“No,” she mumbled, mouth filled with the yellow stumps of rotted teeth. “This is not how it ends.”
“I’m sorry, did you say something?” Cyrene shuffled the deck with his quick and nimble gloved fingers. He dealt another round. “I say, shall we play for the big one? Enough of this prettying around. A decade rich enough for you? No? How about two?”
As the gambler dealt the cards, Grandmother Taal’s attention became fixed more and more closely on Cyrene’s eye-patch. Her sense for brown itchily insisted it concealed more than empty socket. If he could see the turn of the cards before they fell, this, her magic said, was where his power was centred. But a crumbling old woman could not hope to wrestle with a man in a stolen prime. But there were other ways. Ways perilous to a crumbling old woman, but worse not to attempt. She wedged her cards into the claw of her hand. Three Hieros.
“Two,” she said. Cyrene smiled, and so did not observe Grandmother Taal slip the pin out of her hair. “Twist.”
Spice of Wasps. Cyrene twisted a Boss of Blades.
“Hm. The Strife Card,” he said, and so did not see Grandmother Taal begin to scratch the word eye into the back of her hand with the hairpin.
“Twist,” she gritted. Curse of the Panarch on her hand, stop shaking! Stop shaking. The Hieros of Hands slid across the Formica. Four of a kind. Keep going. Keep going.
“And for myself,” Cyrene said.
“Stop!” Grandmother Taal commanded. She held up her maimed hand. A bloody eye confronted the blind brown leather patch. Powers boiled between them. Grandmother Taal’s hand shook. She could not hold it up any longer, it was heavy as pig iron, painful as rheumatism, her power was ended. Leather creaked. The eye-patch bulged. Cyrene’s hands flew to keep it down but the strap snapped. The patch catapulted across the carriage. Cyrene let out a wail. Crouched in his eyesocket was a tiny metal homunculus, some machine-demon thing. It turned chromium mandibles on Grandmother Taal and made to leap to safety. Too slow. There was spirit yet in the ancient woman. Quick as thought, she rammed the silver maté straw into Cyrene’s possessed eye-socket, straight through the belly of the demon-thing. Impaled, it crashed to the table, wailing like band-sawn tin. It staggered between the cards, clutching ineffectually at the impaling spear. It tripped over the stainless steel table trim and fell to the floor. Grandmother Taal’s high-heeled boot lifted once and came down with a metallic crunch. She turned to face Cyrene, fumbling at his blind eye.
“You have blinded me!” he screeched. “You terrible old woman!”
“And you have cheated me,” Grandmother Taal said. She laid down her hand. “Four Hieros. Now, shall we see what you have?” She twisted the top card. A second Boss. Looking Cyrene in his single eye, she said, “Vue.”
She flicked over the face-down cards. They were blank. As she stared at them, Grandmother Taal saw the patterns of other cards flicker over them before settling into the six-eyed Boss of Wasps and the top-hatted Boss of Cash.
“You are a despicable creature,” Grandmother Taal said, feeling all her gambled years rush back into her. Infirmities slid from her like cast-off clothes. She felt herself growing, back beyond what she had been, five, ten, fifteen. She was Amma no longer, she was a vigorous, spry woman of twenty-seven. “And no gentleman!” Cyrene slumped back in his seat as the stolen years fell on him like a landslide. He withered. He aged. His body sagged, wrinkles grew up him like strangling vines. His hair greyed and vanished, his mustachios drooped impotently. The hand clutching the silver-tipped cane shrivelled into a claw. He dwindled inside his crushed velvet clothes.
He reached for his deck, his strength, his hope. Grandmother Taal scooped them out from under his grasp.
“No more!” she said. She stood up, opened the window and threw the cards out. They fluttered and spun in the slipstream; amshastrias and blankness.
“No!” Cyrene Ree cried and the cry became a thin, wheedling wail as, before Grandmother Taal’s eyes, all the years that the gambler had stolen over his centuries of existence were returned. In a breath he crumbled, man to eyeless mummy to ragged skeleton to a pile of soil and humus. An empty suit of tailored clothes hung on the leatherette club chair. Brown dirt spilled from the sleeves, frilled collar and boot-tops. Grandmother Taal grimaced in distaste, rang the attendant bell to summon the impolite Stuard boy to tidy up the mess, moved to an empty seat and hunted a compact out of her bottomless bag to greet a face she had not seen in decades.
16
On the third day, between delirium and dehydration, Sweetness hit the steel rail. She tripped over a crumbled concrete sleeper and fell on it. It burned her right cheek. She reeled back and left a strip of skin fused to the metal. That was how she knew it was real. It was the first experience she had been certain of in two days.
When her feet had given her no answer to being dropped from a height of three metres over a sterile red desert by an air-borne cathedral waltzing away over the horizon in a gaudy of purple clouds, conned out of what she half understood was her greatest asset—the woman who created the world—Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th did an inventory.
Don’t think bruised maybe cracked ribs. Don’t think rim-rocks and rust. Don’t think, nothing that even suggests something I recognise. Don’t think which way? Don’t think how much food and water? Don’t think how soon the night, and how long and cold? All the answers have to be in this little black sack, so start there.
The sandwiches were long since mummified crescents but there were four bottles of oxygenated water. Sweetness set them out on the sand in front of her. With her pencil and paper she sat down to work out how many sips, then realised it was pointless without an idea of how long she would be walking, which was pointless without knowing where she was. And among the petty treasures, she had forgotten a simple map and compass.
One useful thing. Psalli’s emergency spell. Lost in a desert, no map, no compass, night coming on, four bottles of water between you and the condors; that’s an emergency. Sweetness unrolled the little scroll of paper, fastened with a hair-tie.
For Aid Beyond Comprehension in a Time of Direness, first light a beeswax candle…
What the hell kind of emergency spell is it that’s picky about the kind of candle you light? Or even that you light a candle at all? Sweetness hauled out her all-weather lighter and a tampon. She lit the thread end. It burned enthusiastically, then sputtered at the wadded cotton.
“Then face the sun…” She did so. “Call three times, ‘Aid me in my succour, Green Saint,’ then blow out the candle and say, ‘May my wish be granted.’ Okay.” She performed the recitations, blew on her light. The tampon guttered and expired in a curl of red embers and smoke. “May my wish be granted.”
Sweetness sat down and waited for Aid Beyond Comprehension. To keep herself amused in a Time of Direness, she thought. You’re lost in the middle of a desert without a map or a compass. You’ve got a radio. You’re facing the sun, which is about two hands above the horizon. You’re facing vaguely west, so most of the important stuff in the world is that way. Nine o’clock-ish. South. Walk and you’ll hit something human sooner or later. If you roll over—cock piss bugger bum balls, it hurts!—and use the top of this pen as one sight and the top of that finger rock as another and hold real still, you can guess how quickly the sun’s setting. Fast on the equator, slow up north. This season, hardly at all above the polar circle. Well, it’s definitely moving, so I’m not that far north. About three minutes from top of pen to top of rock. That’s up above the thirty degree line north. Where had that fly bastard Harx said they were going? Molesworth, for a mail run. That’s Bequerelly, west-southwest from Therme. Now, your watch is still on Deuteronomy time. So, you tune the radio to a Deuteronomy station and listen for the Evening Angelus. Star of the Evening, pale blue mother of men…Then you find a place where you can see the horizon. It’s okay to walk about a bit. The Help Beyond Comprehension isn’t going to miss you out here. There’s a gap in the shield-wall. Now count the time until the sun sets here. A few head-sums—how many degrees is it per minute? Three. And there it goes…Magic hour. Wooo, big blue. The rocks are so red, like they don’t want to let the colour go. No, no, it’s mine, not the black’s. Eight minutes. So, you’re mid Axidy, edge of Chryse. Not too many railway lines up here, which is arsebiscuits, but down south is Tempe and the thirty-degree orbital. That’s a walk. You’re going to sprout wings and fly? Getting night-wise. Best to walk in the night, sleep in the day. That sun’ll cook you like a stripey penis on a Waymender barbecue. Let’s not entertain that thought or those people. You’re warm already on forehead and cheeks. Upper arms are stinging. Also, you’ll drink less water. Snuggle up in your bag and sleep in the sun on the sand. So, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer, best get booting. Wait wait wait. It’s night. No sun. So, how will you know which way is south? Moonring’s east–west, and south, but it goes all the way across the sky and a little error now can be days out. Can be leather and bones, Honey-Bun.