The Broken Lands (38 page)

“He has something I need, and I figure the only way to take it from him is to win it, and the only thing I have to wager with that he really wants is a girl. A . . . friend.” Sam swallowed. “So I can't lose.”

Tesserian nodded with a look of sympathy. “Then any game you've ever played is out.”

Sam felt like he'd just been punched in the stomach, hard. “Wha—Wait a minute—”

The other gambler shook his head. “Nope. At every single game you know, he beats you. I promise. Now, you want to beat somebody,” he continued, “you gotta know three things about him: why he's playing, what makes him confident, what makes him question himself. Then you pick your game based on how he thinks you'll win it.”

Sam found himself nodding along. He'd never really put words to how he went about figuring out somebody else's game logic, but Tesserian had just done a pretty good job of summing it up. “So, for Walker . . . ?”

“He plays because winning tides him over between killings. Reminds him that he always has power over you, even when he can't kill you. Or, the way he would likely put it, even when he
chooses
not to. And by
you,
I mean . . .” Tesserian waved his arm around as if to encompass Culver Plaza, Coney Island, all of Long Island, and the world.

“As to what makes him confident . . . well, he's a predator, and he's a rung or two up the ladder from most everything and everybody around him. Now, what makes him question himself . . . kid, that's the challenge. But you can't do it with poker, or monte or stuss or any game you've ever played. He's old.
Old
. He's had decades to perfect every game you've ever heard of.”

“I know a lot of games. I used to play in the tenements; I played with men from all over the place. I probably know some
he's
never even heard of.”

“You misunderstand me. When I say old . . . Sam, he's played every game humankind's ever
invented
.”

Sam frowned, racking his brains for the most obscure games he'd ever heard of. “What about elfern? Harjan? Einwerfen? Or there's styrivolt. Talonmarias. Tressette.”

“Please. Every gambler who's ever been to Italy knows tressette, and you can't even play einwerfen and styrivolt with two people.” Tesserian lifted his hat and scratched his head. “Or talonmarias, either, for that matter. I'm telling you, there's no game you know right now at which you have so much as a chance at beating him.”

“I—” Sam hesitated. “That I know
right now?
”

The sharper nodded. “Which brings us to the only way I can think of that might make Redgore question himself. You challenge him to a game you should have no way of knowing.”

“I thought you said—”

“I said he knew every game humankind's ever invented. And he knows plenty more than that. Thing about those
plenty more
is”—Tesserian reached across and tapped Sam on the chest—“there's no way
you
should know them.”

“But you do?”

“I do.” Tesserian leaned on the table again, his eyes glittering. “And I'm fairly certain if you show up and challenge him to the game I'm about to teach you, it'll pretty much wreck his poise. It might just give you edge enough not to lose in the first hand.”

Not exactly a ringing vote of confidence, but it would have to do. “I'm listening.”

“The game is called Santine. We play it with these.”

Tesserian put a narrow wooden box with a horn handle on the table between them and opened it. Sam recognized it immediately: a gambler's kit, not all that much different from the one he carried himself. His own held a few decks of cards (a forty-four-card Italian deck that had belonged to his father, a well-worn fifty-two-card deck, and two more—one square and one subtly marked for a brace game—that were still wrapped in their factory paper), a couple pairs of dice, and a piece of green baize fabric printed with a layout for faro on one side and craps on the other.

Tesserian's kit . . . heck, Sam didn't even recognize half of what was in there. There were cards, yes, and dice, and baize. There were little ivory or bone rectangles, like dominoes or Chinese tiles. There were stacks of coins, although not ones that he had seen before. And there were other objects that were completely foreign to him.

Tesserian took a deck from the box and held it out.

The cards were old and thick, with a good snap and edges blunted by long years of fingers smoothing them down. The backs were printed with a pattern of overlapping red and gold circles that seemed to move if you looked at them without focusing. Sam turned the deck over and looked at the picture on the card: a young man in Roman armor, facing a stag with a tiny image of Jesus between its antlers. It had been a long time since he'd seen something like this, but he recognized it immediately.

“Saint Eustace,” he murmured. He looked at the next card: a bearded man who wore a halo like a circle of lightning, with a signal house in the background. “Saint . . . Elmo, maybe?” He flipped through a few more. “They're
santini
. Prayer cards.”

“In four suits, although in this game the suits are called reliquaries.”

Sam shuffled until he saw the repeating symbols: thorns, chalices, silver coins, spears. “This reminds me so much of my father's old deck. Italian. It has suits of staves, cups, coins, and swords.”

“Holy thorn, holy grail, silver piece, holy spear. Everything has its origin,” Tesserian said, taking the deck and laying cards out in rows on the table. “In each reliquary—remember, that's a suit—you have your saints. They break down into two types.” He pointed to a little red heart over the chest of Saint Elmo—“Red Martyrs”—and a white one over the chest of another Sam didn't recognize—“and White Martyrs. Then they divide further into sets: Hermits, Ascetics, Incorruptibles, Mystics, and Virgins.” He pointed to tiny letters on their foreheads. “There's usually overlap within sets. There are subsets, too, which you have to recognize by other signs. Warrior Saints wear armor, Cephalophores carry their own heads, Stylites stand on pillars, Child Saints—well, they're pretty obvious. You've got your Holy Unmercenaries, your Thaumaturges, Hieromartyrs, Protomartyrs, and your Myrrhbearers. Those are harder to differentiate.”

Sam blinked. It wasn't looking so much like his father's deck anymore.

“There are ruling groups that preside over the deck.” Tesserian pointed to an assortment of cards with golden borders around the images. “The first batch is made up of the Aurean Saints. Then you have the Fourteen Nothel­fers, the ones with the black borders, and the Four Holy Marshals, with purple.”

“But Saint . . . who is this?”

“Blaise.”

“He's got gold
and
black.”

“Yeah, there's some overlap between the ruling groups, too. Then you have the ultimate trumps, which can be played for damage or for profit against any suit of relics: the Procurator, the Holy Mother, and the Devil's Advocate.”

“My head is spinning.”

“Wait until we get to the complicated part.”

Sam dropped his forehead onto the table, mumbling apologies to whatever saint it was he'd just landed on.

 

“So then I should play . . .” Sam rifled through his hand for a card with a purple border. “A Holy Marshal, if I have one.” He dropped Saint Anthony on the table.

“Well, he'll do, but you could take the trick with any saint that counteracts plague. If you've got a Nothelfer, you ought to use that and hang on to your Marshal. Unless you've got all four Marshals, because—”

“That would end the game. Right.” They'd been sitting at the table for a good hour now. Sam's head was aching.

“Well, it wouldn't in this case, because I have the Devil's Advocate. You'd have to have the Procurator, too. Or the Holy Mother. Preferably both.”

“Okay, okay.” Sam stared down at the pile of
santini
on the table. “Look, this isn't coming together fast enough.”
Not a very good Catholic,
Jin's voice taunted him silently.
Not a very good Catholic
. “Is there any way for me to understand this game without having to know everything about the saints? Patterns I could use that don't require me to . . . I don't know . . .”

“Memorize the hagiography?”

“I don't even know what that word means.”

“History of the saints. You want pure strategy.”

Exactly
. “I want a way to
win
. If this is the game that can beat Walker, then I'll play it, but there has to be a way to win with cards rather than with saints. Cards I get. Saints, not so much.”

Tesserian nodded slowly. “You need the Liar.”

Sam frowned. “You haven't mentioned a card called the Liar.”

“Haven't I?” Tesserian scratched his head, picked up the unplayed cards in the deck, and started riffling through them. “This one.”

He tossed a card down on the table: a robed cleric with a lute over one shoulder and a quill and inkpot on the desk before him.

“The Liar allows you to play the cards to counter any hand, or end the game, if that's what you want to do, whether you have them or not.”

“Whether you have them or not?”

“When you play the Liar, it works. In Santine, with the Liar, you can manipulate the cards any way you want.”

Sam frowned at the card, then at Tesserian. “Is this how you worked that nonsense on me? All the spades, making the suits change in front of my eyes?” He snatched the card and turned it over, looking for some clue as to how what Tesserian was suggesting could possibly be true. “You had this, so you could—what? Change diamonds into spades?”

The sharper shook his head. “In
Santine
you can use the Liar this way. Every game has its own rules. You know that. Anyhow, I told you I didn't cheat when we played.”

“Then how did you do it?” Sam sputtered, his frustration finally refusing to be contained. He flung the Liar back down on the table. “It doesn't make sense! I saw you do things that were impossible! I've been trying to figure it out, and it's driving me out of my mind. If you didn't cheat—”

“Kid,” Tesserian interrupted, his voice almost gentle. “Listen, you're good. You know that, right?”

Sam paused, mid-rant, and looked at the man on the other side of the table. “What?”

“You're a good player. You're a good sharper. But you're—what?—sixteen?”

“Fifteen,” Sam mumbled.

“Okay, you're fifteen. You have a lot of years and a lot of life to live. You don't get to know everything all at once. You're also you, and, not to sound puffed up around the gills, I'm me. I've been roaming a long time, and I've been playing even longer. There's a lot I can do that would make you question your eyes. That doesn't mean I'm not actually doing it.” He neatened the edges of the deck, lining the cards up in a perfect stack. “Not a bad thing to keep in mind as you wander, Sam. This world's a strange place. You go around ignoring everything that doesn't seem to fit with your expectations, you could miss a lot that's well worth seeing.”

This reminded Sam of Tesserian's words when he'd first told him about Walker. “You called me a roamer, earlier.”

Tesserian tilted his head and looked at him closely. “I did, didn't I?” Sam nodded. “Well, I'm usually right about that kinda thing.”

“What does it mean?”

“Can mean a lot of things. Different things for different folks. For Redgore it means cards and killing. For me it means cards and not-killing. And, evidently, teaching you Santine. For you . . .” He gave Sam another one of those appraising once-overs. “Hard to say. You're young yet. But you've got dust on the soles of your shoes, for sure. It's an expression,” he added, when Sam actually started to look.

“Then . . . how can you tell that about me?” But even as he asked it, Sam felt something for just a moment: a fizzing at the back of his tongue, a brief taste of pine and cinnamon. He frowned, momentarily distracted. Tesserian watched closely, nodded.

“I don't know what it was you just remembered, but from the look on your face, it was something big.”

It was there, and then it was gone. “Could drinking something be enough to make me a roamer?”

“What, you think you drink a potion, you grow small, you eat a cake, you grow tall? No, Alice, the real world isn't like that.” Tesserian looked thoughtful for a moment. “Except when it is, obviously.”

“Obviously? Who's Alice?” Sam shook his head to clear it. “Never mind. Let's get back to the game.” Because right now, Santine was starting to seem almost logical compared to the rest of this conversation.

Tesserian clapped his hands. “Right. Look, here's the simplest way to understand it. Santine is a game about invoking saints, right? You a churchgoing fellow?”

“Not particularly.”

“But you understand that people invoke saints when they need something. Think of it like this—you're invoking the saints to help you win against someone else who's doing the same thing. But saints—and I've known plenty—are unpredictable so-and-sos. So are the Santine cards. There are lots of ways to win by playing square in Santine—more ways than anyone knows, in fact. I could even tell you stories of players discovering new ways to win in the middle of a game. They say you just see a solution where there wasn't one before, and it works. It happens, but it's rare. Heck, I've never done it. Which is why it's best if we focus on the Liar.”

“And the Liar can't fail, right?” All this talk about the unpredictability of the cards was beginning to make Sam nervous again. Not that he'd ever really stopped being nervous about this game.

“The Liar works in Santine because it enables the person holding it to reinvent the game. Just the way a lie works in the real world. Playing it ends the game the way a lie ends a discussion. There's nothing more to say after somebody tells an obvious lie and insists that everybody else believes it, is there?”