Back up the top deck, hands clenched in the pockets of his jacket, Surus tried not so successfully to put his companions taunts out of his mind.

They had a most profitable partnership over the previous two decades with the playhouse they owned together being a perfect front for the tradecraft Surus most enjoyed. His friend knew best how to needle him, what a Suüdlander like Jacetani and a man of the Midvries like himself considered scandalous were at great variance.

However, most importantly, in spite of Jacetani's obtuseness in everything else, he knew better than anyone else what to overlook in Surus' eccentric indulgences to make it all work to their mutual benefit.

Still, the careless manner in which Jacetani would typically express his disapproval. It was more than Surus could stomach. The ignorance he often displayed on the nature of subterfuge, the blithe treatment he gave for the skulduggery that propped up the Imperium, he was a man from Barronne, of all places!

A king of the Suüdlands once moved his palace from there to the college and naval fort of Castle Barso to survive the backbiting courtiers of the old city.

An adventure he called it!

When Surus reached the gambling hall front door, Surus shook off his concerns.

Hold your head up, smile and smirk with unabashed confidence.

When he entered, Surus was greeted with the aroma of sweet musk and majoon that pervaded the carpet joints in any given city or backwater den on either side of the Mooring Sea.

Twenty-three passengers sat arranged around five tables. Each table ran by a dealer with a single attendant who made her rounds between the tables. She most definitely made an impression on Surus.

Her kindred were a rare sight in the western provinces of the Imperium outside the Nin where they migrated from the D'jestre lands generations ago.

A diminutive Eastern cousin to the Haute Elves called the Jezde. A few inches under five feet tall, this one actually stood tall for her race.

Her skin tone a rich purple that melded smoothly from light on her cheeks and hands to a near marron shade on her arms and neck. She dressed modest but proper for her hostess duties in a black velvet jacket and matching pants sleeved in boots that appeared to be fashioned from copperhead skins.

Her wolf gray hair was pulled back in a samite patterned scarf. Jezde's were known for their love of intricate design and bright colors.

She made Surus' heart skip a few beats when she looked up while she patted the ugly, stubby fingers of a rotund but bewhiskered with mutton chops gentleman. She tossed her head and smiled approvingly at the sight of Surus who she had heard entering due to the chimes at the door.

He pointed to the decanter in her hand after she poured a burgundy colored liquor into the gambler's glass and he made a tipping motion.

The Jezde woman sauntered her way to him only pausing long enough to retrieve a clean glass from an overhanging rack at the center bar.

The smell of majoon grew stronger as she neared him. On quick inspection, her eyes appeared focused and animated, seemingly clear of the narcotic's influence.

"Hello, sieur," she said as she poured the liquor; itself aromatic,

"I'm Pucè. I'll be your hostess for the evening. Will you be joining us for sport?"

Surus' eyes swept the tables. At the far end, the gamblers bent and stooped around a low table in a very animated fashion throwing three dice against the cuff board in a game of Chance Bones.

He cared not for games of pure luck. "Pucè," he said as if tasting the word on the rim of his lips. "A fine and lovely name of the Midvries."

"My family has lived here a free people for three generations, sieur," Pucè responded, formal but prideful.

His eyes scanned other tables in a search for a game to his liking. The images from a dealt hand of cards held by a man in a gaudy lavender dinner jacket startled Surus.

A game of Noreu Null, or most commonly known as Blackwater. Named after a Ninci city on the Midvries border most well known for hosting the vagabond Jezde.

Pucè placed a reassuring grip on the back of his elbow. She had read his reaction correctly.

"Sieur, I assure you the Jezde tarot this game is based upon is neutered of all symbolic meaning beyond harmless sentiments. It has been approved for games of both skill and chance by the Imperium Komatte."

With a side cross glance and raised brow, she added, "otherwise, it would not be allowed in our establishment."

Surus nodded and he relaxed his shoulders, not wanting to appear too frosty for this young appearing elven beauty. His suspicions told him that it wasn't just his ruse of being a well-mannered, upstanding gentleman that held her attention. No, there was something else at play with this one.

He pushed his lips tight and scratched the dimple in his chin to hide his lips from the curiosity of others while carefully annunciating in a blown whisper the words, "kindness finds you" in a thieve's cant derived from an old Suüd patois. Pucè responded without missing a beat by leaning her head to her left; her lips in the same active ventriloquism, saying, "for this day we are in accordance…"

Then together they said, "made agreeable." To this the two guild members shared a pleasant laugh.

Surus sipped the liqueur. It tasted sweet of sorghum candies but with a bitter finish from the zest of a fruit he could not identify.

It came as no surprise that overseeing the operation of a riverboat gambling hall would be a sister member of the Kostlevidda, 'thing most vital', as the guild founders felt their role in Imperial society to be.

"If I truly don't risk subjection to blasphemy, then Moiselle Pucè, please lead me to a seat. I'll watch the game and learn before committing myself to any chips." She took his arm in her own.

"I'm certain this Eastern damnation will prove to be a mere temporary affection to your greater constitution, sieur. Right this way."

The Jezde woman did as he requested and she was rewarded with three silver ducats.

Settled down, Surus watched as the dealer flipped the pair of cards on the table. The first card had been engraved with the image of a yellow primrose being held by a strawberry blonde Elven lady with an emerald stud in her ear set in relief against a cascade of hair spun high.

He recognized her as Rozzenblunde; a goddess who had turned her back on her sister goddesses to become the consort of a D'jestre warlord thought immortal until proven otherwise.

The card was in black trim. The second card flipped by the dealer matched the first. The players went a round of bidding with none of the four players folding.

Once the final bids were placed, with forty-eight chips in the queue, the players began to show their hands. Surus' eyes followed the various cards while he ignored the actual players.

One aspect of the game at a time. No sense getting a feel for the human element of the game until he understood the ruleset.

His one advantage was his familiarity with the standard tarot deck he acquired while traveling the East for the guild.

A complete deck consisted of twelve cards representing the Zodiac, twelve corresponding cards to each of the constellations called the Incarnations.

The Primrose Lady was one of these cards.

Six cards that name the Fates, and a final six called the Realms. The set of cards being used for Noreau Null was incomplete, and at first glance, seem to be a haphazard choice to Surus.

One card, three balls being juggled by a skeletal hand, Death's Jest, indicative of bad luck and of life bound in ironies was not balanced by a card with the image of three nude hermaphrodites dancing in a field of clover to represent good luck.

There appeared in one hand he observed a grinning skull enveloped in darkness Oblivion Awaits, but no twisting orgy of dragons in any of the hands to represent the Call of the Abyss.

None of the other Realm cards appeared either. The cards were not haphazard, nor random, but purposely lacked the scale of balance that comprised the standard tarot set.

The full set contained lavish and intricate geometry corresponding to the astronomical layout of the sky in her four cardinal poses of equinox and solstice.

Only the Obelisk with the Midday Star, Settetoile, above it kept the original lattice design.

Long, feminine hands held the last set of cards in the bid. Her first card was the Disemboweled Albatross, in gold trim, a Fate card.

Surus had seen the practice himself in his travels. Beneath the palace walls, spiral towers and minarets in eastern cities, squalor festered on the streets.

Emaciated, impoverished hags for augers, squatted around a spread of entrails from the birds they captured coming in from the sea. Why such a desperate people excluded from a prosperous future would want to know their fate eluded Surus' thief-honed comprehension.

The last two cards she flipped over were a pair of Primrose Ladies trimmed in black and matching the pair on the table. Her four-in-accord beat anything else that had been played before.

With a predatorial laugh, she raked in the coins.

He was just looking up to see the face of the winner when that laughter evoked a ghost of a memory; a near hoarse chuckle that echoed the giggle of a familiar girl.

She was a forty-ish woman with faded red hair pinned back in a black netted billiment with roses adorned in the crown of her head. Pearls studded along the length of her ears.

Her eyes were as lavender green as he remembered. She had not grown dowdy in the intervening years but remained quite elegant.

Surus remembered this woman most vividly. Large nipples on an ample ivory bosom stood erect for his squeezing fingers. The delicate pink that turned blood red with a twist of his thumb.

The all-pervading scent of her succulent cunt, lactose sweet and salty urine to the taste when he brought a finger up to his lips. He had stroked her curls, running his hand through the downy pubes that were even lighter in color than her head of hair.

Curls of a tangerine blonde, and so, so many of them. He remembered it all, rubbing the sides of her pussy, pushing the red fleshy mound beneath up into his grip.

Her folds pressed so firmly together, revealed the peach red cavity beneath peeking out of the slightest of crevices, and fittingly shut with the massaging press of his hand.

Then beneath his delicate touch, with her thighs pressed against her cunt, the delicate, warm juice shot up into his palm and between his fingers.

Dripping of her oily cum, he licked his hand once more while staring into her green eyes.

She could not move. A glass needle with a thin line of a mercurial appearing backwash of blood in its hollow cylinder pricked the side of her neck.

Those eyes revealed nothing that evening but an intense curiosity. What did she feel? What was she thinking? She did cum, after all.

Now on a riverboat going upriver to Gareen, she stared back into Surus' eyes with the same intense curiosity, and she knew precisely who stared back in turn.

I'll be thrice damned. That random chance of encounter needed not even the exponential of my feet stepping off this boat.