but he was already halfway across the room, moving with long, purposeful strides. If only Dag would fly off in an uncharacteristic rage and send the pompous Warlock scurrying! But Dag was singularly unobliging. His men were clustered around him, clapping him on the back and yelling congratulations. Dag looked over at Emily, letting his eyes linger on her for a long time. Emily blushed furiously, heat rising up her throat. At the very least he could have gotten a yes before he started telling everyone!
In his transport of excitement and joviality, Dag didn’t even notice the Warlock standing behind him. Stanton’s throat-clearings went from quietly polite to aggressively cathartic, but were of no avail. He shifted idly from one foot to the other until he was distracted by the sight of women bringing in fresh platters of food. His nostrils twitched as he eyed the piles of fried chicken, the heaps of steaming biscuits, the mounded beef cutlets cloaked in cream gravy. Without another look at Dag, he tucked the crowbar under his arm and followed a steaming apple crisp over to the table. Emily watched with indignation as he took a plate and began to pile it high.
She was about to set the Warlock straight when someone raised a cry: “Besim!”
The call was taken up by dozens of voices: “Besim, Besim!” until finally a scrawny old man with scraggly black hair and skin the color of rawhide allowed himself to be pushed to the center of the dirt floor.
“It’s Besim!”
“Hey, Besim!”
“Do us a Cassandra!”
The request echoed, rippling in dozens of different voices: “A Cassandra, a Cassandra!”
Smiling toothlessly, Besim motioned to a young man standing nearby, who had obtained a pint bottle of whiskey and was holding it with eager anticipation. The young man leaped forward, proffering the bottle to Besim.
Besim drained it in one protracted guzzle.
The room exploded in congratulatory cheers. Coins rained down on Besim, thrown by the men in the crowd. Besim scrambled for these, thrusting them deep into his pockets.
“Regrettably, your lumberman is in no mood to discuss crowbars.” The voice came at Emily’s elbow. It was that insufferable Stanton, crowbar still under his arm and a brimming plate of food in his hand. He used a chicken leg to gesture at Besim. “So who’s this?”
“That’s Besim,” Emily said. She eyed the chicken leg meaningfully. “He’s one of those varmints who show up whenever there’s free food and liquor to be had.”
Stanton chewed thoughtfully as he watched Besim begin to spin. The old man gained speed as he rotated; bystanders pushed him back to the center whenever he threatened to topple over.
“What the devil is he doing?”
“He’s doing a Cassandra,” Emily muttered. She hated Besim’s Cassandras. The old man had once been a charm maker in Dutch Flat, and in his better days he’d been Pap’s biggest rival for custom. But the rivalry had faded as Besim slid into drunkenness and its concomitant poverty. These days, the only money he got was from his impromptu liquor-lubricated prognostications. These were doubly embarrassing to one of her profession in that while they tended toward the ridiculous, they proved right about half of the time—which was about the same success Pap had with his scrying.
“Fascinating,” Stanton said. “He’s a dervish.”
“What are you talking about?” Emily asked. “Pap always said Besim did Indian magic.”
“Rubbish. That man’s no more an Indian than I am. He’s a Turk. He was a Sufi holy man once, or he studied with one.” Stanton pointed to Besim’s hands. “See how his right palm is turned upward and his left is turned down? Power comes down from Heaven into the right hand and returns down to the earth from the left. All that energy rushing through the dervish’s body supposedly endows him with supernaturally clear insight into the true nature of all existence—past, present, and future.” He took another bite of the chicken leg. “I must say, though, the addition of a pint of whiskey tends to undercut the rite’s spiritual element.”
At that moment, Besim fell with a great crash in the middle of the floor, and lay moaning and writhing, holding his gut. Words began slurring out of his mouth.
“Emily … Emily Lyakhov” Emily froze. Besim wasn’t going to Cassandra about her, was he? She didn’t recognize the name Lyakhov, but she didn’t have time to think about it before Besim spoke again. “Emily, you have been doing bad magic.”
A few people turned to look at Emily curiously. She wished she could sink through