Jim Baen's Universe

Fantasy Stories

Knight of Coins

Written by Margaret Ronald

Illustrated by Jared Blando

I can tell a lot about a person just by how they come into my office. If they come in all wide-eyed and expecting something out of The Maltese Falcon, I know I'll have to choose between shattering their illusions and getting a few extra bucks out of them. If they assume I'm the secretary (after all, the sign on the door just says G. Scelan), I know I probably don't want to work for them. And if they seem disappointed at the lack of divination circles or runestones, I know that they're one of my referral cases, and that I'll have to be careful with them.

The man who came in that November morning didn't easily fall into any of those categories. He didn't seem to have any expectations of what a person in my profession ought to look or act like, and he was probably the most businesslike (and most well-dressed) client I'd seen in a long time. I didn't even realize he was a referral case until he mentioned what he was looking for.

"Tarot cards," Sforza said, settling into his chair. "Specifically, three very old and powerful tarot cards."

I didn't answer right away, since my coffee took up more of my immediate attention. "Where'd you hear of me?" I asked after half a cup. Now that he'd mentioned the cards, I noticed a few things that should have tipped me off to his profession. Expensive suits could mean either respectability or its opposite, and Sforza had a peculiarly piercing gaze that I'd only seen in those who'd stared down demons.

He shrugged, an eloquent movement in tailored Armani. "Friend of a friend. Heard you'd found the death mask of Giles Corey."

That was true, though it wasn't a favorite memory. "All right. Tell me more."

"I want you to find them and their current owner, then bring them to me so I can nullify the hex."

Referral or no, it sounded like he hadn't talked to anyone directly involved in the death mask case, or he'd know my methods. "I don't know how much you know about me, Mr. Sforza, but I rarely do retrievals. Look me up in the yellow pages, and it doesn't say a damn thing about bringing something back. If it were a lost ring or a puppy, then, but since these cards are hexed—" I set down my coffee and leaned back in my chair. "If you want me to actually get them for you, I'll need twice my usual fee, and your assurance that they won't hurt me."

"Would you retrieve them for two thousand per card?"

"That's a start," I admitted, but inside I sat bolt upright. "Depending on what I have to do to get them. And the rest?"

"They are unlikely to hurt you."

"Not good enough. Tell me what they are, or take your coat and go home."

He raised one black eyebrow. "You don't trust me?"

"Not necessarily," I said, thinking that I trusted the new breed of magicians about as far as I could kick a Rottweiler. "But understand: I don't do these sort of cases by choice. I do them because I've gained a reputation among the—" I tried to think of the most succinct way to put it.

"Magically adept?" he offered.

"Occult yahoos," I countered, and Sforza's jaw tightened. "And if you're as experienced as you look, then you know that I've only survived this long by knowing which cases to turn down. I've half a mind to turn you down already."

Sforza looked out the window, and rubbed his chin. I returned my attention to the last of the coffee, listening to the rasp of his hand over fine stubble. "All right," he said finally. "The Visconti-Sforza deck is the earliest surviving tarot deck. Every one before it has been either lost or destroyed."

"Wait. Visconti-Sforza as in—?"

He inclined his head graciously. "A bastard branch, I'm afraid. An ancestor of mine bound the cards to his family line. In the process, he . . . sealed away certain cards of ill omen, hoping to forestall the events they presaged. Those four cards are currently assumed lost."

"Three cards, you mean."

Sforza gave me an exasperated look. "No. Four. You see, the cards are so bound up with my family that they can be used to hurt me. If one of those four cards is unsealed, it acts as a hex against me—triggering the events foretold in that card. The cards are extremely dangerous, Ms. Scelan, but only to me." He took a blank envelope from inside his jacket and laid it on the desk, between the phone and yesterday's newspaper. "Three days ago, this card turned up in the mail."

I slid it across the desk and opened it. "Did you keep the envelope it arrived in?"

"That is the envelope it arrived in."

I didn't answer, having already taken out the card. It was as long as my hand, nearly as wide, and a lot heavier than your basic Bicycle playing card. Against a gilded background, a horned and winged figure squatted, grimacing. It held the leashes of two naked figures who cowered at its feet. I hurriedly stuck it back in the envelope.

Sforza nodded at my reaction and reached across the desk for the envelope. "The next day, my office burned down."

"I see," I said. "Are you sure you don't want to consult someone with a background in hexes?"

"The cards themselves are the hex," he snapped. "I need you to find them so I can neutralize them, and I need you to do it as soon as possible."

I paid little attention to that. All my referral cases are peremptory. I need the gem to start the ritual! I must have the book by the next full moon! Usually they pay just as well no matter when I finish the job. "Twenty-five hundred per card," I said, watching his eyes, "and I'll do it." Sforza didn't flinch, and I kicked myself for not upping the price another few hundred. "What are the other cards?"

"The three of swords, the knight of coins, and the Tower." His voice wavered just a little as he named that last one, and I remembered that the Tower was supposed to be one of the really awful cards. "You have my contact information."

"Mr. Sforza?" I asked as he stood up. "Let me see that card again."

His hand went to his breast pocket, but after a moment's hesitation he gave me the envelope. I didn't look at the picture, just closed my eyes and touched the edge of the card to my upper lip, inhaling deeply. I had the scent.

Sforza was staring at me when I opened my eyes, but if he hadn't been warned about my methods, I wasn't about to explain.

I handed the card back, and he left without saying more. To be honest, I was glad he was gone. I didn't like how this case felt, but, well, rent was coming due, and the death-mask case hadn't paid much.

I spent another hour or so in the office, taking care of a few minor things (the woman whose ring I'd found in a pawnshop had finally admitted it was hers and that her darling boyfriend must have pawned it there) and straightening out a few misconceptions (the band whose missing drummer I'd located last year wanted me to stay with them in case he disappeared again, and I didn't like playing baby-sitter). I also called a few people I knew and asked them to look into Sforza's background. Finally I took a bulky batik jacket from the coatrack; it was a gift and I hated the color, but it was roomy enough to hide my shoulder holster. I had a permit to carry, which is tough in Boston, but the bullets themselves weren't even close to legal. They might not kill everything that could attack me, but they'd slow most attackers down.

I didn't head for the Common to start my usual search pattern. I needed more information than Sforza had given me, and luckily I knew someone who would give it to me.

****

If names actually corresponded with personalities, my friend Sarah would have been named Genevieve instead of me. She even looks like a Genevieve, all dark ringlets and flawless skin, while I'm stuck with a braid like an electrical cable and a perpetual sunburn no matter the season.

She is also one of the few people allowed to call me Evie, which she did as soon as I entered The Goddess Garden. "How's the nose?" she added.

"Tracking," I said, steering away from the incense and aromatherapy display. "Got a moment?"

Sarah glanced at her assistant, a bored girl in a black T-shirt and too much mascara, and nodded. "Yeah, sure. Liz, I'll be in the back room if you need me."

Liz nodded absently, twaddling a chunk of dyed agate on the counter. She was the third of Sarah's assistants whom I'd met, and damned if I could tell her apart from either of the others. Sometimes I wondered about Sarah's hiring practices.

"Can you give me some advice on a few tarot cards?" I asked as we headed towards the back room.

"You want a reading?" Her eyes widened. "I'll get out the champagne. This is an occasion." She opened the door and turned on a few of the lights. On top of running The Goddess Garden, Sarah brings in a fair amount from "performance tarot readings." Her reading room is the sort of place that most of Sforza's kind expect when they come to my office: runes over the door, feng shui-aligned bookcases full of holistic wellness manuals, gauzy curtains that move with the slightest breeze (and that incidentally hide the lovely view of the alley in back). She once told me that she really prefers to read on a kitchen table without her other decks nearby, but she knows her audience too well.

Sarah's really the only person who's both a business contact and a friend. I try to keep the occult as far away from my personal life as possible; it's bad enough I've gotten a reputation for it in my work. But Sarah's much too sensible to get into anything scary, so I figure I'm safe with her.

I took a seat on one side of her non-rainforest-wood table. "No reading. I just need some information on a few cards I've been asked to find."

I filled her in on the case, and she whistled. "This is a heap of bad karma you've gotten into, Evie."

"No kidding. And here I've believed you when you say the cards aren't heavy magic."

She began rummaging through her tarot decks. "Depends on how you use them. It is possible to use the tarot in magic, but to use a tarot deck for major thaumaturgy, the kind he's talking about, you'd have to "wake it up" first. Once it's awake, it'd be like using a chainsaw to carve wood: powerful, but messy, clumsy, and you're likely to lose a limb if you're not careful. And frankly, I'd rather use the chainsaw itself than a truncated deck like the one you describe. The magic would be crippled, deformed, and extremely unpredictable. You'd better hope this Sforza guy isn't practicing the same kind of magic."

"He can't," I said. "The deck is scattered between about ten different museums; I checked. Just tell me what the individual cards mean."

She shrugged and pulled out a common Rider deck. "Fine. The Devil," she said, flourishing a lurid black card with a scene very like the one on Sforza's, "represents the dark side of ourselves, temptation, deliberately becoming a slave to our desires. It can signify either black magic worked against one or a temptation into black magic. It's a little hard to judge without context."

I spread my hands. "You've got all the context I have. What about the others?"

"Well, the three of swords essentially means sorrow, heartbreak." She flourished a card that looked like a bad biker tattoo: three swords piercing a heart. "The Tower is usually considered a pretty awful card; it means upheaval, destruction of one's plans, although it can also mean a bad situation shattered so that better can come of it. It's probably the worst card to seal off; the longer you put off the fall, the worse it'll get." The card she put down was as dark as the Devil, showing lightning knocking a crown from the top of a tower and setting it ablaze. I looked at her face and decided against making any castration jokes.

She paused, her hands lingering on the three cards. "I can understand why he wanted those cards kept out of his life, even if I don't agree. But the knight of coins baffles me. It's not strictly a bad card, and there are much worse in the deck to ward against."

"And it means . . ." Sarah could get like this sometimes.

"Well-grounded practicality, sometimes with a lack of connection to the inner self. Usually it signifies a person, though. Somebody with the resources for action, but who's not acting just yet."

That sounded a little like Sforza, but I didn't say so. "Thanks. Anything else I need to know?"

She hesitated. "Well . . . you may want to be careful with this Sforza guy. Excising cards from a powerful deck can have effects beyond the magic. Those events would be severed off from your life—it'd be like losing a limb, psychically speaking. You'd never be able to mourn, never be able to face and therefore withstand temptation, never undergo tempestuous changes. And when they did break into your life, the effect would be monstrous."

I whistled. "No wonder he wants me to find them," I said. "I owe you a drink."

"Double mocha latte," she replied immediately. "But I meant it about the broken deck. If it's involved, this could get nasty. Be careful."

"I am." I opened my jacket to give her a glimpse of the gun. "See you later."

****

I left Sarah's and headed for the Common. Once there, I stopped at the edge of the Frog Pond, surrounded by milling pedestrians, and closed my eyes.

This is what brings in my grocery money, day to day. I can track anything once I have the scent. Missing children. Absent spouses. Stolen jewelry. It's earned me something of a nickname—the old man in Chinatown who casts my bullets out of impure silver calls me "Hound," and I don't care enough to correct him. My dad, who was a cop, used to say that one of the bloodhounds must've jumped over my cradle. Mom never laughed at that, though.

This is also what brought in all the cases I call "referrals." It's inaccurate—at least half of my regular cases are by word of mouth, and any magician can find me in the phone book—but it's a hell of a lot easier to describe them as "referrals" rather than "sorcerous missions." It started when I took on one weird case, finding a lost book for someone who needed it to survive. That was followed by a search for a grave (though the way that one turned out, I'm not sure "grave" is the right word), and then word started to spread.

I inhaled again, shutting out the exhaust fog, the faint reek of the harbor, the odors of a thousand people. The same scent, I told myself, but not quite the same or I'd just follow the Devil card to its current location.

The Tower, I told myself. The three of swords. The knight of coins.

And suddenly there it was, clear as if they'd just materialized. I took another breath, adjusted my coat, and followed the trail east.

It's hard to describe a scent, and even more so when it's not really a scent at all. I mean, real scents dissipate quickly, and I've tracked down things lost for years, following my nose to its source, like you would follow the smell of bread to a bakery. But scent is the closest analog to what I follow, and the scent of these cards was dry and old, like books that hadn't been read for a very long time. Metallic, too, though I thought that might be the gold leaf. The Devil card had smelled of smoke, which was unsurprising, but this new trail also had traces of smoke to it. Odd.

I followed it to the financial district, past the courthouse, past City Hall. Any passersby either were too busy getting to their next appointment or took me for one of them. New York may be good for not making eye contact, but for not giving a damn you gotta go further north.

Near the aquarium the trail split. I stopped in the middle of the street the moment I sensed it, cursing. Two cars screeched to a halt and began honking, which I ignored. You'd think after enough driving in this city, they'd know that all pedestrians are insane. With all the exhaust in my nose, I couldn't tell which trail was stronger. I cursed again, made a note of the intersection, and chose a direction at random.

I went straight north, or as straight as it's possible to go through Boston streets. It led me up to the North End, home to the best Italian cuisine this side of the Atlantic, so the denizens claim. The days when it was strictly the Italian part of Boston are past, but the associations stay.

The trail wound though the streets for a while and disappeared into a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Tomato Gianni's. It was like many such restaurants in the North End: concealing culinary marvels behind a grubby facade. My stomach growled.

When I say the trail disappeared, that's exactly how it seemed to me. The moment I walked in the door, a palpable reek of garlic enveloped me, obscuring any other scent. I concentrated, trying to recapture that dry and metallic smell . . .

"Can I help you?"

I turned to see a man in an apron over his white shirt and jeans smiling at me. I realized I'd been holding the door open to the cold air, and let it swing closed. "Yes," I said. "I'm looking for someone who might have come through here today."

He held out his hands, palms up. "If you are with the police, I cannot tell you much." His English was accented, but the grammar was fine. I couldn't quite place his accent: not entirely Italian, as if he'd learned from someone with an entirely different accent.

"I'm not with the cops," I said, then stopped. There was something, some whiff of parchment . . . possibly he'd held the cards, or seen them . . .

"Man or woman?"

"What?"

"Are you looking for a man or woman?"

"I . . . man, I think. Possibly of Italian descent, probably kind of shady-looking."

He grinned. "That is me, my boss, and most of our customers."

"Yes. I'm sorry, I—" I inhaled again, but there was only the strong aroma of garlic, and plum tomatoes, and melting Romano cheese and dammit, I hadn't eaten since six-thirty that morning. "Forget it. I'll just have lunch, if you're still serving it."

"We are." He beckoned to another waiter, who'd been standing by the window smoking a cigarette. While the waiter slouched off to fetch a menu, he hesitated a moment, then smiled at me, almost shyly. "May I join you? I am on break, and perhaps I can help you to remember."

And I bet you don't get many single young women coming in on their own, I thought sourly. "Sure. Why not."

****

He didn't, in fact, see many single young women in here, but he didn't say it with a leer. In fact, he was almost skittish, and I seriously wondered whether he was a lot younger than he looked; I hadn't seen a guy act this way since early high school.

His name was Paolo diTerre, he'd been in the States for a year, and he was extremely nervous about his English. I assured him that he sounded fine and helped myself to the excellent tagliatelli primavera, thinking that it was rather too bad I'd met him on a case.

It was worth the hour lost just to watch him talk. He spoke with a cadence like that of an inspired poet, and I still couldn't place the accent. "Gianni, my boss," he told me, gesturing extravagantly with the garlic bread, "well, his name is not Gianni, but it goes with the restaurant, you see, well, he is a good man. He lets us eat in the dining room as long as it is not busy, but since we have so many patrons, I have learned not to hunger at lunch and dinner. Or any other time, it seems. It is learning when to be hungry, I think, that has been most difficult for me."

"So you weren't a waiter before working here?" I said, as much for my own curiosity as for more information on the case.

"Oh, no, no no no." He gestured toward the waiter with the cigarette, who had returned to his place by the window as if we didn't exist. "Yosef, he is from Little Russia, he says I used to be a lazy bur-shwa know-nothing."

"Bourgeois," I corrected, smiling a little.

"Ah. Bourgeois. English—no, French, yes?" I nodded, and he grinned. "So it is not my English that is bad. No, I was a poet, a leech on my family. Coming here and working was a shock for me."

"I take it you didn't leave willingly."

His lips quirked. "No. But that is a long story, and I dislike telling it. You are liking the food? Do you wish coffee, or espresso?"

I waved his offer away. "So," I said, "do you know anything about cards?"

Paolo's brow furrowed. "Cards? No, I—I can play the game, I think you call it triumph, but not much else." He didn't look up at me, though, and I thought his hand faltered as he raised his glass.

I was sorry to be spoiling such a good meal by turning it into an interrogation, but I've had to do worse in this job, and I really do have to keep the division in place between work and personal life. "Maybe someone came in here with cards, a deck of very old cards. Perhaps your boss owns a set."

He shook his head, and this time met my eyes as he spoke. "No, my boss is not involved with cards. He says they take away your money."

There was something he was hiding, and he knew I knew it. "Do you know anyone named Sforza?" I asked abruptly.

Paolo blinked at that, but the expression in his eyes was startled, not guilty. "I—" he began, then looked down at the dishes. "My cousin married a Sforza. I have not seen them in a long time."

"Have you heard from either of them recently?"

He shook his head. "No. And Miss Scelan, these questions are beginning to sound like police questions, and my boss does not like me answering police questions."

I tried to smile. I knew there was something about the cards here, but my nose was baffled and I couldn't do a thorough search during business hours. I probably wouldn't get a direct answer from Paolo, and getting Yosef's attention was unlikely as long as he had cigarettes. "Sorry. Thanks for the company," I added, standing up.

Paolo got to his feet, then hesitated. "I do not know if I should let you pay," he said to the table. "Since I arrived -- well, what I knew of women has changed since I was last home.

I grinned. "I'll pay for myself. But thanks."

I noted the address as I left, and headed back to where the trail split.

There are times when I wish that I didn't have to do my work on foot. It's time-consuming for one, tiring for another, and depending on which part of town I'm in, it can be dangerous. But it's much too easy to lose the scent on the subway, and driving is out—by the time I determined which way to go, I'd have six cars backed up behind me. So I wear out my sneakers instead and block traffic in my own way.

I didn't like it that the trail had split. It could mean that someone from Tomato Gianni's had an accomplice, or that this was a much bigger affair than I had thought. The things I didn't like about this case were piling up, outweighed only by $7,500 and a really good lunch.

My cell phone rang twice as I trudged south along the waterfront, once from one of my contacts and once from Sarah. The contact hadn't been able to dig up much on Sforza beyond that he was fairly rich and had started to get a lot more powerful in the last year or so. That didn't sound good; those who rise quickly to power often fall the same way. Sarah had checked out a rumor on the Visconti-Sforza deck and found that most of the current owners of the fragments were holding tight to their cards as a result of a theft scare a couple of years back. Perhaps whoever was sending them to Sforza had tried to make a bid for more.

I also made a call of my own to one of my former clients