Lex Trent versus the Gods

by Alex Bell

  Lex scowled at her. ‘Well you’ve made a right cock up of this, haven’t you?’ he snapped. ‘I thought you were going to help me get out of the city. Why didn’t you stop that crone from dragging me into that tent?’

  ‘She hardly dragged you, dear. You went in willingly. Anyway, I was the one who sent her to you in the first place.’

  ‘You what? Why? Look where it’s got me!’

  He held up his wrist where the black obelisk bracelet gleamed in the light from the small window.

  ‘It’s exciting, isn’t it? The Game has begun!’

  ‘G-Game?’ Lex repeated, his mouth dropping open as he gaped at her in delight. ‘You don’t mean . . . ?’

  ‘Yes, Lex. One of the Games.’

  Lex was so thrilled - so beside himself with excitement - that he actually hugged the Goddess. He just couldn’t help himself. A Game! A Game at last! He had made a lot of money on them in the past but betting on them was hardly the same thing as actually playing in one! And he had longed to take part for such a long time.

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ he beamed. ‘When does it start, my Lady? When can we begin?’

  The Goddess smiled. ‘Well, I can see that I’m not going to have to threaten to turn you into a chessman.’

  Playing in the Games held by the Gods brought fortune, fame and glory - if you were the winner. But it could also bring . . . well . . . danger, death and loss of limb. It could bring suffering, misery, discomfort and hardship. In short, if you were not a natural winner then the Games could be very unpleasant indeed. Many players were motivated by vanity and greed but others didn’t think the chance of glory was worth the risk of painful death. More and more people had started refusing to play, which hadn’t been much fun for the Gods at all. They couldn’t force them because all players had to be willing. So they came up with the idea that potential players would have a choice - either they could agree to play the Game or they could choose instead to be turned into life-sized chessmen, which the Gods would then put on display in their own churches. No one could quite tell whether these chessmen had any degree of sentient awareness but the general consensus seemed to be that it was better to take your chances with the Game than to resign yourself to being turned into an inanimate lump of wood. So not many people got turned into chessmen nowadays, but most Gods had one or two pieces in their churches from the olden days when people had half thought the whole thing was a bluff. One thing it’s always worth bearing in mind is that Gods very rarely bluff.

  ‘How do the Swanns come into this?’ Lex asked.

  ‘What Swanns?’

  ‘The Wishing Swanns of Desareth,’ Lex replied, pulling the velvet pouch from his pocket. ‘The enchanter gave them to me with the bracelet.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about any Swanns,’ Lady Luck said with a touch of impatience. ‘Perhaps the enchanter wanted to get rid of them for some reason, the silly man. I just sent you to him because I knew he had a Binding Bracelet for sale and we need one to secure you a companion for the Game.’

  ‘Companion?’ Lex repeated, pulling a face. ‘I’ve never heard of that before.’

  ‘Yes, it’s new. From now on, all players must have companions.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘It was felt that companionship and camaraderie would add a little something for the spectators, dear. And . . . they’ll also act as a backup in case the first player should become . . . indisposed. Not that you need to worry about that, Lex. I’m sure you’ll do just fine. I fully expect you to win.’

  ‘I will win,’ Lex replied vehemently. ‘But I don’t want a companion. I don’t need one.’

  ‘It’s compulsory, I’m afraid. You must have one. The two of you must eat every meal together, until the Game is over, otherwise you’ll switch bodies. It’s a companionship thing.’

  ‘All right, but why Schmidt? If I must have a companion, why can’t it be one of the raven-haired, doe-eyed variety—’

  ‘Yes, I did think Schmidt was an odd choice. I rather thought you might go for that little gypsy girl but the lawyer was the first person you had direct skin to skin contact with and that’s how the Binding Bracelets work so—’

  ‘But nobody told me!’ Lex wailed, thinking of Cara and mentally comparing her to Mr Schmidt.

  ‘I am sorry, dear. I meant to let you know but it must have slipped my mind.’

  Lex could have shaken her. Instead, he gritted his teeth and said, ‘What do the runes say?’

  ‘So Begins The Game,’ she said, dropping her voice dramatically. ‘Of course. It starts at Khestrii the day after tomorrow. Make sure you are there at the Black Tower by sunset. When you get there, everything will be explained and it will be announced to the stadiums. It will be glorious, Lex. You and I are going to win this by a long shot.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE SOULLESS WAKE

  Lex decided not to say anything to Schmidt about the Game or anything else the Goddess had told him. After all, he didn’t owe the lawyer anything. He hadn’t asked him to come chasing after him across the sea to try and arrest him and drag him back to the Wither City.

  Lex had talked Jani into letting them purchase a wagon she had stored in the courtyard. The mantha beast was tethered to it and was plodding along a country road out of the Farrows with the slow, consistent gait peculiar to its kind, seemingly oblivious to Gersha’s cold winds whipping about them. Lex and Schmidt were sitting on the narrow wooden seat at the front, with some food and their bags stored in the back. It was not a particularly comfortable way of travelling, but it was certainly preferable to travelling on the mantha’s back.

  It was an odd thing because, in Lex’s experience, no one was usually that upset in the aftermath of his crimes. After all, most of his thieving in the Wither City had been limited to large museums that would be insured anyway. He’d never managed to successfully steal anything from Schmidt himself or the partners of his precious firm, so why all the fuss? It surely couldn’t stem only from dislike, for Lex was likeable. People liked him. He had an honest, open face, he could be charming and he was accomplished in the vital art of showmanship.

  ‘What was it?’ he asked, suddenly eager to know, raising his voice to be heard over the gales that whipped about them.

  ‘What was what?’ the lawyer snapped.

  ‘What gave me away?’ Lex asked. ‘How did you know that I was a conniving thief rather than a hard-working sucker-of-a-student?’

  When he was playing a part, Lex was always very, very careful not to give away just how clever he really was. He wanted to appear industrious and hardworking at the law firm, certainly, but not clever. Clever people were watched and accused and suspected and Lex had to be careful not to draw unwanted attention to himself. He had to appear incapable of hatching devious plots, let alone carrying them out. He had learnt, right at the start, that one of the most important things a fraudster should aim for was to be underestimated. If they were scorned and ridiculed as well then so much the better.

  Before coming to the Wither City, when he’d still been travelling across the Globe, moving from place to place and scamming people blind, he had almost always chosen to play the part of a young man who was fabulously wealthy but at the same time extraordinarily dim, with a dash of rakishness thrown in as well. The trick was to make the merchant or the jeweller or the pawnbroker or whoever think that they were the ones scamming him.

  One scam he often used was to buy a brooch - the cheapest he could find - and then dirty it up with some grime, put it in a velvet box and cover the whole thing with dust. Then he would put on his poshest clothes, his sulkiest, most superior expression and saunter into a jeweller’s with the most arrogant manner he could summon up - which was not such a very difficult thing for Lex. And then came the fun part.

  ‘Ai say!’ he would whine as soon as he was in the door. ‘Is someone going to attend to mey or am ai just to be left standing hereyah all day? Ai am not accustomed to being treated in such a mannah!’
>
  ‘I beg your pardon, sir. How can I help?’ the jeweller would ask, hackles raised already.

  Lex would give him a haughty stare. ‘Ai am Trent Lexington IV of the Galswick Lexingtons.’ Of course, there was no such family but the jeweller would nod anyway and look suitably impressed. ‘Ai’ve come to talk about a brooch that was recently discovahed in the attic at the country home, you know.’

  ‘Very good, sir. Do you have the brooch with you today?’

  ‘Yaas, naturally. Ai made the discovery maiself and ai would like to sell . . . ah, that is . . . ai have come to get it valued at the bequest of mey parents.’

  The jeweller would smile knowingly, for most of them had seen this sort of thing before - young Lords dissatisfied with their allowances coming in to try and fob off some of the family jewels, no doubt pinched straight from dear Mama’s jewellery box itself - the sort of women who had so very many little trinkets that they wouldn’t miss one here and there. But attic jewellery was the very best kind for no one was going to miss that and, being older, it was usually more valuable, too.

  It was all in how the thing was presented. Of course, if Lex had walked in wearing second-hand clothes and talking like the country boy that he was then he would never in a million years have been able to pass some cheap bit of costume jewellery off as the real deal. But - between his own immaculate outfit and sneeringly aristocratic manner and the dust and grime of hundreds of years with which the brooch was covered - the jewellers believed him every time. To begin with. Of course, later on, under a more careful inspection, they would instantly discover the piece to be a fake. But at the time they would be so preoccupied with their greedy eagerness to scam the arrogant young toff that they would see in the velvet box only what they fully expected to see.

  After a very, very great deal of practice, Lex was even able to blush on command. This turned out to be exceedingly useful as he had taken to carrying a pack of cards into the jewellers with him. At some point, he would reach into his pocket for something, and the cards would come tumbling out - apparently quite by accident - and one of the jewellers would hurry to help him pick them up and Lex would blush crimson and mutter a bad-natured word of thanks before snatching the incriminating cards back - the clear implication being that he was indulging in gambling, very probably without his parents’ knowledge, that he was in over his head and that that was why he needed to sell the brooch in a hurry.

  It was very important to make it as easy for the jewellers to believe the scam as possible and Lex had learnt that the little details were very important - and added a certain authenticity to the proceedings. He had therefore taken to spending as much time as possible in smoky bars or taverns whilst he was wearing the posh clothes so that they would smell of smoke when he went to the jewellers as if he had spent all night in a gamblers’ den. Sometimes he even rubbed a tiny amount of alcohol around the collar for good measure. He found that jewellers would fall over themselves to short-change a gambling, smoking, drinking, arrogant young aristocrat - there appeared to be a sort of special satisfaction for them in it and the nastier Lex was, the more eager they would be to get him. They would offer a sum that was far less than the brooch would be worth if it were genuine, but actually far more than it was really worth seeing as the item was, in fact, quite as fake as Lex himself.

  But the day he had made his deal with Lady Luck it had all gone a bit wrong because there happened to be a ruby expert in that morning who was promptly called over in order that Lex could be given a more accurate estimation of the brooch’s worth. And, of course, it was immediately apparent that, wherever the brooch had come from, it had not come from any attic - stately home or otherwise.

  ‘It’s a fake,’ the jeweller said flatly, looking accusingly at Lex.

  ‘A fake?’ Lex repeated shrilly, looking genuinely horrified. ‘A fake, you say? Mey good man, that is quaite, quaite impossible. This brooch came from the attic at mey country house - ai found it thereyah meyself. Mey mother believes that it may once have belonged to her own great-great-grandmother Ethel, you know . . . ’ But he could see that there was to be no bluffing and blustering his way out of this one. He could insist that it wasn’t a fake until he was blue in the face but that seemed quite pointless considering the jeweller knew full well that it was not a genuine antique.

  ‘I shall call for the police,’ the man said, ‘and report you for trying to defraud me.’

  ‘Ah, come on now,’ Lex said pleadingly, switching back to his ordinary voice. ‘It’s a fair cop - you haven’t given me any money so there’s no harm done. I promise I won’t ever do it again; cross my heart.’

  But all of Lex’s feigned sincerity and reasonableness did nothing and soon he was racing from the town as fast as his legs would carry him - his top hat falling abandoned in the dust and the tails of his ridiculous frock coat flapping out behind him as he ran towards the church where he was to have his most fateful meeting with Lady Luck herself.

  Aah - those were simpler days before Lex became so ambitious. Fobbing off fake brooches couldn’t possibly compare to the skills he had trained himself in since coming to the Wither City. Everyone knew that he spent hours and hours at a time in his rooms studying and this was true - in a manner of speaking. But he had not been studying the law. With his practically photographic memory, he only needed to flick through the textbooks to get a grasp of the basics anyway. The majority of the time spent in his room had been practising on the ropes.

  No one ever came into Lex’s room for he insisted on doing all the cleaning himself, much to the landlady’s pleased surprise. But, if anyone had gone in, they would have seen a most strange arrangement of ropes hanging from the ceiling. They were of different thicknesses and different materials and had several different types of safety harness attached to them. Lex spent hours and hours and hours practising on what he called the Climbing Frame. If you’re going to fall, better to do so when you’re only hanging four feet above the floor over a carefully-positioned mattress. For whilst it was true that Lex may have been lucky, he was also careful, and he certainly had no intention of lowering himself through any holes in great, cavernous ceilings before he’d practised climbing, spinning, lowering and twisting on his own precisely-constructed spider web. He wasn’t doing anything for real until he could climb those ropes like a monkey. That sort of preparation was - he felt - what truly separated the men from the boys in this game. But he was vigilant that no one should ever suspect what really went on in his bedroom, to which end he had put about the story that he was a sap who studied all the time.

  There had been one occasion, though, when he had been dangling from the middle of the ceiling in one of his safety harnesses when the landlady had started hammering on his door saying that she absolutely must speak to him about some triviality or other.

  ‘Can’t it wait, Mrs Humphrey?’ Lex called, praying that she wouldn’t notice that his voice was coming from nearer the ceiling than the floor.

  ‘I’m afraid not, dear. I’ve got to talk to you about the new locks.’

  Lex sighed. There was no use arguing with her. She wouldn’t go away until he opened the door. He made to lower himself down to the ground on the rope. And that was when he found out that it wouldn’t move an inch and, no matter how he tugged, he didn’t seem to be able to go up or down. He was stuck - dangling there ridiculously like a fly caught in a web.

  ‘Are you all right in there, dear?’ the landlady called after a moment, pushing down on the door handle, which thankfully was securely locked.

  ‘Yes! Just a minute!’ Lex called, desperately unbuckling himself from the harness before doing a sort of half-leap through the air to catch the nearby rope and slither down to the floor by hand, landing lightly on the mattress.

  He was a little out of breath by the time he opened the door, which instantly made Mrs Humphrey suspicious.

  ‘What have you been doing in there?’ she said, trying to see over his shoulder.

  But Lex stepp
ed out into the corridor and closed the door behind him. ‘I was . . . ’ He quickly racked his brain for an excuse, then, once he’d found it, willed the colour to rush to his cheeks in a blush. ‘Exercising,’ he said. ‘Weight lifting, actually. There’s . . . this girl . . . and . . . ’ He trailed off pathetically and looked morose.

  Mrs Humphrey eyed his scrawny frame and instantly looked understanding and sympathetic, fully believing that Lex had been in there bodybuilding to impress some girl.

  ‘There’re more important things than muscles, dear,’ she said kindly.

  Of course, the truth of it was that Lex didn’t actually have any interest whatsoever in having a neck that was thicker than his head. He may have been slender, but all that time going up and down the ropes like a monkey had given him a wiry strength as well as a certain agility. But he didn’t mind Mrs Humphrey’s comments. In fact he liked it when people underestimated him. It was only ever a help and never a hindrance to have people think that he was less than what he truly was.