The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,271

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.

“Nautical trade came to a standstill. There’s simply no defense against them. A few very strong will-casters had limited success against them, but it was rarely duplicated. Without nautical trade, every one of the nine kingdoms became utterly dependent upon its neighbors, and that only gave them all another reason for war. When the Chromeria gained control, the sea giants were hunted to extinction.