She wore patterned silk; it fell off her shoulders like winter sap, promising the pressure of her needful curves to the hungry eye. The stage was lit with soft candles, hued by colored glass, sitting on small porcelain saucers on ledges behind her. No one announced her; she allowed her haloed presence on stage to draw attention from the tables, quiet eyes moving from card faces to her quiet smile. It began with the warbling tuning of a trade worn guitar, finding a melody and as familiarity touched the crowd, a spattering of applause widened the singer’s song and lit the small band into accompaniment. The vibrato of the drums soon followed as the guitar grew confident and the singer blessed the crowd with her falsetto, sweet and droning, like the buzz of honeybees. This was Farandula, a betting house reserved for the quiet gambler, unashamed of its games. Pathos came to the loser with the svelte-dealing, heavy hands that carried the weight of wagers enough turn the honest man pale. Tables of bamboo reed were weight laden with fortunes bought, sold and lost, passed from man to man like the final cigarette. Auereliano moved a deck of cards from hand to hand with the quick flip of hummingbird wings, his eyes never leaving the singer as she moved into the chorus with patented sterility. She was the marching band along the road to purgatory.
The front tables played Cat of Nine Tails, a game that earned its torturous name by the multiple rounds of betting. The dealer wore a hermit’s pallor, turning over card after card, letting the participant build his best hand while digging their own grave. The meat grinder worked through players with disregard to story, hope or dream, leaving discarded coin purses like guano along cave floors. Private tables held local games of card and die, bowls slapping against the bamboo, ticked die faces resting hidden as watchers and players alike set down exorbitant wagers on almost impossible odds. The serious dice games were along the far back wall, ivory dados clinking like ice in cheap scotch. The gamblers formed half circle worshipers, heads bobbing with the rolls, cries of success and failure in its own tumultuous rapture. This was a den of wish-craft, they beat the forge with stalwart dedication, so much work in to gain so little; it was the demon’s private orgasm. He rarely needed to stay long.
The singer moved onto a slow lamenting ballad, if only to remind the gamblers with women waiting at home that sometimes more than gold could be lost at the tables. The night had gorged itself with tragedy; Farandula’s staff moving with a zombie’s gait, letting their exhaustion infect those still pushing the borders of hope. Most had begun to leave, their faces a pantomime of terror and frustration, as they pieced together the lies to account for their losses. Auereliano passed a few amused moments wondering how many wives would be assaulted with tales of bandits in alleyways, weekly pay lost to mysterious thieves that never were. The players abused themselves in the bedchamber of Lady Luck, mutilating their patchwork lives to draw a bat of her eye, a pass of her uncalloused touch. Auere wondered if the mullet of good and bad fortune recognized her lovers’ faces when they came to beg for another night of windfall; she certainly proved her cracked loyalty tonight. Auereliano knew the tally of every man’s earnings, as he watched and shuffled; there was one that interested him.
“That’s enough for me, gentleman.” The gambler said as he stood from the table, his night over. Auereliano watched him, pressing the deck of cards against the table, working the cap off of a snuff box with the nail of his thumb. He pressed even white teeth against the dark fullness of his lower lip as he scooped the rest of the harsh toke onto the elongated nail of his index finger. One snort and his bloodshot eyes grew deceptively clear, it made him narrow and complacent; it made him look like a mark. His hands moved to the cards, with an ever slight tremor curling his thin fingers; Auereliano caught the shuffling pattern after two passes of the deck. The gambler was giving conciliatory smiles to those men he had beaten, as the dealer gathered up the wooden chits he had earned during the night.
“Good game all, perhaps tomorrow night you will earn it back.” That produced a few grunts of consent; they would let him walk out alive with his earnings. With his chips in his arms like a newborn, he began to make his way to the cashier; Auereliano spread the cards in a half moon on the table as he passed. His voice was barely a whisper.
“I’m impressed.”
The gambler wanted to keep walking; Auere could see the strain in his legs as he tried to will himself to continue. Hair the color of fresh soot, twined in a quilted veil over deceiver’s eyes, he looked at Auereliano. The man was a slave to fortune’s blind judgment; Auereliano had watched him gambling all night, as he had watched every hand dealt, every piece of gold that passed hands. This one was proof that cheating was underrated. Games of chance were not the beckon call of every man in Arda, yet in a world where the veil between the living, the dead and the divine was woven from chalk, gambling became the median path of creation. God and man played hopscotch with luck at their side, great warriors blessed with the love of steel and combat could be bested by the meekest of store owners. The gambler was a sycophant, so the cheater, then, became the revival pastor. They promised salvation from the flop, the cards remaining in your favor until the cheater imagined different. Players prayed for the winning hand, the cheater produced it.
The gambler managed to find his silver tongue. “I apologize, sir, but I’m sure tonight has been long for all of us. I will be here again…”
“You’ll be a hundred miles to nowhere by tomorrow, son.” Auereliano gathered the cards into his palm, cutting them into thin sections and moving them from top to bottom in the deck. Another shuffle, his cards whispered secrets and caught the gambler’s eye. “Your tricks only work once.”
“Tricks,” he stammered, “I assure you…”
“I assure you,” Auereliano interrupted, “that your methods are not in question. You are leaving before the hand is over.”
The gambler took a long look at Auereliano’s calm demeanor. The fortune demon could feel the bluffing eye, the long stare every card man would use to separate lies from truth. Auere’s manner curdled cream; his lies were master craft earned from madness. He was crazy enough to believe them; they became truths in his eyes and voice, it made them real. “You mean you wish to run a hand with me, friend?”
“One game,” Auereliano began, dealing out the cards in a whip crack blur and gathering them up again. “If you win, I will triple your earnings.”
“And if I lose?” A tilt of the eyebrow, the touch of amusement lifting the corner of his dry lips; he was baited.
Auereliano presented him a mortician’s smile, offering a bill of lading with the gall in his tone. “You have a full deck of cards hidden on your person; does losing seem to suit you?”
The gambler laughed and took a seat before he knew really what he was doing, letting the chips fall in a comfortable mountain. Behind him, Auereliano could see the men that had lost to the hustler cast tentative eyes over to his table. They would not come over; the cloud that held over the demon’s head promised the decadence of a long hand, a bad deal. The hustler saw profit, the losers saw pain. “What’s the game?”
“Succor.” And the cards flew from hand to hand, holding in mid air like the glam of prism light. Succor was a game of sailors; quick hands of two to three cards, closest to ten would win. Port games of chance, usually with little to no bet because of the pace, money passed hands after hours and hours of the game; there was little else to do at sea. The gambler was educated enough to pause, giving a longing look at money he thought was well on its way to being spent.
“One hand for such profit…I dare ask again, sir, what have I to lose?”
Auereliano dealt two cards, face down, to the man in front of him, dealing another two for himself. The backs of each card were adorned with a dusty glossed glyph, an alphabet long lost to the void. “If by chance I win, you keep your money. What I want from you is knowledge.”
“Ah,” the gambler breathed, reaching for his cards with a flourish. “You want to know my secrets?” Auereliano caught the man’s wrist with his hand, turning it over and gently removing two cards from a band against his palm. He split them in his fingers, seeing the dark haired profile of the Queen of Hearts and the nine of spades. Auereliano let those cards vanish faster than the eye could follow; setting his finger on the two cards he had dealt to the gambler.
“I need no education.” He motioned with his chin to the men sitting at the bar watching, out of the corner of their eyes, the exchange between the two. “But they do. If I win, you keep your money but you tell your new found friends how exactly you won tonight.”
The gambler did not hide his fear, it was more than he was willing to lose. He could have stood and left, taken his earnings and muscled his way out of the gaming house. Yet…
“You have a deal.” And he slid the cards from under Auereliano’s finger, flipping them over, identical fours looking back at him. “Ha! Eight, sir, and I think perhaps I won’t be able to carry my winnings out of this lovely establishment.” The gambler wrapped his knuckles against the table with a start of joy. Auereliano flipped his cards.
The Queen of Hearts and the nine of spades, from Auereliano’s own deck, had been dealt to the demon card shark. The gambler faced his undoing with the same hand he had hidden so carefully up his sleeve, but if Auereliano had cheated, there had been no real means of knowing. The gambler went green, his mouth opening and closing, trying to work a hustle that was no longer there. Auereliano held up a hand, shaking his head.
“No no no, son, no need to waste your words on me.” He motioned to the men at the bar, who unceremoniously got up from their seats and made their way to Auereliano’s table. The cheater’s shaking body made his chair stutter against the heavy wood panels below. “Tell them, my boy. The truth shall set you free.”