“It is a contest — a game. In my childhood home in the Misty Isles, we play it for amusement, or sometimes as a test of skill. At the latter times, money is wagered. Would you like to learn the game?”
“I have no money. I have no need of money.”
“Then we will play for the sheer pleasure of the thing.” Lixal extended his arms and set the game down an equal distance between the two of them. “As for the distance that perforce must always separate us, when you wish to reach out and move your pieces I shall lean back a compensatory amount, allowing you to manipulate the
The Deodand stared at him, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What is a spinari?”
“Not ‘a spinari’—it is plural. One is called a
The Deodand was silent for long moments. “Move one to my right…? What is the point of it?”
Lixal smiled. “I will show you. You will learn it in no time — in the Isles even the youngest children play!”
By the time they reached Catechumia they had traveled together nearly a month and played several hundred games of King’s Compass, each of which Lixal had won handily. The Deodand was somewhat literal in its employment of strategy and had trouble understanding Lixal’s more spontaneous decisions. Also, the concept of bluffing and feinting had not yet impinged on the creature’s consciousness in the least. Still, the Deodand had improved to the point where the games were now genuine, if one-sided, and for that at least Lixal was grateful. The life of a man tethered to a living Deodand was bound to be a lonely one, and so his had proved in these last weeks. Solitary travelers fled them without even stopping to converse on the novelty of Lixal’s situation. Larger groups often tried to kill the Deodand, the reputation of whose kind was deservedly dark, and such groups bore scarcely more good will toward Lixal, who they deemed a traitor to his species: more than once he was forced to flee with the creature beneath a hail of fist-sized stones. Twice the barns in which they had taken refuge for the night were set on fire with them inside, and both times escape had been no certain thing.
“I confess I had not fully understood the unhappiness of your existence,” Lixal told the Deodand. “You are hunted by one and all, with no succor to be found anywhere.”
The creature gave him a look that mingled amusement with scorn. “On the contrary, in the general run of things, one and all are hunted by
This last remark, the most recent of several, pertained to Lixal’s insistence that the creature with whom he was bound up not consume the flesh of human beings while they were in each other’s company — which meant, perforce, all the time. This the Deodand had acceded to with bad grace, and only after Lixal pointed out that he could easily warn away all but the most deaf and blind of potential victims. When he accompanied this injunction by employing the Rhinocratic Oath, showing the Deodand how Lixal could cause the creature’s nose to grow so large as to block its sight entirely, the Deodand at last submitted.
They both needed to eat, however, so Lixal had a first hand view of the sharpness and utility of the Deodand’s claws and teeth when they were employed catching birds or animals. Because the distance between them had to remain more or less identical at all times, it meant that Lixal himself also needed to learn something of the Deodand’s arts of silent hunting and swift attack. However, this level of cooperation between the two distinct species, although interesting and unusual, only made Lixal Laqavee more aware of how desperately he wanted to be out of the creature’s presence.
Since the Exhalation of Thunderous Banishment had proved worse than useless when employed on Deodands — and that, Lixal suspected, had been the exact nature of Eliastre’s deadly ruse — it was only the talismanic bracelet around his wrist which kept the Deodand at a distance. He no longer had any illusions that he could resist the creature’s fatal strike in any other way: the Rhinocratic Oath would not deter it for more than a moment, the Pseudo-Philtre was laughably inappropriate, and even the Cantrip of Notional Belittlement, which Lixal had employed early on in their forced companionship, had only slightly reduced the creature’s obsession with the day when it would be free of him (and, the implication was clear, equally free to destroy him.) He might have used the cantrip on himself to reduce his own level of unease but feared becoming oblivious to looming danger.
One interesting concomitant of the situation was that the cantrip-calmed Deodand became more conversational as the weeks rolled on. There were evenings, as they leaned back and forth like rowers to access the King’s Compass gaming board, that the creature became almost chatty, telling of his upbringing as an anonymous youngster in a teeming nest, surviving against his fellows only by employing those impressive fangs and talons until he was old enough to escape the nest and begin killing things other than his own siblings.
“We do not build towns as your kind does,” the Deodand explained. “We share territories, but only at a distance except for those times when we are drawn together to mate and settle grievances, the latter of which we effect by contests of strength which inevitably end in exoneration for one party, death for the other. I myself have survived a dozen such disputes. Here, see the deep scar of one such honorably concluded disagreement.” The creature raised its arm to show Lixal, but in the firelight he could make out nothing against the flat darkness of its skin. “It has never been in our nature to cluster together as your kind does or to build as your kind builds. We have always been content to take shelter where it is found. However, as I play this game of yours, I begin to see advantages in the way your kind thinks. We Deodands seldom plan ahead beyond the successful conclusion of a given hunt, but I see now that one of the advantages your people has over mine is this very quality of forward thinking. Also, I begin to comprehend how misdirection and even outright untruth can be useful for more than simply catching a wary traveler off-guard.” The Deodand abruptly moved two spinari in the same direction, revealing a sortie he had prepared, but which had been previously hidden behind them. “As you see,” he pointed out with a baring of fangs which was the Deodand equivalent of a self-satisfied smile.
Despite the creature’s unusual strategem, Lixal won again that night. He had been put on notice, however: the Deodand was learning, and he would have to increase the effort he put into the games if he wished to maintain his supremacy and his unbroken record. He found himself regretting, as he had many times before, that hundreds of consecutive victories in a game of skill should net him exactly nothing in the way of monetary reward. It was a suffering more poignant than anything Eliastre could have devised for him.
At last, they reached the small metropolis of Catechumia, home of Twitterel’s Emporium. Lixal and the Deodand paused and waited for nightfall in a glade on the outskirts of town, not far from the place where Lixal’s troop had once camped.
“Do not trouble yourself with speech when we meet Eliastre,” he warned the Deodand. “It will be a tense negotiation and best served by devices I alone can bring to bear. In fact,” he said after a moment’s thought, “It may be best if you remain outside the door while I step just inside it, so that the treacherous onetime mage knows nothing of your presence and can prepare no defense against you, should I find it necessary to call upon you.”
“You have tried once already to trap me on the other side of a door, Laqavee,” the Deodand said sourly. “Not only that, but it was a church door, which you thought might increase the efficacy of the strategem. And what happened?”
“You wrong me! That was weeks ago and I intend no such trickery here…!”
“You discovered you could not go forward while I remained on the other side of the door,” the creature reminded him. “Like the golden links of a magister’s cuff, we are bound together, willy-nilly — one cannot proceed without the other.”
“As far as our current plan, I desired only to keep your presence a secret at the outset,” Lixal said in a sulky voice. “But you will do as you feel you must.”
“Yes, I will,” said the Deodand. “And you would be wise to remember that.”
When midnight came, they crossed town swiftly and mostly silently, although Lixal was forced to remonstrate severely with the Deodand, who would have eaten a drunkard he found sleeping in an alcove outside a shuttered tavern.
“He is of no interest to anyone except me,” the creature argued. “How can you prevent me when you have
