The price of victory- - Thieves World 13 (30 page)

"You'll be wanting breakfast?" Suyan asked from the comer, the lilt making her maternal and chastising.

"No, no breakfast," Illyra replied, meeting the other woman's eyes for the first time, and watching them grow fragile with self-doubt. "I've got a craving for the little tarts Haakon sells; I'll get some on my way."

Those huge eyes grew bright and knowledgeable. "Aye, cravings ..."

Illyra found her fist clenching into a warding sign. Suyan had her own need for security, and security for a wet nurse was her mistress's preg nancy. Not a day went by that somehow, buried in the lilting questions, the subject of Illyra's barrenness was not raised. As Illyra forced herself to relax, the unfaimess of it all swept over her and she knew if she remained one more moment she would dissolve into tears that would only make her world worse.

"I'm going now," she muttered in a voice that sounded almost as bad
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as she felt.

Dubro was instructing the new apprentice in the finer arts of squeezing the bellows. His voice was deep and even with hard-held patience; there was nothing to be gained by interrupting him so Illyra gripped her shawl against the chill harbor wind and hoped to slip away.

"Madame . . . Madame Illyra. Seeress!"

Illyra shrank against the walls, unable to pretend that she had not seen or could not hear the young woman racing through the market-day crowd.

"Oh, wait, Seeress Illyra. Please wait!"

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And she did, while the other woman caught her breath and pressed a filthy, battered copper coin into her hand.

"Help me, please. I've got to find him. I've looked everywhere. You're my last hope. You've got to help me."

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Numbly Illyra nodded and retreated the few steps to the anteroom where she kept her cards and the other paraphernalia of the S'danzo trade. She could not refuse—though not because of the coin as the suvesh commonly believed. It was not payment that compelled the Sight but, sometimes, the contact of their flesh with her flesh. Already she was growing dizzy with the emergence of another reality. It would be a haz ard to her if she attempted to deny the vision.

She pushed the deck across the table as she half collapsed onto her stool. "Make three piles of them," she commanded; there was no time to shuffle them.

The visitor's hand shook as she separated the deck-"Find my Jimny before it's too late!"

Illyra swallowed the notion that it was already too late, then surren dered herself to the emerging images: the Lance of Air, Seven of Ships, Five of Ores, reversed—the Whirlwind, the Warfleet and the Iron Key transformed into a lock. The lock wound through a chain and the chain grew from the belly of a dank, swaying ship—not an anchor chain, but a galley chain from keel to ankle, from ankle to wrist, from wrist to oar. The air reeked of drugged wine and echoed with a whip's crack.

It was too late. Illyra Saw slaves' faces, one clearly, the rest wrapped in fog, and heard—as was the way with her gift—Jimny speak out his own name. She separated herself from the Seeing and sought words to blunt
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the despair her answer must contain.

"Another card," she heard herself whisper. "Seek beneath the Whirl wind."

The suvesh, the ordinary non-S'danzo folk of the world, might not know any of the Seeing rituals but they knew the way things were sup posed to go after they'd put their coin in a seeress's palm—and any deviation was certain to mean bad news. Illyra's visitor was sobbing openly as she reached for the first pile.

Two—not one—cards slipped free: the light-and-dark tunnel of the Three of Flames and the dark-faced portrait of the Lord of the Earth. Illyra absorbed them both and grew no wiser.

"He's been taken onto a boat," she said slowly, gathering the now lifeless chips of vellum into a single stack. "His leaving was not of his choosing," she continued, putting a high gloss over his enslavement be fore adding, without much conviction, "nor will he choose the time or manner of his return." Illyra could not bring herself to say that the best

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Jimny would likely get out of his future was a grave under the soil rather

than the waves.

"Is there no hope? There must be something I can do. Something, anything. Which temple should I go to? Which gods should I pray to?"

Illyra shook her head, then spoke as a woman rather than a seeress.

"There is always hope—but hope doesn't come from a handful of

S'danzo cards."

Her visitor shuffled awkwardly to her feet. Illyra confirmed her suspi cion that she was a few months shy of giving birth and poorer than Suyan had been when they'd found her.

"Take back your coin."

"Will it change things?"

"No, but it will buy you today's food and tomorrow's, too."

"I won't need food tomorrow," the girl shouted through her sobs as she ran from the room.

But she will, Illyra thought, weighed down by the Sight of a pale
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woman and a scrawny child. There's no death for her. And no life either.

The clanging of three hammers brought her out of her visions. Dubro was tapping the cadence and the other two were beating the red-hot iron. One of them had it right—tap, bang; tap, bang—but the other, probably the apprentice, was off the mark and stuttered against the metal. The forge reverberated with an unnatural rhythm that penetrated deep behind Illyra's weary eyes.

"Can't you get it right!" Illyra snarled, thrusting head and shoulders through the anteroom drapes.

The percussive chorus came to an immediate halt with an aghast look on the faces of the younger men and a knowing, concerned one on

Dubro's.

"Learning's not easy," her husband said cautiously, his blue eyes nar rowed to unreadable slits.

"What, then, is he learning? How to give me a headache?"

Dubro nodded twice, once to his men who laid down their hammers and the second time to his wife as he approached her. He wrapped his arm gently around her and brought her into the anteroom beside him.
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Just as the forge was his true home—a place built to his scale and com fort—so the scrying chamber was Illyra's true home and it made him seem an unwelcome giant scraping his head on the rafters, yet unable to sit, as the visitor's chair would not take his weight.

" 'Lyra, I'll send them home, if you want, but I think it's not the hammering that's wrong. What ails you, 'Lyra?"

Illyra on her scrying stool had taken command of the room. She would have had to arch her neck to see Dubro's face, but she had no intention of

meeting her husband's eyes. She spoke to the table instead, in a soft voice that emphasized the smith's awkwardness. Yet she was no more comfort able than Dubro; her hands sought the scrying deck and her fingers rimed through the cards.

"Everything and nothing, husband. I do not know what ails me—and I'm almost past caring." The cards broke free of her nervous fingers to scatter across the green cloth.

Heaving a sigh as he moved, Dubro dropped to one knee; he could look into Illyra's eyes and force her to look into his. "Read the cards for me, then. Ask them what I must do to make you happy."

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Illyra avoided him, watching the cards as she gathered them into a rough-sided stack. "You know I cannot. I love you. I cannot See what I love."

She raised her eyes, thinking to shame him but was herself shamed by what she read, without Sight, in his face. He doubted her love and, now that the notion flowed within her thoughts, he had a right to, because she doubted it as well. The worst pain Illyra had ever known shuddered along her spine. The cards spilled onto the table when she hid her face behind her hands. She never imagined Dubro would study and remember each image in the moment before he reached across the table to massage her neck and shoulders.

"Had we rich relations or a hidden villa surrounded by lakes and trees, I'd send you away. It's Sanctuary herself who's hurt you," Dubro said with an eloquence few others knew he possessed.

Illyra imagined the villa and recognized it from her predawn vision of Trevya. Fresh sobs came loose within her as she shook herself free of the villa and her husband.

"What, then?" Dubro asked, a trifle less understanding.

"I don't know. I don't know . . ." but then, though she still could not discern the nature of, much less the solution to, her problems, Illyra
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stumbled across something that could, under different circumstances, have accounted for her despair. At least to Dubro.

"I woke this morning with a foreboding around me," she admitted, not yet lying but working herself up to the sort of half-truths she routinely fed her visitors. "I thought to escape, but that woman came and the foreboding became a Seeing. She wanted to know where her lover had gone and I found him—in chains in the belly of a ship somewhere. And though I only Saw his face clearly, I saw as well that he was not alone and that many men had been pressed into slavery."

Dubro grew thoughtful, as she had known he would. Chains were made from iron, and Dubro knew every man in Sanctuary who knew that metal—in any of its forms—against his flesh. The blue eyes grew un 160

focused as he, like any other ungifted suvesh, ordered and made sense of

his thoughts.

Ulyra watched his pupils move as each mote of knowledge fell into place. Her sense of guilt lessened; she had tricked him into thinking about something else—but a good issue might yet come of it. She gath
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ered her cards and wrapped them in a square of silk, never noting which

ones had lain exposed.

"This is something for your brother, Walegrin," Dubro decided with a

firm nod of his head.

"You tell him then. I'm going for a walk, maybe I'll find a garden

somewhere. I don't want to go to the barracks."

Dubro grunted and Illyra suppressed a sigh. A year ago, less even, and her husband would have gone into a rage at the mention of Walegrin's name. He had blamed all their misfortunes on her straw-haired brother. Now, since Walegrin had deposited Trevya in her arms, the commander was welcome in their house and the two men often spent the evening in a tavern. Dubro had even gone so far as to share the cost of posting the child to citizenship in the increasingly meaningless Rankan Empire.

Illyra couldn't imagine conversation, let alone friendship, between the two taciturn men, had never really tried, then realized they talked about her. She had pushed them together with the wall she had built around herself. But the understanding brought no desire for reform.

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"Talk to him then. Maybe eat with him as well. I don't think I'll be

back until after sundown."

She straightened her shawl and eased past him to the door, never touching him, even with her skirts. The journeyman and the apprentice were gone. Trevya was squalling despite Suyan's best efforts to sing her quiet. None of it caught Illyra's heart. She was into the market-day

crowd without a backward glance.

There were perhaps two dozen S'danzo in Sanctuary, counting the female children. The men and the children moved unnoticed through the city—especially now that it had become the workplace of the empire with strangers still arriving each day. But the women, the seeresses true and false, put down their roots in the Bazaar and rarely left its confines. Illyra recognized many of the faces she passed, but none recognized hers. As free as she felt, she was also very much alone and shrinking with each step farther from the Bazaar and the forge.

She was all but invisible when she reached the main gate of the palace. She was known here, and recognized, from the many visits she had made to her son when he lived in the royal nursery with the god-child, Gys kouras. She was not greeted, as she passed into the interior corridors, for much the same reason.

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There were others here who knew her, who mumbled a greeting with their eyes averted from hers as they picked up their pace to be gone from her shadow as quickly as possible. It was, perhaps, a great honor to be the mother of a godling. Certainly the slave-dancer who'd been the mother of the other child did well by her servants, suite, and jewels, but such motherhood did not inspire mortal friendship. In truth, though, Seylalha, with her lithe beauty, would have found her nest of luxury without Gyskouras's help and Illyra, confidante to half of Sanctuary, had never had any friends.

Aside from Dubro and Walegrin, whose relationship to her was defined in ways other than friendship, there was only one to whom Illyra could bare her soul: Molin Torchholder. And it was a sorry state when a god less S'danzo claimed counsel with a Rankan priest.

At that moment, however, Illyra wore her isolation like armor and strode by the stairway that would have taken her to Molin's cluttered suite. She had her destination clearly in mind; a sheltered cloister that caught the sun without the chill wind. A place certain to have flowers even this late in the year.