Illyra hesitated. The memories Haakon had aroused were still fresh in her mind, but all that had been fifteen years ago, as he had said. She stared at the clouded-over sky.
'No, there'll be no problem. It may rain today arid, anyway, you've taken everyone's money this week with your oranges,' she said with forced brightness.
'Well then, you see, Dubro - there's no problem. Bank the fires and we'll be off. I'll have you back sweating again before the first raindrops fall.'
Illyra watched them leave. Fear filled the forge, fear left over from a dimly remembered childhood. Visions she had shared with no one, not even Dubro. Visions not even the S'danzo gifts could resolve into truth or illusion. She caught up her curly black hair with a set of combs and went back inside.
When the bed was concealed under layers of gaudy, bright cloth and her youth under layers of kohl, Illyra was ready to greet the townsfolk. She had not exaggerated her complaints about the oranges. It was just as well that Haakon's supply was diminishing. For two days now she had had no querents until late in the day. Lonely and bored she watched the incense smoke curl into the darkness of the room, losing herself in its endless variations.
'Illyra?'
A man drew back the heavy cloth curtain. Illyra did not recognize his voice. His silhouette revealed only that he was as tall as Dubro, though not as broad.
'Illyra?-1 was told I'd find Illyra, the crone, here.'
She froze. Any querent might have cause to resent a S'danzo prophecy, regardless of its truth, and plot revenge against the seeress. Only recently she had been threatened by a man in the red-and-gold livery of the Palace. Her hand slid under the folds of the tablecloth and eased a tiny dagger loose from a sheath nailed to the table leg. -
'What do you want?' She held her voice steady; greeting a paying querent rather than a thug.
'To talk with you. May I come in?' He paused, waiting for a reply and when there was none continued, 'You seem unduly suspicious, S'danzo. Do you have many enemies here. Little Sister?'
He stepped into the room and let the cloth fall behind him. Illyra's dagger slid silently from her hand into the folds of her skirts.
'Walegrin.'
'You remember so quickly? Then you did inherit her gift?'
'Yes, I inherited it, but this morning I learned that you had
returned to Sanctuary.'
'Three weeks past. It has not changed at all except, perhaps, for the worse. I had hoped to complete my business without disturbing you but I have encountered complications, and I doubt any of the other S'danzo would help me.'
'The S'danzo will never forget.'
Walegrin eased his bulk into one of Dubro's chairs. Light from the candelabra fell on his face. He endured the exposure, though as Dubro had guessed, there was no trace of youth left in his features. He was tall and pale, lean in the way of powerful men whose gentler tissues have boiled away. His hair was sun bleached to brittle straw, confined by four thick braids and a bronze circlet. Even for Sanctuary he cut an exotic, barbarian figure.
'Are you satisfied?' he asked when her gaze returned to the velvet in front of her.
'You have become very much like him,' she answered slowly. 'I think not, 'Lyra. My tastes, anyway, do not run as our father's did - so put aside your fears on that account. I've come for your help. True S'danzo help, as your mother could have given me. I could pay you in gold, but I have other items which might tempt you more.' He reached under his bronze-studded leather kilt to produce a suede pouch of some weight which he set, unopened, on the table. She began to open it when he leaned forwards and grasped her wrist tightly.
'It wasn't me, 'Lyra. I wasn't there that night. I ran away, just like you did.'
His voice carried Illyra back those fifteen years sweeping the doubts from her memories. 'I was a child then, Walegrin. A little child, no more than four. Where could I have run to?'
He released her wrist and sat back in the chair. Illyra emptied the pouch onto her table. She recognized only a few of the beads and bracelets, but enough to realize that she gazed upon all of her mother's jewellery. She picked up a string of blue glass beads strung on a creamy braided silk.
'These have been restrung,' she said simply. Walegrin nodded. 'Blood rots the silk and stinks to the gods. I had no choice. All the others are as they were.'
Illyra let the beads fall back into the pile. He had known how to tempt her. The entire heap was not worth a single gold piece, but no storehouse of gold could have been more valuable to her.
'Well, then, what do you want from me?'
He pushed the trinkets aside and from another pouch produced a palm-sized pottery shard which he placed gently on the velvet.
'Tell me everything about that: where the rest of the tablet is; how it came to be broken; what the symbols mean - everything!'
There was nothing in the jagged fragment that justified the change that came over Walegrin as he spoke of it. Illyra saw a piece of common orange pottery with a crowded black design set under the glaze; the sort of ware that could be found in any household of the Empire. Even with her S'danzo gifts focused on the shard it remained stubbornly common. Illyra looked at Wale-grin's icy green eyes, his thought-protruded brows, the set of his chin atop the studded greave on his forearm, and thought better of telling him what she actually saw.
'Its secrets are locked deeply within it. To a casual glance its disguises are perfect. Only prolonged examination will draw its secrets out.' She placed the shard back on the table.
'How long?'
'It would be hard to say. The gift is strengthened by symbolic cycles. It may take until the cycle of the shard coincides...'
'I know the S'danzo! I was there with you and your mother -don't play bazaar games with me. Little Sister. I know too much.'
Illyra sat back on her bench. The dagger in her skirts clunked to the floor. Walegrin bent over to pick it up. He turned it over in his hands and without warning thrust it through the velvet into the table. Then, with his palm against the smooth of the blade, he bent it back until the hilt touched the table. When he removed his hand the knife remained bent.
'Cheap steel. Modern stuff; death to the one who relies on it,' he explained, drawing a sleek knife from within the greave. He placed the dark-steel blade with the beads and bracelets. 'Now, tell me about my pottery.'
'No bazaar-games. If I didn't know from looking at you, I'd say it was a broken piece of 'cotta. You've had it a long time. It shows nothing but its associations with you. I believe it is more than that, or you wouldn't be here. You know about the S'danzo and what you call "bazaar-games", but it's true right now I see nothing; later I might. There are ways to strengthen the vision - I'll try them.'
He flipped a gold coin onto the table. 'Get what you'll need.'
'Only my cards,' she answered, flustered by his gesture. 'Get them!' he ordered without picking up the coin. She removed the worn deck from the depths of her blouse and set the shard atop them while she lit more candles and incense. She allowed Walegrin to cut the pack into three piles, then turned over the topmost card of each pile.
Three of Flames: a tunnel running from light to darkness with three candle sconces along the way.
The Forest: primeval, gnarled trunks; green canopy; living twilight.
Seven of Ore: red clay; the potter with his wheel and kiln. Illyra stared at the images, losing herself in them without finding harmony or direction. The Flame card was pivotal, but the array would not yield its perspective to her; the Forest, symbolic of the wisdom of the ages, seemed unlikely as either her brother's goal or origin; and the Seven must mean more than was obvious. But, was the Ore-card appearing in its creativity aspect? Or was red clay the omen of bloodletting, as was so often true when the card appeared in a Sanctuary-cast array?