"I do not think you did too badly. Others have not been so lucky."
His bitter tone stung me out of doubt and into caution.
I took my hand from under his and put both of them tightly in my lap.
"So what has prompted you to come now?"
The two of them exchanged glances. Hamel's at least was guilty.
"To tell you the truth Dion, we are in need of help."
I couldn't resist saying it. I suppose I was angry.
"I might have known."
"Well and why shouldn't we ask you for help?" snapped Tomas. "You sit here all day helping strangers. We're your family, damn it.”
Hamel rounded on him.
"Look, will you shut up, Tomas. Why are you so shit-tempered anyway? Dion has every right to be suspicious. And you're just making everything worse. She's not Karac. Any fool can see that. But you'll turn her into him the way you're going. So just sit there and shut up. Aumaz!"
Tomas boggled at him. Obviously the placid Hamel rarely spoke to him like this. For a moment I was sure he was going to hit him. Then a rueful grin spread across his face.
"Aye fair enough! I'm sorry Dion. I'm behaving badly. We've had a great disappointment and it has made me very hasty tempered. Come on then, Bubba." He poked Hamel derisively in the ribs. "You're the big man now. Take the floor."
Hamel gave a long suffering roll of the eyes.
"Dion I apologize for us both," he said. "You must understand. Marnie made us promise not to bother you."
"Though she also said we would break that promise," muttered Tomas. "And she told right as usual."
"Yes, Yes," Hamel dismissed him with a wave of his hand and turned back to me. "We would not come now if we were not desperate. But we have a great need of magery and we have no one else to turn to. It concerns our sister Tasha."
"Was Tasha the fair-haired girl who liked sugar?" I asked. I was not going to let my feelings make me act badly. As Tomas said I spent my life helping strangers. I wanted to help them if I could and maybe in return I could ... I wasn't sure what, see them again? Find out more about them? Ah! Here was another trap.
Hamel laughed and the whole atmosphere of the room lightened.
"No that was Silva. She's the family beauty now. No Tasha was dark. She and Karac were twins. Do you remember?"
"Oh yes, I remember now. They were very dark. Not just in coloring, but dark people somehow. Strange. Moody and secretive."
"Aye! That's them," said Tomas. "Sweet Mother only knows what their father was like. Marnie always laughed at life and so do the rest of us more or less, but Tasha and Karac were completely different. When people called them bastards and our mother a whore, it was hard for them to forget it. They were like ... Well, when Tasha became old enough for men to start bothering her, she used to smile and lure them away to a lonely place and than she and Karac would beat them up. The villagers learned to be afraid of them."
"After you, they were the ones with the strongest magely powers," said Hamel.
"And the rest of you, do you have magic too?" I asked excited by the thought of other mages who might also be related to me.
"I've got none that I've discovered. Thomas and Silva have a very little. It was you three who had enough to become mages or healers."
"Though it wasn't so obvious in the twins," put in Tomas. "But they were little swine as children and they got worse and worse, fighting, making all kinds of devilry all the time, drinking. Eventually Marnie worked out what was troubling them. When they were 15, she took them both to see the local healer, Auntie Agnes. Auntie took one look at their auras and agreed instantly to teach them the arts of healing magic."
"So they became magic users too?"
"For a time there was talk of sending them to the Colleges in Mangalore if money or a scholarship could only be found. But then they had one of their fights and Tasha and Silva ran off with a band of travelling players and a few months later Tasha came home alone and pregnant. You would have thought Karac was her father the way he reacted. He never spoke to her again. He just left with the next band of Wanderers that came through. Then Tasha refused to leave her baby so young and later the Revolution of Souls closed the Colleges. So they never went. I'll never forgive myself for not going after Karac and smacking his head and bringing him back. It must have all started when he left."
"What?" I said fascinated and frustrated by this meandering discourse.
Tomas leaned towards me. "Have you been dreaming lately? Bad dreams? The statue of a woman trying to suck your life out? A sky full of eyes above a row of arches?"
He caught me completely off guard. I couldn't help starting, letting out a gasp.
"There," he said to Hamel. "You see. Karac took special steps. I told you so. Heartless swine!"
"A couple of months ago Tasha went away again," said Hamel. "Following a priest - his name was Darmen Stalker. He was secretary to Hierarch Jarraz. It is fearful enough to think of how Tasha might have fared at the hands of a zealot like Jarraz. But now these dreams. We all have them. Tomas and me and Silva and now you. Even her daughter has had them. All her family. We can feel her behind them. We know something is terribly wrong. We have to find her."
I was suddenly back in that dream feeling the terror. If that vision did not come out of the mind of a demon, but out of a person ... Out of a reality ... Oh sweet Tansa have mercy!
"You must help us, Dion. She might still be saved."
I looked down and saw my hands shaking. Pull yourself together, Dion. Pull yourself together. But to be reality ... Was Andre/Bedazzer involved? No. I wasn't even going to think of that possibility.
"We must have a Bowl of Seeing," I cried.
"It won't go far enough," protested Tomas.
"It's a start, Tomas," said Hamel.
"I can see over a hundred miles in any direction in the Bowl, Tomas." I strode over to the water pipe and magicked the water up the pipe and into a jug.
Hamel's jaw dropped, but Tomas smiled.
”Why Dion! You're quite the star, aren't you? Come on then, where are your Prophecy cards?”
He helped me arrange the wide low bowl on the table with the prophecy cards and fill it with water. Without being asked he produced a lock of dark hair wrapped in a white cloth from his bag.
"You know a lot about mages," I said impressed by the way he had wrapped it correctly.
"Magecraft is strong in our family, sister."
"I must warn you," I told them as I sat. "I have good range but my ability to find people through their belongings is not strong. Though I've worked on this spell, I still often get no result."
"Just do your best. If you too have been feeling Tasha's dreams, it may make a link between you," said Tomas.
I took the lock of hair and began the ritual. Since I'd been working in Cardun I'd been practicing magic largely without the spells and rituals I had been taught as an apprentice, because it seemed quite easy for me and was quicker. Now, however, I was glad I had been trained to know the words. They helped clear the thoughts and emotions which churned my mind.
The Bowl of Seeing is the way we mages spy on each other. You can detect all magical activity for as far as you are able to see in it. It looks like pinpoints of light in a black sky. The cards of Prophecy will tell you things about the individual lights. If used by a mage with psychic powers, the Bowl and cards in conjunction with a personal object of the target can be used to locate anybody even when they are not using magical powers. This was what I was going to try to do now.
For a moment after I cast the spell however, I was too surprised to do the