Little Myth Marker

by Robert Asprin

  No comment. No witty banter. I had him thinking.

  The next cards were en route. The three of hearts slid into my lineup. A dead card. Opposing it, the Kid got...

  The ten of hearts!

  I was now looking at three tens against my ten-seven high! For a moment my resolve wavered, but I shored it up again. I was in too far to change now.

  The Kid was eyeing me thoughtfully. "I don't suppose you'd go thirty on that?" he said.

  "I'll not only go it, I'll raise you thirty."

  There were muffled exclamations of disbelief in the room...and some not so muffled. I recognized the voices of some of the latter.

  The Kid just shook his head and pushed the appropriate number of chips into the pot without a word. The crowd lapsed into silence and craned their necks to see the next cards.

  The dragon of spades to me, and the ogre of hearts to the Kid.

  No apparent help for either hand...except that now the Kid had three hearts face up.

  We both studied each other's cards for a few moments.

  "I'll admit I can't figure out what you're betting, Skeeve," my opponent sighed. "But this hand's worth fifty."

  "...And up fifty."

  Instead of responding, the Kid leaned back in his chair and stared at me.

  "Check me on this," he said. "Either I've missed it completely, or you haven't looked at your hole cards yet."

  "That's right."

  The crowd started muttering again. At least some of them had missed that point.

  "So you're betting blind?"

  "Right."

  "...And raising into me to boot."

  I nodded.

  "I don't get it. How do you expect to win?"

  I regarded him for a moment before I answered. To say the least, I had the room's undivided attention.

  "Kid, you're the best there is at dragon poker. You've spent years honing your skills to be the best, and nothing that happens here tonight is going to change that. Me, I'm lucky...if you can call it that. I got lucky one night, and that somehow earned me the chance to play this game with you tonight. That's why I 'm betting the way I am."

  The Kid shook his head. "Maybe I'm slow, but I still don't get it."

  "In the long run, your skill would beat my luck. It always does. I figure the only chance I've got is to juice the betting on this one hand...go for broke. All the skill in the dimensions can't change the outcome of one hand. That's luck...which puts us on an equal footing."

  My opponent digested this for a few moments, then threw back his head and gave a bark of laughter.

  "I love it!" he crowed. "A half million pot riding on one hand. Skeeve, I like your style. Win or lose, it's been a pleasure matching wits with you."

  "Thank you. Kid. I feel the same way."

  "In the meantime, there's this hand to play. I hate to keep all these people hanging in suspense when we already know how the betting's going to go."

  He swept the rest of his chips into the pot. "I'll call your raise and raise you back...thirty-five. That's the whole stake,"

  "Agreed," I said, pushing my chips out.

  "Now let's see what we got," he winked, reaching for the deck.

  The two of diamonds to me...the eight of clubs to the Kid...then one more card each face down.

  The crowd pressed forward as my opponent peered at his last card.

  "Skeeve," he said almost regretfully. "You had an interesting strategy there, but my hand's good...real good."

  He flipped two of his down cards over.

  "Full Dragon...four Ogres and a pair of tens."

  "Nice hand," I acknowledged.

  "Yeah. Right. Now let's see what you've got."

  With as much poise as I could muster, I turned over my hole cards.

  Chapter Nineteen

  "Can't you take a joke?"

  -T. Eulenspiegel

  MASSHA looked up from her book and bon-bons as we trooped through the door.

  "That was quick," she said. "How did it go?"

  "Hi, Massha. Where's Markie?"

  "Upstairs in her room. After the second time she tried to sneak out, I sent her to bed and took up sentry duty here by the door. What happened at the game?"

  "Well, I still say you were wrong," Aahz growled. "Of all the dumb stunts you've pulled..."

  "C'mon, partner. What's done is done. Okay? You're just mad because I didn't check with you first."

  "That's the least of..."

  "WILL SOMEBODY TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED?"

  "What? Oh. Sorry, Massha. I won. Aahz here is upset because..."

  I was suddenly swept up in a gargantuan hug and kiss as my apprentice expressed her delight at the news.

  "I'll say he won. In one hand he won," Tananda grinned. "Never seen anything like it."

  "Three unicorns and the six of clubs in the hole," Aahz raged. "Three wild cards, which, when used with the once-a-night suit shift rule on the seven of diamonds, yields..."

  "A straight-bloody-flush!" Chumley sang. "Which took the Kid's Full Dragon and the largest pot that's ever been seen at the Bazaar."

  "I knew you could do it, Daddy!" Markie shrieked, emerging from her hiding spot on the stairs.

  So much for sending her to bed early.

  "I wish you could have seen the Kid's face, Massha," the troll continued merrily. "I'll bet he wishes now that he carries antacids instead of breath mints."

  "You should have seen the crowd. They're going to be talking about this one for years!"

  Massha finally let me down and held up a hand.

  "Hold it! Wait a minute! I get the feeling I've missed a lap here somewhere. Hot Stuff here won. Right? As in walked away with all the marbles?''

  The brother and sister team nodded vigorously. I just tried to get my breath back.

  "So how come Green and Scaly is breathing smoke? I should think he'd be leading the cheering."

  "BECAUSE HE GAVE THE MONEY AWAY! THAT'S WHY!!!"

  "Yes. That would explain it." Massha nodded thoughtfully.

  "C'mon, Aahz! I didn't give it away."

  As I've discovered before, it's a lot easier to find your breath when you're under attack.

  "Whoa! Wait!" my apprentice said, stepping between us. "Before you two get started again, talk to Massha. Remember, I'm the one who wasn't there."

  "Well, the Kid and I got to talking after the game. He's really a nice guy, and I found out that he had pretty much been betting everything he had..."

  "That's what he claimed," Aahz snorted. "I think he was making a play for our sympathies."

  "...and I got to thinking. I had worked hard to be sure that both the Kid's and my reputations would be intact, no matter how the game came out. What I really wanted to do was to retire from the dragon poker circuit and let him take on all the hotshot challengers..."

  "That much I'll agree with."

  "Aahz! Just let him tell it. Okay?"

  "...But he couldn't keep playing if he was broke, which would leave me as the logical target for the up-and-comings, so I let him keep the quarter of a million he had lost..."

  "See! SEE!!! What did I tell you?"

  "...as a LOAN so he could use it as a stake in future games...."

  "That's when I knew he had...a loan??"

  I grinned at my partner.

  "Uh-huh. As in 'put your money to work for you instead of stacking it, a concept I believe you found very interesting when it was first broached. Of course, you had already gone off half-cocked and stomped away before we got to that part."

  Any sarcasm I had managed to load into my voice was lost on Aahz, which is not surprising when you realize we were talking about money.

  "A loan, eh?" he said thoughtfully. "What were the terms?"

  "Tell him. Bunny."

  "BUNNY??"

  "Hey! You weren't there, remember? I decided to see what our accountant could do. Bunny?"

  "Well, I've never dealt with stake money before, no pun intended, so I had to kind of feel my w
ay along. I think I got us a pretty good arrangement, though."

  "Which was..."

  "Until the Kid pays us back...and it's got to be paid back in full, no partial payments, we get half his winnings."

  "Hmmm," my partner murmured. "Not bad."

  "If you can think of anything else I should have asked for, I'm open to..."

  "If he could think of anything else," I said, winking at her, "you can believe he would have roared it out by now. You did great. Bunny."

  "Gee. Thanks, Skeeve."

  "Now then, if someone would be so kind as to break out the wine, I feel like celebrating."

  "Of course, Boss you realize that now a lot of people know that you've got a lot of cash on hand," Guido pointed out, edging close to me. "As soon as Nunzio gets back, I think we'd better take a look at beefin' up security on the place, know what I mean?"

  "Where is Nunzio, anyway?" Massha said, peering around.

  "He'll be along in a bit," I smiled. "I had a little errand for him after the game."

  "Well, here's to you, Skeeve!" Chumley called, lifting his goblet aloft. "After all our worrying about whether your reputation could survive a match with the Kid, I dare say you came out of it well ahead of where you were before."

  "That's right," his sister giggled. "I wonder what the Ax thinks about what happened."

  That was the cue I had been waiting for. I took a deep breath and a deeper drink of wine, then assumed my most casual manner. "Why bother speculating, Tananda? Why not ask direct?"

  "What's that, Skeeve?"

  "I said, why not ask the Ax directly? After all, she's in the room right now." The gaiety of the mood vanished in an eyeblink as everybody stared at me.

  "Partner," Aahz murmured, "I thought we settled this when we talked to Don Bruce."

  I cut him off with the wave of a hand.

  "As a matter of fact, I'm a little curious about what the Ax is thinking myself. Why don't you tell us...Markie?"

  My young ward squirmed under the room's combined gaze.

  "But, Daddy...I don't...you...oh, heck! You figured it out, huh?"

  "Uh-huh." I nodded, not feeling at all triumphant.

  She heaved a great sigh. "Oh, well. I was about to throw in the towel anyway. I had just hoped I could beat a retreat before my cover was blown. If you don't mind, I'd like to join you in some of that wine now."

  "Help yourself."

  "MARKIE?!?"

  Aahz had finally recovered enough to make noise. Of course, it comes reflexively to him. The others were still working on it.

  "Don't let the little-girl looks fool you, Aahz," she winked. "Folks are small and soft on my dimension. In the right clothes, it's easy to pass yourself off as being younger than you really are...lots younger."

  "But...but..."

  "Think about it for a minute, Aahz," I said. "You had all the pieces the first day. Kids, particularly little girls, are embarrassing at best, trouble at worst. The trick is that you expect them to be trouble, so you don't even consider the possibility that what they're doing could be premeditated and planned."

  I paused to take a sip of wine, and for once no one interrupted me with questions.

  "If you look back on it, most of the problems we've been having have originated directly or indirectly from Markie. She mouthed off about Bunny being in my bed to get Tananda upset, and when that didn't work she made a few digs about her living here free that got her thinking about leaving...just like she deliberately made Massha look bad in the middle of her magic lesson for the same reason, to get her to leave."

  "Almost worked, too," my apprentice observed thoughtfully.

  "The business in the Bazaar was no accident, either," I continued. "All she had to do was wait for the right opportunity to pretend to get mad so we wouldn't suspect she was blasting things deliberately. If you recall, she even tried to convince me that I didn't need to take dragon poker lessons."

  "Of course," Markie put in, "that's not easy to do when people think you're a kid."

  "The biggest clue was Gleep. I thought he was trying to protect me from Bunny, but it was Markie he was really after. I keep telling you that he's smarter than you think."

  "Remind me to apologize to your dragon," Aahz said, still staring at Markie.

  "It was a good plan," she sighed. "Ninety-nine percent of the time it would have worked. The problem was that everyone underestimated you, Skeeve...you and your friends. I didn't think you'd have enough money to pay off the irate merchants after I did a number on their displays, and your friends..." She shook her head slowly.

  "Usually if word gets out that I'm on assignment, it makes my work easier. The target's associates bail out to keep from getting hit in the crossfire, and trying to get them to stay or come back only makes things worse. Part of sinking someone's career is cutting them off from their support network." She raised her wine in a mock toast to me. "Your friends wouldn't run...or if they did, they wouldn't stay gone once they heard you were in trouble. That's when I started to have second thoughts about this assignment. I mean, there are some careers that shouldn't be scuttled, and I think yours is one of them. You can take that as a compliment...it's meant as one. That's why I was about to call it quits anyway. I realized my heart just wasn't in my work this time around."

  She set down her wine and stood up.

  "Well, I guess that's that. I'll go upstairs and pack now. Make you a deal. If you all promise not to tell anyone who the famous Ax is, I'll spread the word that you're so invincible that even the Ax couldn't trip you up. Okay?"

  Watching her leave the room, I realized with some surprise that I would miss her. Despite what Aahz had said, it had been kind of nice having a kid around the place.

  "That's it?" my partner frowned. "You're just going to let her walk?"

  "I was the target. I figure it was my call. Besides, she didn't do any real damage. As Chumley pointed out a second ago, we're further ahead than we were when she arrived."

  "Of course, there's the matter of the damages we had to pay for her little magic display at the Bazaar."

  For once, I was ahead of my partner when it came to money.

  "I haven't forgotten that, Aahz. I just figure to recoup the loss from another source. You see, what finally tipped me off was...wait. Here they are now."

  Nunzio was just coming into the room, dragging the Geek with him.

  "Hello, Skeeve," the Deveel said, squirming in my bodyguard's grasp. "Your...ah, associate here says you wanted to see me?"

  "He tried to sneak out after I told him. Boss," Nunzio squeaked. "That's what took me so long."

  "Hello, Geek," I purred. "Have a seat. I want to have a little chat with you about a card game."

  "C'mon, Skeeve. I already told you..."

  "Sit!"

  The Geek dropped into the indicated chair like gravity had suddenly trebled. I had borrowed the tone of voice from Nunzio's dragon-training demonstration. It worked.

  "What the Geek was starting to say," I explained, turning to Aahz, "is that before the game tonight he warned me that I was overmatched and asked me not to have any hard feelings...that the game with the Kid wasn't his idea."

  "That's right," the Deveel interjected. "Word just got out and..."

  "What I'm curious about, however, is how he knew I was outclassed."

  I smiled at the Geek, trying to show my teeth the way Aahz does. "You see, I don't want to talk about tonight's game. I was hoping you could give us a little more information about the other game...you know, the one where I won Markie?"

  The Deveel glanced nervously around the group of assembled scowls.

  "I...I don't know what you mean."

  "Let me make it easy for you. At this point I figure the game had to be rigged. That's the only way you would know in advance what a weak dragon poker player I am. Somehow you were throwing hands my way to be sure I won big, big enough to include Markie. I'm just curious how you did it without triggering the magic or telepathy monitors."


  The Geek seemed to shrink a little in his chair. When he spoke, his voice was so low we could barely hear him.

  "Marked cards," he said.

  The room exploded.

  "MARKED CARDS??"

  "But how..."

  "Wouldn't that..."

  I waved them back to silence.

  "It makes sense. Think about it," I instructed. "Specifically, think back to our trip to Limbo. Remember how hard it was to disguise ourselves without using magic? Everybody at the Bazaar gets so used to things being done magically, they forget there are non-magical ways to do the same things...like false beards, or marked cards."

  The Geek was on his feet now.

  "You can't hold that against me! So someone else paid me to throw the game your way. Heck, I should think you'd be happy. You came out ahead, didn't you? What's to be mad about?"

  "I'll bet if I try real hard I could think of something."

  "Look, if it's revenge you want, you already got it. I lost a bundle tonight betting against you. You want blood, I'm bleeding!"

  The Deveel was sweating visibly now. Then again, he's always been a little nervous around me for some reason.

  "Relax, Geek. I'm not going to hurt you. If anything, I'm going to help you...just like you helped me."

  "Yeah?" he said suspiciously.

  "You say you're short of cash, we'll fix it."

  "What!!??" Aahz roared, but Tananda poked him in the ribs and he subsided into sullen silence.

  "Bunny?"

  "Yeah, Skeeve?"

  "First thing tomorrow I want you to run over to the Even-Odds. Go over the books, take inventory, and come up with a fair price for the place."

  The Geek blinked.

  "My club? But I..."

  "...Then draw up an agreement for us to take it off the Geek's hands...at half the price you arrive at."

  "WHAT!!??" the Deveel screeched, forgetting his fear. "Why should I sell my club for..."

  "...More than it will be worth if the word gets out that you're running rigged games?" I finished for him. "Because you're a shrewd businessman, Geek. Besides, you need the money. Right?"

  The Geek swallowed hard, then licked his lips before he spoke. "Right."

  "How was that, Geek?" Aahz frowned. "I didn't quite hear you."