“There’s a battle coming. This is all moot,” Kip said.
“I like to plan for the future, even if it looks like there is none. That’s what makes us emerge from them stronger.”
“Are you going to cheat?” Kip asked.
“Only if you let me,” Andross said. “Are you familiar with Keffel’s Variant?”
“I know what it is,” Kip said. It was a set of custom rules that made for a faster game. He’d never played it.
“It’s good for an analogy,” Andross said. “And it’ll give you a chance for luck to help you.”
“Classic decks?” Kip asked. The variant started the game at noon rather than morning, when the most powerful cards could be played immediately, and had an initial mechanic where you drew seven cards but had to discard down to four. Using classic decks, you had some idea what your opponent would be going for. Typical games were a quick slugfest.
“No, my decks,” Andross said.
Instantly, Grinwoody began sweeping cards from the surface of the table as if they’d been there for nothing.
Of course. Asshole. With the many cards out on the table, Andross had misled Kip into believing that Kip would be constructing his own deck. Instead, this was just another way of the old man putting him off balance.
“It’s traditional that the guest be allowed to choose the deck pairing, isn’t it?”
“I am . . . familiar with that tradition,” Andross admitted.
“Hoped I wouldn’t be, huh?” Kip asked with a quick grin.
Andross took a deep breath. “Beating you is going to be such fun. Do you know, I once stooped to playing Grinwoody? So capable in so many duties, and has surely seen me play a thousand times. Yet hopeless.”
“Almost as bad as I am?” Kip asked.
Again Andross smiled.
Grinwoody said nothing, but now brought over a heavy tray, seeming to struggle with the weight with the infirmity of his age. He set it on the playing table and pulled back the top. It unfolded to reveal a score of decks, each nicely inset in a samite surface.
“You choose the pairing. I choose which deck.”
“May I take a moment?” Kip asked as he started going through the decks.
“As you were so adamant to point out, we don’t have all day,” Andross said when Kip paused halfway through rifling through the second deck.
“Of course, grandfather,” Kip said. “It’s just been a while. Green Apple’s Gambit?” he asked, gesturing to the deck in his hand.
“With four substitutions,” Andross said. “As usually constructed, that deck’s a little slow, I always thought it needed a tertiary path to victory, though in my games I’ve never used it.”
“Never needed it?” Kip said.
“I’ve tended to be lucky,” Andross said. It was, perhaps, the first modest thing Kip had ever heard come out of his mouth.
Dammit. Andross had here collected the legendary decks of history, but then made his own adjustments.
“Brier and Fire. Good one,” Kip said, rifling. “But . . . lots of substitutions.” He frowned.
He was at a greater disadvantage than he’d thought. It didn’t matter how good his memory was, not with a time pressure like this. Studying each deck, recalling how close it was to the classic decks and rating its strengths, and then discarding most of the commentary he’d memorized to evaluate how strong it would be in this weird game variant?
Kip said, “I’d need days to prepare adequately for—oh, I see. This is an analogue for our defense against the White King. Not enough time to do what I’d like, so what do I do instead?”
Andross snapped his fingers, and Grinwoody disappeared to go fetch something. “Perhaps you read too much into a game.”
It wasn’t fair—but Kip had agreed to it. Any time he spent whinging was time wasted.
He had to look at the weird rules as part of the game, not as the terms of the game. He got to pick the decks, out of which Andross would choose which one he wanted. Most people would think it was obvious to choose decks that were as equal as possible. With equally good players, it would be.
But why had Andross chosen this variant? And why these decks?
Turn the question from a disinterested analytical query to a human question, and it suddenly made sense to Kip. “I see: I can’t use my memory to simply pick the best decks and play it out as others have done before us. Neither the choice of decks nor the exact strategies involved in our game will have been covered by any book I might have read. So this is another test.”
“Not a test. I simply don’t want to play against your memories of what some card master from some earlier era did. I want to play against you,” Andross said.
So Kip turned everything backward. At the disadvantage he was starting from, he needed a deck that counted on luck. Of course, the games’ masters tended not to rely on luck, but many decks had secondary strategies—if you get unlucky and don’t draw X, Y, or Z, you might still be able to win by using A and B together. Many of the classic decks, however, eschewed those secondary strategies in order to make the original strategy even stronger. They’d simply take the loss if they got particularly unlucky.
Over many iterations, skill prevailed over luck.
Which meant that skillful players naturally gravitated toward decks rewarding skillful play, and few players were more skillful than Andross. So Kip decided not to go with the classically paired decks at all. Instead, Kip looked for a two long-shot, luck-dependent decks that even Andross wouldn’t have played against each other. In a minute, he had the two.
Andross frowned.
Each, in this variant, should be pretty weak—unless they drew one key card. The first deck was generally considered to be too complicated to be used regularly in standard play, Nine Mirrors. The second was Delayed Destruction, which hadn’t been played in centuries because Sea Demon and another card in it whose name had been lost were now considered Black Cards—forbidden from legal play.
Kip wasn’t sure what Andross would have used to shore up the deck, though, so he looked through the two decks for whatever changes the old man had made. “The hell?” Kip said. “What’s this?”
Sea Demon was in the deck. Naturally. But so, too, was the nameless card, lost to the mists of time. It was not nameless here: “Sea Giant?”
“You’ve learned something about will-casting in this last year, I hear,” Andross said.
“Indeed,” Kip said. “And it’s left me with many questions.”
“Dolphins can be will-cast, but only by someone they like or by someone very strong. Whales can’t be will-cast at all. There are accounts of men breaking their minds against them, like waves against the rocks of the Everdark Gates. But sea giants, enormous and peaceful as they were, sea giants were trivially easy to will-cast. It is how the pirate kings first established themselves. A few dozen will-cast sea giants and a pirate queen named Ceres established such a stranglehold on the sea that they named it Ceres’s Sea. But then the other pirates attacked her, or she was murdered, and her followers couldn’t control the sea giants, or she murdered the underlings she had in charge of the sea giants—or perhaps none of those stories are true, but however it was, somehow their reins slipped from human fingers. The sea giants went insane, and destroyed every ship they came upon, everywhere.