Red Seas Under Red Skies: The Gentleman Bastard Sequence, Book Two (Gentleman Bastards 2)
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 one 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 sizeable pile of wooden markers that was about to make the short journey from the centre 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 both decline 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, face down, 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.