Chapter 6: Gambling

Dane fiddled with the cloth bag in his hands, trying to keep himself grounded in the current conversation.

The woman before him, the Sunset Knight’s new counselor, leaned forward eagerly.

“I really think that following a different deity would solve a lot of your problems, Dane,” she said.

Dane wondered how much pleasure she got out of these sort of conversations. Was it euphoric, for her, to ‘fix’ someone? Even if they didn’t need to be fixed? He had known people like that.

“You haven’t thought your advice out,” said Dane. “You’ve only considered why following the Crone is bad for me. But let’s consider the other side. Who would I switch to? Dotean? I can’t make beautiful or interesting things, and you need to make something spectacular in order to gain his favor. Fiach? I’m not a hard worker. Never have been, probably never well.”

“Uisce,” Elaene suggested. “You’re a soldier, your job is protecting people—that’s making other people safe and happy. You already fit the profile. Uisce is not a jealous god, it’s very easy to follow him instead.”

“I don’t really care about other people,” Dane said. “I became a soldier because I was called to be it. It’s that simple. I have no great love for the work, and if I could stop being one, I probably would—assuming I could find something else to do. What if I just stopped following the gods? Not everyone has to be a religious devotee, after all.”

Elaene considered it. “I can think of some reasons why,” she said. “But why haven’t you?”

“Because being a soldier is an occupational hazard,” Dane said. “Especially in this city with the Carpenter and his nut jobs running around. What would I do if I got killed? None of the lesser gods would vouch for me during the Solemn Vigil, and Aigean probably wouldn’t give a shit. I’d be sent to the sunken hells for sure. No, as long as I keep trying, Aer will vouch for me and I still have a shot.”

Elaene kept quiet. Then she said, “Those were my reasons as well. Look, I think we’re on the same ground when it comes to this issue, more or less, so let’s talk about your drinking.”

“Yeah,” said Dane. “Let’s not.”

“You don’t need drink to make you happy,” Elaene insisted. Why did everyone always say that?

“I haven’t really found anything else,” Dane said.

“Have you really tried?”

“Look, Lito pushes me impossibly hard as a soldier. She does that to everyone, as I’m sure you’ve found out. I have no time to find anything new, not normally, and certainly not tonight, as I need to enjoy myself before the end of Gift Day. This is a fool proof way to ensure that, as long as I can stop at a certain point.”

“And you can’t, can you?” Elaene said.

“Historically, that, ah, has not been my strong suit.” Dane admitted. “But I have some new things I’m trying tonight.”

“Have you just tried not drinking for a while?”

Dane started to laugh. He couldn’t help it, it was the most idiotic well-meaning advice he had ever heard.

“Yeah. I tried that once.”

Dane leaned forward. “This was back when I still thought of drinking as a problem, right? I hadn’t yet been chosen to be a soldier; I was trying things out as an apprentice in a few places. The King’s Men weren’t yet sure where to put me. And one night I just got sick of it. Got sick of the whole thing. I hated that I was spending so much of my minimal pay on ale, I got sick that I was spending so much of my time on it, I got sick that everyone seemed to be able to enjoy this reasonably except me. So I ran away to the farmlands.”

Dane wasn’t quite sure why he was telling this new priestess all of this. He had never told anyone this story before, but she was so smug sitting there; she thought she had it all figured out and it felt good to throw this right back in her face.

“I did alright for a little while. There was no tavern in the town; it was too small for that, and I spent most of the time working on a farm for this nice old family.”

“Why don’t you go back to doing that?”

“Oh, did I interrupt you when you were talking about all the people you helped in the Drain and how gods damned successful you are at all of this? No, I did not.” Dane was getting angrier, and really wanted a drink to calm himself down. “So that’s point number one. Point number two, is that I can’t go back and do that even if I wanted to, which I don’t, because I’ve been called to be a soldier and that’s exactly what I’m going to be for the rest of my life.”

Elaene sat there in silence for a second before she spoke. “What happened in the farm lands?”

Dane stood up. “That’s none of your business. And now, I would like you to leave.”

“I can, ah, respect that. For the record, I thought this was a good start to our conversation.”

Dane laughed bitterly, and opened the door. Elaene stood up, and walked forwards.

“Oh, before I leave,” she said, putting her foot firmly before the threshold. “Have you heard anything about a man called Raeden Clamore?”

Dane frowned in thought. “As a matter of fact, I have.” He thought back to the conversation he had with Callador after he had finished making the dice. Callador had told him the story, and cautioned him to be careful in the future. “Spy for Lito, right? Carpenter got him.”

Elaene bit her lip. “Did you hear how?”

“Drowned, I think. I didn’t hear details.”

“That sounds better than usual,” Elaene said slowly. Then she looked up. “Alright, Dane. I do hope that you enjoy yourself tonight—just take it easy, okay? We’ll talk again soon.”

“Thank you Elaene, but I pray not,” Dane said, and ushered her out the door.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

“…and what happens, right, is that Rush actually flips, vertically, right?”

Dane nodded, drink in hand, but in truth he had no idea what Salva Santori was talking about.

“You take all of that wide open river—a hundred feet wide and more in the farmlands, you know, and you just rotate it.”

“What do you mean, rotate it?” Dane said.

“Well, the Autumn Rush is only five or six feet wide, right? You could practically jump over it, and people do, at times, the nutters who worship the Crone most often. So where does all that water go? How does the entire Rush fit into something that small?”

Dane rolled the empty ale mug around on the table. His third? Fourth? He looked at the dice in front of him, and counted six sides. His third, then. “Salva, you tell me. I’ve never been further down than Glen-Clachan.”

“It fits because it’s rotated,” Salva said. He took his flat, outstretched hand, and flipped it so it was vertical. He had repeated the gesture several times, and Dane still didn’t understand what it meant.

“You keep saying that,” Dane said. “But my enlightenment as regards to this, ah, nautical marvel is still very much in doubt.”

“It’s rotated,” Salva said. “The Rush changes from being a hundred feet wide and around six feet deep to being six feet wide and over a hundred feet deep.”

Dane looked at him. “That’s it?” He leaned back. “You could have just said that in the first place, Salva, that’s a much simpler explanation than…” Dane put out his hand a flipped it vertical a few times. “…whatever you were doing there.”

“I can’t help it that you have straw for brains.”

“Handy thing, straw,” Dane admitted. “Dry, prone to igniting spontaneously with brilliance or passion. It’s a lot better than the mud you keep between your ears.”

Salva tapped his chest with two fingers in acknowledgment of the hit. “Here’s the scary thing, though—if you fall into the Autumn Rush you die.”

Dane rolled his empty mug around some more.

“And here’s why,” Salva continued. “The Autumn Rush speeds up really, really quickly. There’s a tremendous undercurrent, and if you fall in you get sucked under and drown. No one who has fallen in has ever made it.”

“That’s nice,” Dane said.

“It gets weirder, right, they have nets at the Winter Rush, to catch things—boxed messages and supplies from the upper island, it’s amazing how fast you can transport things if you want to, you just need to make sure the box has, uh, float-iness.”

“Buoyancy.” Dane corrected.

“Yeah, that,” Salva said. “I mean, it takes days and days to get message up from the Drain to here, right? You can either send one up the main road, or you can send it up to the priests and they can send it down their waterfalls to here. But either one takes so long! But we can just plop our messages to the Drain in the river and it takes a fraction of the time before it shows up in the nets. But do you know how many bodies they’ve found of people who fell into the Autumn Rush? None.”

Salva took another pull from his mug, and continued. “We can get messages and boxes through the Autumn Rush, but not bodies. That’s creepy, right? What’s down there? Some denizens of the ancient world who eat the corpses of thrill seekers? Or maybe it’s the merfolk lord and his vengeful kingdom, capturing men who are foolish enough to enter his domain.”

“Or maybe we never find any bodies because people just swim out of the Rush because that’s a stupid story. Why would the Rush be faster, just because it flipped, anyway? It’s the same volume of water.”

“I, uh, talk to a thinker person,” Salva slurred. “I just dump boxes in a river.”

“Fair enough,” Dane said. He rolled the dice before him, and was pleased to see it come up as a dot. “I’m going to get a drink.” Dane carefully pulled out another dice, which had eight sides, from a bag on his left, and deposited the dice with six sides in the bag on his left.

“What was that about?” Salva asked.

“I’ll tell you,” Dane said, standing up. “After I’ve had another drink.”

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Dane had forgotten about his promised explanation after he returned. In fact, it wasn't until midway through drink five that Salva Santori truly noticed the dice again.

“I roll the die every time I want something, want to do something, I mean,” Dane explained. “If it comes up as a dot, I can do that thing. If it comes up blank, I can’t.”

“Why?”

“So I don’t drink too much,” Dane said. “So I stop when we’re still having a good time.”

“And we are having a good time!” Salva said. He then stopped, confused. “But can’t you just… roll it again? You want another drink, right?”

“Yeah,” said Dane.

“That was what we like to call a rhetorical question. You want another drink, you roll the dice. The magical dice say, ‘No, Dane, you mustn't have another drink! Stay good, Dane! Stay good!’”

Dane chuckled, and Salva continued.

“But what happens, right? You still want that drink, right? So you roll the dice again. And if you keep rolling, you’ll get a dot. That is, unless all of these sides are blank.”

Dane sat, opened mouth in dismay, as Salva picked up the dice that Dane had been using and rolled it a few times, experimentally.

“I never thought about that,” Dane said.

The dice slipped from Salva’s fingers and clattered onto the floor. “What?”

“I never thought about that.”

Salva started laughing, clutching his stomach and putting other hand out in front of him as if to shush his friend. “You are,” Salva said between breaths, “You are the most tremendously clever moron I have ever met. Straw for brains indeed. You could build yourself labyrinth and then forget the way out. How can you know about math and buoyancy and other nonsense but not figure out how a river rotates, and not figure out the most obvious way through your incredibly stupid mechanism?”

“Shut up. Where’d that die go?”

Salva looked under the table for it, but no amount of drunken searching on his part could find it. He came up, hands empty, with a sorrowful expression on his face.

Dane was now experiencing that normal state of panic and alarm, when he needed some sort of direction to fix the issue, but his careful plan to provide himself with guidance in this state had been wrecked. He couldn't go down a die because then the probability of success would be too high for his current level of judgment…

“I think I need to get another drink,” Dane said, and pulled the next size die out of his bag.

Things went downhill from there.

Chapter 6: 2,196 | 15,495/50,000

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