The Pillars of Eternity

‘Probably. But how would I know? I brought them back in Iridan.’

‘They are fake. It is almost certain.’ Boaz turned to Mace. ‘And you?’

She tossed her head. ‘Why would someone with a yen for extinction be searching for anything – except death?’

Boaz waited. She relented. ‘All right. Not me, I don’t give a damn for anything. I belong to a man called Radalce Obsoc. One more collector’s item. He wants to get down to Meirjain. He wants it bad.’

Boaz picked out only what was relevant from her cryptic comments. ‘You belong to him. Is that why you want to die?’

‘Maybe. I’ve been with him a long time. I just felt tired.’

‘Your will to live has been drained away through indulgence in the senses.’

‘Maybe. But then I’m into pleasure, not power like you.’

It was understandable that she should misjudge him. Boaz surveyed them both. They were an unlikely pair.

‘There might be some benefit in our working together.’

Romrey had worked his way through bewilderment and incredulity. Now he was merely puzzled. ‘How?’

‘You are aware that it is going to be very difficult to land on Meirjain without knowing the position of its appearance beforehand. We can take it that all those co-ordinates offered here in Wildhart and elsewhere are false, and indeed in such circumstances it would be impossible to identify the real ones among the fake. Special talents are needed to track down who has the real ones. A detective could do it, perhaps….’

‘Obsoc already hired a detective,’ Mace said. ‘He got nowhere.’

‘So what are these special talents, and why do we have them?’ Romrey asked acidly.

Boaz stood motionless. He had no answer.

‘You can read the future, maybe?’ Romrey persisted.

Seriously, Boaz shook his head. ‘By no means.’

‘I can read the future,’ Romrey said.

*

Boaz watched carefully as he reached into a drawer in the bedside table. ‘I read the future with these,’ he said. ‘And I’m going to read it now.’

He had taken out a deck of cards and proceeded to lay out ten of them on the table, after a quick shuffle. ‘The issue is a simple one. Do I throw in with you, or do I not?’ Romrey’s lean face was intent as he laid down the cards. ‘A positive answer is a score that’s above average. Negative, below average.’

Briefly he reckoned up. ‘Well, that’s fairly positive. A hundred and one. It looks like we’re partners, whoever you are. And who the hell are you, anyway?’

‘I am Captain Joachim Boaz.’

‘Shipkeeper?’

‘Yes.’ Boaz was gazing at the cards with interest. As Romrey swept them up and laid them down, he stepped over to examine them, glancing at Romrey for permission.

‘They’re colonnader cards,’ Romrey told him.

Boaz thumbed through them. ‘Not colonnader,’ he stated. ‘This is a perverted set, muddied with occultism.’

There were in fact many variants on the original colannade pack (itself reconstructed from a pre-scientific pack of great antiquity), most of them produced by deviant philosophical or arcane sects. This one was typical. Artistically it was very accomplished, but the images were altered and adorned with additional symbolism which was often incorrect and also tended to obliterate much of the carefully inculcated subtlety of the original. The Priestess, for instance, a simple but enormously potent figure in the true colannade version, was here cluttered with a number of extraneous signs – in her hair, in her right hand, under her left foot. These symbols were drawn from the aberrant occultism of the sect that had construed them, and in that sense had meaning. But to a colonnader they were simply irrelevant.

‘So you base your decisions on simple chance?’ he said to Romrey. ‘Play cubes would be sufficient for that.’

‘Not on chance, no.’ Romrey shook his head. ‘That’s no ordinary deck of cards. Look closely at the material. The cards have adp in them.’

‘All such cards do – these, for instance.’ With a slow movement Boaz brought out his own deck. ‘To make the pictures move.’

‘No, no, these have much more. They are all adp.’

The cards had a micalike finish. They were, as Romrey had said, made of adp substance, much like silicon bones.

‘These are magical cards,’ Romrey said. ‘Mystic cards. They respond to events going on around them. They are never wrong. In fact, they can create events too.’

‘Yes, if you are improvident enough to let them guide all your actions,’ Boaz remarked.

He had to admit that the cards had a charm all of their own. Even the aberrant symbolism added up to a certain bizarre profundity. And he reminded himself that some of the deviant sects, as they passed down the hidden lanes and by-ways of thought, often made surprising discoveries.

Just the same, his background made him sceptical of Romrey’s claims, so much so that his lip curled.

However, his ship had presumably, during its surveillance of the city over the past few days, seen this man using the cards for divination – something which true colonnaders looked upon as pure superstition. If his ship took it seriously, then so did Boaz.