Aftermath- - Thieves World 10 (29 page)

a smile.

The Beysa had the good manners, not to stare, but her pet viper chose that moment to rustle through her undergarments and poke its jewelcolored head above her collar. It tasted the air, revealing its crimson maw

and ivory fangs, then, while the women held motionless, it lowered itself

onto Illyra's sleeve.

"Don't move," Shupansea cautioned unnecessarily. The immense NO remained imprisoned until the beymt investigated the clotted blood on Illyra's sleeve with its darting tongue. Any thoughts

of instant death were insignificant compared to the reality of the serpent's

touch. With a stifled gasp, Illyra propelled herself out of the circle, flinging the serpent and the child in opposite directions. Cha-bos cried, the snake disappeared, and Illyra was surrounded by a mixed cohort of palace guards. Rankan, Ilsigi, and Beysib by the look of

them. they were united by the steadiness with which they kept their wellsharpened spears pointed at her throat.

The guards saw their duty; no one would blame them for not following procedure when the child of an avatar of one goddess was bounced on the floor by the mother of another. For once Sanctuary proved itself a place of law and due process. Not even the protests of the prince and the Beysa

combined could free the S'danzo from the ordeal of reporting to the watch commander.

"There's nothing to worry about," the prince assured Illyra as he joined the bristling circle escorting her from the nursery. (Shupansea remained behind, watching her daughter and looking for her snake.) "It's just a formality. Sign your name a few times and it will all be over." This brought little comfort to the seeress who signed her name with an X like almost everyone else in Sanctuary.

It might have been different if Dubro had accompanied his wife—for he had begun life destined to be a scribe, not a blacksmith, and remembered what he now had little use for. Unfortunately Deibro wasn't even at

the forge when a liveried palace servitor made his appearance there, and Suyan was awed into incoherence.

Not that Dubro had told her where he was going when he banked the fire and lowered the leather awning that separated the entrance to his workplace from the entrance to Illyra's. He could hardly admit to himself that he was going to the back wall where the other S'danzo seeresses

made camp, to ask their advice.

He thought of Moonflower and was not the only person in Sanctuary that day or any other to gently mourn her untimely death. She'd been barely taller than Illyra but in all other respects she was built on Dubro's

scale and he'd felt comfortable around her.

He reconsidered his whole plan as he entered the incense-rich, S'danzo quarter. He had decided to turn around and retreat to his own familiar world, when he was caught in the appraising glare of the woman who had replaced Moonflower as most indomitable among the seeresses.

"Greetings, blacksmith," the tall stick of a woman called. "What brings you up here?"

It was not done to walk away from the Termagant. She was the living embodiment of every tale ever whispered in the dark about the S'danzo. No sane man doubted that she would and could curse anything that crossed her path in the wrong light.

Dubro crumpled the lower edge of his tunic in his fists and took a step in her direction. "I have a question to ask—about the cards." 168 AFTERMATH

She looked him up and down, which took a moment or two, then pulled aside the curtain to her scrying room,

"Then come, by all means, and ask it."

The Termagant lived alone. No one dared ask or remember if she'd ever had a family. As far as the other S'danzo and all the rest of Sanctuary were concerned she had always been exactly as she was. An aura of timelessness hung over her—by gaudy S'danzo standards—austere chambers. Her wooden table was worn black and shiny from years of use. Her cards were tattered at the edges, their images both faded and stained. She was a seeress who let no one but herself touch the amashkiki: the cards, the Guideposts of Vision. They cascaded from one knobby hand to the other as she settled on her stool.

"Tell me where to stop. Choose your first significance." Dubro thrust his hands, palms outward, between himself and the flittering paper. "No," he stammered. "I do not choose cards. Illyra chose them."

The cascade came to an abrupt halt. "If she chose, what is your question?" she inquired, though surely she suspected the answer.

"She cannot read for those she loves. She would not lay down the cards—but certain ones fell from her hands. I believe that she cannot read for us—but I do not believe she cannot choose."

"For an overly large man, you are not without perception," the Termagant said between self-satisfied cackles. Dubro folded his hands and said

nothing. "Very well, describe the cards you saw."

"There were five. I've heard her name them Orb, Quicksilver, Acom, Ocean, and Emptiness."

For ten or more years Dubro had stood outside Illyra's workroom, pointedly ignoring the wherewithal of her craft. Yet he had absorbed something despite the banging of his hammer. His eyes met hers and were not put off by the disbelief that grew there.

"Prime cards each and all," he averred.

Not to be outdone, the seeress set her own cards back in their silken nest with imperturbably steady hands. "1 don't suppose you noticed the relation of the cards one to another as they lay? Reversed or covering?'*

"They/e// from her hands," he repeated.

"I see." A lengthy pause between them. "Well, then, I suppose it's safe to assume the simplest message: all images erect and alone. It will be easiest that way. You do want the simplest interpretation, don't you?" Dubro nodded, unfazed by her sarcasm. They'd had dealings with this woman before. Her acid was as normal a part of her as a smile was to Illyra—or had been to Illyra.

"I take it you know that among the amashkiki there are five families:

fire, ore, wood, water, and air, as correspond to the five elements from which the universe was made. Each family is led by its Prime and defended by its Lance. There are, of course, cards which do not fall into the

families but they are of no concern here for you described only Prime cards. Every Prime card."

Again Dubro nodded. He had known that. The amashkiki had been generally adapted by the larger society around the S'danzo, though only they preserved its arcane functions. A gaming hand showing five Primes was worth a heavy bet.

"The Lances defend. They are rigid, sharp-edged, defined. The Primes, though, are the start of things." The gray-haired woman grinned. "And also the ends. Magicians like the Prime cards because they mean everything, you know. The appearance of a Prime simplifies the reading, she may have told you this; two Primes and it practically shouts. Five Primes

is absurd—and you, blacksmith, I think, know that." This time he grunted, but it meant the same as a nod.

"Perhaps she had just ordered the amashkiki and merely dropped the end cards?"

"She'd just sent out a visitor. If I thought it were an accident, I'd not

have come here."

"Then you and she stand on the cusp. All has already been revealed to you. It wants only your feet upon the path."

Dubro nodded to himself, letting her statements shore up his own convictions. The old S'danzo's eyes narrowed. At her age, Sight was a secondary gift. Her chiefmost asset was her long knowledge of mortal behavior. The Termagant could read as much in a gesture as the S'danzo Sight might have revealed in her cards.

"If she waits much longer," the crusty woman admitted, "that path may well rise up to bite her feet. It is not to be denied."

"But she will deny it, amoushka"—a S'danzo diminutive for grandmother or elder seeress. "She sees Trevya wherever she turns, but her heart only grows harder."

The Termagant snorted. "She is a little fool who should by now know what happens when children get tangled up in the Sight and fate." Even swollen with strong-backed workers from every comer of the empire, Sanctuary was still a small place where no one was by more than three or four degrees a stranger to anyone else. It took a determined insularity to live in rumorless ignorance; it was utterly impossible to live

in privacy. The entire city had known about Illyra's first children and the

Termagant was informed about her well-cared-for but unwelcome notdaughter.

"The longer your wife denies what her Sight has shown her, the more 170

inevitable it becomes, blacksmith. Glimpsed once, fate is a weak thing subject to change and uncertainty—especially for the young. But repeatedly glimpsed and denied, as Illyra has done . . ." The Termagant shook her head and chortled softly to herself. "Ah, nothing in this life is accidental. Perhaps she knows what she's doing; not even Illyra is stronger than fate."

The interview had come to an end. There was another visitor hovering beyond the curtained doorway. Dubro scrunched down to pass under the lintel"Mind you," the old S'danzo added as the curtain slid across his back,

"if you and yours are pawns in fate's game, you will not feel its hand upon your back."

Dubro shook his head and kept moving. He was suvesh; he expected clear answers when he went to an oracle and he ignored the ones that weren't. Visiting the S'danzo quarter had been a long shot at best: a rare

submission to the gambling urge. He was satisfied that he had not lost anything by the inquiry and was not unduly distressed that he went away no wiser than he'd arrived.

It was about midday. The crowds were thick and his two assistants were gone for the day. He could go back to his forge and do a few hours of business in the old way—by himself—or he, like everyone else in his extended family, could take the rest of the day off. And, as it seemed a day for impulses, Dubro decided against the forge for once. He made his way through the town to the palace.

Walegrin and his men had the first of three great watches these days, coming on duty in the cold, predawn hours, then relieved at just about this time. Even if the man hadn't been his brother-in-law, Dubro would have chosen him over the other two watch commanders, the eminently corruptible Aye-Gophlan or the murdering Zip, to tell about Illyra's visions.

And lately, as Illyra suspected, they'd found a comfortable subject of conversation in their concerns for her. A hearty meal and a few mugs of ale in the all-male taproom of the Tinker's Knob might be just the cure for his own irksome malaise. The market-day crowds parted before him once his destination, the palace barracks, was fixed in his mind.

"There, you see, I told you it was nothing," Prince Kadakithis said with rather too much surprise in his voice to be entirely convincing. Illyra nodded weakly. They might have at least warned her that her examiner would be none other than her own half-brother—and whatever other flaw Walegrin might have, his sense of family loyalty was above

reproach. He'd made it plain that it was reasonable to panic when one of those infernal snakes was around.

"I'm certain the kitchens have got more than enough food. Shall I have the guards escort you there? I'd go myself, but . . ." The prince cast his eyes upward—in the general direction of not only the nursery but

the Hall of Justice and Torchholder's suite of exchequer and registry. Neither husband nor ruler, yet somewhat more than a decorative figurehead, Kadakithis showed his adolescence more these days than he had seven years ago when he had first arrived as a naive puppet. He was growing but not yet grown.

"Thank you, I can find it myself," Illyra assured him. He seemed genuinely relieved and took off at a decidedly unregal trot. Illyra had a flash vision of him seated on a steel-colored stallion, then

nothing, as her thoughts turned to the aromas wafting out of the beehiveroofed kitchen. They'd recognize her there and accord her the same distant politeness the other palace retainers did: they knew they were better than some S'danzo wench from down in the Bazaar even if she did have the ear of royalty and the gods.

With a tightly woven basket, worth more than the food it contained, slung in her shawl, Illyra strolled into the bright forecourt. She might wander along the General's Road to the hills where the trees had turned a hundred shades of red, gold, and orange. Or she might go to the Promise of Heaven which was usually deserted by daylight. Or she might . . . Illyra's musings stopped short when she caught sight of a familiar figure passing under the West Gate. Dubro—and though she herself had told him to seek out Walegrin her heart began to pound. Once or twice—

when she'd been a child and the blacksmith her protector, not her husband—she'd run away from him, but never in recent years. Until now. She scooted behind a water cart, crouching over her basket, pretending to

examine its contents.

She waited, cried, and thought of Cha-bos who hadn't known how to count to one hundred. When her tears had dried she decided it was safe. She headed in the direction she was now facing—to the back corner of the palace, past the ornate gate where priests and gods made their communion with temporal authority. The palace stoneyard was here, ready for the next round of palatial repairs, and the huge water cisterns to sustain the inner fortress in times

of siege. Though far from lost—she could still see the water cart—Illyra had entered unfamiliar territory and did not know the name of the little gate she discovered there. Or even if it was a deliberate gate and not one

of Molin Torchholder's bright ideas. It seemed, judging by the dust, to be

the main conduit between the work gangs and the palace. 172 AFTERMATH

"Hey, sweetheart, got anything in there for me?" a half-naked roustabout called from farther down the path.

"No, just my own meal."

"You're sure? A pretty little piece like you shouldn't be out here eating

alone . . ."

Illyra understood, then, what he had in mind. She blushed radiantly; he laughed heartily and she ran through the nameless gate into the jumbled red sandstones piled beyond it. Indignation got the better other; she