It was Madame Sosotris’s tarot deck, I’m sure of it. I stole it, on commission, from the old witch while she was out drinking in some surely insalubrious pub in the streets of the Camden Throne. It was a surprisingly easy job: you’d think the best Seer in the city would have more protection on her rooms but the door barely had a lock worth talking about and the cards were in a chest with a lock — but the key had been left in the lock! One turn, one click, and there were the cards.
They were a tatty bunch, I was surprised by that too. I expected slivers of ivory painted by some ancient Chinese sage, or elaborately ornate pieces of canvas; maybe even thin slips of balsa wood engraved by one of the ten Dead Engravers that the priest in Ormswood Church likes to talk about. Instead I got a bunch of tattered bits of card that you wouldn’t make a cereal box out of. They were painted, I’ll give you that, but some of the pictures on there looked like they’d been crayoned on first and then prettied up a bit. Probably to justify having to pay for a reading from them.
I did look around, in case these were a trap and the real cards were somewhere else, but there wasn’t all that much in the room. Old furniture, antimacassars, a box of tissues that looked like she was expecting an elephant with sinus trouble. Of course, her everpresent cold is something they all talk about, but that box seemed unnecessary nonetheless. There was a book on a table by the door but it was just a guest-book; you signed your name in it when you came, and by the looks of things you wrote the time you left in it too. I’ve seen them before in businesses, especially those new warehouses down by the dock where the security is tighter than a gnat’s arse, but… but shouldn’t the greatest Seer in the city be able to see when her client’s leaving? Like, literally, with her eyes?
My contact, a ratty little man who goes by the name of Corners and who squeaks like a rat when you grab him by the throat and hoist him off the ground so that his shiny-booted feet dangle five centimetres above the floor, confirmed the cards to me when I called him on the phone and then hung on me. I called him back and made my point, a little forcibly, perhaps, that I needed to know where to deliver the merchandise.
“Back of the Bunch of Grapes,” he said, as predictable as ever. “Tomorrow morning, just before ten.”
I’m not much for hanging on to the merchandise for long, but overnight didn’t seem like a big problem. It wasn’t like I’d signed my name in the guest-book or left fingerprints where they could be found, so I sauntered home, dropped the cards on my night-stand, and was going to make myself a nice hot chocolate when I yawned loud and long enough to crack my jaw and tiredness hit me like a chair crashing down on a man’s head in a bar fight. I looked at the bed and it looked comfortable so I figured I’d just lie down for a minute. As soon as I lay down I felt heavy and warm and I just pulled the comforter up to my neck and my eyes closed and I was gone.
It was the cards. I’m sure they made me tired, somehow, and then plunged me into that dream. Because the next moment I was standing next to my bed, wearing absolutely nothing, and picking up the cards and turning the top one over. And there’s no way in the whole of the Unreal City that I’d go messing with tarot cards stolen from Sosotris.
The card showed a doorway when I looked at it, so I put it back on the top of the deck, face-down, and turned to leave my room. The doorway out looked like the one on the card, but when I picked the card up again it had changed and now was the Fool, starting out on his journey across the Major Arcana. He looked familiar but then I realised he was naked too and put the card back down. I don’t remember leaving the room, but I must have gone through the doorway somehow.
I found myself stood, dressed in grey pants and a blue shirt, on a smooth, black stone path that lead alongside a quarry. The moon was in the sky, hanging pretty central over the quarry, and there were a couple of small, cigar-shaped clouds scudding away from it in both directions. The path glinted and tried to reflect the moon but it was as though the light kept trying to avoid it, so there seemed to be moving patches of shadow all along it. That didn’t bother me much so I set off towards the quarry, wondering what was being dug up there.
I think I walked for an hour, but it felt like ten minutes and nothing around me seemed to change until I got there. Then I gazed down onto Quyani, the City in the Pit, because that was what lay at the bottom of the quarry. The steep black walls became sheer as they descended and the colour changed to a purplish red like new bruising. The tops of the spires and minarets of the city caught the moonlight and shone like tiny torches except where the dragonflies clung and shivered their wings in the light. They cast odd, mind-chilling shadows on the streets and raised walkways below, where people walked seeming unconcerned that such vast monsters were sitting above them. Now and then a dragonfly would launch itself into the air and even from my high vantage point I could see that each must be eight metres long at least. They would circle Quyani exactly once and then settle again on a new spire or minaret. And after a moment another would launch, complete a circuit, and descend. This was known, I suddenly understood, as the dance of the shadows.
“There is a prophecy,” said a voice, and there was a man stood next to me. He was dressed ordinarily and had a hand on the neck of a donkey. There were items in the panniers that the donkey wore and I thought that perhaps he was a merchant. “They say that a man will walk into Quyani uninvited and tear a hole in the Veil. Then the dragonflies will return from when they came, the dance will end and the City in the Pit will drown in lava.”
“That sounds bleak,” I said, squinting at him. He reminded me of Corners and my hands were itching to make him squeak.
“Will you enter Quyani?” he said, and he looked me, meeting my gaze. It wasn’t Corners, I saw that then, but if you told me they had the same mother I might have believed you. “Will you see if you are the prophesied one?”
“Another day, mate,” I said as easily as I could manage, but the words were hard and harsh in my mouth and it felt like I was spitting them out.
“Then perhaps you should not be here,” he said, and he raised a hand. I started to answer him — what bloody right did he have to tell me where I should or should not be? — but the ground heaved beneath my feet and I stumbled. When I looked up again I was on the floor next to my bed.
I bloody was as well. I’ve never fallen out of bed, not even when I’ve been drunk enough to have to hang on to the floor because the room’s spinning so violently, so I’ve no idea how I got there, but on the floor, butt-naked, I was.
I put the cards in the bread-bin, had a couple of bottles of chilled lager, and went to bed a bit later. With a chair underneath the door handle, just in case.
No comments:
Post a Comment