“The Right Words”
by Akis Linardos
By the time he was thirteen, Tiernan could make a dice land on the same side ten times in a row. Now at fifteen, he can do it for up to a hundred throws, using twenty dice at the same time. But for Tiernan, being an erudite luckbender comes hand in hand with crippling anxiety. Everything in life translates to odds and probabilities, and in things that many consider mundane, Tiernan sees threads of chance cascading down paths of paramount consequence.
He has spent three hours atop the deck of the Seadragon struggling to find the words, to muster the courage to approach the girl by the railings. He feels the dice in his hand, tracing the carved dots and embellishments in between them. Above him hangs a lantern, casing crusted with verdigris, creaking to the rhythm of the waves crashing against the ship, groaning a metallic irritation and illuminating the dice as Tiernan lets them roll on the obsidian-black table before him. Sixes again.
It’s mostly aspiring students on deck, as the cabins are reserved for rich merchants, respected officials and Masters or senior apprentices from the Academy of Merthang returning from duties abroad or sabbaticals. The twelfth hour is nearly struck, and the ethereal rhythm of Theren Ocean has already lulled most students to sleep, sprawled on their chairs or curled up over benches. But not Tiernan, and not her. Her bright almond eyes are wide awake, gazing at the dark waves where crescents of blue silver and pink gold float playfully, like fish ghosts spawned from the twin moons. Her hair is the color of midnight in summer, her foxy face and lopsided smirk speak of a pixie playfulness and she exudes the kind of attractive aura that doesn’t let Tiernan hold a thought still in his mind. He shakes dice in his cupped hands and in his mind swirl words over words, forming endless combinations of possible things to say. And in his mind, all of these things are met with an awkward stare or dismissal as they always have been.
Despite his luckbending skills, his luck has always been rotten in the matter of companionship and no amount of bending has managed to fix it. Nor has the weight of his loneliness diminished by his constant distinctions, not even his selection to the Academy. In his mind, even there he will be unwanted, just an extension of his lonely life where he will achieve things with no one to share them. He feels no stress towards the demanding topics being taught, no stress towards the overwhelming potential for insanity that came with honing the craft of luckbending. Only the people frighten him. Maybe he can find vague friendship among them, but what about the bullies and the snobs in their midst? What about the deep connection that he craves? Will he ever find that?
The captain’s voice permeates the deck like an omnipresent ghost: ‘Fortune permitting we will be arriving on Balun Coast by the hour of the fox. We hope you are enjoying your trip on the Seadragon.’ The captain adds a few kind words about the Foundation of Benders and the Archscientess Deirdra Monde for funding the trip but Tiernan has stopped listening. In his mind there’s a deadline now, approximately five hours before the ship reaches shore and the window of opportunity closes. The wind shoots up a wave of droplets over the railings like icy daggers and, above, the lantern’s rusted hoop groans with the tugging of the ship and the noise grates against his mind like a thousand tiny needles. Tiernan takes hold of twenty dice and rolls as vectors spread out of his mind to guide the river of chance to get sixes once more, then again and again.
Time flows onward and the ocean is peaceful and smooth as oil while at the chambers of his mind roars a storm so rampant it could tear apart five ships made entirely of steel. He thinks of bending chance to make the light of the moon strike him in the right way to highlight his good features, and he thinks of bending chance to make the trip last longer, and he thinks that none of these thoughts will help him and that he’ll never summon the courage to approach the girl.
A man in a velvet coat of the deepest purple approaches, his hair and beard long and smooth as silk, bringing with him some artificial aroma that makes Tiernan think of an incense shop that happens to reside beside a quarry. “You seem idle at the moment, young man. Would you perhaps be interested in some diversion with a game of fate-the-jack?” the man says, presenting a deck. He wears matching rings hosting black gems in which white fractal patterns float like ghosts. He regards Tiernan with an unblinking brazen stare more fitting to a child that has yet to learn what shame is than to a grown man seemingly in his fifties.
Tiernan’s mind is at that place where it obsesses over obsessing, and the thoughts drum and hammer and bounce like wild caged animals. And although he craves distraction, he has a deadline to keep. “I-I’m sorry, I am not into games,” he lies.
The man nods politely, the smile never leaving his lips, then walks away, seating himself two tables away from her. Tiernan finds it odd that a man clearly able to afford a cabin would not crave rest by now, but such unlikelihoods are normal, so he spares no more thought on the man.
Moments later, Tiernan stands up, determined to approach her and say the first thing on his mind. He takes three steps. The girl turns. Her eyes like precious sapphires, deeper than the sea, seem to regard his fuzzy, unkempt hair, his awkward teeth. In Tiernan’s mind, she is already laughing at him. Like a man overboard looking for something to latch onto to save him from drowning, Tiernan turns and walks towards the man with the purple coat instead.
“I, uh, uhm, I changed my mind,” he mumbles, glancing sideways, noting that the girl’s attention has already drifted elsewhere.
The man smiles, and it’s the smile of a businessman pleased with his transaction. “Have a seat then.”
“M-maybe move to my table? Th-there is more space there,” Tiernan says, wanting to retreat to a more familiar place. The man nods and as they move back, Tiernan glances backwards longingly, noting that the girl’s attention is on the waves and not on him. He admonishes himself silently, and sits back at his table, looking up at the man he will now have to entertain and considering how to chance his way out of it.
“Let us bet five stubs,” the man says as he sits himself on the opposite side producing five coins bearing the Emperor’s image. “The game is more fun that way. Five stubs should be enough for a warm up game. Would you agree?”
“Uhm, yeah, right, sure,” Tiernan says, resigning to play the game and tosses his own stubs in the pile. At least I might distract my mind with a game and start thinking more clearly. Then the chances I find the courage to make a move increase, he thinks to himself. The man brings out the chips from his pouch and quickly arranges them to represent their bets. He then produces a bulky deck of cards from his pocket, shuffles them and lays down three piles that symbolize the kingdoms of Fandaliya, Merthang and Grundarra. Tiernan cuts the piles and the man tugs them into place, smoothing out any card that juts out so that by the time he draws his cards the decks are like three perfect bricks.
Tiernan’s cards depict a man surrounded by floating dice tied together by silvery threads, a woman in a long coat surrounded by extraordinary creatures, and a depression the shape of a giant lizard on an entirely empty field—a Luckbending General, a Leogun Evolutionary and a Hibernating Dragon. A decent first hand. As the game marches on, the man is conservative, shying away from all of Tiernan’s bluffs and building up a steady income through sustainable cards. Tiernan takes his time, scrutinizing his opponent for movement patterns, trying to understand his reactions and correlate them to the hands he gets turned over.
“Are you a student at the Academy?” the man says.
“Hm? Uh, no. Not officially yet. But, I’m planning to be. My name’s Tiernan by the way.”
He nods and taps at the edge of his cards, “Planning?”
“Yeah,” Tiernan says, curious that the man avoided sharing his own name. He places a legion of Generals in guard of his Evolutionaries that are yet to be revealed. “You have to pass a test to measure your mental faculties and your tolerance. There are some trials to measure skill, intelligence and conscientiousness. Usually they don’t expect you to know any luckbending by the time you get there.”
“You must have worked hard to get there.”
“Not really, no,” Tiernan says and reveals a card from the Merthang pile, the image of Deirdra Monde, which combined with his Evolutionaries and Hibernating Dragons makes for one of the most powerful combinations in the game. He looks at his opponent. There is no smile on his face but his hands are stretched out and his shoulders are relaxed—a sign of confidence. Tiernan takes advantage, betting his entire stash and, smiling widely when his opponent calls his bet, he reveals his winning hand.
“I win,” Tiernan says, and his opponent nods, hiding away his cards. “Uh, won’t you show me your hand?”
“Young man, with the state of the board as it is, yours is clearly the winning hand and I rather not reveal my strategy,” the man says, gathering the cards to reform three decks, again smoothing them in exaggerated perfectionism.
“What’s the point? The game is over.”
“The game is over, indeed. But would you not like to play a follow up game?” says the man.
“Uhm, well, I kinda have to do something.”
“Do something?” asks the man.
Tiernan’s friends had often told him he was too much of an open book, while his mother had sought more fit to call him a see-through bucket with a hole at the bottom. “Well, there’s this girl. I really want to approach her but I don’t know what to say to her,” he says.
“It sounds to me like you have some approach anxiety.”
“It’s not that exactly, I really just don’t know what to say.”
“In search of the right words then. Well, I know ten words that will attract the attention of any woman.”
“What?”
“I have within my repertoire of words ten samples that would peak the interest of any feminine companion you so desire,” the man says and brings out both hands, fingers outstretched. “Ten words that will attract the attention of any woman.”
“As if it’s that simple,” Tiernan says.
“Proof. Right,” the man says, then stands up and wears a smile so wide and warm it changes him into a different person—a sort of person you want to meet and share a drink with. He turns around and heads towards the lean blonde girl sitting two tables away. At his approach the blonde girl perks up, and when he speaks to her she smirks and giggles. He turns his back when he is done talking, and the wide slash on his face fades back to the reserved smile of a pleased accountant.
“Please, verify that she is still looking,” the man says and Tiernan verifies that she is indeed still looking. “I spoke slowly to her. If you’ve read my lips you’d know it was exactly ten words.”
He looks at the man again, measuring him. Not ugly, but the probability that a girl would swoon in his passing is slim. He wonders if it’s the cologne, some product of Alchemy, but such things are banned and hard to disguise. The Arbiters would have been on him as soon as he’d entered the ship.
“What did you say to her?”
“You will have to play me for them, young man.”
“I already beat you. Just tell me.”
“We had not agreed upon a bet, it was a casual game for passing idle time.”
“Alright fine, let’s play.”
He raises a hand. “You must place your bet as well. I want ten words in exchange.”
“Huh? What sort of words?”
“I will bet you my ten words if you bet me ten words of yours. I want ten words that express your anxieties.”
Tiernan frowns at first, then he feels a tingle across his spine, and words are floating over his head as carrion crows over dead bodies, words that have repetitively loomed over him, words like loser, ugly, awkward, weird. He says, “Why would you want something like that?”
The man rubs one of the black gemmed rings with his thumb, “To understand the world a little better today than I did yesterday.”
An uncomfortable feeling settles in. Tiernan glances at the girl with the pixie smile. He wants to know the ten words, and he wants the world to know that he does not back out of a challenge. “That’s fine then. Go ahead,” he says.
“Before we proceed, let’s come to an agreement that no outside forces will influence our game. No one has the right to ask for help from other people on the ship, that would amount to cheating, agreed?” says the man.
“Sure, yes, of course,” says Tiernan and he feels a sudden warmth on his chest.
The man nods with a satisfied smile and redistributes the chips, red, blue, green and black, “Each of our black chips is worth one word. As soon as you lose enough chips to amount to a black, you forfeit a word,” he says as Tiernan shuffles the deck and arranges the stacks.
Fate-the-jack is too complex a game, and unlike rolling dice, luckbending won’t easily serve him. Besides, Tiernan likes playing fair, especially when he is good at something. But in his mind the storm is back on and he plays as aggressively as a pantherlion with its tail on fire, making ambitious bluffs as his mind mulls over the ten words rather than the game itself. And he fails to realize until it’s too late, his opponent is holding three Assassins matching the Fandaliyan Colors on the board.
“One black chip has changed hands. I get a word.”
“Fine, the word is …”
Tiernan feels something in his throat. Like a breeze blowing from within his stomach, something ghostly and threadlike slithers out, and whatever he was about to say slips away from his mind.
“I … forgot the word.”
“Yes, that is quite natural. An interesting word, ‘alone’,” the man says the word three times, as if trying the taste of it in his mouth, ‘alone, alone, alone’. Tiernan hears him say it, and images from his childhood float to the surface. He sees himself in a corner as other kids play and laugh, and he is unable to understand their jokes. He sees them laughing at him, mocking him as he sits alone in his room, dreaming about having someone by his side. He sees the awkward stares of all the girls he’d ever expressed his interest in. But even as he relives these memories, the word itself sounds alien to his ears, like he’s never heard it before. Like a gap in his mind surrounded by lush vegetation whose source cannot be traced.
The man rubs the black gems on his rings and says, “I had known the word before, but for it to be tied to so much meaning. I really understand the world a little better and thank you for it.”
“How are you doing this?” Tiernan says, shivering, aware of his own heartbeat, aware of his memories blurring and twisting and changing.
“I am not sure I follow. I did not do anything. You just gave me your word as per our agreement.”
A knot has formed on Tiernan’s neck and a chill slithers up his spine like a snake made of liquid ice. “You tricked me. How did you poison my mind? What is this?”
The man frowns. “Young man, your own assumptions tricked you. The rules were clear. We bet our words in this game. If we could both have them by the end why bother betting and not simply say them? Words are not just utterings. They have many different meanings, they form associations with other words, their representation is different from person to person. One needs all of it to truly understand a word. And one needs to amass many such understandings to really understand the world.”
“This has to be a bad dream,” Tiernan says, and he notices that something about the word dream has changed, something fundamental about his understanding of it. Is a dream just the thing that happens when people go to sleep or something more? The gap in his brain has widened and it pulls with the force of a black hole devouring all that surrounds it to grow bigger. “What’s happening to me?” he whimpers as his mind struggles to focus. He looks at the table where that blonde girl was, but that seat is now empty. He looks at the pixie-smiled girl who still stares at the ocean, and he looks around at all the sleeping students trying to spot any of the Arbiters. But the world seems to freeze as he does that, and then everything blurs and sharpens again, and he has forgotten what he was just trying to do.
“Remember kid,” the man says, swinging a reprimanding finger, “no outside help allowed.”
Tiernan sees the lantern hanging above their heads, swinging to the rhythm of the sea and he cringes at the sound of metal grating against metal. He looks at his adversary, who stares back with the same unblinking, unashamed stare that slithers under Tiernan’s skin, making him feel as if he were lying naked in a bed of hay amidst a swarming locust. Fate-the-jack is impossible to luckbend, it’s hopeless. He takes a deep breath and from his tumultuous mind, he extends vectors that fly and flow along the river of chance and they multiply and divide the probabilities of all possible outcomes of the game to coalesce them to his will.
#
The game marches on and another black chip is lost. Tiernan’s eyes are wide and his lips tremble. He feels naked, exposed and alone and the more alone he feels the more his mind drums with echoes of lost memories. He sees two kids looming over him, calling him a name that used to linger in his mind, a name he now finds hard to recognize.
“Loser,” the man says, rubbing his temples. “I only ever thought of this word in the context of a game where there is a clear winner and a loser. But you’ve shown me that it can be extrapolated to many aspects of life. I wonder if my master saw me as a loser in that sense.”
Tiernan doesn’t understand what the man just said. The word loses its shape in his mind, becoming an anagram of itself until it slips away entirely dragging and deforming all that is associated with it. Tiernan sees himself through a looking glass, and he does not recognize what he sees. He looks at the board befuddled, unable to recall what he was supposed to do. There’s a field of green and some children playing tink zuk and he is in a corner, left out, drawing a sea serpent on a flaming ocean when the two figures approach. No girl would ever kiss him, says the boy. Maybe his grandma or his cat, replies the girl. They both laugh. An Evolutionary and a Dragon are revealed on the board, the chips slip away. He sees his drawing torn apart, more figures look at him from a distance. Something tugs at his mind. He looks at his cards, trying to retrace a plan he had in some remote chamber of his brain, a last hope for victory. But victory has lost part of its meaning for he has nothing to contrast it against.
The game marches on, and Tiernan loses more chips, and the words slip out of his mind—fear, sorrow, anger—and his mind no longer sees memories but sparks of disjoint information that sputter into fragmented dreams. He sees himself walking an endless maze while a bald lean man takes the heads of his friends with a slimy hand, squeezing them inside his pocket. The maze twists and shifts and he is on top of a pyramid but the pyramid is upside down and below is the sky, and he sees a face etched in the universe beyond it, an angry face the size of the sun opening a gaping mouth to devour all in its path. The face dissipates, and he is alone in a crypt. Skeletons with eyes in their sockets dance and they look at him weird, as if wondering who invited him.
The thoughts scatter further, too disjoint to form a story or a pattern. Tiernan is like a baby that wonders at wondering, looking at the world around as if for the first time trying to make sense of the concept of thinking. The magic of having his own thoughts. The wonder of being.
Tiernan pushes at the cards and looks at them with curious googly eyes. There is a man with a black cane and a beret checkered with red and green lines, and the letters read ‘Jack’, but the letters make no sense to Tiernan. A powerful shake almost jolts him out of his seat. Something bright falls from the ceiling. Tiernan hears a loud thunk.
Then, like a tidal wave, it all surges back. The earliest memories of interacting with people, the taste of food, the feelings of fear and doubt. He sees his parents grinning over jewelry, pushing their merchandise to customers with honeyed words. He sees his only two friends in the world lifting him up from a swamp. And he sees all his memories in a flash bursting in his head with the force of a shotgun, turning a toddler’s mind into an adult within a minute. He holds his head tightly, elbows firm on the table, hyperventilating. A group of students has approached, trying to help the man opposite him who lies unconscious, his beard carpeting the table, the black chips spread all over. A lantern with a copper casing crusted in verdigris is barreling beside the table, halting at Tiernan’s foot.
No help allowed old man.
Fate-the-jack is an impossible game to luckbend. But chancing a wave to crash against the ship just at the right time and the momentum of the lantern to align with its force and the points of contact with the hook to minimize in an improbable way that would turn the lantern loose over the man’s head, urging well intending students to assist him and thus ending the game if it didn’t go Tiernan’s way was easy to do.
He stands up, index fingers at his temples, his brain seemed to be pulsing like a heart, “Inform the Arbiters, this man is a mindbender. Yes, they are real. Please someone bring me some water.” Puzzled expressions and dubious words are exchanged between the students, but in the end the Arbiters do come, two women, one heavy-set with a pleasant face and another with a striking face aquiline and austere, both clad in black uniforms gilded with sanguine hem decorated with sewed patterns of crow heads.
They quickly disperse the students who are all too excited to sleep and whisper at each other, and Tiernan recalls the many times other kids had looked at him weird or ostracized him. But this time, the weird looks did not bother him. Tiernan shares his story with the two women, his voice more certain and even than it has ever been. He notices a kind of knowing in the bulky woman’s eyes when he refers to the way the words slipped out of his mind and the woman approaches the unconscious man and tosses back his hair, revealing an intricate design on his nape. A cloud along its circumference like a brain and in the middle a square out of which curving lines jut out, fold and combine to form the impression of a disc.
“Son of the Architect,” she says with an oomph, “He must have been living on the ship for a while. They find ways to creep in and fade into the background. Thank you for reporting this young man; we will be taking care of him.”
Son of the Architect. Amidst the flux of memories that had flown in and out of Tiernan’s brain, a strand pops out—some vague memory of stories his grandfather had once told him, about beings created and abandoned, looking for a way to fit into the world, stealing from those that have learned to belong. But that is of no consequence to Tiernan’s future any more, and so he bids the Arbiters farewell and hurries off. His pupils are dilated and his blood pumps fast. He has just taken down a mindbender. A burst of confidence like that is an improbability Tiernan is not planning to waste.
He swipes the cards that are still spread over the table, piles them up, strides off, and shuffles the deck as he goes. She is still awake, and her hair mingles seamlessly with the colors of the night, fluttering along the breeze like a timid wave of the ocean. The words fly out of Tiernan’s mouth as she turns to his approach, “Hey. Would you like to play a game of fate-the-jack?”
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