Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

Gilla nodded, and the S’danzo went on, “But if I were to set the cards into a pattern, and lock it with my will-“

“You could reverse the process?” whispered Gilla. “Make the cards the Cause?”

“I could… I would… I will!”

Suddenly Illyra gathered up the cards and carried them to a parquetry table in the comer of the room. She held up a card and showed it to Gilla. “Here, this shall stand for the querent and its surrounding atmosphere….” She laid it down.

Gilla squinted, seeing only the sun shining brightly over a painted city. “Which one is that?”

“We call it Zenith-the noonday sun-but your husband has painted a city as well as the sun.” Illyra held her hands above it and stood for a moment with brow wrinkled in concentration and eyes closed. “As thou wert Zenith, so thou shall become this city!” she murmured. She dipped her finger into the paint water and nicked a drop upon the card, then bent and breathed upon it. “By wind and water do I name thee Sanctuary, the querent of this reading, and the subject of this casting!”

She shouldn’t be doing this, thought Gilla, watching Illyra search through the cards she had selected. There was a focus to her movements that held the attention. Gilla remembered how Roxane had compelled the eye, and shuddered. But she had never understood what needs drove the Nisibisi sorceress, who for all her great knowledge had no part in ordinary women’s joys and pains. Illyra, she understood only too well. We shouldn’t be doing this! she thought then.

Gilla felt the pulse pounding in her temples, tasted the fury of the wolf-bitch whose cubs have been killed. All her life she had known fear, fear of starvation in times of want, fear of theft in moments of affluence. She had grown up listening for the stealthy step behind her as automatically as she watched for movement in the shadows whenever she went out of her door. And then she had borne children, and the fear she felt for them was as much greater than her own personal terrors as the White Foal River was deeper and more dreadful than the sewers of Sanctuary. And there had never been anything that she could do about it! Never, until now….