LITMIR.BIZ

      THE SCRYER’S NEXT question was a delicate one. “May I take it, my lady, that you loved this boy?”

      “I do. Even now I do,” said Sulis.

      “In the way of chaste desire or are there… other feelings involved?”

      Sulis bridled at the man’s insolence. “Does it make a difference?”

      “In such cases, invariably,” said the scryer with a fatherly smile. “The currents that run between our realm and his can easily be disrupted by such intimate attunements.”

      “I see,” said Sulis coldly. “Well, you may put aside all such worries in this instance. My feelings are vast and profound as any ocean, but they are mine and I control them as I see fit.”

      The scryer, who had not yet been paid, assured her that everything was quite in order.

      “Then we should begin,” she said.

      They were standing in the flagged kitchen at Lychfont: Sulis, the scryer and the scryer’s clerk. The servants’ table had been heaved aside and a dusting of chalk laid down, with heaped ridges of ferrous ash trowelled and footed into shapes appropriate to the scryer’s trade. Sulis recognised them as letters, but could not read them. They were Syriac, she supposed, or Hebrew.

      The scryer felt about in his gourd for the dice and knuckle-bones. The curtains were drawn close and the room was sparkling with the reflected glitter of the ash. At a certain point, Sulis noticed that the scryer had begun to sway slightly back and forth, and that an obscure dribble of language was falling from his lips. Again, the speech was unknown to her. She guessed, though, from certain familiar names studding it, what the scryer was about. It was an invocation, though of what quality she could not yet tell. She suspected the man was a quack.

      The scryer’s clerk was tapping the gourd, across one end of which the belly skin of a pig was stretched tight. It was quite mesmeric, Sulis had to admit. That, however, was something to beware of. Sometimes these scryers claimed to have fetched out spirits with such rhythms as this, when all they had done was plant a dream in fuzzed and puttied imaginations. It was a trick of the trade.

      “Now cast your mind like a net,” said the scryer. “Cast through time and space. Don’t be afraid.”

      “I’m not afraid!” cried Sulis.

      “Don’t be complacent either,” he returned without breaking rhythm. Sulis felt as if her response had been expected, required – almost a ritual phrase. Anything she said would sink into the rhythm of that gourd and the old man’s chant as completely as a stone tossed on to the Lychfont mudflats. Trick of the trade? There was certainly movement on the ash-strewn floor. It was – jiggling, somehow. Then it stood stark and stiff, like filings magnetised but shifted to a new pattern. The ferrous dust no longer spelt out letters. It now formed – what?

      “Is it a map?” asked Sulis.

      “One moment!” said the scryer’s clerk. “Silence now, please. Now my master walks the frayed rope between two worlds.”

      Better than a circus! thought Sulis mutinously. All the same, she admired the way the scryer still held his rhythm clear of their words. It was dextrous, if a little sinister.

      A moment later there was a raucous croak in the rafters overhead. Looking up, Sulis saw a raven.

      Charlatan! she thought. An obvious plant!

      Perhaps, but the raven was her true totem bird and who but she knew that? Thereafter, it could be heard commenting throatily on the whole consultation.

      “Each line shows a way to your man of dust, your Ossian,” said the scryer. “From where he has gone there is no easy return, I think. He has been…” The scryer seemed briefly at a loss. “How can I put it in a way that won’t seem too alarming?”

      “I’m paying you for truth, not tact,” said Sulis. “Are you saying you don’t know where he is?”

      “On the contrary, lady. I know very well. Only he is not all… in one place.”

      “What do you mean by that? Has he been dismembered?”

      “Not exactly. Not physically, that is. But he has been scattered, all the same. Scattered like light through a prism. It is the effect of the flight, the difference in time. To put it bluntly, the boy you seek is no longer a living person.”

      “Oh!” exclaimed Sulis in alarm.

      “Do not misunderstand me. One might say he is alive several times over. There are many Ossians. I see his face reflected back in the stream of time at myriad angles.”

      Sulis had recovered herself. “Then let us by all means cover every angle,” she said with laboured patience.

      The scryer looked troubled. “You are aware, no doubt, of the difficulty of a retrieval from history in even the most propitious circumstances. When the subject is in a known location and there are plain tokens of his wish to return, when the signs have all been agreed in advance – even then there is no guarantee of success. I have known cases where what was recovered was mad, or terribly deformed—”

      “He’ll have to take the risk. He owes me that. Is this all you have to say against the operation?”

      The scryer gave another of his embarrassed laughs.

      “It’s all right,” said Sulis impatiently. “I realise it will mean more gold. Just tell your clerk to prepare the equipment.”

      The raven fluttered down from the rafter and sat on her shoulder. It croaked – encouragingly, Sulis thought.

      “I cannot do it yet. No, lady, put away your gold, this has nothing to do with money – though the process is expensive and in due course an adjustment of my fee will no doubt be required. But the technical difficulties are formidable. You wish to find Ossian? Then in each of the places where he now dwells you will need to assume an appropriate form. To determine that takes time.”

      Sulis

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