The Dice Throwers
by Gregory Kimbrell
The wine flowed. Sous-Terrain would drown if
it did not reach an end, and still the duke spoke
of only the hunt. The wild boars, he said, drop like
walnuts. The tusks are exceptionally long and beautiful
when polished. I will show you the bed that I am having
built out of them, if ever you come again. So few visit me
here, in this house. But had it not once been called
the Fortress of the Malady, asked Sous-Terrain.
The duke ordered the glasses filled by the mute
with a white mask completely covering his face.
All the while, the winds of these lost mountains
caused the leaded glass panes set in the walls of
the chamber to shudder and groan, and a corps
of braziers hurled light upon the tapestries that
depicted scenes from deep within the annals of
history—the Massacre of the Excommunicants,
the Siege of Soldak, beheadings of kings whose
complex iconographies Sous-Terrain could not
with certainty identify. The material had grown
dark over numberless decades of dust and soot.
At night, the hounds are alert, the duke said. Indeed,
they would die for me if they believed I was, in any way,
threatened. One night, a lynx leapt into the courtyard at
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