“I’m going now,” she muttered in a voice that sounded almost as bad 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!”
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.”
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.