Red Seas Under Red Skies (Electronic book text)

"CHAPTER ONE" "LITTLE GAMES" "1" THE GAME WAS CAROUSEL HAZARD, the stakes were roughly half of all the wealth they commanded in the entire world, and the plain truth was that Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen were getting beaten like a pair of dusty carpets. "Last offering for the fifth hand," said the velvet-coated attendant from his podium on the other side of the circular table. "Do the gentlemen choose to receive new cards?" "No, no--the gentlemen choose to confer," said Locke, leaning to his left to place his mouth close to Jean's ear. He lowered his voice to a whisper. "What's your hand look like?" "A parched desert," Jean murmured, casually moving his right hand up to cover his mouth. "How's yours?" "A wasteland of bitter frustration." "Shit." "Have we been neglecting our prayers this week? Did one of us fart in a temple or something?" "I thought the expectation of losing was all part of the plan." "It is. I just expected we'd be able to put up a better fight than "this,"" The attendant coughed demurely into his left hand, the card-table equivalent of slapping Locke and Jean across the backs of their heads. Locke leaned away from Jean, tapped his cards lightly against the lacquered surface of the table, and grinned the best knew-what-he-was-doing sort of grin he could conjure from his facial arsenal. He sighed inwardly, glancing at the sizable pile of wooden markers that was about to make the short journey from the center of the table to his opponents' stacks. "We are of course prepared," he said, "to meet our fate with heroic stoicism, worthy of mention by historians and poets." The dealer nodded. "Ladies and gentlemen bothdecline last offering. House calls for final hands." There was a flurry of shuffling and discarding as the four players formed their final hands and set them, facedown, on the table before them. "Very well," said the attendant. "Turn and reveal." The sixty or seventy of Tal Verrar's wealthiest idlers who had crowded the room behind them to watch every turn of Locke and Jean's unfolding humiliation now leaned forward as one, eager to see how embarrassed they would be this time. 2 TAL VERRAR, the Rose of the Gods, at the westernmost edge of what the Therin people call the civilized world. If you could stand in thin air a thousand yards above Tal Verrar's tallest towers, or float in lazy circles there like the nations of gulls that infest the city's crevices and rooftops, you could see how its vast dark islands have given this place its ancient nickname. They seem to whirl outward from the city's heart, a series of crescents steadily increasing in size, like the stylized petals of a rose in an artist's mosaic. They are not natural, in the sense that the mainland looming a few miles to the northeast is natural. The mainland cracks before wind and weather, showing its age. The islands of Tal Verrar are unweathered, possibly unweatherable--they are the black glass of the Eldren, unimaginable quantities of it, endlessly tiered and shot through with passages, glazed with layers of stone and dirt from whic