Chapter 5 – In the Drink
While the surreal, back-breaking labor of liberating his new home from the clutches of hundreds of thousands of tiny calcium-secreting organisms did not take Random and Igan the rest of his year's undersea sentence, the full job took longer than even Vialle had initially thought it would, overestimating her supernatural husband's speed when such nitpicky work was at hand: even with her helping them to sweep up occasionally, it still took over two Rebman six-day 'weeks', a full fifteen days of hammering, scouring, searching, steam-frying, and applying so much of the tacky caulking compound to the ceiling and high walls in areas that the townhouse was bound to reek of that alone for most of the coming ngan. It was a welcome change to the prince's nose, however, even if it was a little astringent. (And while it hadn't been terribly difficult to snare the eelpout in the bedroom, his wife informed him that the fish was not a good choice for eating – too many little bones – and so the hapless creature was taken outside and given its freedom much to the prince's personal disgust and disappointment, watching as the thing sluggishly swam away down the alley, hugging the walls for warmth.) The most difficult section of the townhouse to work on had been hands-down the screw-spiral stairwell. There had been no way to secure anything that could've been used to stand on and the boy could only swim for so long against the less-buoyant water before the extra exertion began to legitimately sap his energy. The prince finally came up with a somewhat unorthodox solution suggested to him by Igan's own initial impertinence: while Vialle had her office hours downstairs, Random hammered hooks into the ceiling itself to secure net 'hammocks' for them both to rest on, giving their full strength to the prying and chiseling. The blind woman was hardly likely to notice two-dozen more holes in her house, and the structure did not seem in any danger from the multitude that had already been drilled more naturally – it was all covered over in the end anyway. Every building along their corridor was doubtless centuries old: they were thick-walled and strong, natural cement, built to withstand the ages with only a minimum of upkeep. In time the prince began to notice the dull chiseling sounds sporadically about the neighborhood when their windows were open during the 'day'.
"We live in Lir's mouth," Vialle answered him once when he remarked upon it in passing. "It is only natural that he is always trying to swallow us."
The thought was hardly comforting to an old Lander; it was all too easy to imagine being subsumed by Rebma, one's color and will fading away in the current as surely as the prince's tan was already gone, as he took on the sunless pallor of the Undersea Kingdom.
He settled into the monotony of once again being at loose ends down here with nothing to do and virtually no autonomy or means with which to enjoy it. One of the built-in perks of being a Prince of Amber was a virtually bottomless wallet out in Shadow if one wished it; privation under 'normal' circumstances was unheard of in the family save for rarely in times of war or temporarily winding up someplace hostile by accident as the result of a badly-planned hellride. Having all the time in the worlds and an unbelievably long lifetime was fine so long as one could choose what to do with them. Without that choice…
Random paced the pristine fourth-floor sitting room, unable to sit still any longer. He knew the titles of all the medical textbooks there by heart, packed together inartistically on the three shelves they'd been reassigned after the bookcase had been scraped of shipworms and rubbed down with a thick waxy secretion 'to smother what was left'. The tomes were as illegible as ever to him, even trying to make the text more visible by angling his taper in relation to the pages to no avail. They had to have cost her a pretty obol to press, but upon closer inspection it was easy enough to see how it had been done – with some kind of soft weights to indent the textblocks from the printing press into the marine vellum on the 'wrong' side sans ink in single pages; their content might well be one of the only things in here that he could rightly categorize as 'dry'.
He knew the contents of every drawer and cupboard in the kitchen like the back of his hand now, even if some of the implements were foreign to him, because they'd had to sweep that all out, too. And he'd studied the five remaining unique human busts in Vialle's studio – four more female and one male, all obviously modeled on real people – until he was on the verge of naming them. At least he wasn't in the frame of mind to start naming the urns and vases yet.
True, he was technically at liberty to travel about the city at will – albeit only as far as his scale-shod feet could carry him one jaunt at a time – but the half-dozen times he'd been out by himself so far he had felt the distinct cold shoulder that virtually all capitalist societies bestow upon an individual lacking a wallet; once he was actually shown the door in a clothing establishment that didn't take kindly to frivolous window-shopping. And while it was also technically possible for one of the blood of Oberon to shadow-walk out of Rebma, the likelihood of him making it back to a land world by passing through myriad alien seas with even more alien marine metropolises and native inhabitants was so slim that he was as good as in an aquarium here and Moire knew it. That little bit of information had been learned by Princess Llewella in her youth: even for one who considered herself a Rebman, who had been raised under the waves, the experience would have been fatal for her had she not been outfitted with a bodyguard squad for the expedition; one of her retinue had not been so lucky…
And while Random's wife was obviously doing her best to be kind and charming, her occupation and its oath of professional secrecy all but tongue-tied her in the evenings when she came upstairs and made them dinner. He knew all about the rest of her scant life by now – the borough she had come from and grown up in, her training as a healer and chemist, what she made in a year, when her next batch of vases was going to market, and so on and so forth. She kept trying to draw him out in turn, and while he would favor her with a few old tales – usually edited for content, sometimes heavily so – he really wasn't comfortable telling anyone too much about himself. It was just the way they had all been raised: any exposed weakness was a signed invitation to attack, as if they lived their entire long lives upon the fencing strip. Many of the couple's nights wound up being quiet, too – Vialle reading to herself, laboring over some passage in one of her reference tomes that she felt the need to brush up on for one of her patients, Random gazing at the blurred lights of the city out one of the octagonal windows, the sparse foot traffic down below on their street, the same people coming and going every day, as regularly as the tide, with little variance.
What really troubled the prince, though, was with what ease Vialle could get information about himself to fall from his lips, the knowledge of it putting him on his guard. Not telling anyone – family, friends, lovers, total stranger, but especially family – about his past fiascos and present foibles had literally been a means of staying alive for centuries. And you didn't get much more 'family' than a wife. Even though he rationally knew that she wasn't actively looking to sell him out to the highest bidder. The girl was only trying to fulfill her duty to him as best she could, as much as he was allowing (which wasn't much – the bar was remarkably low.)
And the times that she crawled over to his side of their spongy mattress at night only to hold him in her lithe, smooth arms, he let her, his own slim-but-strong ones finding their way around her soft young torso; she was silently awaiting a more overly sexual overture but refused to press the issue, at most granting him a few chaste kisses, not once complaining. His wife was only taking a kind of animal comfort in his physical presence – that was alright. It might've even been tempting to do more with her whether his heart was in it or not, but as far as the prince had been able to glean, there wasn't much physical contraception in Rebma, not even anything analogous to a condom. Nearly five-hundred years' sexual activity and no resultant pregnancies had made him careless; he could no longer afford to be so. And he wasn't about to introduce the girl to the full pleasures of the flesh when the chances of her experiencing them again without him was so abysmally low. On the whole, though, she really was an extraordinarily good little moll, he'd grant her that much, even if he'd never say it aloud; the thought usually came to him on nights like this one, with her trustingly asleep half-across his chest, cuddled up, her long, dark, silky hair partly spread over his torso like a slipped sheet. She seemed nearly content with her lot in life, limited as it was. Almost happy.
If Random had to be this good for much longer he was going to scream. He couldn't even let loose and ravish the brazenly topless and willing nubile girl lying on top of him just to let off steam! And there was certainly no point in talking to her about it – he already knew she wouldn't approve of this part of his nature: the rambler, the rover of a thousand-and-one worlds, as trustworthy as his given name… except when it came to gambling – that he took deadly seriously, but chiefly because he was talented enough and lucky enough to win far more than he ever lost at most games, especially cards, and he never cheated, although his almost uncanny abilities at the poker table had resulted in more than a few fist-fights with sore opponents and gang members over the years; the little bit of boxing he had learned from Gérard as a boy had served him well, saving his nose from being broken on more than one occasion.
And while he wasn't entirely certain of what nightlife there was to be had near this poor borough of Rebma, if his memory of the True City would serve, there were a few seedy bars in the corresponding neighborhoods in Amber…
Ever-so-carefully, practically willing her to stay asleep, bit by bit Random extricated himself from his wife's somnolent embrace with painful slowness, not even daring to move his gel-filled pillow into her arms instead – she was too darned sensitive to these things as it was – rising inch by inch until he was standing in the pitch blackness. Feeling for the walls, he gently kicked out of the room and swam downstairs to Vialle's clinic, letting himself in with the keys in the hall and finally daring to allow himself a light; he'd no idea how, but darned if she couldn't smell the incineration of these mineral tapers against all the other briny smells in the house! Quietly walking to her back office and opening the door, he quickly made his way to the metal desk in the center and pulled out a certain drawer on the bottom left, removing the carved limestone 'cash box'. Unlike in Amber, Rebma's sole bank was strictly for the wealthy, and even they sometimes preferred treasure chests if they could afford to guard them. Vialle didn't make much from her practice – that was the hard truth of their existence – but surely a drachma or two wouldn't set her back too far.
'Us' too far, he corrected himself: he'd married her, and by legal right of the land it was his money, too, to spend as he saw fit.
"Husband? What are you doing?" her faint voice came down the stairwell, along with her near-silent footsteps.
And, of course, she was an irritatingly light sleeper, although he had since learned that this was a commonality of many blind persons, not just his wife. It was still inconvenient at times like this; he fingered the three silver coins he had taken out, putting back the box, righting the drawer, walking out of the office.
"I can't sleep. I'm going out," he announced definitely in a tone not to be questioned, breezing back into the hall with the taper.
"But we have yet to purchase your skin-suit – you'll freeze out there!"
"Aw, c'mon doll, it can't be that bad, or all those little stray fish from the mansions on the hill would be dead! I'll wear my cloak," he irritatedly placated her, removing the aforementioned article from its hook on the wall, clasping it about his neck with its cowrie-clasp, stepping into and lacing up his dolphin-leather moccasins; she had disappeared up the stairwell in a flurry of current – but came back just as quickly.
"At least take a couple of water ampules with you as well; it is surprisingly easy to become dehydrated down here," she held them out toward him with just the slightest hint of a wry smile. She hadn't pressed him to take along freshwater on any of his day jaunts. Which meant that she knew exactly what he was up to.
"One," he said pointedly, taking the grenade-shaped kelp canister out of her right hand. "Don't wait up for me – go back to bed, get some sleep," he ordered a little more gently.
She just nodded, finding his free hand, pressing the spare house-key into it – where it clinked against the coins.
"Be safe, Husband; try to stay close to the buildings," was all she said as she accepted the taper, extinguishing it but leaving it on the floor by the door where he could easily locate it, wandering back upstairs in the dark.
Stepping outside, closing and locking the back door behind him in near-total blackness, the prince very nearly had a fleeting misgiving of going out at all at this hour here. Random had lived long enough in 'modern' technological shadows that the idea of nightlife and 'bright city lights' rather appealed to him, playing hard all hours of the night at the gaming table or in a band, retiring comfortably drunk with a girl (or two, or three) in the dawn's reassuringly warming, rosy embrace – right before he closed the blinds. In fact this visual of an electrified metropolis at night had been serving to keep him sane for some weeks now – it was almost easy to willingly delude himself into thinking that the entire populace of Rebma was nocturnal, and when the dawn came they simply shut it out.
But he knew it wasn't true. His townhouse didn't even have curtains. And it was chilly out here, moreso as he moved into the alley and blindly made his way toward the street, wrapping his cloak tightly about his exposed arms and torso, pulling the hood up; it was like the effect of humidity on ambient temperature quintupled and squared. The block was deserted, a big alien emptiness now, the pervasive darkness literally oppressive, heavy-feeling, and he momentarily gulped seawater in spite of himself. It was a just a little too easy to imagine getting crushed down here at the bottom of the world he knew, watching those last bubbles of breath sail away, lost…
He presently shook himself of his temporary morbidity, forcing his feet to move forward toward the guttering street lights (which also served as outdoor ambient heat during the 'day'); they were extinguished, but allowed to smolder until being replace with fresh blocks of the compound the next 'morning' – there was a joke.
This was reality.
As his eyesight gradually adjusted to the dim abyss (there was just barely enough illumination coming from a small handful of windows to see by), he was beginning to notice the faint firefly-green twinkling coming from far, far above the city: the bioluminescent denizens of the Twilight Zone ocean were just visible in Rebma once all the competing light sources were removed, sparkling and shooting about like tiny living stars in a miasmic proto-heavens; sometimes odd, glowing clouds of jellyfish drifted by in pods at varying altitudes, the light wavering, flowing like an aquatic aurora borealis.
They should paint it on postcards, the prince thought snarkily; it was just the sort of thing that tourists would love, if tourism had been encouraged by the Undersea Kingdom. It was not.
Between not being able to make out any street signs, along with his lingering unfamiliarity with the neighborhoods even in the 'daytime', it took Random longer to find an open tavern that he'd thought it would…and Vialle had not been kidding about the buildings: the limestone literally felt warm to the touch of his liquid-chilled limbs; if he hadn't found an open lit doorway when he did, he would've been tempted to press his back up against a wall to try and recover a little body heat whilst grappling for his bearings.
Once through the lightly sea-slimed portal, the blast of temperately warm water felt like walking face-first into an oven before the chill melted out of the prince's bones, the dim (cheap) 'mood' lighting disproportionately bright in his eyes as he took in the room: the bar itself was treated wood salvage from a shipwreck – probably of Amberite origin – but the rest of the furniture looked local enough, with the exception of a fancy ornamental chair or two that clearly should've been better preserved than they were, literally rotting slowly where they sat, the equally scruffy patrons seemingly heedless of the decay, nearly fixtures of the décor themselves, as Random had seen in countless dive bars ashore; a few turned only briefly at his entrance.
He had come to the right place.
Random casually strode across the sparsely filled tavern up to the bar as if he were one of them, amid sharp faces chiseled acutely in the torchlight, some sporting scars, eel-like eyes following him upon his approach once his hood was lowered: his blonde hair instantly marked him a stranger. Nearly everyone here was suited in the 'diving' skins, some carrying big fish trapper gear as well as smaller weapons of the kind permitted to civilians – a dagger here, a dart-gun there – but all were conspicuously out in the open.
"And what'll be your pleasure, newcomer?" the buff, dark-haired, battleworn bartender growled at him good-naturedly. "You can't have been here long if you were wandering around out there in that like a merrow in the night," he cracked a crooked smile, his sea-green Rebman eyes mocking. "You may think you're tough, but cover your hide, Lander – you'll live longer."
"What all have you got on tap here?" Random forcibly ignored the ingratiating dig. "Anything beyond the usual fire-slime?"
"Funny you should ask, Lander," the dark sinuous brows went up. "Got me a shipment off a strange shadow-merchant not two ngan hence, and it's not selling well with the locals, but maybe you'll take a fancy to it – it's supposed to be a sea-safe version of a Lander-spirit, but I wouldn't know myself; odd stuff," he shook his head. "Does the job right, though, and it seems reasonably safe to drink. Here, try one on the house."
And with that the bartender reached below the bar and brought up a large glass cylinder jar filled with smallish orbs of deep-amber, gold, and near-colorless liquids, in an air-pocket! Random's brow furrowed in a little honest trepidation as the man took a pair of padded ice tongs and carefully extracted one dark blob without disturbing the preserving bubble, holding it out to the prince.
"Put it in your mouth quick before the outer wrapper dissolves," he ordered with a grin, setting the glass cylinder on the bar without disturbing it; there had to be a suction mechanism involved with the water-pressure as well, to keep them from falling out like that. "Then close your gob tight, pop it against the roof of your mouth and swallow. You can eat the membrane – it's only seaweed gel, or so he told me."
Random eyed the bartender and what he was proffering him dubiously for a second longer, then acted before he could think about it any further: the outside turned out to be a thin, tasteless chewy gelatin, but once broken a familiar hard liquor spilled into his mouth along with a few incense-y, spicy flavors, and his eyes widened in surprised realization; he swallowed before it could get watered down by the liquid he was breathing, or accidentally drift down the wrong pipe.
"That's Glenlivit whiskey!" he exclaimed with a shocked laugh. "But what have they done to it?!"
"Beats me," the bartender shrugged. "Landers are accustomed to all manner of exotic food and drink we don't have down here. I thought you might know."
"It's probably why the supplier thought he saw a market opportunity," Random's gaze drifted back to the jar. "They're like miniature prefabricated cocktails."
"What?"
"Mixed drinks, with wheat-alcohol – you've never even had a mixed drink before, have you? Those are all different flavors, aren't they? With the colors?"
"Aye – the tan ones are sour and bitter, though; bet those have already gone bad."
"I doubt it," the prince smirked, "it's probably just 'bitters' – digestive herbs. But you are right: Glenlivit tastes best straight. How much are you charging for these little abominations?"
"Four for four-fifths of a drachma; like I said, I'm having difficulty selling them."
Random put one silver coin on the bar. "Keep the change," he slid it over, where it was accepted with a nod. "Give me a light one next."
"Well, well," a vaguely familiar, disdainful male voice came from the shadows by the left wall, as notes of tart citrus exploded over the prince's tongue with the next pod, "if it isn't the male sea-devil, come to wallow in his misfortune like a common bottom-trawler." A tall, well-built Rebman with long aqua hair strode into the light, and Random marked him well as the troublemaker in the street from his second day in the city, but there were plenty of witnesses in the tavern if the youth dared anything rash. The prince was determined that the law would be on his side this time.
The man wasn't alone, though. "Why waste such a fine Rebman insult on a Lander who wouldn't know a black devilfish from a haddock by name?" a sneering older male voice rejoindered before Random could speak. "Although it is choice: a tiny male that parasitically latches onto a blind female solely so that she can use his seed. How long, do you think, before she dissolves his brains and his bones, lads?"
"Not long – he don't have much of a spine to begin with," a gruffer lower voice replied from across the room, in the light, its owner's face craggy and scarred by at least one trident thrust.
Random took a steadying breath, remembering the preternatural cool of his one or two half-brothers that he found less reprehensible. He hadn't come here for this shit tonight; if it wasn't to escalate, he had to shut it down right now.
"You're entitled to your own provincial, ill-informed opinions, sonny," he casually turned to face the aqua stranger, looking up to meet his pale-green eyes squarely, "and I don't think you really want to hear what I think of you for trying to cause my wife unprovoked physical injury in public, for all of Rebma to see. So let's just agree not to bloody up this nice-seeming gentleman's establishment and dislike each other festeringly in silence, huh?"
"Coward," the Rebman spat.
"It's not cowardly to refuse to kill a man because he's too short-sighted to have any common sense or manners," the prince answered coldly. "I don't even know your first name and I don't care to. Move along, kid."
The fist that flashed toward his cheek should have landed with enough force to break the prince's neck, but he dodged it with such speed that his Rebman assailant was momentarily stunned as his previous momentum spun him off-balance; he barely caught himself against the bar to keep from falling, shock clearly written in his handsome, sharp features.
"Don't do this," Random stood his ground; the bartender quietly placed the jar of whiskey pods back beneath the counter to protect them. Other shadow-humanoid forms were drifting closer, but whether to watch or to fight he wasn't entirely sure. Too bad the exit looked so far away.
The antagonistic young Rebman caught his breath, obviously struggling to control the aftereffects of his previous burst of temper… and a slow smile bled across his pale face. "I challenge you to a full round of Sailorbones," he tilted his chin up, pronouncing loudly and clearly enough that the whole room could hear; there were a few audible gasps. "Your reputation as a skilled gambler also precedes you. Here in Rebma we have a game of pure chance, fate even. Let Lir decide between us, then, humiliating the one deserving of humiliation, and the winner lightening the loser's purse – that is, if your wife lets you have one," he added the small barb.
"Dyfan, no!" the sneering voice suddenly piped up in warning with a real note of alarm – what did that portend?
"How is it played?" the prince ventured guardedly.
The man named Dyfan grinned widely as the shark whose leather he was wearing; he gestured to the bartender, who looked none too pleased, yet produced two ceramic cups, placing them on the bar upside-down. He reached into a drawstring purse at his belt and removed several objects, lifting them up to the light in his open palm so that the prince could see…
It was a small handful of bleached, desegmented mid-phalanges that had been thinly coated in some kind of clear shellac: human toe bones! Eight of them!
"Waste not," he added tauntingly.
Random only arched an eyebrow, unfazed. He was aware of 'old world' games that used bones for playing pieces, albeit usually just common animal bones leftover from slaughter; he even knew how to play a few of them. "So it's dice, then," he pronounced, "with the side most unlikely to land right-side-up scoring highest?" He was better at winning card games like poker, but he wasn't all that shabby with dice, either.
"Nay, it would be counted on the side on which they land – if we were playing at it as children. This is no parlor game of rolling cubes. We're all but poor laborers here; there isn't so much as a pair of dice in the whole of this room. There is no score, no tally in Sailorbones; only winning and losing."
There was a strange glint in the young man's eyes; the tavern had gone deadly quiet.
"You mean to tell me if I win at this you'll leave me the hell alone and walk out of here with your face intact?"
"And not with so much as a tiny obol to my purse – but of course it will not be me who loses."
Random scoffed, shaking his head. "You've got a big mouth on you, and a bigger ego, but it's nothing I'm not used to. Alright," he sighed, "I'll do it just to shut you up – but you leave my wife alone in the future regardless, is that understood? Try anything like tripping her again and you're going to be missing your front teeth faster than you can blink."
The Rebman merely chuckled. "I'd say we're pretty fairly matched then, your highness," he threw the honorific at him as if it were an insult. "Put your money where your mouth is: here's mine!" he dug into the purse and dumped a fistful of silver coins onto the bar.
"Not bad," the prince conceded with a nod. The idiot was hot-headed but he came prepared; he spotted a few tetradrachms in the pile. Random reluctantly placed his remaining two drachms on the bar. "I hadn't come ready for a betting spree; there's more at home to back that up if necessary. But it won't be."
"Enough," Dyfan uttered with a snort, dividing up the toe bones, placing four beside Random's cup. "We shake them thrice within the cups, then bring them down on the bar together covered. Ready?" he scooped his own into the enameled stoneware.
Vialle could have made those cups…
Random forced his mind back to the present, cupping his own bone-dice, covering the mouth of the cup with his left hand as his opponent had done. Three shakes later they slammed the cups down on the bar, their contents hitting the preserved wood in a crazy muffled rattle. The prince went to peek at his, assuming the game was played like Liar's Dice – but an ice-pale hand from behind shot forward to stop him, covering his own.
"Nay, milord," the sharp-faced, purple-mopped sneerer edged into the light, his eyes as baleful and savage as a deep-sea angler, "the betting is performed double-blinded. As Dyfan said, this is a contest of Fate," he withdrew his hand.
That did surprise Random – he'd thought he could at least leverage his guesses using his own hand – but it ultimately meant that both of them were literally shooting in the dark; neither could ever have an advantage. This truly was a game of chance. He could only hope that Lady Luck would continue to look a little more kindly upon a man who had been named for her nature.
"Five lie prone top-down," the Rebman youth opened.
Random thought a moment, visualizing the shape of the pieces, how all they could fall, possibly even getting stacked or caught on each other in odd places.
"Only four top-down," he countered, "but one leans on another angled, and two are on their sides."
"Five lie down on their faces," the Rebman reasserted, "two lean on their partners of old, and one sleeps on his side alone."
There was a strange certainty in the youth's eyes, something akin to faith; the prince had never seen the like at the betting table.
"Dream on, sonny," Random said quietly without a hint of cruelty. "Nobody can know that much without even knowing his own hand. You're about to lose, trying to look fancy like that."
"You challenge it?"
"With reality. Let's see."
Dyfan lifted his cup with a measured slowness so as not to disturb its contents with a sudden slight gust of current, and Random pried his up with equal care… and his eyes fairly popped out of his head: his opponent was right! It was a perfect bet, with the 'one lying asleep' under his own cup! The Rebman's friends cheered him, slapping his back as he accepted a drink one of them had just bought for him. He pocketed Random's money, shoving ahead four drachms of his own.
"Care to earn your dignity back?" he baited the prince, taking a sip.
Random eyed him like a hawk. "That was a freak outcome."
"Was it?"
The prince stared a moment longer, then suddenly laughed at himself for where his mind had gone temporarily. "How many rolls is a full round of Sailorbones?"
"Twenty-two."
He nodded, turning to the bartender, who looked unduly concerned for him. "Give me one of the bitter ones; I need my wits for this." The dark man passed him another liquor-filled packet that quickly met its end in the prince's mouth, the familiar taste of vermouth-laced whiskey cementing his nerve. "Ready when you are," he turned back to his challenger – and experienced a moment of fleeting misgiving in spite of himself: the youth's expression was that of a matador just before delivering the death-thrust to the bull.
The bones were rolled again and Random, being the loser, opened the bidding, trying to remember what he knew of bone games, which falls were more statistically likely. He started conservatively, with three 'men' dead facedown in the muck (it didn't hurt anything to try the proper lingo.)
"Nay, two merely rest on their backs, and one is about to score abed; one stands off to the side, waiting his turn," Dyfan rejoindered with a teasing tilt to his grin that had likely seen a woman or two to his own bed.
"Four old men snore on their faces," Random countered. "I don't have to account for all of them, do I?"
"No, but Fate watches us all, and two of your men sleep on their sides, faced together as brothers."
"No brother of mine would do that."
Dyfan genuinely laughed. "You challenge again?"
Random scoffed. "You're crazy, Charlie."
"Who?"
"Just - lift it already."
They did…and the youth had won again, another perfect bet!
It was impossible.
"The game's rigged. I'm through playing," Random turned to go.
"You cannot walk away in the middle of a round of Sailorbones without consequence," the youth warned, "folkway forbids. You openly concede your guilt if you do. I could fetch a soldier in here right now and tell him what you've done to me and what you have threatened, and he would take me at my word due to the wins, which have been adequately witnessed."
"How dumb do you hope I am?!" the prince shot back. "Let me see your pieces. And you cup."
The Rebman couldn't stop laughing as he freely handed them over, although some of the others present did not look quite so jolly. Random examined each of those bones very carefully. None of them were sanded, weighted or magnetized; they hadn't been tampered with in any way, shape or form, not even energy residue from a spell. And the cups were just cups, nothing hidden beneath the glaze; his house-key found no magnetic purchase. He glanced suspiciously down at the bar, then at the bartender who automatically raised his open hands in a universal placating gesture, shaking his head; his concern was too unpracticed, too genuine to be faked.
"Is it possible for me to win at this?" he put to the man squarely.
"Aye," he answered gravely, "but play carefully, and pray your horned horse-goddess favors you in the long-run."
Random nodded once solemnly. "Give me another bitter one."
The game was as bitter as the taste in his mouth; he lost a full six rounds before eking out a single conservative win, and when he did his opponent looked even more shocked than the prince had been at his first loss, and a stranger bought Random another drink-pod. It was entirely a game of statistics – it had to be; he hadn't thought to calculate in the angling of the convex dome of the cup, where the bones were most likely to hit its smooth surfaces before the final crashing fall, whether they bounced any upon the rotting wood of the bar. The man across from him clearly knew all of these things down to a science, likely had for most of his life; he had the advantage of experience. Random knew he would have to be a very quick study. He almost wished that Bleys were there as a second pair of eyes, to council him on devious strategy, skilled chess-player that he was.
But he was alone here – and he kept losing, although by less and less as the ordeal continued; when he won again in round thirteen there were actually a few scattered drunken cheers, as if no one there expected him to win at all, and he got another shot for his efforts. Around round seventeen, a rather comely buxom woman he hadn't seen earlier approached him, draping her well-sculpted arms about his neck and shoulders, lightly raking his bare chest with her long fingernails, pressing up against him, reeking of ambergris musk.
"You poor thing," she cooed in his ear, her long, bright chartreuse-dyed hair spilling over his left shoulder, "I can make you feel better afterwards if you want, if you'd help a girl out?" one nail strayed lazily up his neck.
Random glanced at her, her face practically next to his own, and he had to smirk at her brazenness: she was obviously a 'house' prostitute.
"I don't mix business with pleasure, sweetcheeks; scoot," he firmly-but-gently unhanded her, shoving her off… then took a good look at her as she stepped away. If the Rebman army was ever in dire need of foreign troops, he mulled, all they had to do was paint this gal's likeness on the recruitment poster and they'd be lining up down the Faiella-bionin… yeah, he was definitely starting feel his alcoholic buzz a little. Ah, what the hell. "What are you doing this time next year? That's when my parole is up."
She pouted – it was really something to see, with those lusciously full red-algae-stained lips of hers. "I'll be an old maid by then," she tossed her curly fluorescent hair in slow-motion.
"You're not exactly a 'maid' in any sense of the word right now," he fired back snarkily, turning his attention to the bones in the cup on the bar; a sniggering, evil-sounding laugh followed from the gnarled purple-haired fellow, who gave her a sound swat on her behind, sending her on her way to 'shop' the other side of the tavern.
"Spoken like a true prince of Amber, milord," he approached the bar, setting down a few small obols, gesturing that they went to Random's tab. "No mincing words, no feelings hidden or spared. Just the truth as you see it."
"Wish that could go toward the other debt," Random muttered, noting the coins changing hands.
"Isn't allowed," the man harshly whispered, giving him a companionable pat on the back.
"I thought you had a wife," the prince's opponent deliberately threw in his face.
"It's only a temporary marriage," Random signaled for another citrus-laced pod, vainly hoping it would perk him back up, "she won't be my wife forever – not that it's any of your damn business. I protect what's mine while it belongs to me. Now let's finish this rotten little game," he slurred a bit, reaching for the next gelatin-encased shot…
It was bad. It was so, so bad. He won three of the remaining six rounds, but he had lost so many before – so much money. It wasn't just him: even more than half-drunk, the young Rebman across from him really was that much better at this than he was; he couldn't fault his talent, even if it left him feeling that he'd been had somehow.
"Come back tomorrow night with what you owe me and I will consider your debt of honor cancelled," the youth charged him, "and if you think to rob me of what is rightfully mine, Lander-prince, consider that you are in a room full of people who know who you are and what we did here tonight – and can figure out where you currently live, should it come to that."
"Sure, whatever," the beleaguered prince half-heartedly gave his consent, and was finally allowed to reach the door. The bartender had given him an extra whiskey pod for the road to keep him warm, and the prostitute had also offered her services to keep him pleasantly toasty and physically upright on the way home – for a price.
"I can't even pay you to shove my hands under your armpits," he shook his head blearily, and she finally turned away from him of her own volition as he staggered back out into the cold and the dark, resting against the building for a moment as he angrily wrapped his cloak about himself tightly, still lightly shivering in spite of the alcohol. And some rubbery foreign object was digging into his right side…
He reached inside his cloak and produced the water ampoule his wife had forced on him before he left; it was even warm from his body heat.
Vialle…
He sucked it open and drained it, washing away the war of strange flavors in his mouth, then relieved himself in a corner – too drunk to care – and started back in the hopeful direction of home, leaning against the buildings for support and warmth the whole winding way. By the time he located their back-alley entrance again, his hands, ears and nose were all numb with the pervasive cold, and the 'daylighters' were out plying their trade with their open wagons, replacing the flammable mineral blocks in the street lamps and igniting them in little blasts for the 'day'. Letting himself in, he staggered up the stairs in the dark – his eyes used to it by now – but he only made it up to the first-floor sitting room before he had to sit down, finally passing out facedown on the long ornamental bench facing the sparse bookcase, just like one of those playing-bones…
"…Husband? Husband?"
The whispered female voice fairly thundered in his pounding head, accompanied by the feeling of dainty fingertips gently caressing his hair. Random experienced a moment's disorientation as he went to get up, belatedly remembering where he was… and why.
Oh, shit…
His wife's thin, capable hands assisted him to sit up; there were food smells coming from nearby. She had left the room blessedly dark, although the regular 'day' glow was coming through the uncovered window to his left.
"I had to search for you this morning," she lightly teased him, seating herself beside him before leaning down and picking up the tray she had left on the floor, carefully settling it in his lap: there was a shallow plate-bowl with steamed clams and long seaweed in a kind of thickened gravy (which on land would've probably been a stew), along with a largish spoon to eat it with and a freshwater ampule. "At first I was worried that you had not made it home at all and were passed out half-frozen in the streets somewhere when I woke up alone, but then I thought to make a thorough sweep of the floors and furniture of the lower rooms," she removed his cloak and rubbed his back as he dug into his meal. "Tell me you at least had a good night?"
Random swallowed, but he couldn't force down the lowness he felt coming on like a cold. It hadn't been his fault, dammit; if he had tried to walk away after the second round of that game he would've had a lot more to worry about than the police, he'd been so heavily outnumbered.
"What time is it?" he tried to momentarily evade her, slurping down a noodle-like strand of seaweed.
"Mid-afternoon. I tried to rouse you around at midday, but you slept the sleep of the dead; I had to make sure you were still breathing," she stroked his shoulder, her soft fingertips fondly grazing his stubbly cheek.
He nodded non-verbally out of habit, but she felt it anyway, with her hands still drifting on him the way they were. He scraped the bowl clean then put the tray back down on the floor to the side, grabbing the water ampule. He gave her temple a quick peck.
"Thanks, dollface," he sighed, rising unsteadily to his feet. "I'm going to have to go back there this evening," he casually announced, carefully stretching.
"Why? What happened last night?"
Such a pushy, naïve little question: why. Had she been practically anyone else, he would've given her any number of nasty answers, none of them true; he never let any of his women dictate what he could and could not do…
He glanced down at her, her uncovered unseeing eyes, her face turned in the direction of his voice like a flower blindly following the sun, and he felt his sharpened tongue tarnish a little.
"I owe a man some money," he answered steadily – then huffed, irritated with himself. "I probably should stay away from strange old betting games when I haven't made a proper study of the odds yet from watching others play," he shook his head-
And heard her sudden, sharp intake of breath: she had covered her mouth with both hands, her uncovered dead-fish eyes wide.
"Please tell me you were not playing Sailorbones!" she breathed.
"You know about that scam?!" he spun to face her, too surprised to stop his reaction, instantly gritting his teeth at the decibel-level of his regular voice.
"I would've thought you did – you've visited this city before!" Her hands slowly gripped the bench, as if to steady herself. "How much did we lose? Do we still have the house?"
"Oh, it's not that bad, babe," he sat back down beside her, holding her. "It's only about thirty dekadrachms, more or less."
She stiffened. "That is almost everything I had budgeted for us to live on for the next ten days, plus what I had already set aside for your skin-suit; I do not make enough money to have much put by."
Random groaned, letting go of her, slumping back into the bench. "You're telling me I just spent all the grocery money?" he dragged a hand down his face.
"Yes," she whispered.
The prince exhaled… then pulled himself together, rising. "It's going to be alright, babe," he patted her thigh. "I'll take a hike across town today and see about shaking down Llewella."
"No, you won't," she said quietly, her head bowed demurely.
Her husband balked at her backtalk. "Excuse me? Unless you want to starve, I think I have to."
"You must pay a Sailorbones debt with money that your own bones have honorably made – by proxy mine," she dauntlessly continued. "Gossip travels too quickly in Rebma: your offended party would soon learn that you paid guilt in borrowed coin and would come after you in earnest for satisfaction."
"You've got to be kidding me! This is like a bad chain-letter come to life! How do you even know all of this?!"
"I grew up here," she replied bluntly. "We all learned simpler variants of it as children; even your… even Martin Barimen would have played this as a boy," she uneasily self-censored. "There is also a way to use the pieces for love divination; they are usually handed down in families from a mother to her daughters upon their reaching physical maturation and hence marriageable age. I still have my old set around here someplace," she got up and walked around the back of the bench, her fingertips brushing along the edge; she stooped and retrieved the emptied tray – Random marveled at how easily she located it – balancing it in her arms as she walked back up to the kitchen, her husband following. He had learned from experience not to offer to help her unless she was clearly in need of it, because she frequently took the expression of polite concern as an insult to her ability, which was considerable.
"So, is there a clause in this shitty little game where the winner feeds the loser for a ngan? Because if there isn't, I'm still going to have to try to borrow from my sister; she can afford to be generous to family on occasion, I would think; she's a princess, for crying out loud, and she definitely lives like one up there on the hill."
Vialle set her burden down on a stone counter; when she turned to him her smile was kind in the dim light. "I know you mean well, Husband, but you need not besmirch your reputation here: no one with the will and ability to forage ever need starve in Rebma. We'll be alright, we'll just be eating the same things for several days in a row. Even those with no means at all can survive on the bounty of the Kelp Forest just outside of the city, to the south. Now, where did I put it," she searched the cupboards until she found a pair of ceramic cups – which Random now recognized, their contents clinking against the smooth glazed surface as she removed them. "In any event, I must give you the money that you need, but I would ask that you deliver it where it must go during the daytime; if it was a tavern, you can simply deposit it with the owner and he will make sure that it goes to the correct party come evening if your opponent is a regular there. But before you leave, if your poor head can stand a little more noise, I would like to show you how this is actually done; I must confess to being curious as to whether you can spot it without me having to explain."
"So it is a trick, then," he scowled, grabbing and striking a mineral taper, momentarily wincing against the sudden light. "The game struck me as being crooked, but I couldn't quite place how he was doing it. How is this not illegal to gamble on here?"
"It would be completely impossible to prove that someone was cheating like this in court," she responded as they left the room, going back down to the lower sitting room, this time to the small table. "And you were marked for what happened to you because you are a foreigner and wouldn't know any better. It is difficult to learn this, but not impossible," she seated herself, setting down the cups. Intrigued, Random seated himself on the other side, placing the taper also on the table. "Go ahead and examine the implements; you should find nothing amiss with them," she gestured graciously toward the cups and their small macabre contents.
The prince pulled them across to him and shook the shellacked bones out onto the table. Each rounded porcelain cup held the four smaller mid-toe bones of somebody's foot. "Do I even want to know where these came from?" he asked her dubiously, checking the weight and balance of each of them, even standing a few up on the table just to see if they would stay on their own like the ones in the bar had: they did. There was only a slight variation in size from the set he'd played with the previous night.
"Mine are taken from the fish-eaten corpse of an ancestor, supposedly by my mermaid great-granddame, although the material sources for the game vary widely. Is everything in order to your satisfaction?" she queried.
"I guess," he gave only a cursory glance at the cups, knowing nothing was amiss with them – then had a sudden thought. "Hey, if you're challenging me to Sailorbones, don't we have to be willing to wager something?"
Vialle looked thoughtful for a moment, accepting her filled cup back. "Very well, Husband: if you can deduce the trick to this game on your own – or even beat me at it fairly just once – I will grant you a permanent entertainment allowance for as long as we are married in Rebma, which you may spend however you please, no questions asked – with the caveat that you do not spend more coin at one time than you have in your hand."
"At the moment, that would be none," he shrewdly pointed out, arching a pale brow. "I doubt you meant it like that, but that's one hell of a loophole; I'll have to remember it for personal use in the future. As you actually mean it, that's a pretty sweet offer. What's your counter?"
She shrugged. "Simply that if you lose you will accompany me to the Kelp Forest to harvest urchins and other foodstuffs, and will continue to do so for us until I can afford to go to market for everything we need again."
Random nodded, mulling the prospect over. "Those are incredibly fair stakes, babe. Alright, I'm in, work your magic – wait, this isn't magic by any chance, is it?" he belatedly thought, starting to feel stupid already.
"No," his wife giggled, "but to you it might seem that way. Ready?"
"When you are," he picked up his cup, covering the mouth with his left hand.
Shake, shake, drop. The cups had to be sturdier than they looked, to be able to do that and not even crack on a calcite table, he mused, suddenly curious as to how they were made.
"The pieces are all men now," his wife announced unexpectedly, explaining, "people from all places and times. And they are described as such. Now, which scene from the past or the future have we cast? This is the challenge of the game."
Random faltered. "You want me to say? I've absolutely no way of knowing, beyond a general understanding of there being a couple sides that they are more likely to fall on!"
"Oh, come, Husband," she gently chided him, "if a prince of Amber does not know of human life, then who does? You can best me, I know you can, but do it your way. Don't you feel anything?"
Random closed his eyes, trying to call up the picture.
"They're the crew of a small merchant ship at sea, a mile above our heads right now" he slowly conjured the vision, "some of the sailors are on duty while the others rest below until their watch: three currently stand to man the sails, three sleep – two on their backs, one with his face pressed into the hammock – while two rest on their sides awake, drinking and playing dice. Is it really true that dice as such are a rarity in Rebma, that you just use found objects like durable bones?"
"Is that what he told you?" Vialle's slender, dark brows furrowed inward in pity as she shook her head. "They did mark you for a foreigner. Nearly half the dice currently in the city are all scrimshaw from a mostly eaten whalefall carcass that came to rest northeast of the city some years ago; I remember it, all the bustling activity to clean the thing, breaking it down and auctioning the different parts off right there in the middle of Mirror Avenue to various tradespeople." She suddenly smiled. "You very nearly succeeded in distracting me from my bid. I sense a certain degree of truth in your narrative, one which may even be near us, but it is alas not the one we have cast. The tableau is rather a common scene in Moire's court: the reclining queen rests with her five ladies-in-waiting as they enjoy imported Lander delicacies and listen to standing performers singing a duet, likely upon some classical theme of the marriage of the land and sea."
There was something in her tone, her delivery, that shook Random: his unassuming quiet wife had just transformed into a sibyl!
"How do you know?" he breathed, the question missing its sarcastic bite.
Vialle stopped smiling. "You concede so quickly," she sighed. "You weren't that far wrong; you might have even guessed if you had kept at it a little longer."
"Either you would make the greatest poker player in all of Rebma with a little training and luck, or this is about to get really creepy," the prince slowly shook his head, his eyes not leaving her sightless ones, as if he could will the broken windows to her soul to lift open the curtains.
"Are you saying that you concede?"
"I'm saying that you're good at the psyching bit, dollface. Let's see 'em."
Vialle slowly, carefully lifted her cup, and Random lifted his own…
It was a perfect prediction in her favor, even down to the arrangement of the pieces! The prince glanced at her sharply.
"Are you sure this isn't magic-based?"
"It is a strictly mechanical trick," she iterated matter-of-factly. "Ready to try again? Remember that you don't have to best me – just spot what I am doing and the funds are yours."
"Yeah, bring it on," Random recupped his bones, preparing to shake them, waiting while she more carefully followed suit.
He lost the next round, too, and the round after that, and the round after that, whilst Vialle's predictions were always on the proverbial money. After a while he began to get the impression that the miniature story-scenes that accompanied the gameplay were a kind of carefully practiced and highly artistic form of misdirection, but misdirection from what he had yet to deduce. Granted some of them were quite good, the overall effect impressive: a commonplace domestic scene in a merchant-class Rebman household with small children in the evening, brimming with loads of unnecessary details; a picturesque day-in-the-life snapshot of a handful of Deepwalkers – intelligent merlike shadow-creatures that currently mined the raw compounds utilized in the Rebman 'day' torches, far south-south-east of the city limits. Apparently they preferred to stay there in the chilled, less-oxygenated waters – which went far to explain why the prince had never so much as seen one yet – and they were largely content to labor for the comfort of a more delicate, less adaptable peaceful species (to their way of thinking) so long as representatives of that species were willing to journey out to the quarry to barter exotic goods by the cartload in exchange for the one precious commodity that continued to make the current standard of living in Rebma possible. His wife even conjured up the apparently true historical account of an ancient human sacrifice in the original temple of Lir (since destroyed by a seaquake in a bad storm), in a desperate attempt to curry the god's favor and mercy toward the foreign fluorescent-haired shadowmen – Homo Aquaticus – who were beginning to invade his domain from another world, warring with the native Tritons and other local sea-monsters for conquest of the Mirror Palace, introducing chemical light and savage unnatural death to the eternal darkness of the deep in the name of animal survival, what they were running from in their alien homeland terrible enough to have been blotted from both social memory and the history books.
It was almost entertaining enough to make a man temporarily forget that he was losing money with every round – or would've been, under normal circumstances. Even the jerk who had challenged him in the bar had lost occasionally; Vialle always won – it was like she was wearing x-ray goggles and was looking at the bones straight through the playing cups, like they weren't there at all! After a baker's dozen of rounds, Random was ready to throw in the towel.
"You're too damned good for your own good, dollface," he sighed, setting down his cup right-side-up on the table. "For this to look convincing you have to be willing to lose by one or two pieces every now and again. This isn't a contest at all; it's out-and-out highway robbery backed by cultural tradition, which is simply insane if you think about it for all of two seconds. I've never even met a card-shark who could win all the time like that. And I can't for the life of me figure out how on earth you're consistently pulling this off. So reveal the trick already, Houdini."
"Who?"
"Oh," he shook his head; she made him comfortable enough in her presence that he forgot sometimes, "just a famous illusionist from Shadow Earth a few decades back – used to wriggle his way out of physical bindings without blades or keys or anything, sometimes submerged upsidedown in a tank of non-breathable water while he did it, to add to the level of risk, among other shock-type stunts."
Vialle grinned, blushing at the backhanded compliment. "This isn't as spectacular as all that, Husband; you make me out to be more talented than I am. This is so simple. I have long observed that the sighted as a whole tend to neglect the development and refinement of their other senses, unless they are professional cooks, fabricators, or musicians. Even at that, they depend too heavily upon their eyes for nearly everything. Stop looking, Husband; close your eyes for just a moment, and listen."
And with that she felt for and picked up just one of the exposed bones and let it fall straight to the tabletop from her hand: it made a distinctive series of differently-pitched clinking noises before coming to rest. She picked it back up with the other three, scooping them into the cup, shaking and casting them concealed as in the game, the small collection of human bones made a distinctive conglomerate noise upon the hard surface.
The prince opened his eyes in shocked, angry comprehension. "You can hear how they fall," he ground out bitterly through his teeth, genuinely furious with himself that he hadn't figured out the ruse sooner: he could have literally lost everything they had to his folly! They were about to scrape by for nearly half the first autumn ngan as it was; it was only a fitting penance that he helped with the scraping. He leaned back in his chair with a profound, deflated sigh.
"Well… you got me on that one, babe," he folded his hands behind his head, closing his eyes once more, briefly wondering at just what all the woman he was currently living with really could hear on a daily basis (he was suddenly grateful that he didn't often talk to himself aloud). "Guess I'll go deliver what I owe and come straight back ere and play a good little husband for a while, 'cause I can't afford to do anything else."
Vialle reached across the table, searching for his arms and finding his lightly downy chest instead – the prince automatically opened his eyes at her touch, to find her smirking.
"It doesn't have to be so terrible; even though it is forced company, I do enjoy yours… and you are still free to enjoy mine in whatever capacity would best please you, should you ever choose…" She abruptly shook herself of the mood, forcing a smile as she withdrew her hand, straightening in her chair. "And while I tend to get turned around badly in the Kelp Forest without a guide, it is supposed to be quite the striking sight for those blessed with vision: the cultivated 'wild' garden stretches out for a few miles, with tall columns topped with massive mineral torches every half-mile to provide the plants with the illumination they require to survive; they actually don't need much heat, and too much can harm them, but it is a necessary evil in order for us to grow them down here at all. Any citizen of Rebma, and even visitors, are encouraged to forage the invasive native deep-sea urchins out of the beds; plant material is a rare treat for them – they are usually carnivorous out of necessity – and if left unchecked they would eat the entire forest, stalks and all, in about four or five ngan given their current feeding rate. It is a public service to eat them. There are also some crabs to be had, and a sizable school of rockfish is cultivated there for the Crown, along with a few brittle stars whose fertilized eggs must have drifted in over the pressure barrier at some point… and the occasional runaway octopus from the palace rock gardens," she smiled. "If you ever do spot one, the queen gives out small rewards for their recapture and return, but I take it the venture is somewhat difficult as the reluctant animals can be quite strong at that size, to say nothing of the ink and the chance of being bitten; I've treated a few of those injuries over the years, and they're no joke."
"Sounds like a regular joy-ride," the prince rolled his eyes. "When do we leave?"
"Just as soon as you return," his wife rose from her chair, walking out of the room and down the stairs; from the sound of an actual door opening and closing, he could tell she had just entered her clinic, and he went down himself, leaving his cloak where it was. She came back out with the tied drawstring pouch of some half-translucent organic material he couldn't immediately guess at; it did have a tensile strength to it, though, as he took it from her offering hands – it was heavy – as he tied it about his waist, hearing the coins inside lightly clink against each other.
"Perhaps it would be better if you wore your cloak to conceal it," she observed; he conceded the point, heading back upstairs for it.
No point in getting robbed on the way to the stick-up…
It took the prince a little longer than he liked to think about to find the same dive tavern again, even with the decent light to aid him; when he did, the door was already open for business. Upon his entry of the establishment, the bartender marked him immediately, hailing him from across the room whilst polishing a glass.
"Afternoon, Lander!" he greeted him in a friendly enough tone as Random approached the bar, "I hadn't expected to see you until tonight, and hopefully wearing more than that, not freezing your fins off like last time."
"Not for a while you won't, on both counts," Random muttered, discreetly untying the purse and sliding it quietly across the bar, looking the man squarely in the eye as he did so. "You understand?"
The middle-aged Rebman's dark eyes briefly widened at the amount of money, but he quickly composed himself with an easy-going nod, accepting it and placing it beneath the bar, behind some shot glasses by the sound of it. Then glanced up at the prince with something akin to pity.
"You were a good sport to go through with that… your highness," he briefly rummaged around – and came up with a light-colored whiskey pod. "To your improved luck in the future," he passed it to him. "Come back when you're better-heeled again and play a different game. We have some real dice fiends who roll through here now and again if you've a taste for more standard gambling."
Random popped the shot in his mouth, fire and citrus going down his throat with the spent capsule.
"Does the 'house' ever take a cut of the winnings from a game of Sailorbones?" he put bluntly to the bartender; the Rebman solemnly shook his head, lightly swishing his long, dark-brown hair.
"And I've seen men ruined in a single night playing it. An assortment of nobles try to get it outlawed every few years, but it never takes; too much of a folkway. I don't encourage it in my house – I'll say that much – but once a formal challenge is issued and accepted, not me nor anyone else is in a position to stop it. You'd have about as much luck banning the Code Duello in Amber, I think."
The prince scoffed a laugh at that, nodding. Yet another good reason not to go home to his homeland any time soon; there were several people there who would love to see him dead, not least of which were probably a brother or two at this point. He shrugged, shoving off the bar.
"I'll think about it," he said noncommittally, sauntering back toward the door.