The Ruby Dice (18 page)

"What hostiles should we be aware of?" Axer asked.

Kelric would have laughed if this hadn't hurt so much. "These people are peaceful. Treat them gently."

"We need a flyer to reach the mountains," Strava said.

Kelric indicated the windrider. "I flew that here ten years ago. If it still works, we can take it to Karn."

"Karn?" Najo asked.

Softly Kelric said, "My home."

The voice on the radio sent a chill up Kelric's spine. The woman spoke in normal tones—in Teotecan. "Sky Racer, I've received your ID. Are you new here? I don't recognize your codes." She paused. "Or your accent."

"It's an old windrider," Kelric said, self-conscious about his rusty Teotecan. "And I haven't been to Karn in years."

"Welcome back." She sounded wary.

"My thanks." Talking to an Outsider was strange. Keeping an Oath of silence for so many years had reinforced his taciturn nature. As Imperator, he had to overcome his reticence to speak, but being here brought it back. In all his time on Coba, he had never had a conversation like this. Piloting a rider wasn't that different from the antique aircraft he flew as a hobby, and he had overheard pilots during his trips as a Calani, so he had an idea of protocols. But this felt surreal.

"Request permission to land," Kelric said.

"Go ahead," the woman said. "Lane Five."

Quis patterns appeared on his screen, providing directions. In the copilot's seat, Najo peered at the symbols, his brow furrowed. Axer and Strava had the two seats in back, and Kelric felt them concentrating on his Teotecan. He could have translated, but he wanted the privacy of his adopted language for a little while longer.

He spread the wing slats of the great metallic hawk and circled the airfield, fitting into the pattern of two other riders. At most Estates, he would have been the only one; Karn, however, had the largest airport on Coba. The woman in the tower tried to draw him into conversation, but he remained noncommittal. She was more curious about a man piloting a rider than about his accent.

Kelric landed reasonably well, though the craft bounced a couple of times. While his guards unstrapped from their seats, he went to the locker in the back. He hung his jacket on a seat. As he pulled off his shirt, a surge of pleasure leaked around Strava's mental shields, which she immediately clamped down. Facing away from her, Kelric smiled. Her appreciation of her shirtless commander embarrassed her far more than him.

He removed his duffle from the locker and donned the white shirt with loose sleeves he had packed. It matched the ones he had worn here, even the embroidery on the cuffs. Next he took out his armbands. For a moment he stood, staring at the engraved circles of gold. Finally he slid them on his arms. They felt strange. He almost took them off again, then decided that for this one day he would wear these signs of his former life.

He shrugged back into his jacket, in part against the chill winds of the Teotecs, but also to hide his bands and gauntlets. His dice bag hung from his belt and his Talha around his neck. Seeing the scarf, people would assume he came from Haka Estate, which was far from Karn in both distance and culture. It would, he hoped, account for his accent and bodyguards. He didn't have the dark coloring of the Hakaborn, so he obviously wasn't native to that shimmering desert land. People would probably assume that was why he neither covered his face with the Talha nor wore a robe. In this age, only Haka men went robed. And Calani. But of course no sane person would believe that even a guarded Calani would be out on his own.

Finally they disembarked from the rider. He stood on the tarmac with his guards, wind tugging his clothes, surrounded by spectacular scenery. To the west, the Teotec Mountains rolled out in forested slopes; to the south and east they dropped down in endless ripples of green. The city jumbled north of the port, and the Upper Teotecs towered starkly above it. Clustered beneath those peaks, Karn basked, yellow and white in the morning sunshine from a cloud-flecked sky.

The lane of blue and white cobblestones was as familiar to Kelric as a picture seen a thousand times but never touched. He walked with Najo, Strava, and Axer, marveling at the city he had lived in, yet never experienced. Shops crowded both sides of the street, and wooden signs hung from bars above the doors, creaking in the wind. He passed glassblowers, potters, butchers, and dice makers.

The pure mountain air, exhilarating in its clarity, stirred memories edged with beauty and pain. After Savina had passed away, he had ended up at Varz Estate, even higher in the Teotecs. The Varz queen had been a nightmare. She had forced him into a marriage the day after Savina died, respecting neither his grief nor his need to see his child. He hadn't known which was worse, the physical brutality of her obsession with finding ways to hurt and control him, or the cruelty she could inflict with words. His repressed fury had saturated the Quis and roused the sleeping dragon of violence the Cobans had so long submerged.

It had been more than a year before Ixpar brought him to Karn. In the exquisite serenity of her Calanya, he had begun to heal, but it had been too late by then. His influence had saturated the Quis for nearly eighteen years. Nothing could have stopped the war.

A pack of boys burst out of a side lane, laughing and calling to one another. They gaped at Kelric but kept going, jumping over invisible obstacles with shouts of delight.

"Happy kids," Najo commented.

Kelric couldn't answer. His memories brought such longing. He
missed
Coba. Despite everything he had gone through on this world, he had also spent the best times of his life here.

He knew the location of the market only from maps he had studied as a Calani, and he wasn't sure he could find it. He heard it first, a rumble of voices in the street. The lane crooked around a corner and opened into a bustling plaza like a tributary feeding a great lake. Merchants, stalls, and customers thronged the area. Buildings two or three stories high bordered it, many with balconies. Chains adorned with metal Quis dice hung from their eaves, clinking in the ever- present wind. A tumult of voices poured over him like Teotecan music. So much color and vibrancy and
life.

"
Too many people," Axer said, his hand on his holstered gun.

Kelric barely heard. He walked forward and Cobans flowed around him. Merchants called out wares; children ran and hopped; street artists sang, fiddled, or acted out skits. He looked around for a sausage stand. In the first Quis game he had ever played, the Dahl Manager had bet him one tekal, "enough to buy a sausage in the market." He had owed her Estate that tekal for twenty-eight years. He didn't know the cost of a sausage now, though, besides which, he had no Coban money.

Although people noticed him, they paid less attention than he had expected. Just as he started to relax, a lanky woman in the red and gold of the City Guard stared hard at him. Then she spun around and strode across the plaza.

"Not good," Strava said, watching the woman.

"She knows we're out of place," Najo said. "She's going to tell someone."

"Probably at the Estate." Kelric indicated a fortress of amber-hued stone high on a hill across the city. "The Manager lives there." He might soon see Ixpar, perhaps his children. Just as he had needed time alone after Jeejon had died, so now he needed to prepare; in matters of emotion, it always took him time to adjust. Before he faced Ixpar, he wanted to know how it felt to be part of Coba in a way he had never known when he lived here.

Strava was studying him with that penetrating gaze of hers. "What is a Manager?"

"The queen of a city-estate," Kelric said. "The Manager of Karn, this city, is also the Minister. She rules Coba."

Najo tensed. "Does she pose a danger to your person?"

Danger indeed. He wondered how such a funny question could hurt so much. "No," he said. The only danger was to his heart.

Nearby, a man was sitting against the yellow-stone wall of a shop. He wore fine clothes: a well-tailored white shirt, suede trousers with gold buttons up the seams, and suede boots. His air of confidence evoked a king in his milieu. Quis dice were piled on his low table.

"Someone you know?" Strava asked.

"I've never seen him before," Kelric said.

A woman had sat down at the table, and a crowd was gathering. Kelric stayed back and acted like a Haka man, never smiling. With so many people around, he absorbed a sense of their moods even through his shields. They found him exotic, but he didn't think anyone realized he was more than a visitor from a distant city. Although his guards disconcerted people, no one seemed to realize the Jumblers weren't just big stunners.

The man at the Quis table cleared off his extra dice, and the woman rolled out her set, all their pieces carved from wood. The two players were talking, setting a bet that involved many coins and goods. When they finished, the woman opened the game by playing a blue cylinder.

Conversations drifted around Kelric from the crowd.

"I heard she came all the way from Ahkah to challenge him," a man was saying.

"His reputation is spreading," a woman replied.

"I can't figure why he isn't in a Calanya," another woman said. "Everyone says he's good enough."

"Maybe he has some problem," someone else said.

A man snorted. "Right. A problem with living in a cage."

"Why go in a Calanya?" another man said. "He's making pots of coins here, and he doesn't have to abide by an Oath straight out of the Old Age."

"Did you hear about the offworld Calani in Viasa?" a woman asked. "Viasa Manager kidnapped him, just like in the Old Age."

"Heard he was good-looking," a second woman said.

A third one chuckled. "You want to carry one off, too?"

The other woman bristled. "I don't need to kidnap a man to get a husband."

"You haven't heard?" a man said. "The fellow escaped."

"He did not," a woman said.

"Play Quis with someone from Viasa," he countered. "It's in their dice. Stole himself a windrider and whisked off."

Kelric listened as people embellished Jeremiah's tale. Manager Viasa had built her cover story well; he heard no hints of his own involvement. So he returned his focus to the game. The players competed rather than studying problems or plotting the ascendance of their Estate. They were opposed rather than aligned. It reminded him of the Quis played among Managers, but on a less intense scale, for fun rather than politics.

Both players surely rated the title of Quis Master. They built towers, arches, stacks, bridges, rings, claws, and more. Whenever one gained advantage, the other wrested it back. The man was probably the better player, but the woman seemed more experienced. They vied solely for advantage, without the complexity of Calanya Quis. Kelric had no doubt the man would thrive in a Calanya: he had the gift. He would find such Quis far more satisfying than anything Out here. That he chose freedom despite the price it exacted—never to play true Quis—hinted at far-reaching changes in Coba's social structure.

Suddenly the man grinned. "My game."

"What?" The woman looked up with a start.

Murmurs rolled among the crowd. "He hasn't won . . ."

"His tower has more dice then hers . . ."

"She collapsed his tower . . ."

"But look! He hid an arch."

Axer spoke to Kelric in a low voice. "Do you have any idea what these people are saying?"

"They're arguing over the game," Kelric said, intent on the dice. The man had bridged several structures with an elegant arch, increasing their worth enough for him to claim victory. He had managed it despite his opponent's vigilance because he used dice of a similar color to the surrounding pieces, so it looked as if he were creating lesser structures. A camouflage.

The woman ceded the match, and applause scattered as people slapped their palms against their thighs. After arranging to pay her debt, the woman stood and bowed with respect to the Quis Master. Then she went on her way.

Kelric walked forward.

The gleam in the man's eyes when he saw Kelric was the same as in any culture on any planet, the calculation of a master sizing up a rube. Kelric temporarily eased down his barriers. With so many people at market, it was hard to distinguish moods, but he gathered the man didn't see him as a challenge. Good male Quis players were in a Calanya. He also associated Kelric's large size with low intelligence. The crowd that had watched the last game was dispersing.

"Have a seat," the Quis Master said. "I'm Talv."

As Kelric sat down, he wondered if he had somehow let on that he didn't know market-style Quis. He had never learned to gamble, and he had played nothing but Quis solitaire for ten years. He wasn't certain he could beat Talv. But if he could win a few tekals, he could buy a sausage and indulge his admittedly whimsical desire to repay his old debt.

Talv glanced at the pouch on Kelric's belt. "You've brought your set, I see." He started to remove his extra dice.

Kelric knew if he rolled out jeweled Calanya dice, the game would end before it started. As much as a Quis Master might want to challenge a Calani, he would never risk the ire of a Manager. So he indicated Talv's extra dice. "I prefer those." Speaking with an Outsider was even harder when he was about to play Quis. "Your extra set."

"Are you sure?" Talv yawned. "Most people find it easier to use their own dice. They will be more familiar to you."

It was, of course, something any child knew. "Yours will be fine," Kelric said.

"All right." Talv smirked at him. "What shall we bet?"

"How much for a sausage?"

"A
sausage
?" Talv wasn't even trying to hide his disdain. "One tekal."

So. Same price. "Let us play for two tekals."

Talv shrugged. "Oh, all right. You can start."

"Shouldn't we draw dice?" Going first was an advantage.

"If you insist." Talv pulled a disk out of his pouch and handed over the bag. Kelric took out a lower-ranked piece, a flat square.

"Your move," Kelric said.