of the Old Great Gods.
    “Attalissa enlightens me,” Old Lady said aloud, rising stiffly. Two sisters hurried to offer her support. Her knees creaked, taunted her with pain. “She will have peace with this warlord. He comes to fling open the shutters on a new dawn of glory for Lissavakail, he comes to show us the true path back to the Old Great Gods. We are wicked to resist; it is not Attalissa's will.”
    “Should I go to the Spear Lady…?” her assistant asked, hesitantly. Sister Darshin aspired to the position of Old Lady, was all too assiduous in trying to ease the burdens of office from her, as though she were ancient, not merely arthritic and greying.
    Go to Spear Lady Kayugh and the arrogant Blackdog, who thought himself so much closer to the goddess than all the women who truly served her. Go to plot against Old Lady, that's what Darshin would do, scenting a chance to weaken Old Lady's authority yet further with that pair of vow-breaking reactionaries, who would have the goddess subordinate to their will forever, having forced themselves into her malleable child's heart as parental authorities.
    “No,” she said. “I've already told them we should have waited and offered to negotiate, and they refused to hear the goddess's word. If they are deaf to Attalissa's will, they are damned. We will wait here till wiser counsels can prevail.”
    The women looked shocked.
    “Bar the doors,” she snapped. “Admit no one. Attalissa has been betrayed by those who fight against her will. Attalissa will have peace with this warlord and love between our peoples. We will wait, and welcome him in her name.”

 
    T he air smelt heavily of blood; a priestess sat white-faced with her back against the parapet, her arm below the short sleeve of her armour tied with soaking bandages. There was more blood on the stairs where they had carried someone else down.
    “We're nearly out of arrows already,” Kayugh said grimly. “I said we needed to keep more in the stores, but Old Lady said the fletchers’ guild was charging too much and we weren't going to send more than a few dormitories out as mercenaries this summer.” She wiped the back of her hand over her mouth, as if that could settle the unsteadiness of her voice. “’Prayer is our work,’ she said. ‘Lissa forgive me, I should have stood up to her.”
    “She is Old Lady.” The Blackdog was Attalissa's champion, and by tradition avoided becoming entangled in administrative debates among the priestesses. But Otokas should have