"You lost with 34 points to my 53. Since you are an initiate and I'm a Grandmaster, we may consider this a sufficient test of your skill. However, to be fully admitted into the guild, you need to prove understanding beyond mere skill. Tell me, how would you measure a game's elegance?" Grandmaster Thishek smiled faintly, like a benevolent grandparent.
I looked at the game board before me. Polished stones of obsidian and mother-of-pearl were placed on a simple rectangular grid. Disregarding their colour, all stones were the same, as were all places on the grid. The gameboard was as simple as the patterns the pieces formed were complex.
For the first time since the test had begun, I opened my mouth. "We played according to rules any child might understand, yet followed strategies as vast as the sea and as deep as the deepest caves. These are the two main virtues of games: to avoid complicated rulesets while allowing for complex challenges. The difference between the two, what might be called emergent complexity, serves as a measure of elegance."
I knew my answer was passable at least. My point was clearly made, and I had spoken poetically, comparing the boundaries of the game with the natural boundaries of the nation. Nonetheless, the Grandmaster's smile had withered as he listened. I could not escape the accent I had been born with; it marked me as a child of cave-dwellers, a tribe the rest of the nation despised just as they exploited them.
"You propose a measure without offering a scale. Should I take that as a sign of ignorance, or stupidity?" All traces of warmth had vanished from the Grandmaster's voice.
"Any scale, no matter how carefully calibrated, is rigid. A scale for grain and gold needs rigidity to be reliable, because weights are neither complex nor subtle. Games are both, and as such, any attempt to judge them is a matter of the soul." Again, I intertwined wordplay with a logical argument.
"You presume to be more capable than an objective scale? How arrogant."
"I presume a Grandmaster to be capable. As an initiate, my role is to learn, not to judge."
"That will suffice," the Grandmaster said with the air of one who was forced to accept an unpleasant fact. "You are hereby accepted as a full member of the guild. Do not overstrain your privileges, mind your duties, and listen to your betters."
I bowed deeply to hide my expression. Grandmaster Thishek would have accepted any other initiate with praise and encouragement, but for me, he had only warnings and implied threats. I bore them for a reason.
Assigned meal times in the Guild were staggered in half-hour intervals. On normal days, this rule lessened the strain on the culinary infrastructure, but today, the Grandmasters had declared a feast day in honour of the new members. The hall was full to bursting, with more than three hundred guild members, initiates and even some of the high-ranking service employees celebrating. All sound was swallowed by the din, and if the five other new members sharing a table with me hadn't shouted at the top of their lungs, I wouldn't have been able to follow teir conversation.
"I hope to work for the Guild outposts, either in the mountains or at the shore. You know, it's the craftsmanship of the gameboard that drew me to the games initially. Did you know that days of work go into crafting a single obsidian piece? The dedication of the craftsmen is amazing." Arjen was red in the face. Whether that was from the shouting or the beer was anyone's guess.
The others nodded appreciatively. There was a short lull in the conversation before Arjen turned to me.
"What are you planning to do?"
"No idea," I said, trying to make it sound like an embarassed confession. "I think I'll do some odd jobs for a while, trying to find something that really interests me."
"Really, you don't know what you're going to do? You're always so serious about everything."
"Serious?" I smiled. "I didn't think I was."
Arjen nodded, then shook his head. "I mean, maybe your grades weren't." When the others raised their eyebrows, he stopped and considered what he had said. "Sorry. I'm drunk. Still, there's always been something about you. Like, you're deliberate?"
"Intense," one of the girls chimed in.
I sighed. They were not suspicious, merely curious. Nonetheless, any kind of interest in my person was dangerous. "Well, I think I know what you mean, now. You're all from the cities, or the farmland surrounding them, right?"
"Ah," Arjen said. "It's because you're a cave-dweller." Again, the others eyed him in disbelief at his frankness. How quickly their culture of verbal games faltered and stumbled under the weight of alcohol.
"It does change how people see me," I said. "And it does mean that I need to care about how I'm seen. Better to be a too serious initiate than one who has too much fun, right?"
"That also explains why you're not sure where you're going. You have to find a place that's willing to take you." Arjen sounded as satisfied as though he had solved a difficult puzzle, while around him, the others groaned. They were quick to call him out for his rudeness, and quick to offer their condolences for me. I accepted them, glad that I had given them a plausible answer. Now, they would not see me as a mystery, but an outcast and a failure. Someone no one would suspect.
Raking was a surprisingly subtle art. Too much pressure, and the rake would snag on every bump in the ground; too little, and it would not be thorough. There were some similarities to my current situation. I needed to be thorough, and at the same time, too much pressure might cause irreparable damage.
"What are you thinking?"
"Nothing," I answered by reflex. Then, I considered the question, its dangerous true answer and the carelessness of my impulsive lie.
"Nothing, huh? Not good enough." The speaker was a man who towered over me, standing with his arms folded behind his back. "You need to be better than that."
There was an accent to his speech, fainter than my own, but just as distinctive. "You're from the caves," I said.
"Yes," he answered. "Like you. And this is why I'm talking to you frankly. You're not good enough. I am a master, and you a freshly inducted member of the Guild, but both of us face the same discrimination. They see us as members of one group, and thus they judge us together. You're an embarassment to the tribe."
My head sunk, and it was no deception. The words hurt from his mouth, more than they would have hurt from one of the cityfolk.
"You think I'm harsh." The man laughed. "Life will get harsher for you. Becoming a member of the Guild is easy. To rise further, you will need to fight tooth and nail against those which would call themselves your bettters, and every misstep will see you punished far worse than your peers."
"And if I don't?" I said, my voice small. "If I'm not trying to rise?"
"If you aim to be merely mediocre," he said, "to just exist, why did you come to the city? You should have stayed in the mountains."
"I—"
"No need to tell me your story, I know what kind you are. Weaklings like you don't have principles, and at some point, you will have no option than to break the law. Let this be your warning: you will either find strength, or I myself will drive you out so that you cannot taint my reputation further."
I made myself smaller, but the moment had passed. My fellow countryman had no more understood me than anyone else in the Guild, and that had taken the bite from his words. I wasn't weak.
When he was gone, I smiled. The cave-dweller who lacked ambition, who had joined the Guild only to end up as an errand-boy because he had never found something he was good at. A simple character was easily kept consistent and made for good cover.
Behind the cover, I planned. With all the wit of a member of the Guild of Games, I sized up the pieces, I took in their every movement, and slowly, the shape of the board was becoming clear in my mind.
There was no dust in the air to catch the oil lamp's light. The floorboards had been scrubbed recently. My fingers found the door's bronze knob shiny and worn by heavy use. With every beat, my heart climbed higher. There was something in the attic, no doubt.
It had taken months to get this far, months of digging up old blueprints, shadowing the Grandmasters, and finally trying to find the perfect time to come up here. I twisted the doorknob, opening a door gliding on well-oiled hinges.
The secret of the attic was a single room that spanned the entire length and width of the guildhouse, but was barely five feet high. An entire hidden floor, easily missed in a building as large and architecturally inhomogeneous as the guildhouse.
I tore my gaze from the room's low ceiling, and my heart skipped a beat.
The ground was covered in stones. Polished obsidian and mother-of-pearl, reaching from one wall to the other and as far into the distance as the lamp's light reaches. The patterns are vast and unfamiliar, not like any of the games I knew. They reminded me of an ocean's waves, and I wondered at their possible motion.
Next to the door I came in through is a small, squat bookcase filled with worn leather-bound tomes. I opened the one that looks newest. Its pages were full of some manner of code I could not decipher, but it was easy enough to guess at the book's function. Whatever I was seeing was some sort of notation for the vast game before me.
Beside the bookshelf lay several pairs of sandals, their soles specially made not to disturb the pieces.
In the game I had been playing, this was the endgame.
The door opens, and Grandmaster Thishek stumbled through, his hair dishevelled, breathing heavily. "Boy. What are you doing here?"
I looked up from my spot in the middle of the room. "Reading," I said, pointing at the book in my hands.
Thishek laughed nervously. "That's not funny. Get away from there before you disturb the pieces. You cannot fathom how much work went into that."
"Can you? I wonder."
"You're insubordinate," the old man bellowed. He reached for the pile of sandals at the door.
"Don't," I said. "Or do you want me to make a mess?"
"Are you threatening to disturb the board? How do you expect this to play out, boy?"
I raised my lamp. "I'm threatening to disturb the board, then set the book on fire. I believe it's the newest volume, yes?"
The Grandmaster's face reddens. "You're going to regret this."
"Possibly," I said. "At the moment, however, I'm not regretting anything at all. I suppose we're clear on our respective positions now, and can get to my demands."
"Your demands? You insolent—"
I shook the lamp. Shadows danced, oil sloshed, and the Grandmaster fell silent. "See?" I said. "You'll want me to stay calm, so I don't accidentally drop this. I'm not demanding anything exorbitant. I just want you to answer a few of my questions. First of all, what is this?"
The Grandmaster wrung his hands. "It's a hobby of mine. The biggest game ever played."
I laughed. "Try again. Anyone could see that some of those books by the wall are far older than you."
"Well, a game as grand as this can only be played on a vast timescale."
"Did you know that there is a serious shortage of workers around the Guild house?" My tone was light and conversational. "Someone who's willing to do the boring jobs can quickly move through various positions, whether that means caring for the gardens or scribing for the quartermaster. And the quartermaster's accounts in particular can be quite interesting. There is a discrepancy in the amount of game pieces that are ordered and the ones that are used, and no place of storage is mentioned anywhere."
"What do you—"
"And the records are extensive," I cut in, my voice harder now. "They reach back centuries, to the beginning of our nation, and the discrepancy has been there from the beginning. The missing game pieces aren't cheap. Though the accounts list their cost in gold, the game pieces are paid for in blood. After all, if the cave-dwellers ever regained their political independence, they could control the prices on the obsidian pieces, and for some reason, the government is willing to violently put down any uprisings to keep that from happening."
The Grandmaster scoffed. "Your conspiracy theory is full of holes, boy."
"Holes that you are capable of filling, Grandmaster. If I had more time with that book, I might figure it out myself, but as it stands, I'm still lost on some details. This is a game of solitaire, is it not?"
"Put the lamp and the book down and come here, and you might still get off with a slap on the wrist."
I chuckled. "If I were looking to get off easy, I wouldn't be here at all. This is your last chance to give me an explanation."
"Or what? You'd burn the Guild down for the sake of a half-baked conspiracy theory?"
"Given that you would merely have to tell me truth to stop me, you're the one risking the Guild burning down. Are you sure that the truth you're guarding is worth it?"
"I have no part in any of this," the Grandmaster said.
I could hear footsteps on the stairs. Whoever was coming was unlikely to be an ally of mine.
I let the lamp fall.
"You are charged with the crime of destruction of guild property by way of arson. Fortunately, no lives were lost, yet the circumstances of your crime are particularly severe, as the flames claimed almost the entire guildhouse before they could be extinguished. Were it not for the efforts of hundreds of volunteers, the flames may have reached other buildings, dooming the entire city.
"Your crime weighs heavier yet since it was not a case of mindless vandalism. Despite your youth, there was intent and long planning behind it. Grandmaster Thishek told the court that you were motivated by racial hatred. There can be no tolerance for actions like yours.
"How do you plead?"
"All of you saw me merely as a black piece surrounded by white ones. In the games we play, this meant I would have been captured, but the real world isn't as elegant. It's complex and complicated both, an absolute nightmare to plan with. Maybe this phrasing better suits your aesthetic sensibilities: A stone that falls into an ocean casts waves. By virtue of the system's complexity, those waves cascade unpredictably, and in their ripples, the stone's fall lives on forever. The Grandmasters see the world as but an ocean of game pieces. A dangerous simplification, but even if it were valid, they could not stop the cascade.
"I don't fear my punishment. It will be but a stone falling into an ocean."