Madame Sosotris

Madame Sosotris, famous clairvoyante, still had her bad cold. Phlebitis looked in dismay at her rheumy eyes, so watery he wondered if she sometimes thought she'd drowned, and shuddered to hear her ferocious sniff.
Every bloody time, he thought morosely. It doesn't matter what time of year I come, or how hot or cold it is, but that bloody woman always has that bloody cold. Does she keep it as some kind of bizarre pet? She looked up then, and he forced a smile onto his face.
"Madame Sosotris," he said almost pleasantly, "It is always a delight to see you again."
"I have a premonition coming on!" she said sharply, one wrinkled hand moving across her plucked-and-pencilled eyebrows. "You are going to ask me about... the future!"
"Does anyone ever ask you about anything else?"
"No," she said, dropping her hand and looking a little sad. "And it would be nice, if even only for once, someone asked me how I was, or if I'd been keeping well since the last time I saw them."
Phlebitis nodded. "I know what you mean," he said. "The crew on my ship all jump to carry out my orders quickly enough, but none of them ever asks me if they're doing it right, or if I'd like it done differently, or even how I'm feeling for that matter. Sometimes you wonder why you're doing it all."
"People can be so self-centred," said Madame Sosotris. "I don't know how you cope." She arranged her necklaces, many strands of gold, silver, electrum and uranium, across her wattled neck, and adjusted the neckline of her age-discoloured linen shirt, and then looked up again.
"Are you still here?" she said.
"Madame Sosotris," said Phlebitis, feeling in his pocket for the leather purse he'd put there before leaving his ship. "I have come to purchase your services."
"Ah well--"
"Your clairvoyant services," said Phlebitis quickly, stressing the second word. He shuddered again at the look of real disappointment on her face, and tried to push the images that it raised far from his mind.
"You'd better sit down then," she said, ungraciously. "And put that purse where I can see it."
She pulled a torn deck of cards from a pocket of her sea-green skirt and gestured casually to a stool on one side of a small circular table. A lace cloth, its pattern enhanced by moths, draped casually over the table, and she whisked it aside and threw it to the floor. Underneath the wood was polished with age and warped with neglect, and she sat on the other side of it in a high-backed chair with carven arms and legs that would have been impressive in another place. Phlebitis sat, noticing that the deck was barely half the size it had been the last time he'd been here, and waited.
She held the cards out to him, and he shuffled them, cutting them three times always with his left hand and handed them back to her, whereupon she dropped them on the floor, spilling tattered painted pasteboard everywhere.
"Butterfingers!" she swore, sweeping them together as best she could with a calloused bare foot. Phlebitis crouched down and gathered them up, handing them back to her in a higgledy-piggledy pile.
"Right," she said, turning the first one over. "This is the signifier, this is your card." The card she laid on the table, as close to the centre as the twisted wood would allow, was the Boiled Frog. It was a vivid green, its eyes closed and an oddly blissful smile on its all-too-human face, sitting in what appeared to be a copper boiling pan.
"The Boiled Frog," she said. "Sitting replete in a vat of briny water. I am sure that this will have some signficance to you."
Phlebitis ground his teeth and merely nodded.
"Your second card is... Belladonna, our Lady of the Rocks," she said, laying down half a card, torn lengthways so that only half of a woman's face and body remained. Phlebitis stared at it as Madame Sosotris laid it crosswise on the Boiled Frog, unable to grasp why its presence terrified him so much.
When he finally made himself look away from the cards, he found that Madame Sosotris was industriously sorting through the remaining deck of cards.
"I cannot find the Hanged Man," she said. "He was in here this morning, I know it. I had a man in who wanted to know his future, and bugger me backwards with a broomstick if all the cards I could pull weren't the Hanged Man."
Behind her, shadows formed and writhed, and a pair of yellow eyes observed her actions. They met Phlebitis's briefly and conveyed a warning of silence, and he knew without being told that somehow Madame Sosotris was cheating, and that there were forces afoot that disapproved.
"Oh well," she said flipping over another card. "Your third card ought to be the Hanged Man, because if there's anyone I'd like to see hanged it's you, but instead you're getting... oh." The card on the table was the Jade eyeball, depicted as having fallen from the head of a tentacled idol of a god. "I've not seen that one before," said Madame Sosotris. "Oh well, fear death and slaughter. That's always good advice."
Phlebitis pushed the purse across the table and Madame Sosotris made it disappear far more dextrously than she'd handled the cards, and he stood and left, forgetting to thank her for her time. As he walked away, unseen behind him and her, the shadows thickened and the yellow eyes blinked.