“The old patterns?”
“The Seer’s Patterns, my nurse used to call them. It’s why I wanted to see you, as it happens.” He gestured for her to sit in the chair opposite him before resuming his own seat.
Dal laid the tips of his fingers lightly on the backs of the tiles nearest him. “My mother brought this set into our Household. I don’t know how far back it goes in her family, but it was said the set was made in the time of the Caids.”
Dhulyn shrugged, her eyes on the tiles. “It’s certainly possible. If parchments and even some paper can last so long, why not tiles? Do you know what they’re made of?”
“Some kind of bone or stone, judging by how they change temperature.” He picked up a piece and handed it to her.
Dhulyn lifted the tile to her mouth and touched it with the tip of her tongue, tested it with her teeth. “Stone, I would say. I do use the tiles for gambling, as it happens, but I doubt you’ve asked for me in order to teach you how.”
Dal laughed softly. “Quite right. Turn over the tile you’ve got in your hand.”
Suddenly-
A HEAVY WEIGHT OF TIME; GENERATIONS; HOUSES RISE AND FALL. A MOUNTAIN PUSHES UP OUT OF THE SEA. AN ISLAND. SHE TOOK A SHARP BREATH…
“Wolfshead, I said, ‘are you all right?’ ”
“Yes, thank you.” Eyebrows raised, Dhulyn turned the tile over. Rather than being marked with one of the cups, coins, swords, or spears that she was familiar with, this tile had a circle with a dot in the middle. She looked back at Dal-eLad.
He was nodding. “There are tiles in this set not seen in the sets used for gambling. That’s one of them. There are four tiles with that dot and circle. And three other sets of four.” He began turning over the tiles in front of him. “A simple straight line, running lengthwise down the center. A rectangle, just smaller than the tile itself, and a triangle, centered along the length of the tile, like a spearhead.”
Dhulyn set down the tile she held next to its brothers. “A line, a circle, a rectangle, a triangle. Four in each pattern. Sixteen extra tiles?”
Dal shook his head. “Seventeen. This one is unique.” He picked up a tile that lay to his left, and showed, if possible, more wear than the others. When he turned it over, Dhulyn could see, faint but clear, a design of three concentric circles.
“Could the other three have been lost?”
Dal shook his head. “My nurse said no, the set had always been like this.”
“But surely, if the set is so very old…” Dhulyn let her objection die away as Dal went on shaking his head.
“No other tile is missing, you can tell by the wear and the patterns that they are all original. What odds would you give me that three tiles only, and those particular three would be the only ones lost since the time of the Caids? No. This tile is unique.”
“So.” Dhulyn leaned back in her chair, tapping her lips with her linked fingers. “Seventeen extra tiles we don’t use in the modern sets of vera tiles. And these patterns, what are they?”
“As I said, my nurse called them the Seer’s Patterns. My sisters and I-”
Dhulyn looked up from her study of the tiles. Dal sat with his elbow on the table, chin in his hand, lips pressed tightly together. His sisters are gone, she thought, and it still hurts him.
“My sisters and I,” Dal began again, his voice lower and carefully under control, “would pretend to be Seers, telling each other’s fortunes.” He cleared his throat and began turning all the tiles faceup. “You know that some of the tiles have names, other than their places in the suits?”
“The Tarkina of Swords is called the Black Maid, the nine of cups is called Wealth, that kind of thing?”
Dal nodded. “Exactly.” He held one tile in his hand, leaving the others as they lay. “My nurse said that once upon a time all the tiles had names, and meanings as well. That you would choose the tile that stood for you, and from it your fortune could be told.”
Dhulyn leaned forward, placing her elbows on the table.
“Show me.”
“This is my tile,” he said, showing her the Mercenary of Coins. “A young man or woman, golden-haired, brown-eyed. This tile would be placed in the center of a table such as this one. I would ask my question, and this tile,” he held up the singleton, “with its concentric circles, would be placed atop my own.” He set the unique tile on top of the Mercenary of Coins. “The circled dot above, the triangle below, the rectangle to the right, the line to the left, forming a small cross. We would toss the rest of the tiles, and, drawing one at a time, place one face up above the circled dot, one below the triangle, one to the right of the rectangle, and one to the left of the line, extending the arms of the cross.” Pretending to draw tiles from the box, Dal placed them as he indicated. “Lastly, we would choose four more, one at a time, and place them in a vertical here, to the left of the tiles we’ve already set up. This is the simplest of the Seer’s Patterns.”
“The simplest?” Dhulyn drew down her brows in a frown, shaking her head. “And what does it tell you?”
Dal spread his hands, palms raised. “That I can’t say. No one in my family ever had the Sight, to my knowledge. But I thought that you…”
Dhulyn let her lower lip slip from between her teeth. “I’ve seen these markings before,” she said. She tapped one of the rectangle tiles with her fingernail. “Around the base of Mar’s bowl. They’re-” the blood rushed to her ears. “They’re Marks.” She looked up, smiling, but Dal was frowning his incomprehension. “Marks,” she said again. “This one’s a Seer,” she tapped the circled dot. “It looks like an eye. This one’s a Finder, Gundaron says Finding is like following a straight line.”
Now Dal was nodding. “So one of these is a Healer-”
“Probably the square.”
“And the other’s a Mender.”
“But this one,” Dhulyn tapped the unique tile with its concentric circles. “I’ve no idea what this one might be. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Because it’s a Lens,” Gun said from the doorway. Dal jumped in his seat, but Dhulyn didn’t even look around. “The missing Mark.”
“What do you mean, my Scholar?”
Gundaron held up the scroll in his hand. “It’s in the Commentaries, the part I couldn’t remember, Holderon writes about an ancient text of the Caids, one that existed in his day but doesn’t any longer, though some of the stories it was said to contain have come down to us in the forms of folk songs and plays. Anyway, in the part that I’m referring to, Holderon appears to be answering the argument of another Scholar, and it’s Holderon’s position that the other Scholar is mistaken, that the Missing Mark, the so-called Lens, doesn’t exist.”
“A fifth Mark? What was his logic?”
“That while everyone knew of the other Marks, no one had ever encountered a Lens.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t a person,” Dal said. “Perhaps it was an artifact?”
An artifact, Dhulyn thought. A round artifact. One, perhaps, that had somewhere along the line been disguised as something more ordinary, and therefore not nearly as old. Something round could easily be disguised as… Dhulyn’s blood began to pound in her ears. As a bowl, for example.
Dal and Gundaron had gone on talking, and after a moment Dhulyn realized they were suggesting that she try Seeing, using the tiles.
“I’m afraid there is no fresnoyn,” Gundaron was saying. “I’ve tried Finding, but I get nothing.”
“Possibly Lok-iKol used it,” Dhulyn said, shelving her thoughts about the bowl. It would wait until they were back in the Dome. “Let me see what the tiles can do. Which shall I use?”
“I should think you’d be the Mercenary of Swords,” Dal said. “You’re not old enough to use the Tarkina’s tile.”