Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [95]
“None yet, though Jill’s shut herself up in her tower room again. Creeps my flesh when she does that. I’m always afraid to look up when I’m walking in the ward for fear III see that cursed falcon flying about.”
The dwarves all nodded grim agreement.
“It’s beginning to get on my nerves, all this waiting,” Yraen went on. “And the rest of the men are as jumpy as cats in a bathhouse, especially now that it looks like his grace might lose Matyc’s brother’s loyalty.”
Rhodry winced. He’d rather forgotten about affairs of state when he’d been challenging the lord. But what was I supposed to do instead? he asked himself irritably. Let him cut down an old man in a piss-poor excuse for a combat? Yet all at once he could see an entire web of politics that he’d slashed when he’d killed Matyc. Perhaps he should have tried to talk the lord round?
“You all right?” Yraen was saying to him. “You’ve gone as white as snow.”
“Have I now? I think I’ll go back to bed. My thanks for bringing me my goods.”
“I’ll carry them down for you. Where are you sleeping?”
Once Yraen had dumped the gear into the chest and gone again, Rhodry lay down and fell asleep, boots, belt, and all. All night he had strange dreams of dragons and of eyes, disembodied elven eyes, floating in clouds and watching him from far away. When he woke again, he was soaked with sweat. The chamber was pitch-dark; he could guess that the fungi had given up the last of their stored sunlight some time before. He staggered up and flung open the door. Merciful light, dim but adequate, bloomed in the corridor outside. Leaving the door open, he went back in and found on the chest a pitcher of water and other necessary items. Apparently someone had come in during the night, and he’d never even woken.
He considered sleeping again, but he was afraid of the dreams. He cleaned up a bit, then returned to the common room. Only Otho and young Mic were sitting at the table, which was spread with a variety of oddments—two oblong wooden trays, a sack that seemed to be filled with sand, some pointed sticks, a bone object that looked like a small comb, and part of a split cowhide, all painted over and written upon.
“Morrow, Rhodry,” Mic said. “How do you feel this morning? It is morning, by the by.”
“A good bit better, my thanks. The cut aches, but it’s mending.”
“Come sit down.” Mic gestured at a bench. “Uncle Otho’s going to cast us an omen.”
The innkeep came bustling across from the fire and handed Rhodry a bowl of porridge, glistening with butter, and a wooden spoon.
“My thanks,” Rhodry said. “Has there been any word from Jill?”
“None, but it’s not long after dawn now. Mayhap—”
“Will you two hush?” Otho snarled. “I’m trying to prepare my mind, and I don’t need anyone nattering round me.”
With a choice oath the innkeep retreated. Rhodry ate his porridge in silence and watched while Otho poured pale white river sand into the trays, then used the comb to smooth it out as flat as parchment. With a stick he drew lines on one surface from corner to corner to divide the tray into four triangles. Then, on the outer edges, that is, the bottom of each triangle, he found the midpoint and connected those, overlaying a square to divide the area into four diamonds and eight smaller triangles.
“The lands of the map,” Otho announced. “See, each one is the true home of a metal. Number one here is iron, two copper, and so on. The third is quicksilver, and the twelfth is salt, and I suspect that those two lands are going to figure large in this map.”
“Salt’s not a metal,” Rhodry said.
“I know that, silver dagger. That’s why it stands for all the hidden things in life, feuds and suchlike, and the dweomer.”
“All the things that brighten a man’s day, indeed. How do you tell fortunes with it?”
“Watch. I’ll show you.”
Otho took the second stick, held it over the second tray, then turned his head away and began to poke dots into the sand, as fast as he could. When he was done, he had sixteen lines of dots and spaces to mull over.
“Now, these are the mothers, these rows. You take the first lines of each