Two more deaths for the curse. Walegrin stared at the bodies, then praised Malm's diligence and sent him back to the garrison barracks to prepare for Illyra's visit. He left the corpses in the cul-de-sac where they might never be found. This pair he would not enter into the garrison roster.

Walegrin paced the length of the town, providing the inhibiting impression of a garrison officer actually on duty, though if a murder had occurred at his feet he would not have noticed. Twice he passed the entrance of the bazaar, twice hesitated, and twice continued on his way. Sunset found him by the Promise of Heaven as the priests withdrew into their temples and the Red Lanterns women made their first promenade. By full darkness he was on the Wideway, hungry and close in spirit to the fifteen-year-old who had swum the harbour and stowed away in the hold of an outbound ship one horrible night many years ago.

In the moonless night that memory returned to him with palpable force. In the grip of his depravities and obsessed by the imagined infidelity of his mistress, his father had tortured and killed her. Walegrin could recall that much. After the murder he had run from the barracks to the harbour. He knew the end of the story from campfire tales after he'd joined the army himself. Unsatisfied with murder, his father had dismembered her body, throwing the head and organs into the palace sewer-stream and the rest into the garrison stewpot.

Sanctuary boasted no criers to shout out the hours of the night. When there was a moon its progress gave approximate time, but in its absence night was an eternity, and midnight that moment when your joints grew stiff from sitting on the damp stone pilings of the Wideway and dark memories threatened the periphery of your vision. Walegrin bought a torch from the cadaverous watchman at the charnel house and entered the quiet bazaar.

Illyra emerged from the blacksmith's stall the second time Walegrin used the mountain hawk cry. She had concealed herself in a dark cloak which she held tightly around herself. Her movements betrayed her fears. Walegrin led the way in hurried silence. He took her arm at the elbow when they came into sight of the barracks. She hesitated, then continued without his urging.

Walegrin's men were nowhere to be seen in the common room that separated the men's and officers' quarters. Illyra paced the room like a caged animal, remembering.

'You'll need a table, candles, and what else?' he asked, eager to be on with the night's activity and suddenly mindful that he had brought her back to this place.

'It's so much smaller than I remember it,' she said, then added, 'just the table and candles, I've brought the rest myself.'

Walegrin pulled a table closer to the hearth. While he gathered up candles she unfastened her cloak and placed it over the table. She wore sombre woollens appropriate for a modest woman from the better part of town instead of the gaudy layers of the S'danzo costume. Walegrin wondered from whom she had borrowed them and if she had told her husband after all. It mattered little so long as she could pierce the spell over his shard.

'Shall I leave you alone?' Walegrin asked after removing the pottery fragment from the pouch and placing it on the table.

'No, I don't want to be alone in here.' Illyra shuffled her fortune cards, dropping several in her nervousness, then set the deck back on the table and asked, 'Is it too much to ask for some wine and information about what I'm supposed to be looking for?' A trace of the bazaar scrappiness returned to her voice and she was less lost within the room.

'My man Thrusher wanted to lay in an orgy feast when I told him I'd require the common room tonight. Then I told him I only wanted the men out - but it's a poor barracks without a flask in it, poorer than Sanctuary.' He found a half-filled wineskin behind a sideboard, squirted some into his mouth, and swallowed with a rare smile. 'Not the best vintage, but passable. You'll have to drink from the skin...' He handed it to her.

'I drank from a skin before I'd seen a cup. It's a trick you never forget.' Illyra took the wineskin from him and caught a mouthful of wine without splattering a drop. 'Now, Walegrin,' she began, emboldened by the musty wine, 'Walegrin, I can't get either your pottery nor Haakon's oranges out of my mind. What is the connection?'

'If this Haakon peddles Enlibar oranges, then it's simple. I got the shard in Enlibar, in the ruins of the armoury there. We searched three days and found only this. But, if anyone's got a greater piece he knows not what he has, else there'd be an army massing somewhere that'd have the Empire quaking.'

Illyra's eyes widened. 'All from a piece of cheap red clay?'

'Not the pottery, my dear sister. The armourer put the formula for Enlibar steel on a clay tablet and had a wizard spell the glaze to conceal it. I sensed the spell, but I cannot break it.'

'But this might only be a small piece.' Illyra ran her finger along the fragment's worn edges. 'Maybe not even a vital part.'

'Your S'danzo gifts are heedless of time, are they not?'

'Well, yes - the past and future are clear to us.'

'Then you should be able to scry back to when the glaze was applied and glimpse the entire tablet.'

Illyra shifted uneasily. 'Yes, perhaps, I could glimpse it but, Walegrin, I don't "read",' she shrugged and grinned with the wine.

Walegrin frowned, considering the near-perfect irony of the curse's functioning. No doubt Illyra could, would, see the complete tablet and be unable to tell him what was on it.

'Your cards, they have writing on them.' He pointed at the runic verses hoping that she could read runes but not ordinary script.

She shrugged again. 'I use the pictures and my gifts. My cards are not S'danzo work.' She seemed to apologize for the deck's origin, turning the pile face down to hide the offensive ink trails. 'S'danzo are artists. We paint pictures in fate.' She squirted herself another mouthful of wine.

'Pictures?' Walegrin asked. 'Would you see a clear enough image of the tablet to draw its double here on the table?'

'I could try. I've never done anything like that before.'

'Then try now,' Walegrin suggested, taking the wineskin away from her.

Illyra placed the shard atop the deck, then brought both to her forehead. Exhaling until she felt the world grow dim, the wine-euphoria left her and she became S'danzo exercising that capricious gift the primordial gods had settled upon her kind. She exhaled again and forgot that she was in her mother's death chamber. Eyes closed, she lowered the deck and pottery to the table and drew three cards, face up.

Seven of Ore: again, red clay; the potter with his wheel and kiln.

Quicksilver: a molten waterfall; the alchemic ancestor of all ores: the ace-card of the suit of Ores.

Two of Ore: steel; war-card; death-card with masked men fighting. She spread her fingers to touch each card and lost herself in search of the Enlibrite forge.

The armourer was old, his hand shook as he moved the brush over the unfired tablet. An equally ancient wizard fretted beside him, glancing fearfully over her shoulder beyond the limits of Illyra's S'danzo gifts. Their clothing was like nothing Illyra had seen in Sanctuary. The vision wavered when she thought of the present and she dutifully returned to the armoury. Illyra mimicked the armourer's motions as he covered the tablet with rows of dense, incomprehensible symbols. The wizard took the tablet and sprinkled fine sand over it. He chanted a sing-song language as meaningless as the ink marks. Illyra sensed the beginnings of the spell and withdrew across time to the barracks in Sanctuary.