. It concerns the game of Kingdom, which I invented for the novels and which nobody has had the decency to licence and make me a rich man by producing limited edition gold-plated versions thereof. Or even a DOS game. The story takes place just before the opening of
. It's appeared at the Angry Robot website and some delightfully hand-made booklet versions were given to people who attended the book launch, but it appears here for the first time.
Lying
Like Cards: A Marius dos Hellespont Fix
An hour ago there
had been six at the table. Now there were two. Marius don Hellespont, late of
His Automancer’s Court of Taslingham, even later of the cells beneath the
court, took a moment to glance down at his cards before casually flicking over
a stack of riner coins so they splashed across the green paper tablecloth.
“Whatever that adds
up to,” he said, deliberately yawning. The fat Tallian across from him pursed
his lips.
“That is bad
etiquette, sir.”
“In this fine
place?” Marius waved a hand at the shabby, peeling wallpaper, the warped
floorboards, and the boarded up windows that surrounded them. “Where are my
manners?” He nodded at the coins. “Whatever that adds up to. See it or raise,
tubby.”
The fat man waited
enough that Marius knew he was beaten. The game of Kingdom was a complex one,
if you paid attention to the cards, and it became more difficult the fewer
players were at the table. Ostensibly, the object was to build the hand most
closely resembling the current ruling class: Royal family, if you were in
Scorby, Council of Elders in Zerpha, Automancer’s Cabal in Taslingham, and so
on. If you were paying attention to the cards. Only the most trusting of
beginners did that.
Real players, and
Marius was a real player, knew that the object of the game was much simpler: to
take your opponent’s money. The cards were immaterial. What counted was keeping
your opponent off-balance– learning their tells, their psychological
weaknesses, and then exploiting them. Like all truly great sports, Kingdom was
won by the one who best played the man. The Tallian hesitated the tiniest
smidgeon, and Marius had him.
“Gods damn it.” The
fat man blew out his cheeks, aiming to recover lost bravado. “Gods damn.” He
made a show of counting the coins, then counting them again. Marius very
deliberately did not leer like a greedy baby snatcher. “All right,” his victim
said. “All right.” He riffled his stack, came to the decision Marius knew he
was coming to all along. “All in.” He moved his pile into the centre of the
table.
Marius didn’t count
them. He had no need. He knew he had the bet covered. He paused just long
enough to make him sweat, then casually smiled and laid his cards face down
before him. “Call.”
A queen, a prince,
a knight, three nobles, a peasant. Pretty close. Good enough to win most hands.
The fat man stared at them for several seconds, then raised his gaze to Marius.
“One peasant.” He
snapped the card onto the table. “Three nobles.” Snap. “One knight.” Snap. “One
prince.” He held up the last card, turned it so that it faced Marius. “One
King.” He laid it down with a grin, slid it into place with the others. “My
hand, I think.”
He reached out to draw in Marius’
coins. To their right, a door crashed open.
“What the fuck?”
Both players reared back from the table as if stung. A soldier was standing in
the doorway.
“The King!” he
roared. “The King has been killed!”
“What?”
“Assassins from the
house of Belchester! The King is dead!” He flung himself back out the door. The
room erupted in a mad scramble to follow him: off duty guardsmen and civil
militiamen hurling themselves towards distant guardhouses, to swords tucked
over lintels, to scythes and halberds and sharpening wheels in front yards. As
the room emptied, Marius raised a sympathetic eyebrow at his stunned opponent,
and began scooping coins into his pockets.
“Tough timing,” he
said, and rose before the fat Tallian could recover himself enough to object.
“Still, the cards never lie.”
# # #
Marius sat in a
booth at the back of ‘The Hauled Keel’ and watched his young apprentice Gerd
weave through the crowd, two tankards of Krehmlager in his beefy fists,
plonking down opposite his master and passing one over. Marius raised it in
salute, and took a long swallow.
“You hid the
armour?” he asked, once he’d recovered his breath. Gerd took a sip, and choked.
“In a barrel on
Pudding Alley.”
“Good. Good.”
Marius removed a short stack of coins from a pocket and slid it over. “Your
share.” Gerd accepted it without counting. Trusting lad. Stupid boy. Marius
felt the weight of all the winnings secreted around his body, and took another
swallow to help ignore a sudden pang of conscience. From outside came shouts,
and a clattering so loud that even the seasoned drinkers within the pub were
silent for a moment.
“What’s that?” Gerd
stood, and turned towards the window. Marius tilted his head.
“Soldiers,” he said
after a moment. “Forming up in front of Traitor’s Gate.”
“Isn’t that the…”
“Road to
Belchester?” Marius nodded. Gerd slowly sat down.
“You don’t
think..?”
Marius took a long
draught of his lager, shook his head, and signalled a passing girl for another
while he recovered the feeling in his face. Krehmlager was traditionally
strong. The Hauled Keel’s brewing room deserved its own hospital. “No,” he
said, finally, flipping a coin through suddenly-clumsy fingers. “And even if
there’s a little skirmish or something, nothing will come out of it but
opportunity.”
The new pints
arrived. He picked his up and gestured to Gerd to do the same. “Drink up,” he
said. “We’ve got to get our stuff and be ready to follow them.” He smiled,
thinking of the riches to be had on the battlefield to come. “I’m going to
teach you how to be a corpse-rat.”
