languages but can’t pass water without someone to guide his hands?’
What indeed?
Dubro went back to his forge and Illyra stared over the bazaar walls to the
palace which marked the northern extent of the town. Haakon, who had expected a
less mysterious reaction to his news, muttered farewell and wheeled his cart to
another stall for a more sympathetic audience.
The first of the day’s townsfolk could he heard arguing with other vendors.
Illyra hurried back into the shelter of the stall to complete her daily
transformation into a S’danzo crone. She pulled Walegrin’s three Ore cards from
her deck and placed them in the pouch with her mother’s jewellery, lit the
incense of gentle-forgetting, and greeted the first querent of the day.
THE DREAM OF THE SORCERESS
by A. E. Van Vogt
The scream brought Stulwig awake in pitch darkness. He lay for a long moment
stiff with fear. Like any resident of old, decadent Sanctuary his first fleeting
thought was that the ancient city, with its night prowlers, had produced another
victim’s cry of terror. This one was almost as close to his second-floor,
greenhouse residence as-
His mind paused. Realization came, then, in a nickering self-condemnation.
Did it again!
His special nightmare. It had come out of that shaded part of his brain where he
kept his one dark memory. Never a clear recall. Perhaps not even real. But it
was all he had from the night three years and four moons ago when his father’s
death cry had come to him in his sleep.
He was sitting up, now, balancing himself on the side of the couch. And thinking