5 - Setting up shop

I sat back on rat-bed with the book I’d stolen from Master Hedwin. Lancaster’s Manual of Wills, it was called.

When first I was admitted to the Seekers Guild, my sole drive was preventing another disaster like the one brought on by Margot Bethane. But over the last three years, we’d read books like this cover to cover. Books that said seekers couldn’t read the future—or change it. At least, not any more than any individual could.

Any adherent of Skein will happily tell you how solid the future isn’t. They’ll go on and on about what a tangled mess causality is until the loom mistress sorts it all out for us. Bunch of religious hooey.

At first glance, the book seemed no different. Lancaster’s Manual of Wills was about as mundane a title as you could get. But as I sat cross-legged on rat-bed thumbing through it, my eyebrows began to rise. The book I’d stolen outlined advanced theory on working soul-seeker magic with the cards with some very controversial deviations from prescribed guild doctrine. No wonder it had been banned. It claimed, among even more outlandish things, that the cards were little wooden windows to other worlds, and that the reason the wane dragons didn’t sap their magic was because that magic didn’t originate with us. It also had some interesting things to say about both the suit of knaves, and the suit of dragons. I saw several chapters on both, as well as one discussing dragon-courted individuals.

Master Hedwin had been telling the truth, then. No other student at the academy had the twinned suits of knaves and dragons. He’d been reading this very book as he considered my fate.

What no book had yet explained was why some people could tap into the magic of the Wills. Some, like most seekers, could only work fortunes. And most people couldn’t even do that. Soul Seekers were even more rare. Of course, no one really knew why one person had the potential for wizardry while others didn’t, or why a pious man might gain favor and a measure of power from the gods, or what caused a child to be born plane-touched with the power to tunnel portals to other planes, or wilds-marked. Books didn’t explain why some warriors manifested techniques beyond the power mortal bodies should hold, or how some could twist elements.

Why should the Wills be any different? What I’m really saying is that while the book was interesting, if the answer to my problem was in a book, I probably would have found it years ago. I snapped the covers close and slid it under the mattress.

I held up my hand and called the deck to me. It shot off the table and flew in seventy-four different directions. That’s how many cards there are in the deck, Divided into twenty-four major arcana spread across the table and bed, and ten suits of five cards scattered across the floor and hearth. I sighed at the mess. “Yeah, yeah. Real funny.”

Stooping to sweep them out from the nooks and crannies they’d found, I continued to ponder. For the Soul Seekers with the gift of Wills, each could potentially master four of the ten suits. That was another thing no one knew: why every adept was limited to at most four. While I hadn’t mastered either, I’d touched both the suit of dragons, led by the Heiress, and the knaves, led by the Court. I wondered if I might touch another, and which of the eight remaining it might be. Probably not peaks or petals. I’d never been much for nature, and you couldn’t exactly call me overly ambitious.

I hoped it wouldn’t be the suit of demons or the suit of storms as I swept them into the pile. Both were indicators of a dangerous, chaotic life and a short life span. But I didn’t even consort with devilborn if I could help it, let alone actual demons.

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The suit of lances I found unlikely. I picked up the four of lances. Tanlith Guifoyle had hit me with this in the courtyard before I’d been kicked from the guild. I hadn’t been able to get close to him. He’d damn near flattened me, and some of the other students thought he’d mastered the suit and manifested the Knight of Lances. Lances were associated with nobility and valor. If you think that’s me, then you haven’t been listening at all.

I collected the last of the cards and squared them off, before returning to sit on the bed and shuffling them out of habit. Far more likely that, if I could access any more suits, it would be towers, ways, or streams. Having lived through Margot Bethane’s reign of terror, and her subsequent death, I had a general desire to protect the world from having to go through that again. But that desire was still rooted in self-preservation, and that was knaves all the way down. Ways was the suit of those who know where they stood or where they ought to be going. Streams could be possible. I’d never been much for healing arts, but I could go with the flow.

I meditated a bit on my new card, the three of knaves. Despite my abysmal showing at the unsheathing, the uses for a shadow clone were wide and varied. The fact that it was a rooted image of me wasn’t ideal, but it could still be used to distract an enemy, create a temporary diversion, or even pass information. It would work well with the two of knaves, letting me get behind for a strike at their back. But it didn’t solve the problem of me having to get close to danger.

As much as I didn’t fancy the suit of lances, the usefulness of its ability to attack from a distance couldn’t be overstated. Maybe something in the suit of dragons would help with that—if I could unlock it. I’d felt the suit resonate when I stopped the street tough from taking back his coppers.

As an experiment, I stood from the bed and spread the cards in the air before me. They cycled, twisting around in a single circle as I infused both the three of dragons and the three of knaves. Combining the cards took every ounce of my concentration, but I stepped forward and pushed my will into both cards. They spun from the wheel and hovered before my hand while my will flowed into them.

I regarded the shadow clone that sprang from the card, the clone which had taken on a yellow, wavering haze. Even from several steps away, I could feel the heat radiating off of it. Well, that was like a ranged spell. That opened even more possibilities, but just the act left me exhausted.

Magic—even card reading—is much harder to do at night in Dragonmaw, thanks to the ghost dragon gods of the golden elves. They conquered the shadow veldt and the good beasts under that light, sapping the magic of their foes. Well, look where that had got them. But evoking the cards was somehow immune.

The apparition winked out after just barely longer than before. The extra stamina granted by the three of dragons had gone into the clone, siphoned directly out of me. I looked at the floor.

“Shit, shit!”

Two smoldering footprints had been charred on the wooden beams.

I heard a fist thump on my door, and my first instinct was panic, believing it to be the money changers asking why their ceiling was burning. But when I opened the door, it was the flat-nosed half-orc again with a pair of friends. One was taller, maybe enough to pass for full-blood. The other was a woman, with thick arms under torn-off sleeves. He’d brought muscle. I took a step back, ready to try and repeat my trick with the smoldering clone while I went for the window. But the flat-nosed green skin laughed and clapped me on the shoulders.

“You were right!” he claimed. “I was going to place a bet, on what I thought was a sure thing. But I remembered your warning, and I couldn’t!”

“And what happened?” I asked, shoulders aching from what passed for friendly blows among the half-orcs.

“My fighter lost! Went down in the third round to a shot in the gut! I’d have lost everything!”

I tried not to look at the card above his head as I grinned. It hadn’t changed. Soul seekers don’t change the future. At worst, it had kicked the can of his misfortune down the metaphorical road, some. But now I had my first satisfied customer.

The orc jerked a thumb behind him. “Can yeh do them, too?”

“Full price, this time,”

The orc nodded. “Just tell us which one is lucky tonight!”

I reached behind me. Instead of grabbing my deck, I grabbed the clay cup. Both of my suits buzzed.