A/N: Being a Discworld story that is not in the Discworld style, featuring a Gambler, some Card Sharps, a Goddess, and Death. Rated for slight swearing, several deaths, and first-person POV. Unbetaed, because I currently do not have a Discworld beta.
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They say you'll never know what the Lady thinks until it's too late.
Take me. I loved Her, I did, loved Her as no other ever could. I devoted my whole life to Her, as best I could. Devoting your whole life to a deity like Her is difficult to do. Firstly, there's getting Her attention. Then there's having the bravery to do the things that will keep it.
Ours is an unusual guild. There's two types of gambler, see. There's the genuine professional – the one with three apparently identical sets of dice and two dozen nations' worth of royalty secreted about his person in some highly unlikely places. Our guild is mostly made up of those – card sharps, they're called. They don't need Her, not really. They can handle the games without any bother.
Then there's the other sort. My sort. We're rare – very rare, and the ordinary gamblers treat us with a kind of awed reverence.
Because we don't cheat. Not ever. We shuffle with scrupulous honesty, we check the dice before we toss them just to make sure. If ours was an ordinary religion, we'd be the High Priests. We play fair.
And we win.
That's why the card sharps look up to us. Most of us die young – sooner or later, we lose Her favour. But the ones who survive, the ones who keep on winning – those ones are Her favourites. Every evening, we get up, we go down to the Guild Hall, we toss the dice or pick up our cards and we smile and we bluff and we hope like hell – and somehow, we get away with it, and go to bed in the morning with enough money to pay the entire city's back taxes, which is saying something.
Of course, the riches never last long. Every god demands sacrifices, and She's no different. She never says it in so many words – well, She very seldom speaks at all, so that's hardly surprising. But we all know that She's got little interest in wealthy men. So the money goes into the Widows and Orphans fund, and once the fund is overflowing, it goes to other charities. Of all the guilds in the city, we're the only ones who pay our taxes every time.
After all, we've got to do something with the money. And though no one ever says it aloud, spending it on ourselves would come very close to sacrilege.
Keeping her attention is hard to do. You have to keep on taking risks, raising the stakes, or She gets bored. I was one of the best. I was twenty-nine years old, and I'd been gambling since I was fifteen. I'd taken every risk I could take, and She'd brought me through safe. It had gotten to the point where I was starting to run out of ideas. I'd played every game there was. I'd played with amateurs, I'd played with professionals, I'd even played with little old women dressed all in black, which, believe me, is seldom a good idea. I'd wagered copper, silver, gold, precious stones, my clothes, my friends, my life, the Guild, the Patrician's Palace and Pseudopolis.
What can a gambler do when he's run out of gambles?
It seemed like a good idea at the time. If She was pleased, I'd have a winning formula. If she wasn't… well, everyone dies sooner or later, and for us it tends to be sooner anyway.
I had nothing to lose but my life, and that was Hers already.
I got some of the younger lads together. Like I said, the sharps admire us. They were all too ready to try and gain Her favour. If you play your cards right, I said. What have we to lose, I said.
We did it in one of the basements, at the dead of night. As religious rites go, it was fairly simple. Nobody needed an apron. We crept back to our rooms afterwards. I was scared. I had a feeling I'd made the mistake of my life.
It was confirmed the next morning when I discovered that Richardson had had a heart attack in the night. At the breakfast table, Torrifel took three bites of his toast and turned pale. He died of food poisoning a few hours later. Gopher slipped out to – er – get his socks darned – a bit later on. On the way home, he tripped over a loose cobblestone and fell in the Ankh.
It went on like that all week. By the time the next rite should have been performed, they were all dead. Only me left.
One thing I've learned in this Guild – if you're one of the sharps, you quit while you're ahead. If you're one of Hers, you keep going. You can't have a change of luck at the last minute unless you keep on until the last minute.
I went down alone to the basement, and waited. We'd commissioned a statue of Her on the guild's account. We all of us had a different idea of what She looked like, so in the end it was just a recognisably female, faceless figure, dressed in robes, with a dice cup in one hand and a fan of cards in the other.
I watched it. It was a while before I heard the click of bone on the floor behind me. "I suppose it was too much of a risk, then," I said.
CORRECT, said a voice.
You'll never know what She thinks until it's too late. She's a cruel, fickle goddess. Fall in love with Her, and She kicks you in the teeth.
But then –
You could say that of any goddess, couldn't you?
And I died happy.