The Dark Sire Issue 1 (Fall 2019) | Page 63

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 61