Mort (Discworld 4)

'Excuse me, I just want to look at this crossbow,' said Cutwell conversationally, reaching across them. 'Don't mind me.'

'I shall go proudly to meet my destiny,' said Keli, but there was the barest flicker of uncertainty in her voice.

'No you won't. I mean, I know what I'm talking about. Take it from me. There's nothing proud about it. You just die.'

'Yes, but it's how you do it. I shall die nobly, like Queen Ezeriel.'

Mort's forehead wrinkled. History was a closed book to him.

'Who's she?'

'She lived in Klatch and she had a lot of lovers and she sat on a snake,' said Cutwell, who was winding up the crossbow.

'She meant to! She was crossed in love!'

'All I can remember was that she used to take baths in asses' milk. Funny thing, history,' said Cutwell reflectively. 'You become a queen, reign for thirty years, make laws, declare war on people and then the only thing you get remembered for is that you smelled like yoghurt and were bitten in the—'

'She's a distant ancestor of mine,' snapped Keli. 'I won't listen to this sort of thing.'

'Will you both be quiet and listen to me!' shouted Mort.

Silence descended like a shroud.

Then Cutwell sighted carefully and shot Mort in the back.

The night shed its early casualties and journeyed onwards. Even the wildest parties had ended, their guests lurching home to their beds, or someone's bed at any rate. Shorn of these fellow travellers, mere daytime people who had strayed out of their temporal turf, the true survivors of the night got down to the serious commerce of the dark.

This wasn't so very different from Ankh-Morpork's daytime business, except that the knives were more obvious and people didn't smile so much.

The Shades were silent, save only for the whistled signals of thieves and the velvety hush of dozens of people going about their private business in careful silence.

And, in Ham Alley, Cripple Wa's famous floating crap game was just getting under way. Several dozen cowled figures knelt or squatted around the little circle of packed earth where Wa's three eight-sided dice bounced and spun their misleading lesson in statistical probability.

'Three!'

'Tuphal's Eyes, by lo!'

'He's got you there, Hummok! This guy knows how to roll his bones!'

IT'S A KNACK.

Hummok M'guk, a small flat-faced man from one of the Hublandish tribes whose skill at dice was famed wherever two men gathered together to fleece a third, picked up the dice and glared at them. He silently cursed Wa, whose own skill at switching dice was equally notorious among the cognoscenti but had, apparently, failed him, wished a painful and untimely death on the shadowy player seated opposite and hurled the dice into the mud.

'Twenty-one the hard way!'

Wa scooped up the dice and handed them to the stranger. As he turned to Hummok one eye flickered ever so slightly. Hummok was impressed – he'd barely noticed the blur in Wa's deceptively gnarled fingers, and he'd been watching for it.

It was disconcerting the way the things rattled in the stranger's hand and then flew out of it in a slow arc that ended with twenty-four little spots pointing at the stars.

Some of the more streetwise in the crowd shuffled away from the stranger, because luck like that can be very unlucky in Cripple Wa's floating crap game.

Wa's hand closed over the dice with a noise like the click of a trigger.

'All the eights,' he breathed. 'Such luck is uncanny, mister.'

The rest of the crowd evaporated like dew, leaving only those heavy-set, unsympathetic-looking men who, if Wa had ever paid tax, would have gone down on his return as Essential Plant and Business Equipment.

'Maybe it's not luck,' he added. 'Maybe it's wizarding?'