The Two of Swords: Part 7 by K. J. Parker Read Free Book Online Page A

dismounted and started to walk up through dense undergrowth; the same feeling that something close by was waiting for him, and when it burst out of cover and headed straight at him he simply wouldn’t have the time or the presence of mind. Silly old fool, he thought; he closed his eyes and walked his fingers up the table until one fingertip encountered the cold silver.
    Damn idiots nowadays, fortune-tellers and frauds and cheats, smooth cards and pretending there was a precise, fixed meaning to every card and every sequence and combination of cards. He slid his thumb between the top card and the one underneath, then hinged the top card sideways until it fell into the palm of his hand. In Rhaxantius’ day they favoured blind men as dealers, because a blind man couldn’t see to cheat; idiots, because a blind man can read with his fingertips far better than a sighted one. He let the pad of his middle finger drift across the metal, following the contours of the embossed relief. Eight of Arrows. He supported its weight as he spread it on to the table, like laying down a woman who’s fainted in your arms. Done that once or twice over the years, of course. Ah well.
    Next card, Victory. Of course, Victory doesn’t mean
victory
, just as Death doesn’t mean death. He laid it down and slid it until its edge met that of the Eight of Arrows. The Two of Spears, which always made him shiver. Poverty; he let his fingertip dwell on her face before he turned the card and put it next to the others. She always reminded him of his second wife – a remarkably inappropriate similarity, but he’d been in love with the little silver face since he was twelve years old, and even now the feel of her made him smile. A pattern, or at the very least a faint obscure shape, was beginning to emerge. He dealt the Nine of Spears, which made no sense at first, followed by the Angel, and then he understood.
    Tandulias maintained that a brief pause for reflection after dealing six cards allowed impressions to seep through from the unconscious mind, and avoided the dangerous tendency to leap to conclusions. Well, the Two was almost certainly young Senza Belot, couldn’t really be anything else. The Nine must be a reverse of some sort; impossible to say at this stage whether the Angel was figurative or personal. Trump, number, trump was nearly always a transition, but trump, number, trump and then a Nine was a problem; it all depended on how you read that disputed passage in Vexantian, and whether the verb was to be construed as indicative or subjunctive. Damn nuisance, and if there really was an afterlife he eagerly anticipated meeting the unknown copyist in it, so he could kick his arse for being so wickedly careless. Until then, all he could really do was go by context and the overall mood of the cards.
    Onwards, as young Senza would say. Next he turned up the Five of Stars, which of course made everything much clearer; personal, had to be, in which case the Angel was presumably some savage chieftain – the nomad prophet, perhaps, or some headman of the Hus or the Tel Semplan. The feeling of tension slackened off just a little – odd, that, but somehow he felt he could cope better with people than with abstract ideas, laws of nature and war and economics. He turned up the Blind Woman, who presumably was someone he hadn’t met yet.
    Four of Spears – three Spears in one deal, for pity’s sake. The Blind Woman and Senza Belot; he frowned. He assumed that young Senza liked girls – yes, there’d been that one he’d been particularly keen on, though wasn’t there some story about what had happened there? Slipped his mind, but presumably there’d be someone about the place who knew it, a damned gossip factory like the palace. Then it occurred to him that three of the same suit meant that the last three cards must be subjective – yes, fine, but who was the subject? Four of Spears, Senza Belot. Fine. He turned up a new card to find out who Senza