Lightbreaker

at any rate-know the local illuminati. They know the covens, the packs, the temples, and the societies; they know which shape and affect the local flow, and which are full of noise and flash.

My local contact was a Georgian fortune teller named Piotr Grieavik. I had met him on my third night in Seattle, and my ability to provide proper remuneration was matched by Piotr's knowledge of the city.

Piotr's shop was a twenty-two-foot Airstream trailer. After nightfall, it would appear in the corner of a parking lot near one of the white energy rivers. Its silver shell would pick up an unnatural gleam under the sodium lights of the parking lot, while the curved front windows would be lit by a warm glow as if the inside of the trailer was coated with amber. In the back window, there would be a curled piece of neon. An intricately woven pair of rings, the red and blue neon light was Piotr's calling card. Lit, he was receiving visitors; dark, he was occupied with a client.

In the early hours of this Wednesday morning, we found Piotr's trailer down near the Fisherman's Terminal in Interbay. The trailer smelled of incense, a bouquet of jasmine and pine that lay heavily on the tongue and helped to mask the smell of the nearby fishing boats. Ornately carved dragons sat in the corners of the central room, their bellies filled with incense cones. Thin strands of smoke drifted lazily from their flared nostrils.

A plush half-moon of a booth took up most of the room. Comfortable seats arced out from the curved walls like a welcoming matronly embrace. Piotr sat on one side of the dark table, playing solitaire with a normal deck of cards.

He was bald and his remaining hair-eyebrows and forearms-was white, stark contrast to the burnished copper of his skin. His teeth were smooth and even, and when he smiled, the wealth of lines creasing his face and hairless head melted away. He talked of a history that went back eighty years-stories of life at sea on a succession of Merchant Marine assignments-but the buoyant lilt of his affected English left you with an impression of youthful naivete.

'Hello, wolf,' he smiled as Nicols and I entered his warm salon. He was wearing dark pants and a crimson shirt beneath a fringed vest adorned with patches and decals of astrological symbols. Fish splashed down the left side of his chest, and a bull wrapped itself across his right shoulder. His smile broadened as he spotted the bag of candy in my hand. We had stopped at a QFC on Queen Anne to buy sweets. 'What do you have there?'

The basic rule when seeking information from an oracle, I had told Nicols when I had asked him to stop at the store: bring a gift.

I put the bag on the table near his half-finished card game. 'Caramels,' I said. 'A couple of different flavors.'

On the top of his discard pile, the card he had turned over as we had entered: the jack of spades.

He caught my glance, and tapped the card several times with a blunted forefinger. The top knuckle was missing, as was the knuckle on the middle finger next to it. Both of them, supposedly lost in a fishing accident, and I hadn't bothered to call him on his white lie. It was enough that we both knew, just as he didn't talk about some of my secrets. The cards have a way of revealing a man.

'The Prince of Swords,' he said, giving it its tarot name.

I nodded, not surprised to see the jack. Energy patterns were coalescing. Coincidences were simply a manifestation of systemic orientation. 'This is Detective John Nicols,' I said, introducing my companion. 'Seattle PD. We're working together.'

'Ah,' Piotr said. He turned his attention to the sack of caramels. 'There are neophytes in the ranks of SPD now, are there?'

'Inadvertently. And he's not the first.'

Piotr selected a candy and unwrapped it delicately. 'No,' he noted, glancing up at Nicols. 'Not the first. .'

'Have you seen Lt. Pender recently?' Nichols asked.

'Not recently.' Piotr smiled at Nicols as he popped the chewy candy in his mouth. 'The lieutenant has a tendency to neglect my sweet tooth,' he explained. 'Unlike Markham, who always brings something.'

Nicols nodded, a gracious inclination of his head. The sort of salute usually reserved for visiting royalty. He was good at reading situations and swallowing his own ego in order to make people comfortable. One of those traits of invisibility so useful to a homicide investigator. 'It would appear the lieutenant believes his position exempts him from certain obligations,' he said. 'And you aren't influenced by his shiny badge now, are you?'

Piotr's smile widened. 'Influence is the butterfly which flaps its wings and changes the weather a thousand miles away. Pender is not a butterfly.'

'Nor am I,' said Nicols. 'But I'm starting to wrap my head around the basic concepts of your special style of chaos theory.'

Piotr turned his eyes toward me. 'When the calf is born, accidental or otherwise, the farmer cannot put it back. The animal must learn how to stand, how to suck from its mother's teat. The farmer may assist the calf when it first learns, but if it is to survive, it must find its own strength. Wouldn't you agree?'

'My dad owned a potato farm,' I said. 'They didn't need much coddling. You just put them in the ground, and they grew all on their own.'

'Ah, the life of the vegetable farmer. So dependent upon the cycles. So trapped by the wheel.' Piotr pushed a hand through his game, dissolving them into a haphazard mix of red and black.

The trouble with fortune tellers was their constant exposure to the vicissitudes of chaos, which gave them an unconscious ability to know the course of a thread throughout the Weave. They were oracles, unconscious soothsayers who spoke in enigmas and mysteries. Most of them weren't even aware of the esoteric precognition that underscored their words.

I hadn't told Piotr anything about my past, neither stories of the farm nor anything about my initiation into magick. And yet, he always seemed to be readily aware of my mood and my intentions, as if they were warning labels printed across my chest. This one is hunting, and has become lost in the woods. Devoured by darkness.

Piotr's hands, like the brush of palm fronds back and forth, moved across the cards, and they became a deck. He shuffled them twice, and all the cards, regardless of their previous orientation in his motley deck, flipped themselves face-down. The backs of the cards were green with yellow and red lettering-a garish logo for one of the Indian casinos that haunted the curve of I-5 through the tulip fields up north. With a deft motion of his hands, he cut the deck, and turned over the top card of the bottom half of the stack. The jack of spades.

'The jacks are but mere princes,' he said. 'Swords to spades; the work in the field remains.' He put the deck back together and set it aside. 'Do you come under the influence of a sword?'

'It's the sword hanging over his head,' Nicols offered.

Piotr smiled again. 'And you wish to know why your hand isn't on the hilt?'

I nodded. 'Yes, I do.'

Fortune tellers. I could see a vague shimmer of the Weave when I tried, but real precognition always made my skin itch. A Deterministic Universe was not a model I found very comfortable. I, like Pandora, hoped that Free Will was what was left in the box.

'Please,' Piotr said as he stood. 'Sit.' He crossed to the miniscule kitchenette where he put the deck of playing cards in a drawer. As Nicols and I squeezed ourselves around the other side of the table, Piotr opened a cabinet and got out a wooden box. Inside was a large deck of tarot cards.

The deck was his own design, hand-painted and enchanted over a period of four years. On one of my previous visits, he had told me its history. This was the third deck he had done since coming to the United States. For many years, he had worked menial jobs-washing dishes, picking fruit, detailing cars-and the casting of fortunes was done on the tailgate of pickups, in cramped storage closets, and over upended crates behind gas stations. When he had saved up enough money to open his own shop, he burned the set that had given him life, and made a second, one meant to give him security. The third was meant to show him the way to freedom.

Dark with color, they were based on the original Visconti-Sforza designs that Bonifacio Bembo had painted in the mid-fifteenth century. Piotr's flourishes came from personal knowledge of Persian and Oriental motifs as well as Aleister Crowley's unavoidable influence upon twentieth-century magickal thought. My efforts to read the world, Piotr had told me when I had asked about the designs.

He took the deck out of the box and offered it to me. I took the cards, and started to shuffle them. Cold and slick, they stole heat from my fingers as I made them dance cheek to cheek.

'Tea,' he asked, and Nicols nodded for both of us, more out of politeness than need. In the cupboards, Piotr found a small teapot and matching china cups-frosty white with tiny inlays of blue fish. He set the kettle to boil, and