Zelazny, Roger A Night in the Lonesome October

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"Yes. Me, too. I've a funny feeling you're still missing something in the equation. I'm in this version?"
"Yes."
"We've discussed this before. If you take me out of it, where does that move it to?"
"The other side of the hill and farther south and east. Roughly the same distance as from your place to
a point across the road from Owen's."
"Let's take a look."
We climbed the hill and climbed back down the other side. Then we walked southeastward.
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Finally, we came to a marshy area, where I halted.
"Over that way," I said. "Maybe fifty or sixty paces. I don't see any point in mucking around in it when
we can see it from here. It all looks the same."
"Yes. Unpromising." He scanned the area for a time. "Either way, then," he finally said, "you must still
be leaving something out."
"A mystery player?" I asked. "Someone who's been lying low all this time?"
"It seems as if there must be. Hasn't it ever happened before?"
I thought hard, recalling Games gone by.
"It's been tried," I said then. "But the others always found him out."
"Why?"
"Things like this," I said. "Pieces that don't fit any other way."
"Well?"
"This is fairly late in the game. It's never gone this long. Everyone's always known everyone else by
this time, with only about a week to go."
"In those situations where someone was hiding out, how did you go about discovering him?"
"We usually all know by the Death of the Moon. If something seems wrong afterward that can only be
accounted for by the presence of another player, the power is then present to do a divinatory operation
to determine the person's identity or location."
"Don't you think it might be worth giving it a try?"
"Yes. You're right. Of course, it's not really my specialty. Even though I know something about all of
the operations, I'm a watcher and I'm a calculator. I'll get someone else to give it a try, though."
"Who?"
"I don't know yet. I'll have to find out who's good at it, and then suggest it formally, so that I get to
share the results. I'll share them with you then, of course."
"What if it's someone you can't stand?"
"Doesn't matter. There are rules, even if you're trying to kill each other. If you don't follow them, you
don't last long. I may have something that that person will want, like the ability to do an odd calculation,
say, for something other than the center."
"Such as?"
"Oh, the place where a body will be found. The place where a certain herb can be located. The store
that carries a particular ingredient."
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"Really? I never knew about those secondary calculations. How hard are they to perform?"
"Some are very hard. Some are easy."
We turned and began walking back.
"How hard's the body-finding one?" he asked as we climbed the hill.
"They're fairly easy, actually."
"What if you tried it for the police officer we put in the river?"
"Now _that_ could be tricky, since there are a lot of extra variables involved. If you just misplaced a
body, though, or knew that someone had died but didn't know where, that wouldn't be too hard."
"That does sound like a kind of divination," he said.
"When you talk about being an 'anticipator,' of having a pretty good idea of when something's going to
happen, or how, or who will be there, isn't that a kind of divination?"
"No. I think it's more a kind of subconscious knack for dealing with statistics, against a fairly
well-known field of actions."
"Well, some of my calculations would probably be a lot closer to doing overtly what you seem to do
subconsciously. You may well be an intuitive calculator."
"That business about finding the body, though. That smacks of divination."
"It only seems that way to an outsider. Besides, you've just seen what can happen to my calculations if
I'm missing some key factor. That's hardly divinatory."
"Supposing I told you that I've had a strong feeling all morning that one of the players has died?"
"That's a little beyond me, I'm afraid. I'd need to know who it was, and some of the circumstances. I
really deal more with facts and probabilities than things like that. Are you serious about your feeling?"
"Yes, it's a real anticipation."
"Did you feel it when the Count got staked?"
"No, I didn't. But then, I don't believe he'd technically have been considered living, to begin with."
"Quibble, quibble," I said, and he caught the smile and smiled back. It takes one to know one, I
guess.
"You want to show me Dog's Nest? You've gotten me curious."
"Come on," I said, and we went and climbed up to it.
At the top, we walked around a bit, and I showed him the stone we had been sucked through. Its
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