The dream of Quyani

 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.

Clouds in the coffee

Major Cadwaller had drawn the short-straw again and been despatched to visit Madame Sosotris.  There had been an usually wide-spread outbreak of illness in the barracks, and he’d been the only person, his Commanding Officer told him, who was considered healthy enough to risk sending near someone as often ill as Madame Sosotris.  Major Cadwaller was extremely suspicious about this outbreak, especially as he’d seen several of the supposedly afflicted men drinking in the Officer’s Mess a couple of nights ago, and they’d seem hale and hearty enough then.  He suspected that there was an office network he was missing out on, and that was the one that let people know when Madame Sosotris duty was coming up again.

Madame Sosotris made it part of the conditions of the reading that the army buy her dinner, and the last time the Major had sat through a bizarre three-course meal where Madame Sosotris had coughed into her soup and then read the future from it; then taken her dentures out to more thoroughly enjoy her boiled beef, and finally slurped a Bakewell tart that the Major hadn’t considered slurpable.  At the end of the meal the Maître d’ had politely requested that he never return, and he’s quite liked the restaurant as well.  So this time he’d picked a place that had a fairly filthy reputation around the barracks and was stood outside, waiting for Madame Sosotris, wondering if he’d made quite the right choice.

She arrived wearing a dress that went out of fashion twenty-years ago and would have been twenty years too young for her then.  The ensemble, together with the inartfully applied makeup and forgotten hairdo, said more harlot than houri, and suggested that she would be cheap only because she’d forget that you hadn’t already paid when you came to leave.  Major Cadwaller wondered how badly you’d hate yourself after that experience, and didn’t feel even remotely guilty for having these thoughts.

“I’d not have had you pegged as knowing about the sign of the tongue,” said Madame Sosotris, her voice still screechy and creaky.  She sniffed; her perennial nasal drip was present.  “My word, no-one’s taken me here for years!”

“People used to take you here?” asked Major Cadwaller, more than a little shocked.  The bar’s reputation had shocked him when the other men at the barracks had told him about it, laughing a lot as they did so.  The idea that a woman might come here on a date was slightly appalling.

“I used to insist,” said Madame Sosotris smugly.  “It was the most jumping joint in the whole of the Unreal City.  I met the most amazing people here, and we made art together.  We drank the ridiculous things that we found in the bottles, and we chased each other around the tables and under the chairs.  They were the best nights I’ve ever had.”  She shifted her weight slightly and assumed the most blatantly sexual stance that Major Cadwaller had ever seen and her eyes unfocused slightly as she dwelled on her memories.

“Uh, I think they might be full,” he said, his courage deserting him.

“Nonsense!” said Madame Sosotris returning to the present.  She grinned, showing too few teeth for the Major’s comfort, and leaned in the doorway.  “Room for a little one?” she yelled.

“Is that all he’s got?” came back the response from a voice that might have been a woman with a thyroid problem or a man with no balls.  “Bring him on it then and we’ll see if can’t fix that!”  Laughter rolled around the bar, and Madame Sosotris grabbed Major Cadwaller’s hand and dragged him in.

The general ribbing died down after twenty minutes, and Major Cadwaller sat down at the table he’d reserved while Madame Sosotris continued to hob-nob at the bar.  He was relieved to be sitting down, as the huge bartender behind the bar had pulled his pants down around his ankles twice while he was trying to explain that he had a dinner reservation, and each time the room had burst into laughter.  He hoped it was because his boxers had yellow smiley faces on them (he thought they looked happy) and not because of Madame Sosotris’s earlier unfortunate comment.  He picked up the menu, which was so wet it fell apart in his hands and landed on the table in a pile of soggy, illegible cardboard.

Madame Sosotris sat down suddenly next to him, with a cup of coffee in her hands.  “Don’t worry about the food, lad,” she said.  “Bringing me in here again after all these years is more than enough for your reading.  I’ve missed these people, you know.  They told me that three of my paintings from years ago still exist, you know?  How exciting is that?”

“I do know,” said Major Cadwaller, briskly.  “We have them.”

“Do you now?  Well, all I’m going to say is that you better not be keeping them in the same room if they’re not covered up, Mr. General.  And that my price next time might be seeing them again myself.”

“That could be arranged,” said Major Cadwaller, leaping at the chance to avoid having to take Madame Sosotris out to dinner.  “Hang on, what do you mean–“

“Look dearie,” said Madame Sosotris, punching his shoulder and pointing in the coffee cup.  Major Cadwaller peered at it.

“What am I looking at?”

Madame Sosotris’s voice suddenly took on a crisp, clear quality and cut through the noise in the room like a newly sharpened knife.

“Two thrones will incarnate in one man, and the City’s foundations will tremble.  The Drowned Sailor will walk into conflict with his eyes averted and will bring with him a child of nine.  There shall be a re-sorting in Heaven and the Earth will reflect its glory.  The last man standing will choose their new home.”

Major Cadwaller looked around.  The bar was silent, and everyone was listening to Madame Sosotris’s prophecy, which was definitely a breach of the rules for these matters.

“Are you sure?” he asked, lamely, hoping to sow doubt in the minds of the other listeners, but the chorus of snorts and vocal shrugs assured him that he’d failed.  Of course she was sure.  She was the best Clairvoyant in the City.

The Hyacinth girl

Phlebitis shivered even though he was stood in sunlight.  The skies had been clear for nearly two weeks now, and the wind had barely raised itself from its bed.  His ship sat in the harbour, effectively becalmed and he had wondered now for three days if he shouldn’t break out the oars and give the crew some exercise.  Even if it turned out that there was no wind on the open sea, by the time they were there the crew would have no choice but to either keep rowing until they found wind, or at the very least row back to the harbour.  If it were just a little cooler here he’d probably stay until the wind picked up again, but the heat was making him fretful, and the crew were having nightmares.  He couldn’t blame them, over the last six months they’d seen plenty of things to give people nightmares; he rather thought that a day’s rowing would probably tire them out to the point where they slept without dreams.  They might be grateful to him for that.

His thoughts turned for a moment to the great moths that the Eidolon of the Marches kept for the purpose of eating the dreams of its subjects, and he shivered again despite the heat.  Even if he were to capture one, he doubted that anyone would tolerate having it locked up on the ship for any time at all.  Some things were just evil in and of themselves.

There was a splash somewhere starboard of him and he pulled himself from his reverie and went to see who was swimming.  The harbour was normally far too busy and dangerous for that kind of activity, but with everyone becalmed several of the crews had taken to playing in the water.  As he strolled along the deck, he heard a cry go up from some of the men, and quickened his pace.

There in the water, being watched and laughed at, was a young girl with her arms full of flowers.  She was kicking her legs to stay afloat, and even managing a small amount of movement towards the dock wall, but she was refusing to let any of her flowers be tugged away by the chill green water.  Phlebitis sighed.

“Who pushed her in?” he asked.  “And who’s got the book on how long it’ll take her to drown?”  Scattered laughter among the men, but curiously no volunteers.  He hardened his expression.  “I’m thinking maybe we should row out to find the wind,” he said.  “If I don’t get an answer, I’ll be picking me some pacemakers for the rowing.”

“She’s not from our ship, Captain,” said someone in the crowd.  “No-one pushed her that we saw.”

Phlebitis frowned.  There were no other ships near enough for her to have jumped from one of them and reached where she was without being a strong swimmer, and with her arms full of flowers she wasn’t even a weak swimmer.  She was just a slow drowner.

“Lower a boat and bring her up,” he said.  “I want to know who she is.”

“Women are unlu–“ started the voice from the crowd, and Phlebitis pointed like a Titan exiling an impudent child.  “You, Jack,” he said.  “You’re leading the boat-crew.  Pick two others, and if that boat isn’t in the water in two minutes, you will be.”  He knew all the stories about women being unlucky on board a ship, but in his experience women were unlucky full stop.  Madame Sosotris came treacherously to mind, attempting to flirt with him despite being old enough to be his grandmother.  “Ninety seconds,” he said, feeling a touch cruel.

The boat rappelled down in short order, and he watched with slight satisfaction as they rowed out to the girl and then struggled to bring her aboard.  She refused to let go of even a single one of her flowers, and eventually they resorted to dragging her in by her heels and her head, though she squealed and writhed like a sea-snake when they did.  When they reached the ship, she remained in the boat while it was raised, and only when it was back on deck did she step demurely out and look around her.  The crew retreated a little, still superstitious, and Phlebitis stepped forward.

“Who are you, and what were you doing in the water?”

“I was swimming ashore,” she said, sounding defiant.  “Until you interfered.”

“Who are you?”

He got no answer, just a fiery stare.

“Fine,” he said.  “I’ll call you the Hyacinth girl since those are hyacinths.  How did you get into the water?”

“I stepped,” she said.  “I wasn’t supposed to end up in the water though.”

“Did you somehow miss the ship?” asked Phlebitis, and the crew laughed approvingly.  “It’s not that big, as they go.”

She flushed at being mocked, but thrust her elfin, pointy chin out.  “I was pushed off course,” she said.  “I normally arrive where I intend.”

“And you were intending to arrive on my ship?”

“Oh yes.  Madame Sosotris was most insistent that I come and visit you.”

Phlebitis’s heart sank.

Can I play with madness?

Madame Sosotris was feeling uncomfortable, which was unusual for her.  She was sat at the battered, wooden, circular table where she conducted her palmistry (occasional dental), tarot readings and other divinations of the future.  The table rocked because she’d never bothered to get the legs evened off.  On the other side of the table was a young man, possibly even a boy, with milky white eyes that seemed to be pointed directly at her face.  His nose was running almost as badly as her own, and they sniffed in concert every few moments.  His upper lip was split and twisted revealing slightly yellowed teeth.  And he was listening intently to ever word she said.

She passed her hands over the crystal ball that she’d set in the middle of the table for this reading.  It chilled slightly in response to her hands, sucking in energy from its surroundings to allow her access to the future.  White clouds seemed to boil inside the ball and she flinched.  Normally the future was much more serene.

“What do you see?” asked the man-child, lisping slightly.  “I can feel the future drawing closer.  You are strong with your gift, aren’t you?  They’ve told me true.”

Madame Sosotris opened her mouth, intending to ask him who they were in this context, and who had been talking about her.  Partly it was professional pride, wanting to survey her customers to know how they’d learned about her, but partly it was fear as well, fear that there might be more people like him intending to pay her a visit.  Before she could speak though, the mist in the ball cleared and she leant forward, stunned by what she could see.

“Well I never!” she said.  “Did you see that?”

The man-boy sneered at her, but she was still looking into the ball and missed the expression.  “I cannot see,” he said when the silence drew on and he realised that she was either ignoring him, or not looking at him.  “You might have noticed my eyes?”

“I’ve learned not to make assumptions without better evidence than just my eyes,” said Madame Sosotris.  They sniffed at the same time.  “And if you had been watching, you’d have seen that in less than a year you regain sight in your eyes.  A man performs surgery and cuts away the veil from your vision.  You will wear cotton pads for three days, and then you will take the pads off and see again.”

“Really?”  The man-boy’s voice was hoarse, possibly with excitement.  “Do you truly see this?”

“Oh yes,” said Madame Sosotris.  “I know the man who performs the surgery, though I cannot see what would bring him here.  It seems that he is only part of your future insomuch as he lets you see again.”

“What do I do with my sight?  What is my future, woman?”

“There’s no call to take that tone with me!  I have a name you know.”  They sniffed is unison again.

“And I’m paying for your services,” said the man-boy.  “I’ve bought the right to call you woman.”

“I’m putting my prices up…,” muttered Madame Sosotris, not bothering to be quiet enough to keep her words from the man-boy’s ears.  “Your future is unclear afterwards.”

“What does unclear mean?  Tell me!  I HAVE TO KNOW!”

“Shouting gets you thrown out, money or not,” said Madame Sosotris.  She looked up from the crystal ball and saw that he’d pushed his chair back and was standing at the table, leaning on his knuckles and staring intently at the chest-of-drawers off to her right.  “I mean your future is unclear; the crystal fogs like there’s a frog in there breathing all over it when I try and look further.  There are a couple of reasons for that….”

“A frog?”

“It’s my metaphor, don’t mess with it.”

“Fine, woman.”  His voice was pointedly angry.  “What are these reasons?  And don’t tell me that I’m powerful and that hides the future from you.  I’ve had that from every charlatan on this side of the City.”

“Hah!  No, you’ll not hide your future from me just because you’re powerful.  You can sit down again now, if you like.  Your future might be unclear because you’ve crossed paths with the Drowned Sailor, because he distorts the future and reshapes it wherever he goes.  Your future might be unclear because you go and visit the court of the Eidolon, and She has ways of protecting her dominion.  Or it might be unclear because you’re fated to die and it’s not yet been decided how.”

“I’m hardly going to visit the Eidolon, everyone knows she eats people!”  The man-boy sat, his voice calmer now.  He reached out a hand and it brushed the crystal ball.  He sucked in a breath, a gasp, and pulled his hand sharply away.

“Don’t touch, it gets cold,” said Madame Sosotris automatically.  She sometimes used the crystal ball to make ice.

“Why is it so cold?”

“The future is frosty,” said Madame Sosotris.  “She is a harsh mistress.”

“What was that about death?”

“Oh nothing,” said Madame Sosotris.  “Anyway, it’s most likely the Drowned Sailor.”

“Who is that then?”

“He’s a friend.”  If the man-boy could have seen he would have recoiled from Madame Sosotris’s leer.  “And he’s coming here in three days time.”

“Are you always this cryptic?”

“Are you always as cheap as you’re going to be when you leave?”

“Oh.  You saw that in the crystal ball?”

“Hah.  Reading the future has its perks, yes.”

Tiergarten

The colonnade was a long covered walkway supported by wooden pillars that had been carved with grinning, leering, demonic faces.  Many were poking their tongues out and were pop-eyed.  Teeth sprouted from parts of faces that should only have grown hair, eyes were extruded from ears on stalks, and bones were twisted and deformed as though the heads had been through strange and unusual pressures.  Some of the tongues were long, unnaturally so, and one or two stretched from one pillar to the next, forming slender railings that, if you looked closely, were textured as though covered in hair.

“They’re carved from life, you know,” said Dr. Rosendieb.  He gestured casually with one black-gloved hand at the pillars.  “Each face was the face of a real person in the Tiergarten in the late seventeen hundreds.”

“Tiergarten?  Zoo?” asked Phlebitis, staring at his feet.  The pillars made him feel queasy, almost sea-sick if it weren’t for the fact that he hadn’t felt sea-sick since he was fourteen, even when Poseidon was angry and the sea was throwing his ship around like a dog worrying a chew-toy.  He was trying hard not to look too closely at them, partly because he thought he might recognise some of them.

“Hah!”  The doctor’s laugh was short and sharp, almost humourless but redeemed at the end by the hint of dryness.  “Hah, yes, I suppose.  It was a name that would be considered unpolitisch these days I suppose.  That’s politically incorrect in the delightful euphemism of English, of course.”

“Really?  I thought that was a type of trumpet.”

“You’re thinking of the euphonium, of course,” said Dr. Rosendieb.  “I played it as a child in a marching band.  It was, despite the name, not a particularly pleasant instrument, too heavy for my little arms.  I much preferred the shawm.”

“That sounds lovely,” said Phlebitis, aware that the doctor had stopped walking and hoping that if he continued the doctor would resume suit.  Instead, Dr. Rosendieb caught his elbow and gestured at the pillars.

“The Tiergarten then was the name given to the Asylum,” he said.  “The inmates were… demented I suppose, although it is arguable that they resulted in that state because they were interned in the Tiergarten rather than being put there because they were already in that state.  There have been a small number of high-profile cases in the papers of late, which you must have seen.  Various records have been uncovered that suggest that certain high-ranking families were disposing of unwanted family members there.”

“Well,” said Phlebtits looking with distaste at a pillar.  “You can see how some of them might not have been the relative you wanted to introduce to people.”

“This one,” said Dr. Rosendieb, laying his hand on the forehead of a cephalitic-looking young man with a twisted jaw and flattened nose, “ended up looking like this only after five years in the Tiergarten.  When he was committed there he was sufficiently handsome that fights would start in bars because of other men’s wives looking at him for too long.

“I see,” said Phlebitis.  He shivered somewhat theatrically.  “It’s a little cool under here, doctor.”

“Of course, of course!  Let us continue, at the end there is sunlight.  It is a lovely day.  But tell me, my dear chap, what brings you here?  Why are you interested in the Tiergarten?  It was closed down over eighty years ago.”

“I think my first mate might be in there,” said Phlebitis, his eyes firmly fixed on the ground again.  “And I’d quite like him back.”

“No, you are quite mistaken,” said Dr. Rosendieb, his voice now quieter and more discreet.  “The Tiergarten was closed down and the patients remanded into other, better care.  Your first mate cannot be in there.  Perhaps you misunderstood the name of hospita–“

“The Tiergarten,” said Phlebitis.  “There has been no misunderstanding, just as it was not chance that caused me to seek you out, Doctor.  I had a little help, of course, but not too much.  Not so much that I couldn’t find you, I was warned about that too.”

Doctor Rosendieb stopped again and Phlebitis, cursing to himself, also stopped and looked back at him, trying to ignore the faces on the pillars.  He was sure he could hear insane laughter in the background.

“What are you talking about?”  The doctor’s words could have meant that he thought Phlebitis was gibbering, but his tone made it clear what he meant.

“Madame Sosotris sends her regards,” said Phlebitis.  “She still has her cold.”

“That woman always has a cold,” said Dr. Rosendieb.  “I suspect she has the archetype of colds and were we ever to cure her of it then no-one would ever get a cold again.”

“You should try,” said Phlebitis.

“Hah!  Is she still chasing every man she sees, though?”

Phlebitis nodded and shuddered at the same time.

“I may wait a little longer,” said Dr. Rosendieb.  “I see then, the clairvoyant has told you where the boundaries are then.  Did she also tell you that no-one leaves the Tiergarten until they die?  Hmm?”

“What she said was that you didn’t let any of them leave before they die,” said Phlebitis slowly.  He realised with horrible slowness that the pillar the doctor was standing closest to contained a carving of his first mate’s face second from the ground.

“That woman is too accurate for her own good,” said Dr. Rosendieb, a moue of distaste crossing his face.  “What are you looking at?”

“The face of the man I’ve come to buy from you,” said Phlebitis.  He pointed.

“Buy?”

Phlebitis nodded.

“That’s the first time anyone’s offered,” said Dr. Rosendieb.  “Perhaps I should listen to you.”

“Yes,” said Phlebitis.  “That would be advantageous to us both I hope.  Allow me to tell you what I will not sell you from my cargo first though.  You may have none of the lilacs from the dead land.”

“Lilacs from Paysmort?”  Dr. Rosendieb staggered, even though he’d been standing still a moment earlier.  “You found lilacs from Paysmort?”

“I found Paysmort,” said Phlebitis.  “And I’d really like to forget it now.”

Turning tables II

“Do you think he’s just here to have an orgasm with us?” asked another voice from around the table, this one female.

“No,” said the first woman.  “No, he wouldn’t be able to org….”  Her voice trailed away as she realised that was revealing too much.  All the faces around the table had turned to her, and though a couple looked shocked, several looked interested and one looked revolted.  “Arthur?”  she said, abruptly.  “Is that you Arthur?”

The table rocked enthusiastically from side to side, which Madame Sosotris knew for certain she couldn’t make it do with her pedals.  She treadled them a little anyway, and found them squishy, the hydraulics clearly failing to engage anything.  She treadled a little harder, just in case, but the table just ignored her.

“Itchy legs?” whispered a voice, a woman next to her leaning in to her.  Madame Sosotris’s skin crawled at the proximity of the woman, and she pushed back in her chair.  The legs groaned as they stuttered against the uneven floorboards.  She nodded, and to her relief the woman leaned away again.  The table started to rotate, rocking on the floor about half-way round the circle, and definitely gaining a little height.

“Arthur?” A man’s voice now, one Madame Sosotris recognised.  More voices around the table joined in, all asking if the spirit rocking the table was Arthur.  She cleared her voice, about to tell the room that the spirit’s never spoke directly, only through the medium, when the table suddenly stopped dead and dropped onto the floor.  Someone screamed, a tiny little scream that was heartfelt, and the people on either side of her tightened their grip on her hands.  All of the lights went out, and the curtains fell across the windows with a sound like a sail flapping in the wind.

“Arthur?” asked Madame Sosotris, her voice quavering.  She was instantly annoyed with herself, but as she was clearing her throat, which sounded a little like a tubercular cow, light returned and she fell as silent as the rest of the room.  On the table in front of them tiny motes of purple light were swirling around, drifting, a hologrammic Brownian motion.  For a moment there were just enough to capture attention, and then suddenly they were a column of light, thick and coruscant, that reached to the ceiling of the room.  Madame Sosotris squinted, trying to see if there was something in the light, and then chips of light seemed to slough away, falling to the table where they splashed and vanished.  This unnatural sculpting persisted for five minutes, after which the light presented the image of the statue atop Nelson’s Column.

“Arthur!”

“That’s Arthur?  Wasn’t he… well, fatter?”

“He was fat!  Very fat!  That’s not Arthur.”

“Oh come on, he wasn’t that fat.”

“He had to have help standing up.  How fat do you have to be before you’ll call someone fat?”

“Well…,”

“Hey, he’s pretty fat too.  Maybe Arthur really didn’t look so fat by his standards.”

“Lady!”

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” said Nelson, his voice rolling around the room as though Madame Sosotris had a sound-system.  Heads turned, looking into the darkness that surrounded them, but they were all drawn back when Nelson spoke again.  “Why have you summoned me?”

“We have questions, Arthur,” said the female voice who’d identified his orgasm noise.  “You fell rather suddenly.”

“I was pushed,” said Nelson, the table shaking as he spoke.  Madame Sosotris flexed her fingers, trying to see if she could break the circle, but the people holding her hands tightened their grip.  “I was pushed, by my lieutenant.  It could happen to you all.”

“Not me,” said a male voice.  “No lieutenants.”

“Hah,” boomed Nelson.  “He was inspired by La Reveille, who I see has not accompanied you today.  Beware La Reveille.”

“We know,” said the woman who’d identified the orgasm noise.  “We know how you fell, Arthur.  You were lazy, you were incompetent.  It is no surprise that the Throne passed to another.  But we don’t have enough data on your Throne, and your little… ah, surprises, are causing us issues.”

“You knew?  You knew that I was targeted?”  The indignation in Nelson’s voice made it louder, and a couple of people around the table cringed.  Madame Sosotris pulled at the hands holding hers, now trying her best to break the circle, but still her neighbours gripped her tightly, squeezing.  “What honour is there amongst Thrones?” screamed Nelson, his face distorting with rage.  “And now you come here to ask me for my help?”

Madame Sosotris let herself fall off her chair and landed heavily on the floor, banging her tailbone.  Her arms ended up above her, her hands still held firmly in place.  She cursed softly under her breath.

“Arthur, you’re dead,” said the female voice.  “The concerns of this world aren’t yours any more.  Why don’t you be a little reasonable?”

“Hah!” Nelson’s face twisted into something that might have been a sneer.  “Hah, I might be dead but I’m certainly not impotent.  Each possessor of a Throne becomes part of the Throne when they die!  You haven’t seen the last of me!”

The hologram of the statue disappeared with a sharp crack and a sudden sea-fresh smell of ozone, and everyone’s hands were suddenly thrown apart, breaking the circle.  Madame Sosotris, her hands above her head, ended up clapping them together involuntarily, which drew everyone’s eyes to her as light leaked back into the room around the edges of the curtains, and she clumsily pulled herself up from the floor and back on to her chair.

“Payment,” she said, “needs to be made before you leave.”

Turning tables I

Madame Sosotris huffed and puffed as she scrubbed the wooden table.  The table rocked and rattled; its legs were uneven after years of being dragged around a rough-planked floor with no consideration.  Madame Sosotris didn’t particularly mind, as its occasional tilts and jolts added atmosphere when she was reading Tarot cards for people.  It was more of a nuisance when she was eating soup, but she’d taken to eating that standing up in the kitchen as the soul of a chicken that she’d accidentally imbued into her cast-iron frying pan was summoned by the smell of fresh soup and would cluck around the kitchen for hours if she didn’t exorcise it immediately.  She huffed and puffed some more, scrubbing away at what she hoped wasn’t a bloodstain.  Her dress fell open and her breasts sagged across the table, but she didn’t notice.  Her mind was concentrating on the performance ahead.

The door shuddered under the weight of the blows hammering on it, and Madame Sosotris’s head snapped up like she wanted whiplash.  She looked at the grubby cloth in her hand and tossed it in the fireplace, where it sprawled across cold logs.  She swaggered to the door and flung it open, stretching her face into a slightly manic grin.

“Welcome!” she shouted.  “Welcome one and… one?”

The woman – short, dumpy, wearing a maid’s uniform – looked rather shocked, and it took Madame Sosotris several long seconds to realise that she was feeling a draft from her dress blowing yet further open in the brisk breeze.  She clutched her clothes about her, and tried hard to glare her embarrassment away.

“Who are you?” she said.  “I was expecting milords and miladies for the table turning.”

“I was sent to find out if you were ready yet,” said the dumpy woman.  Her face was scarred with ringworm and her nose looked as though it had been eaten away by something.  Madame Sosotris couldn’t get close enough to confirm her suspicions that it was rats, so she contented herself with jumping to that conclusion instead.

“I am always ready,” she said, ignoring that nagging voice in the back of her mind that said that this ugly little woman was going to go back and tell them that she was dressed now and hadn’t been before.  “Skyclad or no, womb-born or zombie, I am always ready.”

“Right,” said the dumpy woman.  “I’ll go and tell the gentlefolk that you’re not wearing any knickers and that you want to see them anyway.”  Madame Sosotris responded by slamming the door in her face, and then hastily tying her dress back together.  Something important seemed to have ripped, so she pulled the sash-cord from the curtains and tied that firmly around her waist as well.  As she coughed with the sudden constriction, someone knocked on the door again.

“Welcome?” said Madame Sosotris, peering around the edge of the door, this time applying caution.  There were a group of people, all wearing heavy, hooded cloaks and acting edgy: they switched their weight from one foot to the other, swung their hoods from side to side trying to see if anyone was watching, and pushed closer to the door when it looked like it was opening.  Recognising their need, Madame Sosotris backed away, pulling the door open, and they flooded into her room.

“You may leave your cloaks on the couch,” said Madame Sosotris, gesturing in the direction of the paired couches that faced each other.  One looked mildewed, and the other only smelled like it.  The participants muttered amongst themselves, hoods being placed close together to keep the conversations private.  Eventually a consensus was reached, and they all left their cloaks on the floor and took a chair at the table.

“Welcome,” said Madame Sosotris again.  It crossed her mind that she was sounding like a broken record.  “We are here today to contact the spirit world.  Is there anyone in particular you wish to speak to?”

The men and women, beautiful people all, looked at one another, and their gaze said the same thing: Is this woman really this stupid?  And is she really wearing a curtain sash as a belt?

“We wish to speak to the fallen City Director,” said a man, whose name was known to everyone in the room, and whose face would be instantly recognised by anyone of the street.  Madame Sosotris, her face impassive, nodded.

“Let us join our hands,” she said.

The instant the last two hands connected the table shook and jolted as though there had been a small earthquake.  The men and women around the table looked at each other, their faces grey and apprehensive, and Madame Sosotris gasped.  She had started the movement with the pedals under her chair that lifted the table from the floor, but the rest of it had come from somewhere else entirely.  For the first time in a long time she felt afraid.

“Is there anyone there?” she said, her voice thinner and more whiney that she would have liked.  As if in response the table leapt, and the circle barely managed to keep the hands joined and above it.

“Arthur?” asked a woman sat at four o’clock relative to Madame Sosotris, and the table gyrated, grinding out a low growl against the floor.  “Oh Arthur!” said the woman.

“How do you know it’s him?” said a man sat next to her, his eyelids painted with blue false eyes.

“That’s his orgasm noise,” said the woman, and everyone shifted, feeling slightly uncomfortable.

Origami

The little woman was picking her nose, inspecting whatever she found on the end of her finger, and then wiping it on the floral wallpaper next to her chair.  Madame Sosotris, clairvoyant and haruspex, contained her rage, and sniffed.  Her apparently incurable cold continued to make her nose run, and even her balm-dipped tissues weren't enough to keep the skin on her face from getting chapped.  The little woman started at the sniff, and promptly sat on both her hands before looking around her.  When she saw Madame Sosotris standing in the doorway she tried to look both surprised and innocent at the same time.  The end result was a little like the expression of a concussed chipmunk, as drawn by Disney.
"You still have both your hands!" said Madame Sosotris in a tone of mild surprise.  "Please, come through to my drawing room.  The spirits find that room the easiest room to communicate in."
The little woman shuffled to the edge of the chair and actually jumped down.  Madame Sosotris was startled to see that she was actually only a little over three feet tall; looking down on the top of her head made her own head swim and she felt a little dizzy.
"What would happen if the spirits felt most comfortable in your bedroom?" asked the little woman.  It sounded conversational, even a little flirtatious, but Madame Sosotris was still annoyed about the nose-picking and -wiping and so gave an honest answer.
"I'd burn cedar wood in there to make it inhospitable for them, and light votives in the drawing room to make it more attractive," she said.  "I've sacrificed a number of birds and small mammals in the drawing room, burned several expensive essential oils there, and boarded up some other... sacrifices... alive in the walls.  The drawing room is a spiritual magnet now, and to be honest, I doubt you could get hold of a spirit anywhere else in a two-mile radius."  She coughed, a throaty, mucusoidal sound, and her shoulders hunched with the force of it.  Instantly her nose began to run again, and she patted her pockets for a handkerchief.
"Oh," said the little woman in a little voice.  "That must take some effort.  Don't the council complain?"
"No," said Madame Sosotris, her voice muffled a little by the enormous white handkerchief she was trying to blow her nose with.  "They don't."
The little woman, whose name was Jo, now came into the drawing room and looked around.  There were windows in two walls, across which gauzy purple fabrics were drawn, giving the light a definite blue tinge.  The floor was stripped-back floorboards with a couple of hexagonal rugs laid on them at opposite ends of the room.  There was a round wooden table with four irregular chairs set around it at this end; at the other end were two overstuffed, soft-looking couches set at right-angles around a coffee-table.  There were three half-empty cups on the coffee table, and a pile of what might have been dried tea-leaves between them.  Jo found herself looking round the walls, which were wood-panelled, wondering where things – sacrifices she reminded herself – might have been boarded up.  The walls seemed solid, but there were various framed pictures of different sizes that might have been hiding things.
"Sit down," said Madame Sosotris, gesturing at the chairs.  Jo sighed, but only quietly.  Sitting on the couches would have been easier for her.  "While you sit," said Madame Sosotris turning away to an escitoire hidden behind the door, "I shall get the tools we need for this divination."
"I haven't told you what I'm here for yet," said Jo, struggling onto the chair.  To her annoyance, the chair wasnt' quite high enough for her to see over the edge of the table.  Madame Sosotris turned back holding a brown envelope and a cushion, and handed her the cushion.
"I wouldn't be much of a clairvoyant if I didn't know why you were here already," she said, sniffing.  "You're here to find out about Phlebitis, the doomed sailor."
Jo folded the cushion in two and got it under herself and was pleased to find that this boosted her up to the point where she could rest her arms comfortably on the table.  "Doomed?" she said.  "It sounds like this will be a short consultation!"
"Not at all," said Madame Sosotris sitting down opposite her and tipping some colourful squares of paper out of the envelope.  "Phlebitis's long term future is clearly visible, but his short term destiny is a shifting mess of images and mist.  He must do certain things, that is written, but how he achieves them appears to be largely up to him.  He is the pawn of a greater power than we humans normally deal with.  Choose a piece of paper, dearie,."
Jo looked at the papers, all of which were the same size but differently coloured.  Nothing seemed to distinguish them apart from colour, so she selected a pleasant beige square by tapping it with her finger.  Madame Sosotris nodded, and put all the other squares away again, then set the beige square in front of her, and starting folding it.
"You are not here to find out if there will be a romantic liaison between you, either," said Madame Sosotris, running her yellowed, horny nails along a crease to sharpen it.  "You are here simply to find out where he is headed and how you might intercept him."
Jo opened her mouth to deny it, and then paused.  For a moment she could have sworn that the paper shape that seemed to emerge from the paper as Madame Sosotris folded was a crown.
"His whereabouts are important to us," she said finally, kicking herself as she heard herself say us.
"Of course they are," said Madame Sosotris calmly.  She turned the paper over and starting making more folds on the other side.  "You understand that he is under protection though?" She sniffed again, but a trickle of mucus escaped her nose anyway and ran down swiftly to her lips, where it hunted for a way around them.
"I hadn't," said Jo, watching the paper folds with rapt delight.  She'd never seen origami used in divination before, and it was fascinating watching how the paper seemed to catch sparkles and twinkles that shouldn't be there.
"He had protection," said Madame Sosotris.  "I can show you how to find him, but I would advise you to take advice from someone else before you approach him."
"Why someone else?"
"Because I will not tell you who protects him, nor will I expose myself to their regard."
Madame Sosotris stood an origami unicorn up on the table, its eyeless face pointing at Jo.  "The unicorn will find Phlebtitis until it is identified, after which it will probably be useless.  This is all the help I will give you."  She sneezed, and although the unicorn was caught in the middle of the blast of air it didn't even move.
"Good enough," said Jo seizing the unicorn.  "How much do we owe you?"

Playing with a full deck

"Crabbe made them for me."  Madame Sostris sniffed to punctuate her sentence as she shuffled the cards.  They were a new deck; for the first time in a long time it looked like she might actually have a full deck in her hands.  Phlebitis, doomed sailor, tried to look interested.
"Crabbe?" he said, his tone weary and defeated.  Madame Sosotris appeared not to notice.
"He walks the banks of the river," she said.  "You've probably seen him, what with you being a sailor and all."
Phlebitis was indeed a sailor, and made his money by taking cargoes across the Sea of Demons.  One way with frogs that his crew boiled on the voyage, because the people they got the frogs from considered them sacred and would be angry if they knew what was done with the frogs, and the other way with fragile jade statuettes that possibly had curses attached to them.  The curses seemed to stay attached to whoever owned the statuette though, so apart from the odd pang of conscience, Phlebitis managed not to think about it.  Trying to take his ship up a river would be foolhardy.
"Yes," he said.  "Probably.  Does he fall in much?  Perhaps I've even rescued him?"
"I doubt it," said Madame Sosotris.  "His wife did though."
Phlebitis paused and thought about this for a few seconds before replying.  It was clear that this was a deliberate conversational gambit to keep him talking, because he knew that Madame Sostris had an unrequited crush on him, but he was also intrigued as to how she could think this was relevant.  Eventually curiosity won over caution.  "I hope she could swim," he said, going for a fairly neutral comment that didn't commit him to being interested in what she was saying.  Her hands shuffled the cards constantly.
"Yes, but she was run over by a Stinking Barge.  She went under the water and never came back up to the surface."
The Stinking Barges were the city's rubbish-collectors.  They were huge long boats that transported rubbish and sewage downstream to avoid polluting the water that the city depended on for its life.  A few miles outside the city were mountains of ordure and filth that sent out a stench that could make a man want to cut his own nose off his face.  At night, in hot weather, the gases they gave off burned with a pale, shaky blue light that the locals suspected of attracting demons from the sea, and in particularly hot summers they sometimes exploded.  At the base of these mountains men worked, their faces wrapped in cloths soaked in lye, shovelling the filth away into the river, polluting and poisoning the downstream water for thirty miles.  Phlebitis refused to hire men who'd worked on the Stinking Barges because they couldn't get the smell of the refuse off their skin.  He also refused to hire anyone who'd ever been a cultist, anyone who appeared to know what a City Throne was and people who wouldn't drink rum on religious grounds.  So far his crew had been loyal and stable, and he put this competely down to his hiring policies.
"That's sad," he said.  In his experience bodies always came back up unless they were eaten or weighted down first, and his money was on pockets full of rocks.
"Now he collects flotsam from the river," said Madame Sosotris, her hands almost hypnotic.  She was skilled at shuffling the cards, and though few of her clients realised it could prestidigitate any card in the deck to the top almost imperceptibly.  "He hopes to find her in the straw and frayed rope, that her bones might be waiting at the bottom in the mud for the right moment to return to him."
"What's he going to do with the bones when he finds them?"  Phlebitis had a sudden, nightmarish vision of the poor man wiring the bones together and keeping his skeletal wife in his home, presumably a two-room hovel.  Would her keep on display to visitors or in his bed?  Phlebitis shook his head to chase the image away.
"I've never asked," said Madame Sosotris.  "He made this deck of cards though, from things that the river gave up to him.  They're as close to the soul of the city as anything I've ever owned."  She coughed.  "Would you care to cut?"  She held the cards out, and Phlebitis scrutinised them, trying to see if they were bone.  They appeared to be paper, so he reached a hand out and picked a number of cards from the top.
Madame Sosotris bade him lay his cards down, to one side, and turned the top card of the rest of the deck over.
"The strangled Kitten," she said.  "Inverted."  Sure enough, a bedraggled, green-looking kitten took up most of the card, but in the background there was an arm and leg just visible, that might have been human.  The kitten's tongue was hanging out, and its eyes were greyed and hazed.  "Things that people throw away are important to you, and you collect them."
"I'm not sure–" began Phlebitis, but Madame Sosotris glared at him and tapped the card.
"In the background," she said, her finger tapping insistently, "you can see the arm and leg of Belladonna, Our Lady of the Rocks."
Phlebitis fell silent.  His future seemed entwined with Belladonna, who- or what-ever she might be.  He nodded at Madame Sostotris.
"Carry on then," he said.  "Tell me what the mad bitch wants from me now."

Mystic dinner

Madame Sosotris, whose cold seemed omnipresent, sneezed into her soup.  Splashes of Cream of Asparagus spattered the tablecloth and her dress, neither of which appeared to bother her.  A drip appeared at the end of her reddened nose, and a few seconds fell into her soup.  If she noticed at all, she pretended not to.  Her (somewhat unwilling) dinner companion coughed into his napkin and contemplated rushing to the toilets to throw up.  Eventually, after a prolonged coughing fit that finally had Madame Sosotris looking at him with an appraising eye, he decided not to.
"Did something go down the wrong way?"  Her voice was like nails on a chalkboard, and he reflexively bit his spoon.  His teeth tingled.
"Thank-you for your concern, Madame, but it is a lingering memory of mustard gas," he said, dipping his spoon into his soup and stirring it slowly counter-clockwise.  He found that he'd rather lost his appetite.  Madame Sosotris slurped hers with enthusiasm, the addition of bodily fluids apparently adding to its appeal for her.  "When do we get to the bit where you reveal my future?" he asked, considering the salt and pepper pots on the table in case one of them might make the soup more appetising.
His name was Major John Cadwaller and he'd been a Major for seven days so far.  Much of his promotion amounted to an increase in paperwork and less time to stay fit, or even oversee the troops staying fit, and he was wondering if the promotion was really worth it.  Then his new commanding officer had called him into his office, made him wait in a grim little antechamber with a frozen corpse for thirty minutes, and then given him this task.
Get to Sosotris, his CO had said, barely looking up from the newspaper he thought a report was hiding, and find out what she sees in the future for us.  Don't give me any back-talk about utilising proper info, this is proper info.  You'll see it for yourself when you meet her.  Oh, and try not to breathe too much near her.  She's always ill.
"You're a fast one, aren't you?"  Madame Sosotris laid her spoon down in her soup with a splash and grinned, showing too few teeth and too many gaps.  One or two of the gaps looked a little odd, as though the teeth that had once been there hadn't been quite right somehow.  Major Cadwaller tried not to stare, and so stirred his soup instead.  "We can do it right now, Major, since we've ordered.  The food's not important for the reading, just for the reader."  She cackled, and he frowned at his soup.  He hadn't known that people could actually cackle.  She sounded like an overexcited chicken.
"Don't you need equipment?"  He looked up now, gesturing with his hand and spoon and accidentally showering a nearby diner and his table with Cream of Asparagus soup.  When the diner turned to see who was throwing food at him, the Major tilted his head slightly, indicating Madame Sosotris as the culprit, and didn't feel even a single pang of guilt.
"The future's all around us," said Madame Sosotris.  She laid both her palms flat on the table.  "Most of the trick is recognising where its concentrated and then reading it from there.  That's most accurate.  Otherwise, even a weatherman could give you a decent guess, unless you're asking about the weather of course."  She cackled again, possibly an indication that she thought she'd made a joke.  The Major thought that perhaps she'd laid an egg and, again, didn't feel guilty about such an uncharitable thought.
She closed her eyes, and her knuckles went white.  The Major frowned a little harder; he'd expected a bit more a show from the old fraud.  He waited, but she didn't speak, and didn't move.  Just as he was wondering if she'd fallen asleep her soup trembled, and he looked at that for a moment.  It trembled again.
"Is she going to throw more soup?" asked the diner he'd sprayed with Cream of Aspargus.  Major Cadwaller shrugged, still watching the soup.  Suddenly a bubble formed and burst at the surface witha  loud pop.  Several seconds later there was another, and then another.  Within a minute her soup appeared to be boiling in the dish, and the other diner had turned round fully to face them both, watching the soup as avidly as the Major.  With the two men obviously watching something, a waiter at the wait-station was dispatched by the Mâitre d' to find out what the problem was.
"I see a field of grey," said Madame Sostris, her normally glutinous tones suddenly clear and sharp as the peal of a bell at midnight.  "I see four thousand men and women marching out, all dressed alike and carrying cold steel.  I see a man dressed in curtains standing watching them, and as they pass they all turn to the left and salute.  He salutes them back and a path is chosen.  The future diverges, but the men and women all survive."
Her eyes flicked open, her hands contracted into claws, and her soup stopped boiling.
"Well, I say all survive," she said, conversationally.  "Two of the men get into a fight in a pub in Portsmouth and die a few hours later on the train-tracks, and one of the women dies from complications arising from appendicitis.  It will be all very sad."
Major Cadwaller picked his spoon back up and stirred his soup.  He was pretty sure he knew the events that Madame Sosotris was referring to, and it sounded like the future was going to be very positive.

Bludgeonomancy

Madame Sosotris, famous clairvoyant and notorious nymphomaniac, stood in her herb garden looking around her.  A scarecrow, fashioned from tying together mandrake root while muttering words of young power over them, guarded the sage.  The words were perhaps less impressive than those of ancient power, but they were easier to come by, easier to pronounce, and frequently a lot more powerful.  She'd had to learn txt-speak to use them, but that had been simpler than learning classical Latin or Ancient Greek (any language, she felt, where the rule was that the stress fell on the third syllable from the end had simply too many long words in it), and she could keep up with it almost entirely by owning a mobile phone.  The scarecrow was wearing a hat stolen from a man who had died a messy end, a jacket she'd found outside a night-club, and trousers made from sail-cloth from a boat that had sunk on its maiden voyage.  Every time she tried to look directly at it she heard a buzzing somewhere behind her, and little black motes scudded across her vision like storm-clouds building in the sky on a summer evening.  No birds approached the scarecrow, and the sage was in pristine condition, for all that she had to wear a blindfold to be able to get close enough to harvest any.
She looked away from the scarecrow, letting the buzzing in her head subside.  Sometimes she wondered if she'd overpowered the scarecrow a little, but she'd not found any signs that it was walking by itself yet, so she was pretending that everything was fine.  Her eyes fell on the dreamcatcher next, a blue and gold mandala made from seashells dived from a shipwreck, flowers grown on consecrated ground and held together by glue made from week-old corpses.  It shook and shivered, even though there wasn't a wind, as the force of the dreams and nightmares that it held tried to tear it apart so that they could stalk the nights again.  She shivered, just looking at it made her fingers itch and her skin crawl, and even though it clearly needed emptying she couldn't bring herself to pick it up and dunk it in the well-water to wash it clean.  She would leave it until tomorrow.
The fishpond was green and murky, and she knew without going closer that the kelpie would have killed and eaten all the fish and would now be lurking, waiting for flesh to get close enough to snatch.  The crazy paving was sparkling with stored sunlight, and stepping incautiously on the stones, especially in the wrong order, would release a brilliant column of stored sunlight capable of incinerating would-be burglars.  The shed was creaking and leaking, and she had no intention of getting close to it without protective clothing.  All in all, she was starting to think that coming out into the garden might have been a rather bad idea.
"Hurry up!"  The voice from inside was a client, and with a start she remembered that she'd come out for a rowan branch.  She edged along the narrow line of grass that bordered the crazy paving, slipping between the rockery and the raspberry canes, and stopped beneath the rowan tree.  It stretched upwards, its branches like arms raised in supplication to the sun god.  Leaves rustled softly, and there was a dusty, musky smell hanging on the air reminding her of druid ceremonies.  She looked at the lofty branches, and then down at her feet.  Sure enough, scattered on the grey soil were a small collection of branches, one of which looked thin and long enough to suit her needs.  She picked it up and sidled her way back to the back-door.
"Coming!" she called, testing the flex of the branch.  It proved satisfyingly whippy.
She stepped inside, her stride now meaningful and determined, and happily away from casual danger.  She had no idea what the name was for the kind of divination that required her to beat the client half-to-death and then interpret the bruises and weals that rose on his flesh, but she did rather enjoy it.

Dental Palmistry

Phlebitis paused at Madame Sosotris's door and re-read the sign on it.  At first glance he'd thought it said Oriental Palmistry but now that he was closer he could see that it in fact read Dental Palmistry.  He hesitated, his calloused fist a couple of centimetres from the door's surface, wondering what it could mean.  Indecision wracked him for several seconds; his visits to Madame Sosotris were not made for pleasure but out of painful necessity and the opportunity to not visit was tempting.
The door opened just as he was deciding that madness was as good a reason as any to not knock and not find out his future from her.  A small woman who barely came up to Phlebitis's waist walked into him and said, "Ow."
Phlebitis lowered his fist, seeing Madame Sosotris emerging from the gloom inside her house.  Her eyes seemed dilated and unfocused, and there was a trickle of blood running from the corner of her mouth.
"I said, 'Ow'," said the small woman, looking up at Phlebitis.  He pulled his gaze from the slightly vampiric-appearing Madame Sosotris and looked down.
"Watch where you're going," he said.  "If you were a sailor you'd be over the side in no time, making friends with the sharks."
"Are you saying I'm clumsy?"  The small woman squeaked when she was excited or angry.
"No, I'm saying that the other guys would think it funny to trip you over and watch you fall over the side.  Don't worry.  You look like you'd float for quite a while."
There was a noise like a boiling kettle whistling, which Phlebitis slowly realised was the small woman.  She was so angry that her face had turned a deep purple and she was standing on the very tips of her toes.
"Are you going to move?" he said.  "Only I'm here to visit Madame Sosotris and you're rather in the way.  You seem to be blocking the entire doorway."
The small woman was actually vibrating with anger now and was having trouble staying on her toes as she did so.  Seeing an opportunity, Phlebitis stepped to the side and tugged gently on her shoulder as he did so.  A spasm of panic passed over her face as she lost her balance completely, her hands reflexively pushing forwards to break her fall and pushing her center of gravity further out of alignment, speeding her fall.  Phlebitis stepped over her and pushed the door shut behind him.
"I'b god a midderable code," said Madame Sosotris.
"You always do when I visit," said Phlebitis.  "It's almost like it's been written about somewhere and we just have to play our parts out over and over again."
Madame Sosotris gave him a penetrating look and produced a lace handkerchief from one of her sleeves.  As she lead the way into her drawing room, where she performed séances, table-turnings, read cards and ate dinner, she blew her nose.  It was a long, drawn-out, mournful honking process, at the end of which she dropped the sodden handkerchief into a bucket
"What's dental Palmistry then?" asked Phlebitis sitting down in the high-backed chair that didn't wobble.  Madame Sosotris glared at him but sat on the other one without saying anything.  She rocked slightly as she tried to make it balance.
"A mistake by the sign-writer," said Madame Sosotris.  Phlebitis could see that her eyes were red as though she'd been crying, and her wrinkles seemed to get deeper and dirtier everytime he came.  "Although, a couple of nights ago I did get a visit from a man who had mouths in his palms.  His future was very hard to read, but eventually I figured out that he'd misunderstood the sign and was hoping for Palmal Dentistry."
"Is there such a thing?"
"Ye–e–es," said Madame Sosotris trying not to look at the builder's wrap of hammers and chisels on the sideboard.  "How have you been though?  Surely another eight months alone at sea must give a man certain... urges?"  She winked.
Phlebitis tried to ignore his stomach doing somersaults and forced a smile.  "I'm not alone," he said.  "I'll just have the usual please.  The future for the next six months in strange images and dire pronouncements.
Madame Sosotris sighed softly, suspecting that Phlebitis was somehow mocking her, and leaned back in her chair.  For many clients she would draw out cards or a crystal ball and use them to distract the customer while she engaged the trance, but she'd been trying and failing to seduce Phlebitis for years now.  He could see it all done the real way, warts and everything.  Her eyes rolled up back in her head, revealing jaundiced whites, and her fingers tensed until her hands looked like claws.
"I see a marriage," she said, and Phlebitis snorted.
"You tried this two times ago," he said.  "You do not see me marrying you, you just wish you could."
"No," said Madame Sosotris, her voice now oddly thick.  "I see you marrying a shape, an intelligence that is not moulded by earth into a human form.  The ceremony is under a moon, and there are people and ... and un-people watching.  There are boiled frogs for the wedding feast.  There are... wait, the image is changing.  There is a chair, a golden chair with eyes in the back.  They are watching you, they are looking for you.  Then they cannot find you and the chair warps and twists.  It is angry.  There are more chairs, and they gather around a table to discuss you."
She sat forward, her wispy grey hair spilling over her eyes and gasped for breath.
"Great," said Phlebitis standing up.  "Married to something not human and it looks like one of the wedding gifts is going to be a carnivorous dining suite.  You've outdone yourself this time, Madame."
His money tinkled on the table.  "I should have asked for the Dental Palmistry," he said.  "That might have made more sense."
As the door closed behind him Madame Sosotris finally got air back into her tired, ancient lungs, and called out.  But Phlebitis was already gone.

Lady's maid

There was a tap on the door, and Madame Sosotris, once a famous clairvoyant and still a notorious prestidigitatress, opened it with flair and verve.  And almost immediately tripped on the hem of her white lace dress and ended up in a crumpled heap on the floor.
"Oooh, very Lady Haversham," said a voice, and Madame Sosotris cringed to hear what she thought of as common-accents, accents which she'd removed from her own voice over five years and through three elocution coaches.  "I rather like it, it suits you, you know.  You've got the face for it."
"What?"  Madame Sosotris couldn't help but notice that she wasn't being helped up, and so had to pull herself back to her feet using the small table that she kept by the door for post that she didn't want to read.
"Old."
Back on her feet, she could see that her visitor was the short, dumpy woman with bad skin who insisted on being called Amelia.  Madame Sosotris had considered telling her what amelia was, but had then decided to save it for when she couldn't stand her any longer.  Which day, she now felt, was drawing closer.
"Please, won't you come in?" she said, trying for gravitas and feeling relieved that her voice didn't do the shrieky think it had started doing a lot lately, making her sound like a pubescent boy.  Her doctor had advised her to take up smoking, but the cards had advised her to change her doctor and she was caught in the snares of indecision.
"Oooh, don't mind if I do!  You know, I tell all my friends about this place, I say how nice it could be if you opened the curtains a little, but then I suppose you'd have to dust as well...."
"Is this a social call?"  Madame Sosotris peered around the door as she closed it, checking for television cameras.  Those Channel4 people got everywhere these days, and she was quite expecting a visit from the mad harridans who invaded people's homes and announced that they were so filthy it was astonishing that they weren't incubating tuberculosis and reviving the Black Death.  The path outside was thankfully empty of lurking camera-crew or be-wellied women with a polishing rag and the twinkle of insanity in their eyes.
"Oh, if only!  It would be lovely just to sit down with you one day and have a little coeur-a-coeur don't you think?  But no, I'm on the cock agai– I mean, I'm on the clock again, how silly of me!"  She tittered, and Madame Sosotris decided not to offer her a cup of tea.  "Yes, I've only got a half-hour and I did so want to find out what this month has in store for me.  You're the best fortune teller around, I tell everyone that.  Even that Mystic Millie, I went to her to have my head read you know, and she thought I was a poodle!  Can you believe the cheek of it?  So I'm back here, and I want those cards laid out for me, pronto!"
"Mystic Millie?  A phrenologist?  A poodle?"  Madame Sosotris felt rather confused; her circle of people involved in the mystic arts included an astrologer who was corpulent enough to have to include himself in his star charts as a significant influence on the life of anyone nearby and a fingerprint reader who she knew was actually working for the Met, but no phrenologist.
"Yes, she's got that shop on Abattoir Road.  But like I said, I'm in a bit of a hurry, so can you sit down and do your thing please?"
Madame Sosotris gestured to a chair at her card-reading table and sat on the other side.  The only shop she could think of on Abattoir Road that might fit was a dog-groomer's, and that kind of bemused confusion fitted her mental image of Amelia perfectly.  She took a deck of cards out of the left-hand side of the table, from a hidden drawer.  These cards were already stacked, just for visitors like Amelia.  She offered them for cutting, and then had Amelia hold them firmly between both hands for several seconds, to imprint on your secret soul.  Amelia giggled a little.
"Right," said Madame S. turning the first card.  "This is the nine of clubs, which indicates that there are many secrets to be uncovered this month."  She laid the card down in the middle of the table.  "This then is the four of wands;" she laid this card crosswise on the nine of clubs, "and that indicates that not all of these secrets will come to light of their own accords.  Wands signify wisdom, so you will need to consider events that are unfolding and seek reasons for them beyond what is presented to you.  This is the eight of..." she paused, realising that she'd not turned the card over yet, and pretended to concentrate, "... the eight of coins–" she turned the card, revealing it was indeed the eight of coins and smiled as though pleased with her prediction, "which in conjunction with the other two indicates that there will be a cost associated with understanding some of these secrets."
"Oooooh!" said Amelia sounding like a steam-kettle on the boil.  "What kind of cost?"
"Let us see," said Madame S., grinning.  She turned the next card, and stared at it.  It was not the two of clubs which she knew she'd set next in the deck.  "This is the Tower, inverted," she said, laying it down below the eight of coins.  "It suggests that the cost will be life-changing.  You should take care what you're prying into."
"Well!" said Amelia, shooting to her feet.  "Prying!  Indeed!"
But Madame Sosotris wasn't listening.  Instead she turned the last card for the layout and looked at it for several seconds before laying it down on the table.  "This is the Fool," she said.  'It can indicate the start of a transformative journey."
She looked up and found she was talking to herself, Amelia had stormed out leaving the front door swinging to and fro.  Madame Sosotris looked again at the cards, and quietly finished the reading with, "And death is very transformative indeed."

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.