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 remem- bered 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 him- self 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."
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 Sanctu- ary were concerned she had always been exactly as she was. An aura of timelessness hung over her-by gaudy S'danzo standards-austere cham- bers. 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 flit- tering 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 ques- tion?" 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 Terma- gant 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. "I don't suppose you noticed the relation of the cards one to another as they lay? Reversed or covering?"
"They're all 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 de- fended 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 every- thing, 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 grand- mother 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 not- daughter.
"The longer your wife denies what her Sight has shown her, the more inevitable it becomes, blacksmith. Glimpsed once, fate is a weak thing subject to change and uncertainty-especially for the young. But repeat- edly glimpsed and denied, as Illyra has done ..." The Termagant shook her head and chortled softly to herself. "Ah, nothing in this life is acci- dental. 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.