Sacrifice Mage-Chapter 18: Playing With Lies

It wasn’t that surprising Kostis took me to a gambling den with my newfound power to detect lies. I would have been more surprised if he had taken me someplace more serious.
“You know it’s limited, right?” I said. “I can only detect a set number of lies.”
“That’s alright.” Kostis was hardly paying attention. He was too busy looking around the smoky room. “We’ll make it work.” He glanced briefly at me, slit-pupiled eyes sharpening for a second. “Though, if I don’t actually win, our deal’s off.”
I could protest that was being unfair. After all, I was detecting lies. Not winning whatever was going on here. But in for a penny, in for a pound, as they said. “Sure.”
Kostis entered the establishment like he owned the place. And he might have, the way several people reacted to his presence. Some hailed him like long-lost friends, others whispered as he passed, and a
lot
of people had their eyes on the white-scaled Scalekin. It felt kind of like how I’d been the centre of attention at the Mage Guild during my testing, but with a greater sense of respect.
I didn’t understand the game Kostis eventually sat down at. It looked like cards, but I certainly didn’t recognize the symbols on them or how people were calling out certain phrases as they placed their cards in sequence. Was this Ephemeroth’s version of poker?
“I brought my young friend here to enjoy the establishment,” Kostis said, indicating me to the rowdy gang of gambling addicts. They eyed me like I was yet another card they could play. Kostis turned to me with a serpentine smile. “Why don’t you go off and find something you enjoy? Me and my little party here have some business to settle.”
I nodded my farewell to the other gamblers before walking off. That was part of the plan. Kostis blew out a chunk of smoke from his pipe and it turned into something like a bird and followed along. I made sure to find an empty seat far enough away from where Kostis and his posse were seated.
It didn’t take long for my part to start.
“You can hear, yes?” Kostis said, his voice emanating softly from the smoky bird.
“Yep,” I said. “Loud and clear.”
“Alright. Let us begin.”
The process was pretty simple. Honestly, Kostis’s explanation of how his game worked had flown over my head. I didn’t really care for things like that, and I wasn’t about to start now.
But the key point was something I could handle. The main play revolved around participants putting down a card, which then prompted the others to pose questions regarding the card played down. The original player could then either answer with a truth or a lie, and based on said answer, the others would place the appropriate card.
Of course, there were a lot more complications than that. More things to keep track of that determined who was the ultimate winner. For instance, I had no idea how points were tallied or victory conditions that weren’t dependent on accumulating the most points.
I didn’t care. My part was detecting lies and that was it.
All the participants’ voices were coming through the smoke-bird now. Thankfully, they weren’t talking much. They had already started so the only chatter was related to the game itself, mostly just questions and answers as people played their cards.
There might have been the danger that I’d detect lies and run out of detection charges, as I was starting to think of it. But that wasn’t going to happen. I had discussed the Sacrifice reward with Kostis before coming to the gambling den, and we had tested it a bit. We had discovered why I hadn’t detected a single lie yet.
It was because I had been stupid. Or rather, I felt stupid for not figuring out that I had to
apply
the reward myself. Basically, it was an activatable ability that could judge whether a statement held any falsehoods, not some kind of passive skill that would automatically inform me about any lies I heard.
Kostis and I had figured that out before coming to the gambling den. It had led to a lot of questions, especially from me, about how exactly the Weave determined what was a lie and what really counted as lies.
“Don’t worry,” Kotis had said back at the Mage Guild with a sly grin. “My smoke won’t harm you.”
I had frowned, before concentrating on trying to detect whether it was a lie or not. Mana threads had swivelled through me like threads of electricity.
[ Sacrifice
Your Sacrifice reward has detected a lie.
]
I was confused for only a second before the smoke from his pipe had rushed straight at my nose, which had immediately made me double over and cough. Through my tears, I managed to read the notification.
“It worked,” I had said, voice choked and raspy. “Guess it considers trying to suffocate me with a surprise smoke attack as
harm
.”
I had glared at a grinning Kostis. That was all the testing we had needed.
Now, as the first calls came through the smoke-bird in the gambling den, I had to identify which were bluffs and which were true. It was actually easier in a setting like this, because the statements and actions were very simple. What a player said was either a lie to trick an opponent, or a truth to make them double-guess. There was no in-between, no spectrum of vague definitions.
A series of two short coughs came from Kostis. Our little signal.
“Gale,” one of the participants said.
I repeated my effort at wanting to detect whether the previous statement was a lie, feeling the mana threads come to life within my chest, making me feel light and fluttery.
[ Sacrifice
Your Sacrifice reward has detected a lie.
]
Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, the violation.
“Lie,” I said.
And so it followed. I didn’t need to know the particulars of the contest or what even the statements of
breeze
,
wind
,
gale
, and
eye
actually meant in terms of the game’s context. I just heard specific statements, and with the help of my Sacrifice rewards, I could tell whether they were false or not.
Having already Sacrificed all the scammers’ packets before coming to the gambling den, I didn’t need to do anything other than just sit and observe. We also had to be careful so that the players’ statements were the last thing I heard and not Kostis’s warnings or anything like that.
No need to waste one of the Sacrifice rewards on a meaningless sentence.
The problem was that the game was going on for a little too long.
“I’m running out,” I warned Kostis.
He didn’t reply through the smoke. Another statement came from a player, and I had to determine whether it was a falsehood or not. For their part, the other participants had grown a lot more wary after Kostis kept winning round after round. I could even see the tempo of the game changing from where I sat.
I was also receiving some odd looks from some of the other patrons of the establishment. However, I
had
purchased a drink from the bar, so it wasn’t like I was just sitting there. Not entirely…
“The next one is going to be my last,” I said, worried slightly. Kostis had mentioned that
winning
his little game was the condition of the deal where he would then delegate a job to me. “Make it count, master.”
“Hmph. Let’s see now…”
I ed the next one as a lie and then I was out. All charges gone. I had to wonder if I could find the scammer and repeat this same trick again. Somehow, I had my doubts. The shifty fellow had been extremely suspicious after I had run off with most of his stock, and he no doubt would avoid selling everything to a cultist he couldn’t blatantly rip off.
At least Sacrificing all the weird little packets of fake powder had pushed the countdown back by another two days. Terrible though the Sacrifices had been, the sheer quantity of them had given me some breathing room, which I was grateful for.
The strange card game was growing more exciting, going by the way people were reacting at the table. I was hoping to listen in through the smoke-bird, but with a soft pop, it puffed into nothingness.
“Okay, now that’s mean,” I muttered.
I was left just watching the increasing exuberance among the players, with one participant slapping the table repeatedly and another excitedly standing up for a moment before his fellow players dragged him back down onto his seat. Their expressions weren’t easy for me to decipher, since not a one of them were human and with the poor lighting and all that.
A sudden hush emanated from the table and my heart thudded in my chest. I was getting a little
too
invested in it.
But relief flooded me the next instant when Kostis stood up from the table, a triumphant grin on his face.
“Are you sure you didn’t want to join?” Kostis asked, jingling the fat bags of coins in each of his hands, one of which he had given to me as a “bonus”. They were large and heavy, or they would have been had I not used Gravity to lighten them up a good bit.
[ Rank Up!
Your Spirit Attribute has risen by one Rank.
Spirit
: Iron III
]
Well, I hadn’t been expecting that, but I supposed it was a long time coming. I had been using Gravity nearly all day for the last couple of days, and then there was Sacrifice too. Spirit had taken its sweet time.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Positive?” Kostis’s slitted eyes turned sharper with unhidden avarice, his forked tongue flicking out. “Think of all the money you could be making.”
“You mean think of all the money I could be making for you.”
“Well, that was implied, but yes!”
“I’ll pass, master. They’re going to catch on if you do it too often, and I’m not really a fan of gambling dens. Plus, I don’t even know if I can get the same Sacrifice reward again, nor do I feel like taking the trouble to do so.”
“Straight and narrow, is it?” Kostis sighed like it was a right shame someone wanted to earn money in legal ways. “Well, alright then. Gambling dens are out. How about the pleasure district? The one on Ring Two, especially.”
“…I think I’ll pass, master.”
“With the right bit of massaging, I might just be able to bring you along. You might be a little human, but believe me, once you get a taste of a Plumefolk’s—”
“
I’ll pass
.”
“Alright, alright, no need to get grouchy.” Kostis jingled his coins happily. “How you can forego such pleasures is beyond me.”
“Well, this might sound surprising to you, but not everyone is interested in having sex with random strangers you don’t know the first thing about. Also, no offence, but you’re taking some things for granted. You have no idea just how
incredible
it is that you have access to magic, to mana, to things like the Weave…”
I was pretty sure I hadn’t even scratched the surface of everything I was capable of via the Weave and with mana and my Aspects and all that. We passed by more buildings. That they were lit up more than usual was the only real indication it was getting closer to what passed for dusk. Oh, and the fact that the red dwarf sun was barely visible on the horizon.
“True, I suppose,” Kostis said. “But remember, only automatons are made for pure effort.”
Huh. Was that the Zairgon version of all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy? I suppose Kostis had a point there. Hyperfocus on one thing, and it would be too easy to lose track of just… being human.
“Where the Pits are you going?” Kostis asked. “The Mage Guild is the other way.”
I had been about to go in the wrong direction. “Oops, sorry.”
Kostis intended to go to his bank to deposit his earnings—for some reason that no doubt had to do with certain illegitimacies, the gambling den didn’t transfer money directly to banks—but would head to the Mage Guild with me first. We got more looks again. The newbie human mage who had fooled the testing cube walking alongside the well-known figure of Kostis, who bore a lot of money on his person. What a sight we presented.
“
You
want to sign up for a Silver-ranked job, Master Kostis?” the receptionist asked, with only the slightest hint of an emphasis at the start. “An Opal-ranked mage such as yourself?”
“Well, it’s not against regulations to go
lower
than your rank, now is it, Silhatsa?” Kostis said pleasantly.
“Not at all.” She glanced at me, not fooled for an instant. Then she took care of some paperwork. “There, the job is now yours to complete as you see fit, Master Kostis.”
“Thank you.”
She handed him a silver pin, which Kostis accepted before handing it off to me, right in front of the receptionist without a care in the world.
“There you go, Ross, my boy.” Kostis blew out more smoke, which shaped into a vigorous gesture of two fists colliding together. For some reason, it felt like this world’s version of a thumbs-up. Wait, was Universal Language Approximator telling me that? “Don’t disappoint me, alright?”
I clutched the little pin. “I won’t. And thank you.”
Next day, after taking another peek at the job board to memorize the details in my head, I went over to the designated location. Naturally, I got lost a few times.
“You came for more training?” Gutran asked, just outside his smithy. “Without completing our end of the deal?”
“Uh, no…”
He raised a snaky eyebrow. “You
don’t
want my training?”
“Um, I’m not sure how I ended up here again…”
I explained my situation and the smith kindly grunted out the directions to where I was supposed to go. Sure, I got lost along the way again—ending up at a weird, factory-like place with lots of pipes that looked mostly abandoned—but I was pretty certain it was still more or less morning when I finally got to the client.
“Hello,” I said when the door opened. The house already looked mostly packed and everything, just waiting for someone to come along and start moving everything. “I’m your designated mover, here straight from the Mage Guild.”
The old Rakshasa man looked at me severely, his lint-grey hair parting to either side of the crest of mohawk-like horns running over his head. “They notified me you’d be here earlier… mage.”
I tried to not take offence at the moment of hesitation before addressing me as a mage. “Yeah, sorry. I’m a bit new here and got lost on the way. But don’t worry, I’ll make up for it.”
“
New?
”
Ah, crap. I noted the way the client’s hand tightened on his door handle, like he was getting ready to slam it in my face. I had hidden my storm-grey badge since the job had been for a Silver-ranked mage. Luckily, he hadn’t demanded to see it. But he might still intimate that I was just Iron… or was I?
“I got tested as Gold-ranked, si—” I stopped myself, recalling what Kostis had said about using
sir
here. “I don’t think you need to worry.”
That made the Rakshasa’s eyes widen. “I’m not paying for a Gold-ranked mage.”
“The Guild would have notified you if the job rank had changed, right? Don’t worry, the job itself is still at Silver.”
The Rakshasa inspected me for some time before finally inviting me in. I cracked my knuckles. Time for my first real job.