"Will not your word suffice as president of the Council of the North?" Arianne asked him.
"You know the answer to that, Lady," Bal-Simba rumbled. "I am not the mightiest magician among us, and the Council’s power ebbs as people realize they do not stand in constant need of us. Wiz may be the most junior member of the Council, but he is our most powerful magician and our best hope for correcting what is wrong."
Arianne shuddered. "So if we do not find him, we face war."
"We must do more than find him, Lady," Bal-Simba said. "We must find him alive and sound."
Seventeen: Everything Wild
Magic is real—unless declared integer.
"Okay, deal."
Karl, Judith, Mike and Nancy were seated around the table in the Wizard’s Day Room, settling in for a quiet session of bridge. Ignoring the glares of the half-dozen or so wizards present, they had pulled a table from its accustomed place and brought chairs in around it.
Mike opened a fresh pack of cards and dealt the first hand with his wife Nancy as the dummy.
Nancy organized her hand and frowned. Every card she held was a heart. By some weird happenstance, she had drawn the entire suite of hearts!
"Damn, what a time to be dummy!"
Then she looked up and saw the strange expressions on the other players’ faces.
"What’s wrong?"
Wordlessly, Mike laid down his hand, face up. Karl and Judith followed suit. Mike had gotten every club, Judith had all the diamonds and Karl had all the spades.
"Jesus!" Nancy breathed. "Are you sure you shuffled those cards?"
"You saw me," Karl said. "My lord! I wonder what the odds are on that happening?"
"Astronomical," Judith said softly. "Simply astronomical."
They all looked at the cards for a minute.
"Well," Mike said finally. "Let’s shuffle and get down to play."
He raked in the four hands and took great care to shuffle the deck thoroughly. Then he dealt them out again.
Nancy picked up her hand, looked at them, and threw them down. "Shit," she said informatively.
The others followed suit. This time Nancy had gotten all the clubs, Karl had the diamonds, Mike had the hearts and Judith had the spades.
"This isn’t working," Karl said finally. "Somehow the magic in this place is interfering with the shuffle." He looked at the four piles of cards on the table and made a face. "Do you still want to play?"
"If we can find something that we can play," Judith said. "I don’t think bridge is going to do it."
"How about poker?" Mike asked. "We could play for matches or something."
"I don’t really know how to play poker," Judith protested.
"We’ll make it easy," Mike told her. "Five-card draw."
This time Karl shuffled the cards and dealt the first hand. Then he picked up his cards and looked at them.
The hand was assorted, but it was a dog. Not even a pair and no card higher than a five. Well, that was okay too. Karl played poker for the long haul and the first hand of the game was a good place to find out how the other players would react to a bluff.
Suddenly the top of his head felt wet.
Karl looked up and saw that a tiny thundercloud, no bigger than his hand, had formed above his head. A miniature bolt of lightning flashed from peak to fluffy gray peak and a fine mist of rain settled on him.
"Let me guess," Nancy said. "You got the low hand."
Karl threw down his cards in disgust. "I don’t think this universe is designed for card playing."
"Wait a minute," Mike said. "Let’s try something that’s more strategy and less pure luck of the draw. You ever played Texas Hold ’em?"
"That’s a version of seven-card stud isn’t it?" Karl asked.
"I don’t know," Judith said. "I’ve never played stud poker."
"It’s easy," Nancy told her. "You deal three cards to each player and four face down in the middle of the table. You try to make the best hand with the cards in your hand and the four on the table. You bet after the deal and then again after each card is turned. I’ll help you with the first hand, if you like."
"And," Mike continued, "it’s got the advantage that the outcome depends on the cards on the table more than the cards in your hand. That and your betting skill."
They had no chips, and matchsticks were not a part of this world, but they appropriated a bowl of unshelled nuts from the sideboard by the port, ignoring the audible sniffs of the wizards.
Again Mike shuffled the cards and dealt.
"Three filberts."
"I’ll see your filberts and raise you a brazil nut," Judith said. She looked at the zebra-striped nut in her hand. "At least I think it’s a brazil nut."
"What did we say, five pecans to a brazil nut?" asked Nancy, shoving into the pile of squirrel fodder.
"Ace," Mike said, flipping the card. "Place your bets."
They went around the table with everyone betting moderately. Mike reached out and flipped the second card.
"Ace again."
Nancy made a strangled sound.
"What’s wrong?" her husband asked.
"Just keep going," Nancy said, staring at the cards.
Again everyone bet and again Mike flipped a card.
"Another ace… wait a minute!"
There on the table face up were an ace of clubs and ace of diamonds. The last card was the ace of spades.
"What the hell…"
He pulled a card from his hand and threw it face up on the table. An ace of spades.
"That makes seven aces," Nancy said, throwing down her and Judith’s hands.
"No, nine," Karl said, adding his cards to the pile.
"Ten," Mike said bitterly, adding another ace from his hand. "Come on guys, let’s go watch the sunset or something."
Over in the corner Malus and Honorious watched them leave.
"What do you suppose that was all about?"
"Obviously a divination of some sort." He shook his head. "I do not think they like the outcome."
"I wonder what it portends?" said Agricolus coming over to join them.
"Nothing good, I warrant you," said Juvian from his seat near the window. "I thought the Sparrow was bad with his strange magics and alien ways. Now we have near a score of them and they are all more fey than the Sparrow ever was."
"And they left the table and chairs out of place," Honorious snapped, ringing a silver bell to summon a servant to put them back. "Encroaching mushrooms. No manners at all."
"It is a plague! A veritable plague," Agricolus said.
Juvian, Malus and Honorious all nodded in glum agreement.
"Worse than that, perhaps," said Petronus, a wizard with thinning hair and a pronounced widow’s peak, sitting apart from the others. "How much do we know of what these strangers do?"
"They have explained…" Agricolus started.
"Did you understand the explanation?"
"Well…"
"Just so. They labor endlessly in the very citadel of the North and foist us off with explanations none can understand. Meanwhile non-mortals everywhere prepare against us."
"Do you think something is amiss?" asked Malus.
"And you do not? We stand on the brink of a war of extermination that is somehow bound up with the Sparrow and we let his cohorts work in our very midst doing things they will not explain." He slapped his hand on his knee with a sharp crack. "If these strangers are so powerful, let them give us clear proof and reasonable explanations. As members of the Council of the North we should demand it of them."