Mort

figures knelt or squatted around the little circle of packed earth where Wa’s three eight-sided dice bounced and spun their misleading lesson in statistical probability.
    “Three!”
    “Tuphal’s Eyes, by Io!”
    “He’s got you there, Hummok! This guy knows how to roll his bones!”
    I T’S A KNACK .
    Hummok M’guk, a small flat-faced man from one of the Hublandish tribes whose skill at dice was famed wherever two men gathered together to fleece a third, picked up the dice and glared at them. He silently cursed Wa, whose own skill at switching dice was equally notorious among the cognoscenti but had, apparently, failed him, wished a painful and untimely death on the shadowy player seated opposite and hurled the dice into the mud.
    “Twenty-one the hard way!”
    Wa scooped up the dice and handed them to the stranger. As he turned to Hummok one eye flickered ever so slightly. Hummok was impressed—he’d barely noticed the blur in Wa’s deceptively gnarled fingers, and he’d been watching for it.
    It was disconcerting the way the things rattled in the stranger’s hand and then flew out of it in a slow arc that ended with twenty-four little spots pointing at the stars.
    Some of the more streetwise in the crowd shuffled away from the stranger, because luck like that can be very unlucky in Cripple Wa’s floating crap game.
    Wa’s hand closed over the dice with a noise like the click of a trigger.
    “All the eights,” he breathed. “Such luck is uncanny, mister.”
    The rest of the crowd evaporated like dew, leaving only those heavy-set, unsympathetic-looking men who, if Wa had ever paid tax, would have gone down on his return as Essential Plant and Business Equipment.
    “Maybe it’s not luck,” he added. “Maybe it’s wizarding?”
    I MOST STRONGLY RESENT THAT .
    “We had a wizard once who tried to get rich,” said Wa. “Can’t seem to remember what happened to him. Boys?”
    “We give him a good talking-to—”
    “—and left him in Pork Passage—”
    “—and in Honey Lane—”
    “—and a couple other places I can’t remember.”
    The stranger stood up. The boys closed in around him.
    T HIS IS UNCALLED FOR . I SEEK ONLY TO LEARN . W HAT PLEASURE CAN HUMANS FIND IN A MERE REITERATION OF THE LAWS OF CHANCE ?
    “Chance doesn’t come into it. Let’s have a look at him, boys.”
    The events that followed were recalled by no living soul except the one belonging to a feral cat, one of the city’s thousands, that was crossing the alley en route to a tryst. It stopped and watched with interest.
    The boys froze in mid-stab. Painful purple light flickered around them. The stranger pushed his hood back and picked up the dice, and then pushed them into Wa’s unresisting hand. The man was opening and shutting his mouth, his eyes unsuccessfully trying not to see what was in front of them. Grinning.
    T HROW .
    Wa managed to look down at his hand.
    “What are the stakes?” he whispered.
    I F YOU WIN, YOU WILL REFRAIN FROM THESE RIDICULOUS ATTEMPTS TO SUGGEST THAT CHANCE GOVERNS THE AFFAIRS OF MEN .
    “Yes. Yes. And…if I lose?”
    Y OU WILL WISH YOU HAD WON .
    Wa tried to swallow, but his throat had gone dry. “I know I’ve had lots of people murdered—”
    T WENTY-THREE, TO BE PRECISE .
    “Is it too late to say I’m sorry?”
    S UCH THINGS DO NOT CONCERN ME . N OW THROW THE DICE .
    Wa shut his eyes and dropped the dice on to the ground, too nervous even to try the special flick-and-twist throw. He kept his eyes shut.
    A LL THE EIGHTS. THERE, THAT WASN’T TOO DIFFICULT, WAS IT ?
    Wa fainted.
    Death shrugged and walked away, pausing only to tickle the ears of an alley cat that happened to be passing. He hummed to himself. He didn’t quite know what had come over him, but he was enjoying it.

“You couldn’t be sure it would work!”
    Cutwell spread his hands in a conciliatory gesture.
    “Well, no,” he conceded, “but I thought, what have I got to lose?” He backed away.
    “What have you got to lose?” shouted Mort.
    He stamped forward and tugged the bolt out of one of the posts in the princess’s bed.
    “You’re not going to tell me this went through me?” he snapped.
    “I was particularly watching it,” said Cutwell.
    “I saw it too,” said Keli. “It was horrible. It came right out of where your heart is.”
    “And I saw you walk through a stone pillar,” said Cutwell.
    “And I saw you ride straight through a window.”
    “Yes, but that was on business,”