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neck. "How about a haircut for a win? A shave for a second win."
Zecha shrugged. "Whatever." She set a blue cube on the table. "Your move."
It was hard to change mental gears to Quis. He felt too tired. But the
prospect of more shifts or being beaten again by Torv was worse. So he poured
out his dice and set blue cube on top of Zecha's die. She added a red ube to
the stack.
"You can't do that," he said.
"Why not?"
"Red can't go on blue."
She snorted. "I thought you knew how to play Quis."
Bolt, he thought.
SDFJ$(
Bolt, come on. Can you access my files on Quis rules?
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Kelric gave up and fell back on intuition, placing a rod on the table to pull
Zecha's play away from the cube stack. She set a sphere near the rod, and he
added a rosewood arch between the sphere and stack.
Zecha laughed. "My game."
"Your game?" He looked at her. "It's not your game."
"You made a bridge. Both ends touch my pieces. A baby knows better than that."
Damn. He hadn't even noticed his arch touched her sphere. By bridging it to
the stack, he had formed a structure. The combined rank of Zecha's pieces in
it easily surpassed his, so she could claim it for the win if she wanted.
The warden cleared the playing area and set down a dodecahedron. Kelric put a
blue triangle on top of it.
Zecha smirked. "Extra shift number two."
"I lost?"
"Miserably."
"Why?"
"My dodecahedron has black edges."
"So what?"
f
i
144 Catherine Asaro                     
"So you can only pla black on it." Zecha flipped his trian-1 gle back to him
and left her dodecahedron. "New game. Your! move."
f
Kelric rubbed his eyes, trying to stay awake. He set a heptat | hedron on the
table. , Zecha laughed. "Shift three for
you." I For pugging sake, he thought
i
; "I thought he was a Calani," a guard muttered. |
"If you can't give me the reason why you lost Zecha | j added, "you
get a fourth shift." i Kelric wondered what possessed the head
warden of the i ; entire prison to drag him blindfolded across Haka
in the mid- | ; die of the night for a Quis lesson. "It's a
continuity law he 1 said. But which one? Color? Shape? Dimension. That was it.
I Dimension.
"I lost on the first move of the last game he said. "You ' opened this new
game with the dodecahedron you played before. So continuity holds. I had to
fix my losing move from the previous game by properly placing a piece with the
same dimension as the one I misplayed before. Which means a flat piece. Two
dimensions. But I instead played a threedimension piece."
2 "Fourth shift Zecha said smugly.
1 He gritted his teeth. "What for?" | "Your piece
also had to supersede my dodecahedron." | "Nothing supersedes a
dodecahedron." ] "That's right." She took away his die and
left the dodecahedron. "Your move." ;
Kelric scowled. The more sides on a polyhedron, the higher its rank. In Quis,
no polyhedron had more than a dodecahedron's twelve sides and in the current
structure no other shape would outrank a polyhedron. She had him trapped in an
infinite loop of losses.
"Looks like another shift," Zecha commented. Behind Kelric, the door opened. A
girl came over and spoke to the warden in a low voice. Zecha frowned and
nodded. \
After the girl left, Kelric balanced an ebony ball on the dodecahedron.
"I'm sorry," Zecha said. "But that move is illegal."
                     The Last Hawk 145
His mouth almost fell open. It was the first civil phrase she had ever uttered
to him. When he recovered from the shock he said, "It's legal. I misplayed a
three-dimension piece the last game and a ball is a three-dimensional piece."
True," she agreed. "But it doesn't supersede a dodecahedron."
"Yes it does."
Her polite veneer cracked. "Don't contradict me. You need a piece with more
than twelve sides. You don't have one."
He grinned. "A ball has an infinite number of sides. It's the limit of letting
the number of sides on a polyhedron go to infinity."
With a scowl, Zecha knocked his ball off her die. Then she took her
dodecahedron out of the playing area. "Well? You won. So open."
Kelric resisted the urge to laugh. He put down a pyramid and the game took
off, rapidly evolving into a complicated series of structures. After a while
something began" to tug at him. What... ? Yes, there. Zecha had built a
convoluted snake of green dice and was trying to close the coil.
She drummed her fingers on the table. "Are you going to take forever?"
"No." He played a blue pyramid.
She shoved a green pyramid into a structure. "Your move."
He smiled. "My game."
"It's not your game. Make your move."
Kelric tapped his finger along a line of pyramids winding through the
structures. "Black, brown, red, orange, gold, yellow, green, blue, purple,
violet, black. All mine except for the red and green." He laughed. "Grand
augmented spectrum, my advantage. You owe me a shave and a haircut Warden."
Zecha glared at him. Then she turned to the octet. "You can take him back
now."
When he stood up, they locked his wrists, then blindfolded him and led him
away.
Zecha leaned against the table in the Interstice room that connected the
Estate to the underground tunnels of Haka. It irked her that Rashiva insisted
she hold her Quis sessions with
146 Catherine Asam                      .
Sevtar here, where a window of one-way glass allowed the Manager to watch
unobserved. Spying, that's what Rashiva was doing. Smart idea to put that girl
on lookout, to warn her if the Manager showed up.
Across the room, the door opened and Rashiva Haka entered.
Zecha bowed. "Manager Haka."
"Morning, Warden." Rashiva chuckled. "He caught you S with the
infinite-sided polyhedron, heh, Zecha? And that spec: trum was a
beauty."
"You missed his first games. He played like a child."
Rashiva stretched her arms. "Why did you schedule the session before dawn? If
my aide hadn't seen you come in, I would have slept right through it."
Zecha had intended to be done with the "lesson" before the early-rising
Manager awoke. "I didn't want to bother you, ma'am."
"It's no bother." Rashiva leaned against the table. "Do you need to blindfold
and restrain him that way? It must be unpleasant for him."
"If we don't blindfold him, he'll learn the route here from the prison.
Without restraints, he could break into the Estate." Maybe she ought to let
him loose. If Sevtar knocked around Rashiva's staff, it might cure the Manager
of this rehabilitation nonsense.
"He doesn't act dangerous," Rashiva said. "He seems a pleasant fellow." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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