cavernous with all the forces she’d disturbed.
She found her witching room and and sluiced the sweat from her body as she
filled her scrying bowl herself.
Then, trembling with pain and fury, she spoke the spell to open the well that
held the power globe, and another to summon a fiend of hers-the slave named
Snapper Jo who spied for her in the Vulgar Unicorn where he tended bar.
Before the fiend arrived, she spoke her spell of utmost power and in the bowl
she saw a fate she didn’t understand.
Men were there, and the cursed Beysa, and a goddess called Mother Bey locked in
love or hate with Jinan’s terrible father, Stormbringer. And these two deities
straddled the winter palace while, inside, Niko played with children and Tempus
with the fates of men.
She trembled, seeing Tempus and Niko in one place-the very place where her
surviving snake (more talented than most) slithered corridors in Beysib-snake
disguise, biting and killing where he could.
Good. Good, she thought, and brought back Niko’s face to the surface of her
bowl. But this time, the vision was not of him alone. Over one of Niko’s
shoulders she could see the Riddler-or the Rankan Storm God, whose aspect was
the same; over the other, a woman’s face and that face was comely in an awful
way-her own.
The meaning of it, remaining hidden, chilled her.
She could do only so much; she had certain words to say.
She said them and the dark witching room was lit with balefire. The light
touched the globe in its hidey-hole of nothingness and the globe began to spin.