The second interlude concludes! The usual caveats apply. This is a rough draft with adult language and situations. Hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading!
“Just tell her when to stop,” Christopher said as the cards peeled off his hand and into the air above the table. They spun and whirled like autumn leaves dancing in an eddy of wind. As they flashed through the air, Katherine caught glimpses of vivid blues, greens, and reds. Elanor didn’t have much experience in cartomancy, but even Katherine could tell this wasn’t your standard Rider deck. Not that it was surprising, few truly magical items were mass-produced, they just didn’t have the capacity to contain that much magic.
“Goodness, she’s putting on a show tonight,” Christopher commented, watching the cards form intricate patterns in the funnel with his eyebrows raised.
The display caught Katherine by surprise and it was a few seconds before she remembered she needed to tell them to stop. “Um… stop.”
The cards halted in mid-air and rushed back down to the tabletop with a thump. The top three cards flipped out and landed in a neat row on the table before her. They were made from thick card stock and were longer than regular playing cards. On closer look, Katherine could see that each had been painted with a protective lacquer coating, the strokes from the paintbrush still visible in ripples on their backs.
“Looks like she’s gone for a simple three card spread,” Christopher explained, pointing at the cards. “Past, present, future.”
The first card flipped itself over. It showed a beautifully painted picture of a figure in a long, dark cloak sitting at a bar. Katherine couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, but from its hunched posture, they didn’t look at all happy. Two glasses of red wine stood untasted on the bar before it, while three others were toppled over on the bar leaving a puddle of red pooled below them.
The puddle of wine was what drew her attention, there was a visceral connection between it and the blood Elanor had traced on the stone floor of the laboratory. Katherine felt they were the same, though she couldn’t explain how. As she watched, the figure reached out an arm in jerky little stutters, like an old animation with some of the frames missing, and flicked one of the empty glasses off the bar. It fell and smashed to pieces on the floor without a sound.
Christopher’s face fell. “Oh my, it’s the five of cups, that’s so sad,” he lamented. He looked closely at her, “Well, you already know your past, sweetie, but for the sake of form I’ll tell you what I see.”
“You’ve lost something important, from the feel of it a mother or spouse, but something of them remains behind. It’s enough to remind you of them, but it’s not enough to be happy about.” He sighed in what sounded like genuine sympathy. “That really sucks.”
He looked at Katherine with a careful expression. “This is going to sound strange, but even for the best cartomancer, most people’s pasts are pretty muddled. It’s like like listening to all the tracks on a playlist at the same time. With the best readings, I can pick out bits and pieces of different songs. I can tell if it’s classical or speed metal, but there isn’t a lot of detail. With you though, it’s like there’s a single melody repeating over and over. I don’t think I’ve ever read someone so clear and sad.” He looked at her questioningly.
Katherine swallowed and felt her throat click dryly. She shrugged, unable to speak and gave a brave smile.
Christopher gave her a sad smile back and reached out to pet her hand. “Life can be shitty sometimes, can’t it?” he commiserated.
“Well, let’s get back to it. She won’t be happy until we’re finished,” he said gesturing at the as-yet unrevealed cards.
The deck on the table shivered and another card flipped out to land below the Five of Cups, it was the Seven of Swords. It showed another darkly cloaked figure, this time though she could see that it was a young man. He was man-pretty in the way of preppy douchebags that star as the villains in movies about frat boys. In the card it was twilight, and a cluster of medieval-style tents was pitched in the distance behind him. He had a bundle of swords hidden in his cloak and a confident sneer on his face. As she watched, he secreted the last two swords away into his cloak. Christopher peered down at the card, then back up to Katherine.
“So, it looks like she has something to add about your past. This card,” he said tapping on it, “is all about betrayal. Somebody done you wrong, girl, even if you don’t know it yet.” Katherine didn’t know how that could be since she hadn’t been around long enough to be betrayed by anyone. At least not as far as she knew. “What’s more, the little asshole thinks he’s gotten away with it,” he said smiling. “But look at the card closer.”
She didn’t see anything at first. The man with the swords was still smiling in an unpleasant way, the swords all but hidden in his cloak. It was then that she saw it. Just visible in the background there was a group of soldiers, one of them had his sword out and was waving it in the air. He was looking in the thief’s direction.
“The secret will come out, and we can hope he gets what’s coming to him.”
It seemed that was all the deck had to say about her past because the next card on the table flipped itself over and the pale whiteness of a full moon actually glowed out of the card. The flickering images of a large Mastiff and a wolf were pacing below and pausing to bay up at it, their mouths forming silent howls, their eyes reflecting the same silver as the moon itself. A paved roadway led away into the distance, passing between two large trees, their branches swaying in a phantom wind.
“Oh look!” Christopher said looking at the card as though he’d expected a Pop Tart instead. “It’s The Moon.” He looked down at the cards, then back up to her. “I’m not judging, but maybe you’re feeling just a touch off balance?” he said delicately. “What this card tells me is that you need to give yourself some me-time. Run yourself a hot bath, get your nails done, get comfortable in your own skin.”
She laughed at his choice of words, and the sound came out bitter as battery acid. “That sounds like some good advice. What’s the last card?” This had been a bad idea.
The final card flipped and a grinning woman in bright red tights was hung suspended by a noose around a single foot from a swaying tree branch. Her other foot was resting negligently behind her knee making an upside-down number four with her legs. Both hands were clasped behind her head, one of which held a small silver dagger. Above her, on the leaf-covered branch, two ravens looked down at her. Though she was bound, she didn’t seem at all upset, actually, Katherine saw she had a wicked grin on her face, as though she had just thought of a dirty joke.
“That’s two trump cards in a row,” Christopher began, then he stopped talking as he noticed that the deck was quivering again. Another card flipped out and landed face down to settle edge to edge with the Hanged Woman. As though the cards had suddenly become magnetic, The Moon, The Hanged Woman, and the new card, all snapped together with an audible click. The Five of Cups and Seven of Swords stayed where they were.
The new card flipped over to reveal it was Death. As if there was ever any question, Katherine thought dully. Death stood in a field of rippling golden wheat under a horned moon, the severed heads of kings and commoners peeking up from between the ripened stalks. The figure of Death was little more than a discoloured skull with patches of scalp still attached, hovering above a body made of thick black mist. The smoky form swirled and snapped like a flag in the wind. A heavy and worn scythe dragged behind it leaving a furrow in the earth as it passed. Green sprouts sprang up where the earth was disturbed.
“My mistake, that’s three trump cards,” Christopher said in a quiet voice.
The backgrounds of the three cards slowly became indistinct, mingling together, before becoming one. The fields of golden wheat wrapped around the knoll where the Hanged Woman’s tree around the base of which the dog and wolf were now beginning to snuffle. Where once the cards had shown images of both day and night, now there was twilight with the moon rising huge and merely waxing gibbous instead of full on the horizon.
The figure of Death turned and began to drift from its own card toward the tree where the Hanging Woman swayed. It moved with that same Zoetrope flicker that put Katherine in mind of some of the oldest sepia-toned silent movies.
Katherine looked at Christopher’s shocked face, he was pale and sweat was beaded on his shaved scalp, then back down to the cards. Death had almost reached the tree where the hanged woman still waited, her impish smile unchanged, though Katherine could see her eyes tracking Death’s progress. In a move, violent and sudden, Death reared back with his scythe to strike. Katherine flinched, and Christopher’s hands came up and steepled at his mouth.
Instead of slicing into the woman as Katherine expected, the scythe flashed out and parted the hanging rope from the tree. The Hanging Woman, now in name only, flipped nimbly as an acrobat to the ground and took a bow.
The dog and wolf from the Moon card seemed delighted at this turn of events and bounced happily off her chest and licked her face. The Hanged Woman stretched her arms to the sky, ruffled the ears of the excited canines, and put a companionable hand around Death’s shoulder. It was the hand which still held the dagger.
The Hanged Woman turned, made deliberate eye contact with Katherine, grinned even wider, and slowly winked. Then she turned and plunged the dagger into Death’s back. Death didn’t appear to mind, and all of them, Death, the dog, the wolf, and The Hanged Woman, began to make their way down the road toward the two huge trees in the distance. The knife still gleamed in death’s back, and the length of rope from the noose around the Hanged Woman’s ankle trailed in the dust behind her. The two ravens who had been waiting in the tree cawed soundlessly and launched themselves into the air to circle above the group.
Unseen by the any of them, the cloaked figure from the five of cups had sidled out of its card and hid behind the Hanged Woman’s tree to watch them go.
With an audible snap like the sound of breaking ice, the borders of the cards became visible again and each of the figures was back in its own card.
“Well,” said Christopher in a shaky voice after a silence of perhaps thirty seconds, “that was unexpected.”
They didn’t get time to discuss the cards further. Over Christopher’s shoulder, movement caught Katherine’s eye. Two of the groups that she’d noticed loitering outside were entering through the front door. The people looked…wrong. It was a moment that contained a kind of numbness as her brain registered that something was amiss, but had yet to fully process the danger. Two speeding cars bearing down on each other can’t possibly be about to pancake into each other. That jet can’t be about to fly into that building. But then the cars hit, the plane explodes, and the screaming starts.
It was like that for Katherine, as the first of the group, a matronly woman with thinning red hair and grey roots, unhurriedly reached into her jacket pocket, pulled out a fist-sized rock, and without a flicker of expression, savagely brained the man at the nearest table.
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