The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [121]
‘Damn you, Laz!’
‘I’m already damned, according to you.’ The grin grew broader. ‘So curse away!’
‘Will you put that thing back in its box, then? I’m tired, and I want to sit down.’
‘Come sit. You don’t have to look. Turn your back to it. But I’m a wretchedly bad host, aren’t I? My poor love, you must be starving. Here, let me dress, and I’ll go get us some food.’
He pulled on his trousers, laced them up, then sat on the stump to put on his boots. When he stood up, he glanced back at the white pyramid. ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Evan the minstrel.’
With a vague smile in her direction he walked out without putting the crystal away. Sidro thought of lying down on the mattress again, but if one of his men should come in—besides, her back hurt her—and she might fall asleep—her mind produced so many reasons to sit at the table instead of on the bed that she knew she’d already lost her battle with curiosity. I’m damned, too, she thought. Nothing matters any more. She walked over to the table, sat down on one of the cut stumps, and looked into the crystal.
At first she seemed to be peering through a crack in a wall and seeing a very small painting on the other side. All at once the vision widened. She was seeing a painting, indeed, the picture of Alshandra hanging over the altar in the Inner Shrine, although the colours were oddly dull, and the details hard to distinguish, as if she were looking through smoke. She sobbed aloud as her broken vows stabbed her conscience. The gesture changed her focus. She was looking through deep smoke or mist at the interior of the shrine. Rocca knelt before the altar. Her lips moved as she stared directly into the smoke.
‘Sow!’ Sidro spoke aloud. ‘Ugly sow!’
Rocca raised her head fast and drew back in shock. The vision wavered, then disappeared, leaving Sidro staring into the clear depths of a piece of rock crystal, sitting on a table in Laz’s cabin. That smoke—of course, she’d been seeing the shrine through the obsidian of the black pyramid. The white had somehow or other linked her to its black twin. Rocca must have been working the ritual devoted to the holy witness Raena, which entailed staring into the obsidian crystal.
As Sidro thought about it, she remembered the times that she’d worked that ritual herself. In most instances she’d seen nothing but obsidian, though now and then she’d picked out a murky form or an indistinct shape that might have been a face. Had she been seeing Laz here in this cabin? And how had Laz seen Evan in the white crystal? Maybe that loathsome viper of a minstrel had returned to Zakh Gral. Maybe he had the gall to enter the holy shrine itself.
She took a few breaths to calm herself, then sent her mind looking for Evan. Occasionally she could scry people out. Before she’d always attributed the power to Alshandra’s favour, the goddess’s reward for her chastity. Thanks to her broken vow Sidro was expecting to see nothing, but much to her surprise, the vision built up more strongly than it ever had before.
She seemed to be hovering in the air above a vast round room where Lijik Ganda men and women sat at wooden tables and drank from pottery mugs or metal tankards. On a table near a cold hearth Evan was standing and talking, his hands moving gracefully as he mimed his way through some sort of tale. Her heart fluttered at the thought that he might be describing Zakh Gral, but he reached up and appeared to pluck an egg out of the air.
Suddenly he dropped it, and everyone in the round room laughed. A marketplace trick like that would have no place in any serious recital. Her heart steadied itself.
Behind her the cabin door opened with a thump and a kick. She turned around to see Laz carrying a big pottery bowl in both hands. Behind him came a skinny Horsekin boy whose skull sported the thin dark fuzz of his first hair-growth. He carried a basket in one hand and a pitcher in the other. She smelled burnt bread and venison stew.
‘This is Vek,’ Laz said. ‘He has the unfortunate habit of going into trances and