His voice carried Illyra back those fifteen years sweeping the doubts from her memories. 'I was a child then, Walegrin. A little child, no more than four. Where could I have run to?'

He released her wrist and sat back in the chair. Illyra emptied the pouch onto her table. She recognized only a few of the beads and bracelets, but enough to realize that she gazed upon all of her mother's jewellery. She picked up a string of blue glass beads strung on a creamy braided silk.

'These have been restrung,' she said simply. Walegrin nodded. 'Blood rots the silk and stinks to the gods. I had no choice. All the others are as they were.'

Illyra let the beads fall back into the pile. He had known how to tempt her. The entire heap was not worth a single gold piece, but no storehouse of gold could have been more valuable to her.

'Well, then, what do you want from me?'

He pushed the trinkets aside and from another pouch produced a palm-sized pottery shard which he placed gently on the velvet.

'Tell me everything about that: where the rest of the tablet is; how it came to be broken; what the symbols mean - everything!'

There was nothing in the jagged fragment that justified the change that came over Walegrin as he spoke of it. Illyra saw a piece of common orange pottery with a crowded black design set under the glaze; the sort of ware that could be found in any household of the Empire. Even with her S'danzo gifts focused on the shard it remained stubbornly common. Illyra looked at Wale-grin's icy green eyes, his thought-protruded brows, the set of his chin atop the studded greave on his forearm, and thought better of telling him what she actually saw.

'Its secrets are locked deeply within it. To a casual glance its disguises are perfect. Only prolonged examination will draw its secrets out.' She placed the shard back on the table.

'How long?'

'It would be hard to say. The gift is strengthened by symbolic cycles. It may take until the cycle of the shard coincides...'

'I know the S'danzo! I was there with you and your mother -don't play bazaar games with me. Little Sister. I know too much.'

Illyra sat back on her bench. The dagger in her skirts clunked to the floor. Walegrin bent over to pick it up. He turned it over in his hands and without warning thrust it through the velvet into the table. Then, with his palm against the smooth of the blade, he bent it back until the hilt touched the table. When he removed his hand the knife remained bent.

'Cheap steel. Modern stuff; death to the one who relies on it,' he explained, drawing a sleek knife from within the greave. He placed the dark-steel blade with the beads and bracelets. 'Now, tell me about my pottery.'

'No bazaar-games. If I didn't know from looking at you, I'd say it was a broken piece of 'cotta. You've had it a long time. It shows nothing but its associations with you. I believe it is more than that, or you wouldn't be here. You know about the S'danzo and what you call "bazaar-games", but it's true right now I see nothing; later I might. There are ways to strengthen the vision - I'll try them.'

He flipped a gold coin onto the table. 'Get what you'll need.'

'Only my cards,' she answered, flustered by his gesture. 'Get them!' he ordered without picking up the coin. She removed the worn deck from the depths of her blouse and set the shard atop them while she lit more candles and incense. She allowed Walegrin to cut the pack into three piles, then turned over the topmost card of each pile.

Three of Flames: a tunnel running from light to darkness with three candle sconces along the way.

The Forest: primeval, gnarled trunks; green canopy; living twilight.

Seven of Ore: red clay; the potter with his wheel and kiln. Illyra stared at the images, losing herself in them without finding harmony or direction. The Flame card was pivotal, but the array would not yield its perspective to her; the Forest, symbolic of the wisdom of the ages, seemed unlikely as either her brother's goal or origin; and the Seven must mean more than was obvious. But, was the Ore-card appearing in its creativity aspect? Or was red clay the omen of bloodletting, as was so often true when the card appeared in a Sanctuary-cast array?

'I still do not see enough. Bazaar-games or not, this is not the time to scry this thing.'

'I'll come again after sundown - that would be a better time, wouldn't it? I've no garrison duties until after sunrise tomorrow.'

'For the cards, yes, of course, but Dubro will have banked the forge for the night by then, and I do not want to involve him in this.' Walegrin nodded without argument. 'I understand. I'll come by at midnight. He should be long asleep by then, unless you keep him awake.' Illyra sensed it would be useless to argue. She watched silently as he swept the pile of baubles, the knife, and the shard into one pouch, wincing slightly as he dribbled the last beads from her sight.

'As is your custom, payment will not be made until the question is answered.'

Illyra nodded. Walegrin had spent many years around her mother learning many of the S'danzo disciplines and rousing his father's explosive jealousy. The leather webbing of his kilt creaked as he stood up. The moment for farewell came and passed. He left the stall in silence.

A path cleared when Walegrin strode through a crowd. He noticed it here, in this bazaar where his memories were of scrambling through the aisles, taunted, cursed, fighting, and thieving. In any other place he accepted the deference except here, which had once been his home for a while.

One of the few men in the throng who could match his height, a dark man in a smith's apron, blocked his way a moment. Walegrin studied him obliquely and guessed he was Dubro. He had seen the smith's short aquiline companion several times in other roles about the town without learning the man's true name or calling; they each glanced to one side to avoid a chance meeting.

At the entrance to the bazaar, a tumble-down set of columns still showing traces of the Ilsig kings who had them built, a man crept out of the shadows and fell in step beside Walegrin. Though this second had the manner and dress of the city-born, his face was like Walegrin's: lean, hard, and parched.

'What have you learned, Thrusher?' Walegrin began, without looking down.

'That man Downwind who claimed to read such things...'

'Yes?'

'Runo went down to meet with him, as you were told. When he did not return for duty this morning Malm and I went to look for him. We found them both ... and these.' He handed his captain two small copper coins.

Walegrin turned them over in his palm, then threw them far ' into the harbour. 'I'll take care of this myself. Tell the others we will have a visitor at the garrison this evening - a woman.'

'Yes, captain,' Thrusher responded, a surprised grin making its way across his jaw. 'Shall I send the men away?'

'No, set them as guards. Nothing is going well. Each time we have set a rendezvous something has gone wrong. At first it was petty nuisance, now Runo is dead. I will not take chances in this city above all others. And, Thrusher...' Walegrin caught his man by the elbow, 'Thrusher, this woman is S'danzo, my half sister. See that the men understand this.'

'They will understand, we all have families somewhere.'

Walegrin grimaced and Thrusher understood that his commander had not suddenly weakened to admit family concerns.

'We have need of the S'danzo? Surely there are more reliable seers in Sanctuary than scrounging the aisles of the bazaar. Our gold is good and nearly limitless.' Thrusher, like many men in the Ranken Empire, considered the S'danzo best suited to resolving love triangles among house-servants.