The S'danzo went hurriedly aside, snatched at a small box on the shelf. "Dubro please," she said when the big man moved to interfere; and he let her alone as she sank down on her knees in the middle of the floor and laid out her cards.
Nonsense, Ischade thought; but something stirred, something twitched at the nape of her neck, and she thought of the magic-fall that still swept the winds, recalling that prescience was not her talent, and she had not a way in the worlds and several hells to judge what the S'danzo did, how much was flummery and how much self-hypnosis and how much was a very different kind of witch.
The cards flew in strong, slim fingers, assumed patterns. Re-formed and showed their faces.
Illyra drew her hand back from the last, as if she had found the serpent on that card a living one.
"I see wounds," Illyra said. "I see love reversed. I see a witch, a power, a death, a castle; I see a staff broken; I see temptation-" Another card went down. Orb.
"Interpret."
"I don't know how!" Illyra's fingers hovered trembling over the cards. "There's flux. There's change." She pointed to a robed and hooded figure. "There's your card: eight of air. Lady of Storms-hieromant."
"Hieromant! Not I!"
"I see harm to you. I see great harm. I see power reversed. The cards are terrible-Death and Change. Everywhere, death and change." The S'danzo looked up, tears flowing down her cheeks. "I see damage to you in what you attempt."
"So." Ischade drew a deep breath, teacup still in hand. "But for my question, fortune-teller: Find me Roxane!"
"She is Death. Death in the meadow. Death on the path of waters-"
"There are no meadows in Sanctuary, woman! Concentrate!"
"In the quiet place. Death in the place of power." The S'danzo's eyes were shut. Tears leaked from beneath her lashes. "Damage and reversal. It's all I can see. Witch, don't touch my son."
Ischade set the cup aside. Rose and gathered her cloak over her shoulder as the S'danzo gazed up at her. She found nothing to say of comfort. "Randal's with them," was the best that occurred to her.
She turned and went out the door. The power was still a tide in her blood, still unabated. She inhaled it in the wind, felt it in the dust under her feet. She could have blasted the house in her frustration, raised the fire in the hearth and consumed the S'danzo and her man to ash.
It seemed poor payment for an innocent woman's cup of tea. She banked the inner fire and drank the wind into her nostrils and considered the daybreak.
"I can't, I can't, I can't!" Moria cried, and went down the hall in a cloud of skins and satin-till Haught caught her up, and took her by the arms and made her look at him. Tears streaked Moria's makeup. A curl tumbled from her coiffure. She stared at Haught with blind, teared eyes and hiccuped.
"You'll manage. You don't have to say where I am or where I went."
"Then take him with you!" She pointed aside to the study, where a dead man sat drinking wine in front of her fire and getting progressively more inebriate. "Get him out of here, I can't do anything with the staff, they know what he is for the gods' sakes get him out!"
"You'll manage," Haught said. He carefully put the curl where it belonged and adjusted a pin for her while she snuffled. He wiped her cheeks with his thumbs, careful of her kohl-paint, and of her rouge, and tipped up her face and kissed her gently on salty lips. "Now. There. My brave Moria. All you have to do is not mention me. Say I delivered my messages. Say Stilcho's with me and we're going to go down to a shop and see about that lock you want for your bedroom-now won't that fix it? I promise you-"
"You could witch it."
"Dear woman, I might, but you don't do a thing with an axe when a penknife will do. You don't want your maid blasted, do you? I doubt you want that. I'll find a lock / can't pick and see if you can. If it suits, I'll have it installed on your door within the week. I promise. Now go upstairs, fix your make-up-"
"I want you here! I want you to tell Her what you did to me, I want you to tell Her you made me beautiful!"
"Now, haven't we been over that? She won't care. I assure you she has quite a many things on her mind, and you are the very least, Moria. The very least. Do your job, be gracious, be everything I've helped you be, and the Mistress will be very happy with you. Don't ruin your makeup. Smile. Smile at everyone. Don't smile too much. These men have been a long time out of a house like this. Don't attract them. Behave yourself. There's a love." He kissed her on the brow and followed the sudden panicked dart of her eyes, the appearance of a shadow in the study doorway.
Stilcho leaned there reeking of wine, his thin, white face uncommonly grim with its eye-patch and comma of dark hair. "My lady," Stilcho said wryly. "Very sorry to distress you."
Moria just stared, stricken.
"Come on," Haught said, and caught Stilcho by the arm, heading him for the door.
"I can't find him," Crit said, reporting in to the palace where Tempus had appropriated an office, down the hall and up a stair from the uneasy business Crit had no wish to know about.
Tempus made a mark on a map. The place was a litter of scrolls and books and the plunder of the map room. They lay on the floor as well as the desktop and afternoon light shone wanly through the window, a murky afternoon, beclouded and rumbling with rain that never fell. He rose, walked to the window, hands locked behind him-stared out into the roiling cloud beyond the portico. Lightning flashed. Thunder followed.
"He'll show," Tempus said finally. "You've tried the witch's place again."
"Twice. I..." There was a moment of silence that brought Tempus around to face the man. "... went as far as the door," Crit said, much as if he had said gate of hell. Stolidly. Eyes carefully blank. Tempus frowned.
"King of Korphos," Crit said then.
"I remember." A king invited his enemies to reconcile. Archers turned up round the balcony at dinner and killed them all. Witchfire might serve. And: Nothing new under the sun, an inner voice said; while another voice recalled dead comrades: tortured souls of yours and mine which must be released. ... At times the world went giddy, skidded between past and present. Korphos and a Sanctuary mansion. A missing Stepson, and a sorely wounded one, both prey to witches. A thing that had happened, would happen, inevitably happened? Sometimes he had run risks from mere expediency. Or perversity. He did not take his men into it to no purpose.
Crit stood there, statue-quiet. Too damn willing. A snake had gotten in among them, and Stepson hunted Stepson and stood there with that look that said Anything you order.
"I've no doubt the witch can find him," Tempus said. "If he doesn't show up. Don't worry about it." He gestured toward the door. Crit took the hint, and Tempus walked as far as the hall beside him. "Just see you're on time."
"Is Niko-"
"Better."
Maybe the tone invited nothing further. Crit went. Tempus stood there with his hands slipped into the back of his belt until Crit had dwindled into a shape of light and shadow on the white marble stairs that led to outer doors.
Niko was where Niko had no business being, that was where Niko was.
He struck his hand against his leg and headed down another stairs, past priests who plastered themselves and their armfuls of linen and simples to the narrow walls.
Through doors and doors and doors, till the thunder overhead diminished and the last door gave way to a sanctum sanctorum deep in the palace bowels. He stepped inside, saw the cluster around the bed, a half dozen priests, the mage, with enough incense palling the room to choke a man. A child whimpered, a thin, faint sound. And Tempus's eye picked out his partner standing in that group. "Get Niko," he said as a priest passed him, and the priest scuttled into the cloying room where he had no personal wish to go. The stuff offended his nose, gave him the closest thing to a headache he was wont to have. He stood there with the pressure throbbing in his temples which might be rage at Niko or the whole damned business of priests and mummery and a mage's ill-smelling concoctions, or just the world gone awry. He stood there while the priest snagged Niko and led him into reach, Niko walking as if he would break, one eye running and filmed with gelatinous stuff,