In the past few days, Dovik had come to understand something about the nature of silence. He had come to understand that it was a thing of degrees.

  Across the red-felted table from him, the biggest faethian dwarf he had ever seen hunched forward, staring down at the line of seven cards he held in his swollen blue hands. The concentration the man put into the seven rectangles of card stock left the rest of the table quiet, silent. However, for all the tension the man carried, for how still the six faces seated around the table looked at him, trying to use the minute twitches of muscle in the man’s face to read what he might hold in his hand, the table’s silence was an isolated thing. Just ten feet away, a woman argued with a waitress at another table, her words slurring as she demanded the finely-dressed drink carrier pay for the hand she just lost. Beyond that, past the velvet rope that cordoned off the room from the main floor of the casino, the noisy clanking of enchanted machines designed to be as loud and showy as possible. They would whirl and chirp, flashing lights, and extract as much hard-earned coin from the poor sods sitting in the unnaturally comfortable chairs set in front of them as possible.

  Outside the walls of the casino, Dovik knew that the city churned on through the night. Faeth never slept, and he sat in the heart of its most insomniatic district, Lights Lane. The noise of pinging balls, synthetic cheering, and the wails of the newly impoverished played out almost rhythmically in the several grand casinos lining this particular street. Yet, for all that noise, the betting table sat in a perceived silence just in front of him. It was only perceived by the others because they could not see as he did. Seven lights around the table, decorated in unique hues and burning in personal patterns, never sat completely still, and they knew nothing of silence.

  While the other gamblers around the table watched the man’s face as he stared at his cards, Dovik watched his soul. Corpulent was not a strong enough word to define his gambling partner. There was such a lack of thick-bodied dwarves in Faeth that Dovik had begun to believe that they simply couldn’t grow fat, but tonight had disabused him of that notion. The soul that burned in the center of his chest like a flickering gray flame was something else entirely; it was beautiful. Dovik found that all souls were beautiful, in their way, but he particularly liked the steady ebb and flow of the one that he gazed at now. There was something that spoke of a potent intelligence in the dance of the flame, yet even that dance never grew uncontrolled, which spoke to discipline and self-control. Then, as he watched, he caught emotion bleeding into the movement of the flame in the form of popping, green color. Elation.

  The man across the table from him reached down toward the pile of chips in front of him, hesitating for only an instant before touching the stack of black and red circles. A few of the others at the table caught the hesitation and thought that they had seen through the man’s attempt at masking a tell.

  “Raise five hundred,” the dwarf said, expertly collecting a pile of ten chips and tossing them into the center of the pot.

  Two others called the perceived bluff as the betting made its way around the table to him. With a grin, Dovik tossed his face down cards onto the table. “Too rich for me.”

  “Running away again?” the woman on his left asked as she tapped a nail against her dwindling stack of chips.

  “You run when you need to, and you advance when you can,” Dovik said, reclining in his chair.

  “Far be it for me to argue with the man at the table with the most cash,” the woman said, tossing her cards away as well.

  Play continued, the gamblers still in the game slowly dwindling until only three remained for the final turn of the card. When all was said and done, the big dwarven man across from Dovik leaned his bulk over the table and scraped the pot toward himself.

  “Unlucky there, friends,” the big man says. His eyes flick across the table toward Dovik and his neatly stacked empire of chips. “Fortune will favor you in the next hand. I am certain of it.”

  Fortune, as it turned out, did not favor anyone at the table that wasn’t a young scion of a magician’s guild.

  Prior to coming to Faeth, Dovik had only gambled as much as any other young man, which was to say that he did so at every opportunity. For the first few weeks, he had needed to walk down Lights Lane more than a few times, as it was the shortest path between the penthouse and the alchemy shop he was coming to favor. As he did, the call of flashing neon lights and raunchy advertisements would reach toward him, begging him to enter, but he had the control not to buckle to such things. That had been, until he and Charlene had been robbed and their funds had dwindled to next to nothing.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  He hadn’t actually expected to win that first night; he didn’t have a system to help ensure that he did. On that first night, Dovik took the remaining coins he had to his name and put them on a game where people bet on the outcome of coin flips. First, he doubled his money, then doubled it again, and wisely chose to pull it off the table before he could lose it all once more. It was by chance, as he was leaving, that he glanced toward the high buy-on card tables toward the back of the casino, his gaze roaming over the people sitting around the red-velvet table and their flickering souls.

  For just a moment, he caught a flicker as one gambler pushed all their chips into the center of the table. He recognized the flicker for the anxiety that it was; he had seen souls move in that way on the battlefield more than once. To his surprise, the other gamblers backed down, their own souls flickering with anxiety and regret as they did so. A smile broke out on the liar’s face as he raked in his winnings, the flame of his soul dancing inside his chest. The sound of jingling chips worth more than what he held tucked away in his ring was like a symphony to his ears, and he found his new path toward wealth.

  The game that was played at the highest-ante tables in the casino was a twist on one he knew. Dovik picked it up in a heartbeat, but he didn’t play it like most others. His ability to read the emotions and the barest surface thoughts from the flickering of his opponent’s souls vastly improved as he won hand after hand. He didn’t always win. In a game where victory could easily come down to who was dealt the best cards by fate, there was no such thing as a person who always won. However, at the end of the night, he was always walking away with more than he brought.

  Dovik developed an approach to the game different than most. All of a sudden, turn order became more important as he was able to tell who had the best hand at the start of a round. Playing on the egos of others, casually goading, pretending that he made mistakes, and figuring out how to push others into behavior he desired became more important than the winning hand. He was having a blast.

  As the night began to wind down and more and more gamblers left the table when they couldn’t afford to buy in anymore, Dovik was left with just three more opponents. The personal challenge he had set for himself to only win with bluffing for the night was proceeding swimmingly, and the exasperated expressions of his opponents only served to push him forward.

  “I don’t believe this,” the thick man across the table from him muttered as he looked down at his cards. The man didn’t even try to hide his hand that time, revealing that he had the third-highest hand in the game after Dovik pushed him to fold.

  “It was a wise choice,” Dovik said, passing his face down cards to the dealer. “You are shrewd for catching it.”

  “No,” the man said, staring up at Dovik. “I cannot believe it. You haven’t lost a hand tonight.”

  “I am good at this game,” he said. “My older sister used to pester me to play it all the time growing up.”

  The dwarven man shook his head. “Bullshit. You are cheating somehow. No one is lucky enough to win every hand.”

  “Cheating?” Dovik barked a laugh. He pointed to the corners of the room where spotters were watching every person in the casino. All of them had either those strange prosthetic eyes Charlene possessed or some kind of apparatus strapped over their face. “How could I get away with that while we are all being watched?”

  As Dovik proclaimed his innocence, he felt it to be true. All he was doing was watching for signs he could see after all. Just because others couldn’t see souls and he could didn’t mean that he was cheating. It just meant that he was more perceptive than most. Dovik didn’t even believe that he was trying to rationalize anything to himself, which is why when a meaty hand slapped down on his shoulder, it caught him by surprise.

  Dovik almost fell out of his chair as he tried to rise. His legs were wobbly from the two strong drinks he had at the table and dissuse. The hand on his shoulder pushed down, trying hard to keep the young man bound to the chair and struggling. In his struggle, Dovik knocked over the glasses on the lip of the table next to him. Six glasses clattered and rolled out onto the felt. He blinked at them as they rocked for a moment and stilled. What was really the difference between six drinks and two?

  “Sir,” the big man standing behind him, a stonespeaker from the sound of his voice, said in a rumbling baritone. “You are going to have to come with us.”

  “What is this about?” Dovik said, turning and looking up at the man. Yep, stonespeaker, just like he thought.

  “You are going to have to come with us,” the stonespeaker repeated.

  Another man appeared at Dovik’s other side, a faethian dwarf. The man threw a chrome briefcase onto the table and started shoveling Dovik’s chips inside. “Worry not. We will keep these nice and safe.”

  As Dovik tried to come up with a quip, the dwarf finished stowing away the chips and hurried toward a red door set into the back wall of the casino. The dwarf walked with a bounce to his step that left Dovik blinking.

  “Right this way, sir.” Another stonespeaker appeared from nowhere and pulled Dovik’s seat out for him. “Right this way.”

  The man on Dovik’s left never took his hand off his shoulder. In just a moment, the three were walking toward the red door the man with the money disappeared through. Harsh light struck at Dovik’s eyes as he stooped into the open and cool air. A question as to what exactly was happening tried to form in his head, but the fist connecting with his ear quickly drove it out.

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