Disillusioned Delusion

[Seven Xu]

You're the kind that deals with the games in the mind
You confuse me in a way that I've never known

Fall 88th, 511 AV
Twenty-two bells

A familiar lantern painted its orange light across the slatted walls of the narrow and drafty bathroom. A dingy porcelain tub lay abandoned and pregnant with murky water, flat-calm and opaque with an ash grey tint. The room’s sole occupant was huddled, naked, on the floor beneath the breadth of a neglected window taller and wider than his arms could fathom, his knees pulled to his chest, staring at a hard face limned in dirty glass that looked just as fixedly back at him. Kinslayer, he wanted to shout at the contemptuous glaring red, but days of weeping and moaning in solitude over his own depravity had left his throat hoarse and tired. “It wouldn’t come out, how-ever hard I scrubbed,” he rasped in calm, measured tenor to his cruel reflection, “It’s gone, now; I’m clean.”

A white hand lifted with its specter in the glass and brushed away a swarthy gathering of bangs, rich with the former contents of a glass vessel of ebony dye; lips stretched a wan simper at an unspoken jape.


The ‘Wager had predictably gone on, as life for the rest of the City of Illusion had gone on, after the halfblood’s small world was crushed beneath revelations of blood long washed from his hands. True to form, Seven had spent the better part of three bells searching for the steep rooftop and peeling green paint that marked the always-closed high stakes gambling house. His feet planted soundly on the stone steps in front of a latched door, he’d barely gotten in a second knock when a rusted slide of iron on iron and a throaty inquisition drew his attention upward.

“Until I am measured, I am not known; yet how you miss me, when I have flown.”

“You are time.” Seven responded, unsmiling. And I have spent too much of you in the damned cold.

There was an echoing scrape of an aged lock, and a heavy door on tired hinges swung open—with it, a wall of thick, piss-and-ale drenched air from the poorly lit hall. Seven loosed and lowered his hand, finding respite in the warmth of his pocket. His gaze tripped over a scattering of tables, sifting between faces in an absent search for one he had not seen in days. It did not take long to find that narrow grinning face, with its mocking rings of silver flashing in the Wager’s permanent yellow twilight.

Like a pale grey moth to a lantern’s flame, he caught and burned a mutual gaze with a sour look even the dimmest of men could decipher.

You left me alone.

The raucous din of a packed gambling house hazed as he fell wholly into that mercury spell. A bizarre tide rolled across Seven, making his skin prickle with sharp dagger points that threatened to cut his skin like butter. It burned and caught between his ears and made him light-headed. Nausea rose to the back of his throat in the form of hungry venom and bile and he nearly relinquished his pockets for a nearby chair to steady himself. The heavy iron remained lodged in his gut as the sensation passed, leaving his fingertips clammy and his lips cold. He could not manage to open his vice-tight jaw or set movement to a pair of boots that felt nailed to the floor; he only stood, and stared, wearing a twisted mask of helpless admiration and resentment.

[Victor Lark]

They did not mind the stale pink stain that had grown murky on their dealer’s palms; if they even noticed it, they gladly assumed it was the aftermath of one of many bets gone bloody beneath Thorren Belvare’s watchful eye. Their little word smelled comfortably of sweat and ale and mildew, so what did it matter that their server was wearing the same shirt for the third night? He was hardly a whiff in the pervading musk, the shuffle of cards, the business as usual. They only cared that they weren’t being cheated, and that their mugs were not empty. It was easier to oblige them nowadays, with so few to let the cool air in. It was tainted with darkness, they were saying, the kind that ate folks up and never gave them back. There were people disappearing from everywhere, they were saying.

That was convenient.

There was a pair of strangers flirting at the bar, two men betting their knowledge in one corner (whatever that meant), and three characters playing the House’s game with Victor at the head of their table. Nearly every face turned to the door when it opened, bathing in the crisp evening air before they turned again to their company. Even the dealer’s stormy greys dipped towards the cards again, before they started and stole a second glance. That glint of red, even as it shone from beneath a mop of unfamiliar shadow—he knew who it was.

An instant’s time affirmed what he had only dreaded was true. A black brow bent over that familiar ruby glare, and Victor’s half-lingering smile fell to a flat line. “Seems another round of ale is in order,” he mumbled to the lot of them, without removing his eyes from where Seven’s held them hostage. He reached for the glass tumbler in front of a grumbling akalak. “And another whiskey, for your luck.”

He stepped towards the Wager’s latest patron with satisfying haste, but stopped a little over two feet from him, like a host before a stranger. His attention was drawn to the ugly blackness that tainted Seven’s scalp; it was all he could do not to tug at it, to run his fingers through it, to confirm that it had really changed for good. Whatever he would feel later, in that moment he hated it. His grip tightened around the glass in his left hand. Absent yearnings and suppressed frustrations painted his fingernails black with djed, the flesh around them white as porcelain. The pallor crawled towards his sleeve like frugivorous roots in a hedge-bound corridor.

An acidic smile lifted his tired lips and a glare of his own flared at the corners of his eyes. He glanced at the bar as if in suggestion, stealing a look at the blond-haired scoundrel that watched the room from behind a slow-sipped mug. It would not do, Victor knew, to starve the establishment of a foolish-looking customer, now that he had already arrived. He returned to Seven quickly, muttered stiffly, “What are you doing here?” Raising his free hand graciously to the half-blood’s arm, Victor offered his aching arms only the consolation of a brief touch. “Can I get you a drink?”

[Seven Xu]

“What am I doing here?” Seven bristled; the impudent question was thrown back as a hiss between gritted teeth. He could not find the resolve to brush off a set of olive fingers tangled in the thick wool of his jacket before they loosed themselves on their own accord.

The halfblood dipped his chin to burn crimson holes in that fragile mask of cold hospitality. How he wanted to shatter it. Prickling tendrils of panic—forgotten in a flourish of anger—were still working themselves from dried pink lips; a tongue lashed out to wet them with contempt and rancorous spittle. “I was looking for you,” his unhurried tenor cracked and lowered and he gave no consideration to the painfully courteous second question or Victor’s palpable distaste for dark hair. Every syllable fed kindling to the fire that flared behind his abysmal pupils.

The room was full of shadows; lanterns worked tirelessly to paint a span of besmirched walls with their dim twilight glow, but it did little to discourage long black fingers to draw themselves out of oil and fire’s line of sight. Ionu’s Wager shunted back to life around them and a distant battle of wits erupted into a shouting match.

Seven exhaled through his nose and resigned to wrench the glass tumbler from the vice-grip of a hand that inexplicably tried to mirror his own; an oddity that coaxed a single skyward brow and a cant of his head. It was not the first time he bore witness to his skinchanger’s meager displays, but it was no less unsettling in the pit of an already churning stomach. Bone-thin digits fumbled blind over carefully edged glass and the dregs of whiskey rolled their skinny trails along its heavy bottom. “You left me for days,” a honey-golden bead fell from the tumbler’s gaping mouth and dribbled down a white wrist not his own, “I got tired of waiting.”

A part of him still wanted to hurl the filthy glass against that perfectly stern jaw, but ultimately concluded that the man the face belonged to was probably too dense to realize what he had done wrong. There were times Victor acted altogether childlike; immaturity had little to do with that presumption, it was the candid mimicry and astonishing remarks that would sound more natural in the mouth of a witless toddler than that of an adult.

“Do you understand what happened? I mean, do you expect to just keep going as if—as if it were nothing?” Vinegar tears clawed at the corners of Seven’s eyes and frayed his angry resolution. As he closed the space between them with a halting step forward and his free hand scrutinized the lapel of Victor’s soiled shirt, tracing the line of hair that clung to his clammy neck, the onslaught of questions stooped to a tenebrous murmur. “We’re playing a dangerous game, Victor. Lives ended. Does that mean anything to you?” Seven was unable to disguise the moue that drew its flat lines across his face. “Tell me the truth.” And mean it, that familiar vermilion seemed to urge.

[Victor Lark]

...as if it were nothing?

“No, I didn’t. I—” That hand, which he had wanted to feel for days and never had the chance to, choked the words from his throat. Lives ended.

“Not even—” Does that mean anything to you? “How do you—” Tell me the truth.

Victor became tense. His jaw stiffened beneath those soft fingers and he grasped them with his own, the side that still remained his, coarse and olive and dirty. He pried the affection away from him, squeezed his lover’s hand with more passion than his face could ever tell, and dropped it to his side. His eyes darted between the two before him, while the rest of his body waited like a statue; he saw the resentment, which even he knew how to feel, and he hated it. He stole the tumbler back with a harsh tug and mumbled, “Have a seat.”

Then he paced to the bar, where the tired tender had already prepared more ale for Victor’s thirsty guests. A grin and a nod asked the man to wet the whiskey glass again, then he turned to the grumbling group at the table and offered a cheerful instigation, “Free drink to the man who beats Somakal here at an arm-wrestle!” He let his eyes linger on Seven as he took the ales in one hand and the whiskey in the other, and quickly deposited them where they belonged. When he returned to Seven, the smiling façade of a wager-maker had fallen completely.

On their first coherent night together, wrapped in linen and chiffon beside lace tablecloths and white wine, Victor had not been the only one to probe into his date’s mind and habits. Somehow, Seven had also peeled away some layers, and he discovered the thing that lay between surface and the darkness: honest courtesy. It was the next best thing to something genuine, and with it, Victor said, “I meant to come home. I mean to, every night. Sometimes, I can’t.”

Heated iron tipped against fiery crimson, peered a moment before he continued. “It wasn’t nothing,” he conceded. The words that followed seemed fast and bored alike, the same sort of flat and impassioned talk that weighed Victor’s tongue when he spoke of Ionu. “It was everything. Death, what it does to a person.” How he wanted to touch him, to take him around the middle and hold him. “The honesty of it.” Instead, he found solace in yet another smile. With it, he seemed to rise into the mask again, or maybe he was falling, receding, stumbling backwards. “So a couple of Kelvics died. A life, Seven. It’s yours. You took it.” He should have looked around, made sure that he was not needed. But it was so easy to wallow in those endless red pools, to watch and swim and drown. “You were happy, I saw you. That’s not nothing.”

He recalled the answer to a frantic question spoken in the dark by a beleaguered mind, half a year ago. Neither expectancy nor sardonicism tainted what seemed to be blatant reasoning on his tone. “Are you happy?”

[Seven Xu]

It was in mercy that I took her life, he wanted to spit, but something in Victor’s rebuttal caught a sizeable lump in the back of his throat. He thought he squeaked.

Seven winced noticeably; in his haste he’d staggered over clumsy words, and he had inexorably brought forth another undeclared confession. His lips twitched, and he swallowed the thickness in his neck in a silent prayer for a steady voice. He could see himself in those callow eyes like polished iron: a head of jet out of place upon a round and unsmiling white face; in the midst of the toneless reflection sat two narrow points as fiercely red as the blood that still stained his sheets.

“A couple of Kelvics,” polished wax dipped against heavy eyelids, and he offered a dismissive shake of his head before an arm emerged from beneath the table top to rest by its elbow and cradle his chin in his palm. He surrendered the short-lived mutual stare. Garnet drifted into the narrow crooks of his eyes, appreciating dancing golden orbs of lamplight on an unfocused leer. “No. The other life was human.”

An ivory fang traced a painful line across his dry and scrutinizing tongue as he groped for words. There had once been a promise: a promise to hold no secrets against a man who, in all his lofty deceptions with passing strangers, gave him nothing but the purest of honesties. His tenor wavered in measured affirmation. “I was not meant to be, and when I was thrust into his life he could not help but resent me. Even as a child, he tried so hard to make me something I was not. He was stupid to even try; everyone knew him as the man with the whore’s Widow son.”

The weight of his gravelled words had lined his thick blond lashes with moisture. “But he made me so angry. I took his life, because he deprived me of my own. He’s gone; I wish I could say that I regret it.”

Misaimed resentment had wilted as quickly as it had blossomed; Seven’s lips traced aimless syllables in thought before he croaked a plaintive, “I never told you, because I could not have known; I made myself forget everything. It wasn’t until I opened her throat that I remembered what I was at all.” Twice a murderer. A kinslayer.

His slight frame quaked, though it was hard to tell whether it was a laugh or a sob that rattled him. “You ask me if I’m happy? I am. I am a lot of things.” A finger and a thumb knotted themselves in a gathering of raven hair behind a white ear and as he dipped his chin, he managed to settle into that prying mercurial stare with a laboured sigh. “And out of all of them, it’s being happy that scares me the most.”

[Victor Lark]

Biting his tongue, Victor’s face spoke of deliberation. The Lhavitian had a history as well as he, one which had spiced every piece of stale bread and lentils for seventeen days, one which Seven shared as easily as he shared their bed. Sometimes Victor forgot that he had not been so open. His associate’s stories were so much more interesting than his, and Victor had never been any good at explaining himself. Seven did not know about Sophia; how could he?

That there had been blood on Seven’s hands—blood that was not put there by the insistence of a dagger-wielding friend—inspired a glimmer of fascination in the pointed steel that scrutinized the story. The fabric on his forearm felt damp and heavy over the new skin that was growing there, the bone inside it light and brittle. Sucking a breath of hesitation through his teeth, Victor held his elbow and caught the djed there. Understanding, or rather the desire for it, was slowly taking hold of the weave around him and painting him in Seven’s flesh; he began to drag it down his forearm beneath the table, but soon surrendered to the task. He did not want to resist knowing Seven. He could deal with the side-effects later.

His hued hand lifted and stole across the table suddenly, rang his fingers through that dye-slick hair and clutched the back of Seven’s head, without regard for what the room thought. For all they knew, he could be insisting on some petty gamble, and betting with smiles was as good a gamble as any. Seven said he was scared, but the look in his eyes was not the fear of a slave being sold at auction, or the fear of a Ravokian when faced with an audience with the Voice, or the fear of a Kelvic that has realized she is dying...

And why would Victor want to see that on this face, which contained a mind capable of feeling so much more? “Don’t cry,” he said through an uncertain smile. “You should be happy. He’s gone; you’re free of him. More than you ever were when you still thought he hated you.”

A whispered laugh shrugged his hand from where it longed to remain. It lingered on the table, then spilled to his lap to manage the blight on his other hand. His eyes never left Seven’s, never dropped that hard, searching look. Happiness: he could win it back. “Listen, Seven. You’re not alone. There was another life. A second Kelvic. I... did not know her, as well as well as you knew your father, but only because she would not let me.” As he turned inward, Victor’s own flesh began to win the battle for his arm. “We were fighting—well, practicing. The dagger slipped.”

No, those words made Seven’s crime seem worse, but Victor knew that was the opposite of truth. Sophia’s death was no accident. She had abused him with her simplicity, just as Seven had been abused with resentment. “But then...” He hesitated. “She had kept herself from me for so many days, and when she was dying, she was more honest than she ever had been. I don’t know why she bothered, in the end.” He laughed, itching at the whiteness that was withdrawing over his first knuckles.

“We’re not so different. Roxanne helped the both of us. Don’t be afraid of that; there are better things, trust me.” Shrugging, he finally glanced around the room, if only for emphasis, and began to realize that he had been sitting too long. When he regarded Seven again, his eyebrows were tipped up, as if in question. “I trust you.”

[Seven Xu]

“I know,” white hands scrabbled across the table, reaching for an arm, a sleeve, while thirsty garnets drank deep of storm-forged iron. He had promised his trust a lifetime ago, dangling from a windowsill in the balmy summer heat. “There is no one else in this world we can trust. If the animals have taught us anything, it is that, I am sure.”

He should have feared for Victor’s admission; for if anyone else were to tell him they had killed so freely—unfortunate slip or not—he would have balked. Instead, his face rippled with an inexplicable fulfilment. Seven straightened. A thin smile tilted the pale pink horizon of his lips, close enough to happiness. The exposed flesh of his wrists bristled as a wave of goose prickles ravaged his forearms. Mismatched fingernails scraped and scrutinized the table’s cracking patina. “We aren’t so different,” he echoed in belated agreement, voice edged in ardour, “we are the same. We are fated, and good, and nothing else in this world is worthy of what we share.”

What was that, if not trust, honesty, and passion? It was simple; but it was mutual, and it was theirs.

“We need each other,” Seven continued, letting his hands fall short of Victor’s chest before receding like a white tide across a gnarled black shoreline. He made his smile flatten; it seemed appropriate, but the fire that burned red hot in the coals of his eyes still laced his words. “More now than ever, I think. I came looking for you because—because I can’t be in that room without you. The blood was everywhere. Everywhere,” he repeated, surrendering one hand to the unnatural darkness of his freshly dyed scalp. “It wouldn’t come out; I could see my father’s blood in it, and what I did to it, when it all poured out of him.

“It happened so quickly, when it happened. I watched the light go out of his eyes,” Seven shook his head, “I felt nothing but my own rage, and then the relief and pleasure of seeing his blood. His face showed me the same contempt it always held; even as he died, that face told me I was nothing.”

A grin split Seven’s waxen countenance near in half; he seemed to have regained whatever humour he found in their macabre exchange. Happiness, Victor had deemed it; he could as well have been delirious, but neither would have known the difference. “How wrong he was.”

He wouldn’t let himself dwell on the past. Not long, to be sure. “Show me what you do here,” Seven urged. The wood-on-wood shriek of a chair scraping across the floor signalled his rise from the table, and he let laughter ride on chiding words and half-accusations, “I want to see what keeps you away from me.”

[Victor Lark]

Victor’s expression followed Seven’s like an echo, rolled with the tides of explanation. He pulled a gratified smile into a solemn glare, let himself flow with the descriptions of past rage and relief and ebb on that relief manifest. Seven had felt for himself as his father died in fear or surprise or whatever it had been; he had known anger and release when Roxanne had only misery. Victor gave him more pride than envy, because he knew for certain that his fire-eyed comrade would gladly share what he knew and more—and yet his smile failed. Drooping quicksilver took respite in the sight of cut and calloused fingers as they toyed bitterly with each other and the old grooved wood beneath; he savored instead the brief touch of the half-blood’s bloodied hands where he did not dare return it. Thorren might think it amusing, to make his underling gamble for the thing that seemed important to him. Even Victor would not take that risk.

“We have each other,” he agreed. The happiness rose around his eyes again as he looked up to argue, “I cleaned the mess; we’ll buy new sheets. I could have—” And then he caught the accusation before it fell from his tongue. Victor might have helped remove whatever stain his own fingers had drawn on that beautiful white head, but he had not been there to see it. He had not been there.

He stood with Seven, giving the table a ready slap. “I’ll come home with you, tonight. I promise.” He was getting better at keeping those, between his devotion to this single soul and his obligation to a gambler’s life. “But not before we win you some gold!”

The akalak was sitting smugly in his corner, his whiskey downed. The humans around him rubbed their sore arms and egos as he argued with the only woman present; he insisted that he buy her a drink rather than break her arm as she tried to win one, but she seemed adamant that she could take him on. A glance at the scene and Victor swept to the bar, leaned close to the tender and nodded through a short exchange of whispers. As the man behind the bar busied himself with mugs and drinks, Victor turned to Somakal. “No one wins, I take it?”

The brute grinned, but paused with some inner deliberation before he replied, “I do. And I’d like another whiskey.”

“You didn’t win against yourself, did you?” The dealer rejoined, reason wrought with careful derision, “So no one wins.”

“Someone would, if you would let me play,” the femme spoke up, flexing her pathetic arms from beneath her velvet sleeves.

Somakal started, and the furniture around him moaned. “I won’t hurt you, woman.”

“Seems to me the lady deserves a drink,” Victor suggested, rising hastily from where he had been leaning before the woman could say anything else. She peered at him curiously, then laughed as he added, “She wins, if you forfeit.”

The blue man’s pale eyes boil with an unspoken protest, whirling between wrath and indignation and inexplicable amusement. The whites of Victor’s eyes flared, but he turned patiently to the pair of fresh pints that had appeared on the bar. Finally the akalak chose amusement, and laughed with the human woman beside him. The other man, whom she had spurned when he had lost the impossible bet, scowled and stood. Victor pushed one mug of ale into Seven’s hands, kissing his ear under the charade of whispering some unintelligible secret; he barely dodged the poor bloke’s progress to the door before he set a drink in front of the woman and took his place at the head of the table.

“Men, this is Seven,” he said as he gathered the cards and pointed them at him; he gestured to a gruff-faced and brown-headed man, then the akalak, then a pale-skinned and greying man from the ambiguous East. “Wolfe, Somakal, and Charles.”

He did not know the woman's name, so he grinned an inquiry at her. “Noelle,” she answered.

“New guy picks the game,” Victor added, and the honey he reserved for strangers lingered on his distracted smile. “How do you like cards?”

[Seven Xu]

“I don’t.”

Seven sat behind a thick glass rim and a facetious smirk, brows hovering below a hirsute curtain of tinted bangs. His tongue darted sideways to his cheek, he held an iron stare in garnet custody until the glass tipped, and Victor’s face went amber and disfigured through a wall of ale.

A hard elbow in his ribs made the halfblood sputter his mouthful of bitter. The surly brunet Victor called Wolfe bellowed in drunken laughter, listing sideways to eye Seven. “Don’t like cards? Yer in a helluva place to not like cards, boy. Pick somethin’.”

He’s more bearish than wolfish. Seven thought to voice that notion as he manfully wiped dribble from his chin on the back of his sleeve; instead, he scowled and gave the man a flickering once-over before turning back to his cohort-turned-dealer. Before he could gather his thoughts into a suitable response—a game he could play well enough to stake money against—Noelle threw her opinion on the table.

“Shouldn’t pick on him,” she purred, lean elbows framing her egregiously pressed bosom. “I saw them talking earlier. Wouldn’t want to piss a friend of the dealer off.”

“What are you implyin’?”

“Nothing, just play nice.” Noelle’s thick-lashed blues regarded Seven and winked. “It’s your pick, darling. You’re the new guy.”

He chewed his lip, inhaled a breath that seemed to involve his entire upper body, and let himself relax against the ale-drenched wood again. Four white fingers drummed through a crescent puddle where his mug had sat and sweat. Seven could recall a game he’d watched his father play a hundred times over but never cared to learn more than its rudiments; the retrospection soured his countenance and inspired another pull of his beverage. He swallowed. “Blind man’s bet,” eyes narrowed curiously, “do they call it that here? You have to get your cards to add up to twenty-one—”

“Aye we know what the game is.” Wolfe butted in, stealing another long look at Seven. His breath was rank with ale and the musk of food long since eaten. “You sound like a Lhavitian. Damn wonder you made it ‘cross the Unforgiving; they haf’ta strap you to an Okomo an’ carry you down like a sack of oats?”

Somakal chuckled and bumped knees with Noelle to coax a giggle from her. The whites of Seven’s eyes flared and he squeezed his mug until he thought his fingers would push clear through it. “Deal.”

[Victor Lark]

Victor was hardly an honest man, but he never played a dishonest game; he lived for the arbitrary rules of life, and thought cheating was an option best fit for the men whose blood colored his mop. And yet he wanted to know the outcome of this game, even as the cards rang their frivolous revelry through a hasty shuffle, even as they darted like whispers to each of five players. As was everything in Ionu’s Playground, nothing was as it seemed in Its Wager. A loss was a win, because a win was nothing but another round, and the mob would be content with nothing less than higher stakes. The lucky ones were the risk takers, until they lost their luck—and, occasioanlly, their lives.

Noelle’s blue eyes laughed a secret judgement at her Knight of Shields while Somakal’s pastel green swam in whiskey over a Six of Arrows, and Wolfe peered through a happy brown glare as the Page of Arrows stopped before him. For once, Victor did not meet Seven’s reds when given the chance, though he had met every gaze before his; the bird’s mind sang a secret prayer that the next card was high, discouraging. A wretched Tree made of skinny broken Spears turned over in front of Seven. Victor stared flatly at silent Charles’s pale grey beard as the Three of Swords entered the fray.

Finally, his aching knuckles thrust Ten Shields onto the dealer’s hand, and whatever obliging grin had faltered in those brief seconds returned. He bent to inspect the hole card and dared to laugh as it smacked against the table. The old whimsy found him again, easy as a smile. His head dipped towards the woman, who required some encouragement from the akalak who had stolen her gaze; as she made her bet, Victor’s swept to Seven’s. “And you sound like a dog,” he told Wolfe, then turned to him as he gave Somakal an extra card at the worldless signal. “How is your collar fitting these days? I bet the old lady wouldn’t like to see you sitting so close to young men.”

That hardly pulled Wolfe’s tail between his legs, but he did lean back in his chair, smirking retreat as he tossed his five gold-rimmed coins at the center of the table. He and Noelle exchanged a confirming look. Victor winced inwardly. His tongue filled his upper lip as a clumsy attempt at annoyance flashed at an uncomfortable white face. Before he could make any other motion to the poor newcomer, Wolfe interrupted.

“And I double,” he added. “The cellar.”

Victor’s smile stank of false sugar as he blinked away his distraction. Earlier that evening, he had lost a bet against the dealer to clean the Wager’s basement, a lightless storage room with more rats and cobwebs than kegs and brooms. Victor had been sent down there once or twice, but he had never scoured its entirety; he had been told it was connected to the infamous underground, if he wandered too far. If his fool folded now, he would be the target of Thorren’s behest; if he kept playing, he could lose to unknowable darkness. And all Victor could do was nod acknoledgement and turn to the player himself.