"Look," Blays said. "If I've dedicated my whole life to sex, I think I'll be good enough at it that it'll be no issue to throw a sheet across the plaza and—"
"I don't think they would appreciate a solo performance," Dante said.
Mourn rose, swaying. "I'm going to bed."
Three days came and went like the boats at the piers. It was time. Worring didn't care about the venue, so Dante had arranged to hold it in the pub where he'd learned to play; he was comfortable there, and the playing-stations lined the back wall, providing ready perches for a spying spider. Worring arrived alone, seating herself opposite Dante. The crowd closed in behind her, pointing at specific positions on the table despite the fact not a single tile had yet been laid. Worring withdrew a glossy teak box from a purple velvet sack. The case's latches snicked. She arrayed her pieces, soapstone warriors and beasts dressed in minutely sewn clothing: leather armor, cotton trousers, and brown boots laced with single lengths of thread.
Finished, she gazed at him over the table. "I hear you're among the best human players of your generation."
He shrugged, stacking tiles with wooden clicks. "When the right cause inspires me, I'll see it through at any cost."
"What cause led you to pushing toy soldiers around a fake map?"
"One of those casual injustices that has been going on for so long that speaking about it in polite company brands you a fanatic."
"Ah. That narrows it down."
They agreed on a map (Lakepatch, a common terrain where the many ponds funneled action into the killing fields of open meadows), piece allotment (standard-three, a skirmisher-heavy default, which they modified with an allowance to swap out any two units), and the terms of the nulla.
"A tapestry," he said. "Choice of subject decided by me."
Her brown eyes met his. "It's said you're a healer."
"Once you cause enough wounds, you get a pretty good idea how to fix them."
"My father was enslaved for debt a few years into my apprenticeship. They worked him in the fields. One day they were short of oxen, so they made him pull the plow. He tripped in a gopher hole and broke his leg." She laid her first tile, holding his gaze. "They didn't bother to set it. He still can't walk."
"Old wounds are harder work," he said. "But if I can, I will."
The arbiters—to reduce the risk of rogue decisions stripping him of victory, Dante had insisted on three of them—introduced themselves and sat. The audience placed bets of drinks and money and sometimes small nulla of their own. Mostly, they watched with open grins as the final piece was placed and Worring opened, drakes zagging along one side of the board while her archers and gnomes ducked in and out of cover. Dante advanced to intercept, his forces aligned in a shifting sickle, striking from both points of the blade as Worring rearranged her defenses from one side of the field to the other.
She gave a small smile. "You fight like a human."
"What does that mean?"
"I have no damn idea what you think you're doing."
He smiled back, then played a run of cards. By the time he completed the side game, he'd depleted twice as many of her cards as he'd spent, snagging a crucial modifier to his sorcerer's armor. The figure was a tentpole of his strategy, obliterating anything that came too close, yet it had already been bloodied to dangerous levels by the regular pelting of her archers, who fired behind the safety of lakes, clad in nothing stronger than their brown cotton robes.
"Take a break?" he said an hour later. Their forces were on the verge of a critical, all-out melee. For the last several moves, her gnomes had harried his norren frontliners, dancing forward to the very point of overextension before drawing back into the protective range of her archers. He'd withdrawn his sorcerer early on to preserve it as he maneuvered his bear-cavalry to block those damned gnomes. Recognizing his ploy, she'd arranged her troops into jagged yet subtly intricate lines of defense that could snap shut like a cougar's jaws.
"No running off for advice from your friends," she smiled.
His own smile was as tight as her deployment. "Just for a drink. Want one?"
"A beer." She tipped her head at the laughing throngs, foam drying on their beards. "If there's any left."
He shouldered through the crowd, face brushed by bulging bellies and sweaty arms. It stunk like men who've spent too long working, playing, or both. He smiled at strangers' encouragement, their playful taunts, and returned from the bar with two heady mugs.
Play resumed. A discussion of the moral implications of Lord Jonn abdicating his throne (and thus abandoning his responsibility to his subjects) to save Lady Herren from the underworld resulted in a rhetorical stalemate—Dante argued his duty to his war-threatened kingdom outweighed his duty to his wife, while Worring argued that a man who won't attempt to save that which is dearest to him is unfit to rule a kingdom in the first place. On the board, Worring advanced and retreated methodically, rhythmically, her drakes weaving among his lines like a shuttle through the loom. At times her forces showed patterns with no identifiable strategic goals, as if she were playing more for the aesthetics than for the thrill of the challenge or the nulla-favors earned from victory.
Dante leaned back in his chair.
Until now, he had been thinking of the game purely in the abstract, analyzing it within the strict rules of its own internal logic. Position his spearman just so, as to block the enemy's drakes. Keep his slingers in motion, reducing oppositional accuracy. Play his card of Blood Debt on the same turn the bulk of his norren swordsmen were in position to strike. On some level, he'd realized the game must have emerged as a way for citybound norren to settle disputes their earlier, wilder, free-ranging ancestors had settled (and still did, in the case of the Nine Pines and others) through blood and steel under harsh and silent skies. But there was another level to Nulladoon, too. It wasn't just a practical game. It was a game of the norren's own spirit, a celebration of their talents, their skill with their hands and their sheer love of fun for its own sake. A chance to express one's own being and witness another in similar expression. And then, in victory or defeat, to give or receive something tangible, if only the memory of a wonderful dance or song, and so appreciate each other all over again.
This understanding lent him no tactical advantage. Knowledge of her cards was enough to slip the noose around her neck; Worring was highly skilled, but not one of the highest masters, and when his bear cavalry pressed her gnomes against the shore of a lake, the pesky skirmishers were eliminated to a man. But when his sorcerer finished its turn and Worring extended her finger to topple her last drake, Dante knew he hadn't allowed her to see the nature of himself. Worse yet, perhaps he
had
. He hadn't played the game. He'd cheated.
And he had won.
5
Perrigan's smile made Dante want to wring his well-bred neck. The man held the parchment at arm's length, as if he didn't want Worring's bare signature to come too close and taint him. After a long moment of admiration, he rolled up the writ of nulla, stuffed it in his desk, and turned that smile on Dante.
"I sold the Clan of the Green Lake to Lord Cassinder of Beckonridge. The estate is some miles east of Setteven. If he hasn't broken up the sale—and I believe he'd just sunk his latest mine, so I don't see why he would—you'll find them there."
Dante thanked him stiffly. "Let's hope the right price can convince him to part with them regardless of his plans."
Perrigan turned to gaze at the woven faces of his ancestors hanging from the wall. "Well, there's always a price, isn't there?"
"And often a later one to boot."
The lord gave him a curious look, but Dante turned on his heel. The carriage descended through rowhouses and a crisp sunlight that was too early in the season to be warm. They rattled over the bridge, smelling freshwater and windborne pollen, and halted in a plaza on the eastern shore. He relayed Perrigan's intelligence to Gala and Mourn.
"Go tell your clan to get ready to move. I have one last thing to do before we leave."
"Don't tell me it's another game," Blays groaned.
"I hope you didn't have plans for the rest of the week."
"What!"
"It wasn't that boring, was it?"
"Two weeks of watching you read books and play an even dorkier version of chess? I'd have more fun learning to piss through my eyeballs."
Dante's grin faded. "No more games. Just one last debt."
As they entered her dark shop, Worring's face folded as fast as her troops had in the final battle. "I already know what you want."
"And for that I'm sorry." Dante met her eyes. "But I didn't come here to claim my nulla. I'm here to pay you mine."
She laughed, deep and bitter. "Beaten by a human who doesn't even know the rules. D'you think I'd be shamed more or less if I killed myself before I finish your order?"
"I know the rules perfectly well. Now close this shop and take me to your father."
Worring drew back her head. "He lives on the far north of town."
"I spent a fortnight playing games. I think I can fit a few more hours into my busy schedule."
Even so, Dante hired another carriage, spending most of what little he'd gained selling nulla and placing side bets on other games. Wheels splashed mud and other substances across unpaved streets. A score of hammers rang from a dozen anvils. The metallic clanks faded by the time shacks replaced the proper houses. After a half mile of dirt alleys and thatch-roofed, single-room homes, Worring called a stop in front of one no different from a thousand others.
She stepped into the cold dust, pausing before a door that fit worse than an older brother's hand-me-down trousers. "Give me a minute."
She slipped inside, tugging the door several times before it squeaked shut. Low tones filtered through the drafty wallboards, one voice female, the other male and coarse as a raven. Clinks, shuffles, and clatters overcut the talk, as if many small things were being converted into one large pile.
"I think she's into you," Blays said.
"I highly doubt that."
"Who else cleans just because a near-stranger comes to their house?"
"Women," Dante said. "A good deal of men, too. Just about everyone, in fact, except those whose servants do it for them. We need to get you out more, don't we?"
"Not if it's to the sort of places where people
clean
."
The door opened, pouring sunlight into a single tight room. A blanket covered thigh-high lumps piled along the back wall. A rickety stove pumped smoke up the narrow chimney of fieldstone and clay, pouring heat into the sievelike shack. A pale leg projected from a cot half-visible behind the doorway.
The norren it belonged to was well past middle age. The gray of his beard had begun to seep into his dark brown hair, coloring it like milk dribbled into unstirred coffee. He had the usual flabbiness of age, but his right leg was a bony broomstick beneath grimy pants. The room smelled faintly of urine.
"My father Shone," Worring said.
Dante introduced himself and Blays. "Your daughter's work is spectacular."
"No doubt," Blays said. "I stared at one weaving of a lady so long I feared she'd reach out of the thread and slap me."
"Well, she stole all she knows from me." Shone struggled to swing his legs from the cot, bracing himself on a block of wood that served as a table.
"Please don't get up," Dante said. "That's why I'm here."
"To gape at a cripple?"
"Sir, I can assure you—"
The old man held up a roughworn palm. "Shut up. Worring told me why you're here. She's expecting a miracle."
"And what are you expecting?"
"To learn one more time that 'I told you so' is always more satisfying in your head than spoken aloud." He lay back on the cot, glaring at the bare, cobwebby rafters. "Let's get to it."
"You might want to leave," Dante said to Worring. "I expect this will hurt."
It did. The knee was hard and knobby as dry coral. To set it, Dante first had to rebreak it, dissolving the old mending with hard rasps of nether. Shone screamed, sweat trickling through his ashy beard. Blays helped hold him down, offering gulps from a flask. Once the knee was disjointed—to the nether's touch, it felt like loose pebbles among an internal creek of hot blood and lymph—Dante aligned the old break as cleanly as he could, filling the gaps with nether-prompted growths of new bone. Most of Dante's intensive work had been done on the vibrant young, on warriors and soldiers (not to mention himself and Blays), and the old man's flesh and tissue responded sluggishly, accumulating and binding only through Dante's constant, steady focus on the nether. Grain by grain, the bone returned.
After some time—a half hour, perhaps twice that long—Dante plopped on the floor, as sweaty as the old man. As for Shone, he regarded Dante coolly, as one watches a lone wolf from across an open meadow.
"Why did you come here?"
Dante wiped his sleeve across his forehead. "Your daughter's a very fine Nulladoon player, too."
"That she got on her own. Damn game ran me right out of business." Despite the old man's cynicism, a decade of anticipation was etched on his face. Shone swung his leg off the bed. The skin around his eyes relaxed. "Josun's toes, son. A man who can do what you do's got no business wasting time with games."
Dante smiled and stepped outside. Worring pulled her finger from her mouth and spat a ragged bit of nail into the dirt. "Well?"
"Better," Dante said.
"Such modesty," Blays said, eyes rolling. "That old crank will be fit enough to kick your ass again in no time."
"Maybe you can come see for yourself." Worring glanced toward the door. "If you come here again."
"Soon." Dante climbed inside the carriage. In the moment, he meant it: he and Blays could come back here on their return from the estate outside Setteven. He'd like to play Worring again, a rematch where he competed without the knowledge of every one of her cards. He would even enjoy losing, he thought, and if he won, to have a weaving made for himself.