The Ruby Dice (14 page)

"About the vote?" he asked.

"She didn't want to discuss it," Dehya said. "I think she's as upset with herself as we are."

Kelric scowled. "That didn't stop her from doing it."

She told me something peculiar,
Dehya thought.

Wary, he let her see only the surface of his mind. Peculiar how?

Her answer had an odd stillness.
That you had an ex-wife.

Kelric was suddenly aware of the dice pouch in his hand. I do.

I thought providers were forbidden to marry.
Her thought was muffled.

They are.

Then how could you have had a wife?

He couldn't respond.

Kelric?
Dehya asked.

His answer came like a shadow stretching out as the sun hovered above the horizon. I wasn't with the Traders all those years.

Neither her posture nor her face betrayed surprise, but it crackled in her mind, not from what he told her, but because he finally admitted what she had always suspected.

Kelric couldn't explain. He had been married against his will too many times. Jeejon was the only woman
he
had ever asked. He had been bought, enslaved, kidnapped, forced, and otherwise had his life arranged, often with no regard to his own preferences. He had never perceived himself as pleasing, but apparently women found him so, enough even to do something as mad as launch a thousand windriders in war over him. He didn't understand why.

But gradually he had come to understand his responses. If a woman treated him well, he became fond of her even if he resisted the emotion. As an empath, he thrived on affection. The better his lover felt, the better he felt. All psions experienced that effect to some extent, but for him it seemed unusually intense. The more he gave his lover, the more she gave back. When she desired and cherished him, he felt those emotions. So he sought to make his lover happy. He liked to see her smile, hold her, laugh with her, pleasure her. Her contentment became his.

It wasn't love, though. When he truly loved a woman, it blazed inside him, until she became imprinted on his heart, even his soul. In his seventy years of life, only two women had seared him with that mark. Ixpar would always be his greatest love, but it had taken him years to realize—for she had come second, when he had believed he could never feel such passion again. She had waited, giving him the time he needed, knowing his ability to love had been crippled, leaving emotional scar tissue in his heart.

The words wouldn't come for him to tell Dehya. So instead he lowered his barriers and formed an image in his mind.

Savina.

She had brought sun into his life. She laughed often, and her yellow hair framed an angelic face. She had stood only as tall as his chest, but that never stopped her from doing outrageous things to him: climbing the tower where he lived and hanging on a rope while she proclaimed her love; carrying him off, up to a ruined fortress; getting him drunk so she could compromise his honor in all sorts of intriguing ways. Somewhere in all that, their play had turned to love, and it had changed him forever.

Kelric couldn't bear the memory. He hid it deep in his mind.

"Saints almighty," Dehya murmured. "What
happened
to you?"

He just shook his head.

After a silence, she said, "Do you want to be alone?"

He nodded, staring at his dice pouch. He listened to the sound of her retreating footsteps and looked up just as she set her hand on the crystal doorknob.

"Do you remember," Kelric said, "when I asked you to make copies of my dice?"

She turned to him. "I still have them."

"Tonight, at home, will you join me for a game of Quis?"

"Quis?"

He shook his pouch, rattling the dice. "This."

Surprise jumped into her expression. "I would like that."

He said no more. That had been enough. Maybe too much.

After Dehya left, Kelric poured his dice onto the divan. He picked up the gold ball. He almost never used it. For him, it symbolized one person. Savina. She had been an empath, a mild talent, but she carried all the genes. Living with primitive medical care, in a place with infant mortality rates higher than on almost any other settled world, Savina had brought an empath into the world. Incredibly, the baby girl had survived the agonizing birth.

Not so for Savina. She had died in Kelric's arms.

On a distant world, protected by the inimitable Hinterland Deployment, a child with gold eyes was growing to adulthood. She had been born of Kelric's greatest sorrow, but she was an even greater treasure, hidden by the Restriction and by one of the greatest military forces known to the human race.

"Peace talks be damned!" Corbal faced Jaibriol across the glossy black expanse of the desk in Jaibriol's office. "With this vote, the Skolians have made their intentions clear. They intend to ramp up hostilities, not flaming chat with us in Paris."

They were on their feet with the desk between them. It was as if they stood within the void of space; today, the walls of emperor's office gleamed with nebulae, and blue points of light glowed in the cobalt floor. A sapphire lamp hung from the domed ceiling. The entire room felt as cold and distant to Jaibriol as any hope for the negotiations.

"The vote was a protest against hereditary rule," he said. "Not peace."

Corbal's red gaze didn't waver. "It was a vote to give Imperator Skolia more power."

Jaibriol stiffened. He could never live up to Tarquine's memory of Kelric, the man who had been her provider and lover, who had escaped from her habitat, shredded her security, and infiltrated one of the largest military complexes in Eube, the Sphinx Sector Rim Base. The Lock that ESComm had stolen from the Skolians was in that complex. Kelric had used it to join the Dyad—to become a Key, which only a Ruby psion could do. Now he was the Imperator. The Military Key. The Fist of Skolia.

Compared to Kelric, Jaibriol had no doubt he seemed young, callow, and inexperienced. Tarquine claimed she no longer wanted Kelric, but Jaibriol didn't believe her. He could never compete with a legend.

Only Corbal and Tarquine suspected Jaibriol could also use the Lock. Except no one would ever use it again, for Kelric had killed it, or whatever one did to deactivate a singularity where Kyle space pierced their universe. Jaibriol had found Kelric in the Lock that day—and he had let the Imperator go free, an act many would consider treason.
Meet me at the peace table,
Jaibriol had told him. But the Paris Accord had fallen apart and now Kelric had even more power. Enough to conquer Eube? All Jaibriol saw was the long, slow dying of his dream.

He sank into his high-backed chair, put his elbows on his desk, and leaned his head in his hands. He was so very tired, a bone-deep exhaustion that sleep never cured. The longer he lived among the Aristos, the more hopeless it seemed that they would ever deal with the Skolians, a people they didn't consider human. They didn't seem capable of understanding why Skolians abhorred the Concord. After all, Eubian taskmakers had a high standard of living. It took no genius to see why Aristos maintained it; only a few thousand of them controlled two
trillion
taskmakers. The Aristos didn't care about the soul-parching effects of that control, how they crushed the spirit of those who resisted them. The slagged remains of several worlds served as testament to how far Hightons would take their reckoning against definace.

But no sane Aristo wanted genocide. They knew perfectly well that too much repression inspired rebellion. Taskmakers formed the backbone of civilization; even a fool could see that keeping them satisfied worked better than oppression. Aristos might be arrogant, amoral, and without compassion, but they were never stupid. They ensured their taskmakers lived good lives—as long as they obeyed.

Providers were another story. Aristos believed they had one and only one purpose: to please Aristos. In their twisted world view, torturing providers "elevated" those slaves to a higher form of existence. But the Aristos knew the truth, no matter how much they masked it with the convolutions of their speech. It was why Corbal hid his tenderness toward Sunrise; his love for her threatened the fabric of an empire. Lurking in every Aristo's mind was the specter that one day their slaves would rise against them, not a city, a world, or a star system, but all of them. Trillions. Then nothing could stop the fall of Eube.

Jaibriol lifted his head to regard his cousin. "We will deal with the Skolians as we must."

Corbal was studying him. "Never show signs of weakness. Your enemies will devour you."

Jaibriol just stared at him, and wondered if he could ever resurrect his dream.

Dehya sat at the round table with Kelric, and they each rolled out their dice. While the rest of the Assembly slept, celebrated, or brooded, the Dyad played Quis.

Words had never been Kelric's forte, so instead of explaining the rules, he showed them to her. He placed a regular tetrahedron, a ruby pyramid, in the center of the table. Then he waited.

Dehya looked from the die to Kelric. When he continued to wait, she smiled slightly, then took a gold pentahedron and set it next to his piece.

That surprised him. Did she know she had started a queen's spectrum? She had probably studied records of his solitaire games, trying to figure them out. Building a spectrum against an advanced player was difficult. An augmented queen's spectrum was almost impossible; to his knowledge, he was the only person who had done it in Calanya Quis.

He rubbed his fingers, which ached with arthritis even his nanomeds couldn't eliminate. Then he set a yellow cube against her die. She followed with a green heptahedron. Well, hell. She
was
making a spectrum.

Kelric played a sapphire octahedron. "My game."

She looked up at him. "You can win Quis?"

He grinned. "Of course. You're lucky we aren't betting; you would owe me ten times whatever you had risked."

Dehya cocked an eyebrow. "Why should I believe you won?"

Despite her outward skepticism, he could tell she was enjoying herself. It was the advantage of being an empath; it helped him learn gestures, body language, and expressions until interpreting them became second nature. He could read Dehya even when she shielded her mind.

He tapped the line of dice. "These increase in rank according to number of sides and colors of the spectrum. Five make a queen's spectrum. Three of the dice are mine and two are yours. That means I have advantage. So I win."

"I was helping you, eh? If you start the spectrum, you win no matter what."

"You can block my moves." He took his dice and slid hers across the table. Then he set an amethyst bar in the playing area. "Your move."

"Are we gambling?"

"If you would like."

She laughed softly. "Ah, well, you made up the rules, I don't know them, and you've been playing for decades. I
don't
think I want to bet." She set her amethyst bar on top of his.

Kelric stared at the bars, frozen. He felt her amusement fade to puzzlement. Finally, still not looking at her, he said, "I didn't make up the rules."

"Who did?" Her voice had a waiting quality.

He set a diamond sphere near the structure. "Your move."

She waited a while. When he said nothing else, she said, "Spectrums go by color, yes?"

He glanced up. "That's why they're called spectrums."

"And white is all colors, as in light."

"Yes!" She was going to be formidable at Quis. He wondered if she realized he had used the diamond ball, the highest ranked piece, to symbolize her. Dehya wasn't hard like a diamond, but its strength fit her, as did the way it refracted light into many vivid colors.

She set a gold dodecahedron apart from the other dice.
Interesting.
The dodecahedron came next in rank after the sphere. What did she mean? Possibly nothing. He could never tell with Dehya, though; her complex, evolving mind often startled him.

He set down an onyx ring, one of his symbols for himself. She thought for a moment, then balanced a topaz arch so it connected the diamond ball and gold dodecahedron.

"That's a sunsky bridge," Kelric said. "It suggests a cooperative venture."

She tapped the gold dodecahedron. "Roca." Then she touched the diamond ball. "You."

He regarded her curiously. "Why assign names to the dice?"

"I've watched you play. Your structures evolve. It's almost as if they have personalities."

It gratified him that she understood. "They tell stories. Or make the story. The dice shape events as much as portray them."

"I don't see how gambling can spur events." With a wry smile, she added, "Except to lower my credit account."

Kelric waved his hand. "Gambling is for Outsiders. It isn't true Quis."

"Then what do you do with it?"

He leaned forward. "Suppose everyone played. Everywhere. Throughout the Imperialate."

She was watching him closely. "And?"

"I put my stories into my Quis when I sit in sessions with other people. Then they play with others. The better designed my strategies, the more it affects their Quis, and the more they pass on my intentions."

"So your effect spreads."

"Yes."

"And if, say, Vaz Majda played Quis, you might affect her opinions with your influence."

Good! She understood. "But other people also input stories. Ragnar might build patterns of war. Councilor Tikal would focus on politics. Naaj would bring in heredity. Their input goes to the public, who all play Quis. Everyone affects the game, but most people don't play well enough to do much beyond accepting, refusing, or transmitting ideas."

Her voice took on a careful quality. "And when everyone is playing Quis this way, what do you call your world?"

He knew what she was asking: where had he spent all those years? He gathered his dice and put them in his pouch. "Thank you for the game."

She started to speak, but whatever she was going to say, she let it go. Instead she asked, "Who won?"

"Both of us."

"So you and I, we don't gamble."