Blood Ties tw-9

by Robert Lynn Asprin

  "In any case, there are others who need her," she continued more calmly. She moved aside and Gilla saw another figure in the doorway behind her, tall, black haired, with a lithe poise that the rich gown she wore so awkwardly could not disguise and an energy that made even Gilla give way as she swept into the room past Myrtis.

  "What are you doing? She's not well enough-" Gilla began as the newcomer strode to the bed where Illyra lay, and stood looking down at her.

  "They say the S'danzo have no gods, and no mages," the woman said gruffly. "Well, the gods the rest of us had aren't talking these days, and the mages are useless. I need information. My old comrades said you're honest. What will you take to See for me?"

  "Nothing." Illyra pulled herself up against the pillows, stony-eyed.

  "Oh, no-enough of my comrades came to you in the old days that I know you keep to the traditional rule. If you take my coin you are bound to answer me...." She pulled gold from her pouch and held it out. Furiously, Illyra dashed it from her hand.

  "Do you know who I am?" the woman said dangerously.

  "I know you. Lady Kama, and there is nothing in Sanctuary that will make me See for you!" She caught her breath on a half-sob. "I could not even if I would. When my-in the riots-my cards were destroyed. I am as blind as any of the rest of you now!" She finished with bitter triumph.

  "But I have to know!" Kama said angrily. "I have promised to wed Molin Torchholder, but when I ask him about the ceremony he puts me off with theological caveats. And the Stepsons are taking the Third Commando with them on some mysterious campaign-all my old comrades! I could go with them-I'd rather go with them, but I have to know what I should do!"

  Illyra shrugged. "Do what you please."

  Considering that Molin Torchholder had taken Illyra's other child away, Gilla thought the S'danzo's reaction to this request from his woman mild.

  Kama bent suddenly and gripped Illyra's shoulders. "What does that have to do with it? I've sworn oaths-they still bind me even if the gods aren't listening anymore, and I've lost too much blood in this town to just walk away without knowing why. Do you think I've stopped being a warrior because I'm wearing these?" She twitched angrily at the rich folds of her skirts. "I will have answers, woman, if I have to wring them out of you!"

  Illyra shook her head. "Can you wring blood from a stone? Do whatever you like to me-I have no answers anymore."

  "There may be no blood left in your veins," Kama said dangerously, "but what about your husband's? I've learned a lot in this cesspool you call home-will you sing the same song when you see me applying some of that knowledge to Dubro?"

  "No..." said Illyra faintly. "He has nothing to do with this. You can't make him suffer for me . .."

  "Were you somehow under the impression that life is fair?" Kama straightened and stood looking down at her. "I will do whatever I have to do."

  Gilla looked from her to Myrtis, who was watching with a faint half-smile. Had the madam of the Aphrodisia House put Kama up to this in an attempt to shake Illyra out of her depression? She could believe it of Myrtis, but she found it hard to imagine Kama cooperating in anyone else's schemes.

  "But I cannot..." said Illyra pitifully. "I told you. I have no cards. And I cannot borrow a set-each deck is attuned to the S'danzo who owns it. Mine came to me from my grandmother, and there is no S'danzo craftsman in this town who could paint a new deck for me."

  Kama stared at her. Then her gray gaze moved thoughtfully from the S'danzo to Gilla and back again.

  "But you know the patterns of the cards-"

  Now it was Illyra's turn to stare.

  "And her husband is a painter who is said to have certain powers ..." As Kama continued, Gilla read in Illyra's face her own anguished awareness that they both still had hostages to fate.

  "Molin Torchholder is the limner's patron. He will order Lalo to come to you, and together you will make a new deck of cards. And then-" Kama's lips twisted in what was intended to be a sweet smile. "Then we will see if there is any magic left in this world."

  Lalo pinned another rectangle of stiff vellum to his drawing board. He could feel the tension in his neck and shoulders, and Illyra looked pale, with a sheen of perspiration on her brow. The two cards they had already finished were drying in the sunshine that came through the window.

  "Are you ready?" he asked softly through the mask over his mouth he always wore now while working, to keep his breath from accidentally giving life to what he made. "We don't have to do any more today. ..." Even if he had had the energy to continue, he did not think that the S'danzo woman could go on much longer.

  "One more..." Illyra winced as she pulled herself upright against the pillows. She was pushing herself. Lalo wondered if she was beginning to feel incomplete without a set of cards, as he always did without drawing materials somewhere at hand, or if she simply wanted to get rid of Kama.

  "The next card is the Three of Flames," said Illyra. Her voice altered, developed a peculiarly flat timbre, as if even visualizing the cards was enough to push her into the seer's trance. "There is a tunnel, dark at one end and at the other bright. In the tunnel I see three figures bearing torches. Are they moving toward light or darkness? I cannot tell...."

  As if the S'danzo's words had entranced him, Lalo found his hand moving, dipping up dark pigment for the shadows and red-orange for the three bright flowers of flame. As Illyra spoke of the meaning of the card, shape and color emerged from the slip of vellum before him as if his brush were a wand that made visible what had always been implicit there.

  The torchbearers were in silhouette, their faces hidden, but he could see that one was small, one broad, one wiry and active. Could the big shape be Molin Torchholder? Lalo finished painting in the number of the card, and in the moment between the last brush stroke and his return to normal consciousness he thought he saw something of Gilla in the larger figure. Perhaps the other two were Illyra and himself, then, but were they moving into deeper shadow or toward the light?

  Lalo straightened and looked at Illyra, who lay back against her pillows with the stillness of sleep, or trance. There were dark smudges beneath her closed eyes, as if he had touched her with his paint-stained finger there. He had felt the power moving through him as he painted, but this time the meaning of his work was hidden from him even when he came out of his own trance of creation and looked at the cards.

  The three flame-cards that were finished glowed in the sunlight that came through the window, the colors seeming to vibrate with their own energy. / should be grateful, thought the limner. At least now I know that my hands still have power. But he did not understand what he had painted, and something ached in his belly at the anguish he saw in Illyra's shut face. Carefully, quietly, fearing to disturb her, Lalo began to put his paints away.

  "The cards are beautiful," said Gilla. "So many of Lalo's recent commissions have been murals, I'd forgotten how lovely his detail work can be." She laid the root card of Wood carefully back atop the pile. The rich greens and browns of the "Forest Primeval" seemed to glow with their own light, like sunshine slanting through innumerable leaves. Molin Torchholder's demand had for the moment given the marriage mural precedence over Kama's commission for the cards, even though the deck was nearly finished now. Illyra was nearly well now too, in body. But she and Gilla had grown accustomed to each other's company.

  "I hate them," said Illyra in a low voice.

  Gilla looked back at the couch, an angry defense of Lalo's work trembling on her tongue. The S'danzo's eyes were closed, but the slow tears were welling from beneath her shut lids. Gilla stifled her anger and went to the other woman, took a damp cloth, and began to sponge her cheeks and brow.

  "My dear, my dear, it's all right now...." It was the instinctive murmur of a mother to a sick child.

  "It is not all right!" said Illyra in a hard voice. "To See, I must open myself to the Great Pattern-become one with it and channel the part that relates to the question the querent has asked. But I do not belie
ve in the Pattern anymore."

  Gilla nodded. Men killing each other was one thing, whether in battle or in the back streets of Sanctuary, but how could there be any purpose in the senseless death of a child? Memory brought her a sudden image of Ganner's eighth birthday, when Lalo had brought him clay and a set of modeler's tools. The light in the boy's face had stamped him and Lalo with a single identity as they explored the new medium. Gan-ner was the only one of the children to have inherited any of Lalo's skill. But he would never bring beauty into the world now. She swallowed over the ache in her throat and turned to Illyra again.

  "More than half the deck is painted now. Kama will force me to read for her when the rest are done and I cannot," said Illyra bitterly. "I will fail her, and then she will take her revenge on Dubro. By all of Sanctuary's useless gods, I hate her! Her, and the rest of those blade-thirsty, swaggering bullies who have destroyed my world!"

  "Will you find a sword of your own and go after her?" asked Gilla, trying to channel into scorn the hatred that was making her own belly bum. "Illyra, be sensible. Try to get well, and be thankful that's not your kind of power!"

  "My kind of power..." said the S'danzo reflectively. "No -when men bum my people for sorcery it's not because they fear the simple power of steel...." Illyra fell silent. Her dark hair swung down across her breast, and Gilla could not see her eyes, but there was something in the other woman's stillness that sent a chill down her back despite the heat of the day.

  "It's forbidden..." said the S'danzo very softly, "even the little teaching they allowed me said that. But what do I care for anyone else's rules now?"

  "Illyra, what are you going to do?" Gilla asked apprehensively as the other woman levered herself painfully off the couch and went to the worktable where the cards that Lalo had finished were piled.

  "Everything goes two ways," Illyra said conversationally. "See this card, for instance, the Three of Flames. If it were to come up in a reading, it could mean things getting darker or brighter for the querent, depending on the context. And this one. Steel-" She held up the Two of Ores. "In the usual position, with the swords pointing toward the querent, it's a death card, but reversed it means doom for his enemy."

  "So does a real sword," answered Gilla.

  Illyra nodded. "So does magic. Power is power. Good or evil lies not in the tool, but in the user's intent and will."

  Gilla stared at her. "You can use the cards as a weapon?" Her heart began to pound heavily, and she realized suddenly how she had envied the gifts that Lalo had acquired so inad-vertently and used with such trepidation.

  Illyra was sorting through the cards that Lalo had completed. "Perhaps-if the right cards are here..." She selected one, another, then three more. "When I read, the querent and the cards and I are all linked in the Pattern and the cards that come up reflect his relationship to it. The Pattern is the Cause; the cards are the effect. My Seeing only translates to the querent what is already there."

  Gilla nodded, and the S'danzo went on, "But if I were to set the cards into a pattern, and lock it with my will-"

  "You could reverse the process?" whispered Gilla. "Make the cards the Cause?"

  "I could... I would... I will!"

  Suddenly Illyra gathered up the cards and carried them to a parquetry table in the comer of the room. She held up a card and showed it to Gilla. "Here, this shall stand for the querent and its surrounding atmosphere...." She laid it down.

  Gilla squinted, seeing only the sun shining brightly over a painted city. "Which one is that?"

  "We call it Zenith-the noonday sun-but your husband has painted a city as well as the sun." Illyra held her hands above it and stood for a moment with brow wrinkled in concentration and eyes closed. "As thou wert Zenith, so thou shall become this city!" she murmured. She dipped her finger into the paint water and nicked a drop upon the card, then bent and breathed upon it. "By wind and water do I name thee Sanctuary, the querent of this reading, and the subject of this casting!"

  She shouldn't be doing this, thought Gilla, watching Illyra search through the cards she had selected. There was a focus to her movements that held the attention. Gilla remembered how Roxane had compelled the eye, and shuddered. But she had never understood what needs drove the Nisibisi sorceress, who for all her great knowledge had no part in ordinary women's joys and pains. Illyra, she understood only too well. We shouldn't be doing this! she thought then.

  Gilla felt the pulse pounding in her temples, tasted the fury of the wolf-bitch whose cubs have been killed. All her life she had known fear, fear of starvation in times of want, fear of theft in moments of affluence. She had grown up listening for the stealthy step behind her as automatically as she watched for movement in the shadows whenever she went out of her door. And then she had borne children, and the fear she felt for them was as much greater than her own personal terrors as the White Foal River was deeper and more dreadful than the sewers of Sanctuary. And there had never been anything that she could do about it! Never, until now....

  Ominous as a mountain moving, Gilla's heavy steps shook the floor as she took her place across the worktable from the S'danzo.

  "What crosses it. Seer?" she asked.

  "The Lance of Ships," said Illyra, "the Narwhale, which may be a card of good fortune, but always means changeability. In this position, it is the good fortune that will disappear!"

  "What do we hope for?" asked Gilla, continuing the litany.

  Illyra took another card and placed it above the first two. Gilla recognized it the Two of Ores reversed, with the Steel pointed downward threateningly.

  "And this is what we already have," added the S'danzo. "Quicksilver, what some call the Card of Shalpa-the Root of Ores and the Foundation of Sanctuary." The next card was placed below the first two.

  "What has gone before is the Face of Chaos-" Illyra held up a card with the images of a man and a woman twisted and distorted as if in some fever dream. She smiled grimly and laid the card down.

  "And what is to come. Seer-show me what is to come!" demanded Gilla. She could feel energy flowing from her to the woman on the other side of the table, and knew that more than S'danzo power was going into this casting.

  Illyra took another card. "The Zigurrat," she smiled dangerously. "For we shall bring the pride of the destroyers tumbling down."

  Gilla looked at the image of the disintegrating tower and thought of the patched up peace that had held the town quiet since the visit of the Emperor. Surely it would take only a finger's push to destroy so uneasy a balance.

  "How?" whispered Gilla then. "Seeress, show me how it will be!"

  Illyra held the remaining cards fanned out in her thin hand. "First the Lance of Winds-"

  The card she set down bore the images of storm and tornado. "This represents our determination to see this done. And this one is for our fear..."

  She set another card above it, on which a triumvirate of robed and hooded figures stood pointing at a kneeling man. "Justice," came the whisper, and Gilla licked suddenly dry lips, understanding even without explanation that this represented the dead children for whom they sought revenge.

  "Our hope is for justice, and therefore I set Sanctuary's tribunal here-" Illyra's voice had a rhythmic resonance, and her eyes seemed to look through the card to some other reality. Gilla realized that the S'danzo was Seeing them as truly as ever she had in a querent's reading, and she wondered suddenly if in choosing just these cards for Lalo to paint first, Illyra had been guided by something more than chance, and if her selection of them now was the result of her will to vengeance, or some subtle working of that Pattern Illyra had denied.

  Gilla shivered, for now the S'danzo was wholly entranced, and she felt a heaviness in the air around them as if unseen forces waited around her to see what the final card would be. The magic of the mages had been broken, but, clearly, she and Illyra were drawing now upon deeper powers.

  Without looking at the cards still in the pile, Illyra took one and set it above all the
rest. Gilla stared at it, her gaze burned by swirling patterns of red and gold, and the beauty of a woman's face staring out of the flames. Even seen upside down that face seared the sight. She forced her gaze away and saw the appalled wonder in Illyra's eyes.

  "What is she?" Gilla asked hoarsely.

  "The Eight of Flames-the Lady of Fire whose touch can warm or destroy!"

  "What will She do to Sanctuary?"

  Illyra was shaking her head. "I do not know. I have never drawn Her reversed in a reading before. Oh, Gilla-" The S'danzo's face twisted in a terrible smile. "I did not choose this card!"

  In the days that followed, the Lady of Fire came to Sanctuary, not in bolts of flame from heaven as Gilla and Illyra had expected, but silently, insidiously, as a flame that kindled in men's flesh and consumed them slowly from within.

  For weeks the weather had been close and still-plague weather, though usually it came to Sanctuary later in the year. In a city whose sanitation system had been designed to move men secretly rather than sewage efficiently, epidemics were an inevitable sign of summer, like the insects that swarmed across the river from the Swamp of Night Secrets. But a dry spring had lowered the water table early, and without enough flow to flush them, the disease bred in the filthy channels and spread swiftly through the town.

  It began in the streets around Shambles Cross and moved like a slow fire into the Maze and the Bazaar, where a few corpses more in the morning caused little comment, until the kisses of the drabs who plied their trade in the cul-de-sacs and doorways burned with more than passion's fire, and men began to fall from the benches in the Vulgar Unicorn with their mugs untasted. Soldiers drinking in the taverns carried the plague back to the barracks, and servants going to their work in the great houses of the merchants carried it to the better quarters of the town. Only the Beysib seemed to be immune.

  Molin Torchholder realized the danger when his workmen began to drop beside his unfinished city wall and, returning to the palace, found the Prince in a panic and a full-scale crisis on his hands. That morning, the decapitated body of a dog had been discovered in the ruined Temple of Dyareela, with "Death to the Beysib" scrawled in its blood on the altar stone.