Everybody anted up, throwing the bare minimum of coins onto the table, to show they were entering the game, and I had to go along. And then everyone discarded some cards in return for others, while I thought furiously. Finally, Parris looked at me and raised an eyebrow when I just smiled at him, placed my cards face down on the table, and shook my head.
“I’ll play these,” I said.
And while everyone else was still staring at me, I pushed forward every single coin I had, to start the next round.
“All of it,” I said brightly. “Every damned obol. Anyone want to see me?”
I saw Molly sit bolt upright at the bar, out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t dare look at her directly. She was looking at me as though I’d gone mad, and to be fair, so was everybody else. But, because everyone else at the table was an experienced gambler, and knew what they were doing . . . they assumed I knew what I was doing. So they all folded, and threw their cards in. Rather than throw good obols after bad. I smiled again, and raked in all the coins already bet. With one single bluff, I’d just about doubled the number of souls I had to bet with. Enough for me to sit back for a few hands, watch the game develop, and allow the Armourer’s potion to kick in. I leaned back in my chair, and felt my heartbeat slowly fall back to something like normal.
Parris reached for my cards, and Schmidt suddenly leant forward.
“No!” he said. “I want to see the cards our callow young friend thought so highly of.”
“Sorry,” I said, pushing the cards over to Parris, still face down. “You didn’t pay for the privilege of seeing them.”
“Quite correct, Mr. Bond,” said Parris, shuffling my cards back into the pack.
“So,” said Schmidt. “That’s how this game is going to be played.”
My first big win had surprised, if not necessarily impressed, everyone else, and they were all very cautious in their betting through the next few rounds. I anted up the bare minimum, just enough to stay in the game, and watched the other players as closely as the play. My card counting skills eased in almost without me noticing, and I was soon starting to recognise patterns in the play. Just enough . . . to give me an edge. The cards went back and forth, and I won a few hands here and there, while avoiding what might have been nasty losses. The other players were taking me more seriously now, and genuinely seemed to believe I knew what I was doing.
And then the Card Shark bet big, just as I had. He bet all his obols, all his souls, on one hand of cards. And then he sat back and glowered around the table. Only I knew he couldn’t have the kind of cards he needed to win that big. I’d been counting. So I called him. It took pretty much everything I had. The Card Shark glared at me, outraged that a nobody like me should dare to call him. He wasn’t giving anything away; he’d looked angry and outraged at pretty much everything and everyone since he sat down at the table. There are, after all, all kinds of poker faces. He turned to Parris, who was already shaking his head.
“No credit, Card Shark. You can only bet what you bring to the table. You have bet, and Mr. Bond has called. It’s time to see the cards.”
The Card Shark turned his over: a pair of kings. While I had three eights. And that was that. The Card Shark had bluffed, trying to intimidate the table with his old reputation, and he had lost. The others looked at him almost pityingly. The Card Shark lurched to his feet, and pointed a shaking finger at me.
“Cheat! I call cheat! There’s no way you could have bet that much, on a hand like that, unless you knew what I had!”
“I suspected,” I said.
“Enough,” said Parris. “There is no room at this table for a sore loser. Perhaps you should have stayed retired, Mr. Fisk.”
“No! No! Give me another chance, another stake!” The Card Shark looked wildly around him, as the nearest armed guards moved forward. He was still begging and pleading, without shame or pride, to be allowed to stay at the table, where he belonged, when he was dragged bodily out the dimensional door. He was crying when the door slammed shut after him, and the sound cut off abruptly. Parris smiled apologetically around the table.
“Some players just don’t know when to quit.”
And then the door slammed open again, and the Card Shark was back, brandishing a gun he’d somehow managed to take off one of the guards. We all sat very still as the Card Shark pointed the gun unsteadily at Parris.
“Give me another chance,” he said harshly. “Just enough souls for a few more hands, enough to get back in the Game. I’m not being cheated out of my comeback!”
“It was never going to be a comeback,” Parris said calmly. “Merely one last chance to play at the big table. Don’t be a fool, Mr. Fisk. Give me the gun.”
“I won’t give up!” said the Card Shark. “I’ve got a gun, so you have to listen to me! I didn’t come all this way just to be beaten by a nobody! You gave me the souls. Give me some more! You can afford it! I can do this!”
“So,” said Schmidt, glaring at Parris. “The rumours are true. You did back a player of your own.”
“You tried to fix the Big Game, Mr. Parris?” said Leopold. “I am shocked, I tell you, shocked.”
“There has been no interference in the Game,” Parris said carefully. “I merely wanted to be sure that there would be someone at the table that other people had heard of.”
The Card Shark suddenly pointed his gun at me. “You couldn’t have beaten me, you little shit. Not you!”
“You bluffed and you lost,” said Leopold. “No one likes a bad loser. This is no way to end a long and distinguished career, Mr. Fisk. Please leave now, before things get out of hand.”
“I’ve got a gun!” said the Card Shark, desperately.
“So you have,” said Parris. “But I have an Evil Eye.”
There was a pause as everyone looked at him. The Card Shark turned the gun back to Parris.
“I don’t see any Evil Eye,” he said.
“It isn’t in my face,” said Parris. “It’s in my hand.”
He held up his left hand, and there in his palm was an embedded metal eye. The lids crawled open, revealing a glowing eye, and the Card Shark couldn’t look away. He looked into the Evil Eye, and was lost. All the expression went out of his face, and he just stood there, staring blankly. An empty shell. The metal eyelids closed, and Parris lowered his hand. He gestured to the two nearest guards, and they led the unresisting Card Shark away. The door closed behind him again, and this time they stayed closed. Parris looked round the table, at all of us.
“All his souls go to you, Mr. Bond. And his soul, as well. Because no one defies the rules of Casino Infernale.” He turned and looked at Eiko, who nodded quickly, hopped down from her high stool, and hurried out the dimensional door. She left it standing open. After a moment there was the sound of a scream, stopped short by a single gunshot, and then Eiko came back through the door. She closed it, nodded briefly to Parris, and sat on her bar-stool again.
“That was the guard who was clumsy enough to allow his gun to be stolen,” said Parris. “I think you’ll find the remaining guards will stay on their toes from now on.”
He didn’t look around. He didn’t have to. Molly looked thoughtfully at Eiko.
* * *
Play continued. I bet small and played cautiously, counting cards and watching the play, waiting for another opening. Leopold seemed to be doing much the same. Perhaps he was waiting for God to whisper in his ear. Jacqueline studied her every hand carefully, glowering, thinking hard, as though everything depended on every hand. And perhaps for her, it did. She was winning steadily, playing conservatively, playing the odds. The pile of obols in front of her grew.
Schmidt seemed increasingly impatient. Things were not going well for him. He squirmed in his chair, rearranging his cards again and again, as though he could force them into a better combination. He scowled, almost sulkily, as he watched his pile of obols slowly diminish. No big losses or upsets, but he was running out of souls. He glared suddenly at Jacqueli
ne.
“Come on! What’s taking you so long! Make your bet; you’re holding the Game up! We should never have allowed a woman to take part anyway!”
Jacqueline turned into Hyde so quickly none of us could follow it. There was no effort involved, no straining or crying out—one minute a small woman was sitting opposite Schmidt, and the next, there was Hyde. Huge and muscular, a great bear of a man. A big brutal engine of destruction. And before any of the armed guards could even react, Hyde reached across the table and tore Schmidt’s head off. Just ripped it away, with shockingly casual ease. The body fell backwards from the table, still in its chair, blood spurting thickly from the ragged stump of neck. Hyde held up the severed head before him, smiling horribly into Schmidt’s still-blinking eyes.
Some of the guards cried out, almost hysterically. They were trained to deal with men; Hyde was something else. Something much worse. Leopold and I had both risen up out of our seats and stepped quickly back from the table, out of Hyde’s reach. But he had eyes only for the head in his hands. He waited till Schmidt stopped blinking, and then he kissed the dead man on his dead mouth, and threw the head calmly to one side. It rolled away, stopping at the feet of one guard, who froze where he was, gazing down at the thing with appalled fascination. Hyde turned his great head slowly to look at Parris, who hadn’t moved an inch.
“Clear up this mess,” said Hyde.
Everyone in the room flinched at the sound of his voice. Parris gestured quickly for two guards to come forward and carry the headless body out. In the end, Eiko picked up the head and took it away, apparently entirely unmoved. The extra chair was removed from the table, and Leopold and I resumed our seats. Hyde turned back into Jacqueline. And once again, just for a moment, I thought I saw the two of them reaching out to each other in the only moment when they could meet. Reaching out, but never able to touch. This evil brute of a man, and this small delicate woman. Beauty and the Beast, or two sides of the same coin?
Jacqueline gathered the remains of her clothes around her. She didn’t look at any of us.
“I’m just a woman in love with a man,” she said. “I only want what any woman wants—to be able to hold her man in her arms. I only want to know what every other woman knows. I want to be together. And I will not suffer anything to get in my way. Do we have a problem, Mr. Parris?”
“I don’t think so,” Parris said carefully. “Mr. Schmidt broke the rules of the Game when he tried to intimidate you. I would have had my people remove him, anyway, if he’d continued.”
“Then play on,” said Jacqueline. And we did.
* * *
The cards went back and forth, to no productive end. Obols passed back and forth across the table, from pile to pile and back again, while I waited for my moment.
Leopold looked at me thoughtfully. “There’s something about you, Shaman. Something I didn’t expect. You’re so much more than your reputation.”
“The nail that stands up gets hammered down,” I said easily. “I prefer to hide my light in the shadows.”
“And I have to ask,” said Leopold, quite casually, “what the infamous wild witch herself, Molly Metcalf, is doing here with you? According to Church files, she is quite definitely involved with a Drood, these days. The remarkable Eddie Drood, no less. I think I can safely say, none of us saw that one coming.”
Molly snorted loudly at the bar. I carefully didn’t look in her direction.
“She still is attached to her Drood,” I said. “I just hired her to be my bodyguard. Dangerous place, this Casino Infernale.”
“And how did someone like you, Shaman, acquire enough money to hire someone like her?” said Leopold.
“With a percentage of my winnings,” I said.
“Of course,” said Leopold. “I knew it would have to be something like that.”
“How did you get to be the famous gambling priest?” I said.
“There’s a lot of card playing goes on at Seminaries,” Leopold said easily. “Almost the only vice we can indulge. Young men together—very competitive. . . . You know how it is. I discovered I had a gift for the cards, and the Church found a use for that gift.”
“And you always win?” I said.
“God gave me a gift, not a miracle,” said Leopold. “It’s all about knowing which cards to back. Like these.”
He placed his cards face down on the table, patted them almost fondly, and then pushed forward every obol in front of him. It was quite a large pile. Leopold smiled around the table.
“Would anyone care to call me? I assure you, God is on my side here.”
I pushed forward my entire pile of souls, to match his. “Do we really need to count them all?” I said to Parris. “It’s every soul I have, against every soul he has.”
“This is acceptable to me,” said Parris. “If it is acceptable to you, Leopold?”
“Of course!” said the famous gambling priest.
Molly was all but bouncing up and down on her stool, trying to catch my eye. I didn’t look at her. I knew what I was doing. I nodded to Leopold.
“You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.”
He turned over a full house. Jacks over tens. Should have been a winning hand. Anywhen else, it would be. But I turned over four aces. And for a long moment, no one at the table said anything.
“God might be on your side, Leopold,” I said. “But the cards are on mine.”
Leopold stood up abruptly, staring at me with a shocked, ashen face. He looked genuinely upset. “I don’t understand. . . . It’s not possible! You are not who you appear to be, Shaman Bond! You are in the employ of dark forces! It’s the only answer!”
I looked at Parris. “I’m not in the employ of dark forces. Really.”
“No demonic possessions here,” said Eiko, from the bar. “The mystical null is still operating.”
Leopold’s shoulders slumped, and the fire went out of his eyes. The guards escorted him out of the door, and he went quietly.
Jacqueline looked across the table at me. “Just the two of us now, Shaman.”
“Shouldn’t that be three?” I said.
“Funny man,” said Jacqueline. “But don’t try anything funny with my other half. You wouldn’t like me when I’m funny.”
“Lady and gentleman,” said Parris. “Let’s play cards. It’s still all to play for.”
He shuffled the cards, thoroughly, and play went on. It didn’t take long before Jacqueline decided she had the perfect hand, and bet all her souls on it. You would have thought that she’d learned better by now, or at least spotted a pattern. But no, she bet every soul she had on her hand, and I pushed forward my pile to match hers. She slammed her cards down on the table, and glared at me defiantly.
“There! Four kings! Beat that!”
“No,” I said, showing her my cards. “I have four kings. You have four queens.”
Jacqueline looked down at her cards, and her jaw dropped. “No! That’s not possible! I had the four kings! I did!”
“The cards in front of you are quite definitely queens,” said Parris. And they were.
“You cheated!” roared Hyde, as he lunged across the table at me.
I was expecting the change, but even so it happened so suddenly it caught me by surprise. Only the width of the table kept Hyde’s clutching hands from my throat. I threw myself backwards, rolling out of the chair and across the floor. Hyde threw himself across the table. I scrabbled backwards, and every guard in the room opened up on Hyde. He charged forward so fast he actually avoided most of the bullets, and the few wounds he did take healed almost immediately. He towered over me, massive and monstrous.
I could see Molly on her feet by the bar, frustrated because she couldn’t use her magics to help me. I was feeling equally frustrated without my armour. I yelled to Parris to give me back my gun, but he just shook his head.
“You don’t need a weapon,” he said loudly. “I have my own weapon. Eiko!”
There was something in the w
ay he said her name that made Hyde stop and look around. Just in time to see Eiko turn into a female Hyde. She didn’t become big and bulky, like a female bodybuilder or wrestler. She was tall but slender, lithely muscular, full of a terrible burning energy. Like Jacqueline’s Hyde, just looking at what Eiko had become made you want to kill her on sight. She was wrong, awful, an abomination. Everything a human being is not meant to be, brought to the surface and made material. Evil in the flesh. Eiko launched herself at Hyde, and the two monsters slammed together in a horrid form of violence that was almost sexual. They tore at each other with their bare hands, ripping flesh away in great bloody handfuls. The wounds healed quickly, and the fight went on.
Until Eiko, the better trained fighter, got Hyde in a headlock, and held him there just long enough for Parris to shove the Evil Eye in his hand right into Hyde’s face. He cried out as the metal eye looked into him, and then he changed back, into Jacqueline. Because that was the only way he could escape what the Eye was doing to him. The moment Jacqueline reappeared, Eiko punched her savagely in the side of the head, and let go. Jacqueline collapsed, weeping in pain and loss. The guards all looked at Parris, the same question in all their faces. Should we shoot her now?
Parris thought about it, and then shook his head. “Let her live. As she is. That’s a far worse punishment.”
Two guards hauled Jacqueline back onto her feet, dragged her to the dimensional door, and threw her out. Before the door closed, Jacqueline looked back at me and screamed I’m glad I poisoned you at the restaurant! Which solved one small mystery, at least.
Parris gave the transformed Eiko a hard look, and she changed back into her previous self. I thought I sensed a certain resistance in her, but apparently Eiko was smart enough not to argue with Parris while he still had his Evil Eye. Eiko went back to sit at the bar, and Molly looked at her thoughtfully.
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