Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Tell me who Heleb works for.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Like you say,” he said, still speaking English, after a fashion, “you could find out easily enough. He works for Amara Guur.”

He got up then to follow the Zabarans into a back room. I followed him, wondering what Amara Guur could possibly want with someone like me.

I’d never met Guur, but I knew him by reputation. He was a vormyran. He was also a parasite—a black marketeer. Tetron government involves a great many rules and regulations, and wherever there are rules and regulations there are people intent on breaking them for fun and profit. From what I’d heard, Amara Guur didn’t bother much with the fun end of the spectrum, but he was extremely keen on the profit end. If he thought there was a profit in mounting an expedition into the wilderness, he’d do it—but it wasn’t his style to speculate. If he was taking two big trucks into the back of beyond, he must have a strong reason for thinking that there was something there to be found. That was interesting, in a scary sort of way.

I sat down at the table in the back room and began to play, almost absent-mindedly. The fact that my attention was elsewhere didn’t seem to do me any harm. Almost from the first hand I began to win—not much, because we weren’t playing for high stakes, but steadily. I figured that the time to leave would be when the Zabarans suggested raising the stakes—at which point, they’d probably figure that it was time to stop laying down bait for the human suckers and get serious.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

What happened instead was that a latecomer arrived, full of apologies, to join the game. He’d sat down and grabbed the cards before I had time to register the fact that he wasn’t a Zabaran but a Sleath.

“You play cards with a Sleath?” I whispered to Balidar in English.

“He’s okay,” Balidar assured me. “Anyway, he’s a terrible card player—and there’s only one of him and four of us. The Zabarans will calm him down if he gets excited.”

The reason I was surprised is that Sleaths had a reputation for being hot-tempered—not dangerous, just hot-tempered. The ones I’d met were small and slender by human standards, but the fact that every other starfaring race in the galaxy was bigger and tougher than they were only seemed to make the Sleaths I’d met try harder to assert themselves. They always lost the fights they started—but in a place like Skychain City, where the Tetrax set the standards of civilized behaviour, winners tended to come out of fights looking even more brutal and barbaric than the losers.

I decided to give it a few more hands.

I continued winning, even more profitably now that there were five players in the game instead of four. Balidar seemed to be absolutely right about the Sleath—he was a terrible card player.

Nobody suggested raising the stakes. I couldn’t blame them; little by little, all the money on the table was making its way over to me. I was glad that almost all of my wins were coming when someone else was dealing; if I hadn’t known that I was playing an honest game, I’d have begun to suspect myself of cheating.

Some people play more carefully when they’re losing. Others play more aggressively. The Zabarans were playing very carefully by now. The Sleath was playing very aggressively. That only increased the probability that he would keep on losing, and he did.

There’s an addictive aspect to card playing, which keeps losers in the game when the voice of reason tells them they should quit. It also keeps winners in the game, even when the voice of reason is whispering that something suspicious is going on. I don’t think the Sleath would have let me go even if I’d tried, but the fact is that I didn’t try. I just kept on playing, until he threw the last of his bankroll into the pot.

It was a bad bet, and he duly lost it—to me.

That was when he accused me of cheating.

I wasn’t scared. He was adapted for fast movement in an environment where the gravity was only four-fifths of Asgard’s surface gravity, and he was such a puny specimen of his kind that he had to wear supportive clothing just to get around. Anyway, I thought I could calm him down, with a little help from the Zabarans.

“It’s just a run of bad luck,” I lied, as soothingly as I could. “Your day will come—and it’s just loose change. Hardly enough to buy a meal and a couple of rounds of drinks.”

The Sleath turned to the Zabarans. “They are in it together,” he said, pointing at Balidar, who’d dealt the fatal hand. “He has been throwing his friend perfect cards ever since I sat down.”

The Zabarans looked down at their own depleted stocks of cash, but they shook their heads. They had no intention of backing him up. That annoyed him even more.

“You are in it too!” the Sleath said. “This whole game is fixed.”

“You obviously know these people better than I do,” I pointed out. “I just bumped into Simeon by chance. I’ve never seen either of these two before. You didn’t get good cards, I’ll grant you—but you didn’t exactly play them well, did you?”

That was a mistake. The Sleath let out a torrent of verbiage in his own language, which was presumably a concatenation of curses, and then he pulled a knife.

I got up and moved away, grabbing my chair as I did so and making sure it was between us. He hesitated for a moment, and I hoped he’d thought better of it, but then he lunged. I plucked the chair off the ground and used the legs to fence him off. I clipped his wrist with the tip of one leg, but my only concern was to make sure that he couldn’t get at me with the knife—it was his own fault that he ran his face into another leg and poked himself in the eye.

The howl he let out had far more rage in it than pain, so I figured that it wasn’t going to stop him. I jabbed at him, catching him in the chest and the forehead. He fell over, but he hadn’t actually been knocked down, and certainly wasn’t unconscious.

For the moment, though, he’d lost interest in trying to impale me. He wasn’t in any hurry to get up. He dropped the knife, quite deliberately, to signal that he’d given up.

The door to the bar was behind me. I heard it open, but I didn’t turn round until I was certain that the Sleath wasn’t going to change his mind again. When I did, I was all set to tell the bartender that everything was okay and that there was no need to call a peace-officer.

The bartender was there, but he wasn’t alone. There were two Spirellans with him: Heleb and his little brother.

I was confused, but the feeling I’d had that things weren’t right suddenly increased by an order of magnitude. I was still holding the chair, and I abandoned any thought of putting it down. I looked at Simeon Balidar, expecting a little moral support. He was studiously looking at the ceiling, absent-mindedly shuffling the cards.

I looked back at Heleb. He met my eye. I looked away immediately, but I knew that it was too late.

“Hello again,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “I’m still thinking about your offer.”

The bartender closed the door behind him, leaving Heleb and Lema on the inside. It was the only door there was, and the room had no window. I looked at the two Zabarans, but they were backing off. The Sleath had been right. They were all in it together—but he wasn’t the sucker the trap had been set to catch.

“I get the message,” I said to Heleb. “You really want me to join your expedition. This wasn’t necessary, you know—it was probably the best offer I was going to get.”

“Everyone knows that humans are barbarians,” Heleb observed, in his scrupulously-pronounced parole, “but cheating at cards is not the kind of conduct that can be tolerated in a civilized society.”