God of Tarot Read Online Free Page A

the deck; how could he have missed it? “I’m afraid I—”
    “No, I am serious. The Tarot is a legitimate way to approach a problem—especially in this case. Let this define you.”
    She dealt the first card, careful to turn it over side-wise rather than end-over-end, so as not to reverse it, while Brother Paul concealed his agitation. He had made a foolish mistake that was about to cause them both embarrassment. He tried to think of some reasonable pretext to break up this reading, but all that came into his mind was a sacrilegious anecdote about Pope Joan, personification of the Whore of Babylon, epithet for the Roman Catholic Church. Such a thought was scandalous in the presence of the Reverend Mother Mary, who was completely chaste. Unless she had summoned him here to— No, impossible! A completely unworthy concept for which he would have to impose self-penance!
    The card was the Ace of Wands, the image of a hand emerging from a cloud, bearing a sprouting wooden club.
    “Amazing,” the Reverend remarked. “This signifies the beginning of a great new adventure.”
    A great new adventure—with her? He tried hard to stifle the notion, fiendishly tempting as it was! In that moment he wished she were eighty years old, with a huge, hairy wart on her nose. Then his thoughts would behave. “Well, I must explain—”
    “Shall we try the second?” She dealt another card from the top of the deck. She was feeling more at ease now; the cards were helping her to express herself. “Let this cross you,” she said, placing the card sideways across the first.
    May God have mercy ! he thought fervently.
    She looked at the second card, startled. “The Ace of Cups!”
    “You see, I—I—” Brother Paul stammered.
    The Reverend frowned. She was one of those women who looked even sweeter in dismay than in pleasure, if such a thing were possible. Silently she laid down the third card. It was the Ace of Swords. Then the fourth: the Ace of Corns. In each case, a hand was pictured emerging from a cloud, bearing the appropriate device.
    Her gray-green eyes lifted to bear on him reproachfully.
    “I did not realize what you intended,” Brother Paul explained lamely. “I—old habits—I did not intend to embarrass you.” No doubt Dante’s Inferno had a special circle for the likes of him!
    Mother Mary took a deep breath, then smiled—a burst of sunlight. “I had forgotten that you were once a cardsharp.” She glanced down at the four aces and made a moue. “Still are, it seems.”
    “Retired,” Brother Paul said quickly. “Reformed.”
    “I should hope so.” She gathered up the cards.
    “I’ll shuffle them again, the right way,” he offered.
    She made a minor gesture of negation. “The wrong is the teacher of the right.” But the ice had been broken. “Paul, it does not matter how you shuffled, so long as you formulated the correct question.”
    And of course he had not formulated it; he had been full of idle notions about the deck, Pope Joan, and such. His face was a mere shell, papering over the disaster of his mind.
    “You are indeed about to embark on a remarkable new adventure—if you so choose.”
    Suddenly he realized that his penance would be to go on this mission, no matter how onerous it might prove. Today’s declining civilization provided a number of most unpleasant situations. “I go where directed,” Brother Paul said.
    “Not this time. I cannot send you on this particular round, and neither can the Order. You must volunteer for it. Knowing you as I do, I am sure you will volunteer, and therefore I am responsible.” She looked up to the ceiling of rough-hewn logs. She was, he knew, making a quick, silent prayer. “I fear for you, Paul, and my soul suffers.”
    The eternal feminine! A mission had found its way down through the Order hierarchy, and she was upset because he might accept it. This was no mere rhetoric on her part; now one hand clutched the Tarot deck lightly, and now the other