The Grandmaster's Gambit

12. Midnight At The Rest

[Day-2 (23:40)]

(Weaver's Lane to Market Row, Sector 9, Alexandria)

The bottom lock clicked shut behind him, and Kai stood in the corridor with the key in his fist and no plan.

He had tried the floor for hours. The boards were hard, and the pipes knocked, and every time he closed his eyes the chair was there, facing him. At half past eleven he gave up. He had always walked before a final. Hotel corridors, the length of a long carpet, back and forth until his head went quiet. Nobody had ever stopped him from doing it.

The street door was unlocked. Weaver's Lane lay empty under the white Curtain lamps. A Registry crew had chalked a COUNTED on every third doorframe, and the chalk showed pale in the lamplight, as if the dead were still being added up.

The cold helped as he walked. His ribs complained at every step in a regular, honest way, and he let them. At the first turn he went left because the lamp was brighter that way. At the second he went right because a cat sat there and he wanted to see if it would run. It did not run. At the third turn he stopped.

The route had not been his choice. He saw that all at once, the way you see you have missed a station. Every turn had been easy, and every turn had pointed the same way. His steps had a place to go, and he did not know the place.

*Fine. Turn round.*

He said it in his head, plainly. He waited for the part of him that obeyed words.

The legs were there. They would have turned if he had asked. The wanting had gone. It was like trying to be hungry for a different food. At the crossing he could not find one reason to go home. The lack of a reason had a shape and a direction, and he was facing it.

He walked on. He told himself he had decided to.

The Rest lay black and quiet under its lamps.

The stalls were shuttered, and the north road was a scorched throat with a rope across it. The ring of fused glass shone dully in the middle of the crossing, and nobody went near it. Kai stopped at its rim, where Doss's pot had spilled yesterday. Somebody had scrubbed the lentils from the stone.

The pot itself stood where it had always stood, on its three feet at the north-east lip. It was cold. Someone had chalked a seal across its belly, a circle crossed by three short strokes. A Quiet-seal. Beside it burned a candle in a tin lid, and next to the candle lay a single dried plum.

He knew where the want was taking him. It was not the pot. It was the ring.

He did not step onto the glass. He kept to the edge with his boots on the cobbles, and the want leaned on him from the middle of the crossing, steady as weight against a door.

*Test it. Don't argue. Test it.*

He walked down the Row, away from the ring, counting twenty paces. The wrongness came with the first step and grew with every one after. It was a sick, specific dread, like leaving a child in a hot car. At twenty his shirt was wet. At twenty-six he was back at the lip of the glass, and the dread had stopped as if a tap had been shut.

In the other direction it was the same. He counted to a hundred, standing still, and told himself that at a hundred he would walk home. At a hundred the legs were willing and the wanting was not. He started the count again. He did it seven times.

*Maybe my legs know the route and the habit is stronger than I am. I took a different street. The pull followed.*

*Maybe it's grief. Doss died here. I thought of Naomi. It got stronger.*

*So it's neither. Something is pulling me here. I don't know what yet, and I won't pretend I do.*

He sat down on the kerb. His hands were perfectly steady, which was worse, and he held them between his knees anyway.

The final position was the place he went, as he had in the arena. The knight on f2, the rook on g1, the king in the corner behind his own pawns. It held. It was the one place his mind could stand that nobody had moved. He stayed there a minute. Then he had to come out of it, because the want was still leaning on the door.

*Whose is it? Is it his? Did I push someone out to get in here?*

Kai could not tell whether Aeron was gone or dissolved. Perhaps he sat somewhere under the floor of his own skull, waiting for a hand to turn him toward home. He had been a victim until that thought. Now he was a trespasser, and the second was worse.

*The pull is a fact. It is not a verdict. I can live with a fact.*

He said it twice. It did not help, but it was something to say.

He had been on the kerb for the better part of an hour when a voice spoke from the Row side of the crossing.

"You've been walking up and down in front of that ring for forty minutes. I thought you were a post."

A hooded lamp burned at the corner. Behind it a barrow rested on its shafts, and on the barrow a basin, a roll of bandages, a tin kettle on a spirit lamp. Senna sat on a stool beside it with a man's hand in her lap. She was winding a bandage round it. The man was a docker, grey in the face, and he held very still.

The green was on her forearms again, curve inside curve, much dimmer than yesterday. The bruises under it had gone nearly black.

"Next," she said to the air. The docker thanked her and went off across the Row. She looked up at Kai. "You, apparently."

"I'm all right."

"You're white as milk. Sit."

He crossed the cobbles. There was a second stool, upturned. He turned it and sat. His legs had stopped asking him questions the moment he moved toward her, and he noticed that, and set it aside.

She poured tea from the kettle into a chipped cup and put it in his hands without asking. The cup was warm. He held it and could not drink. His jaw would not work. He tried to say thank you and the word was too big for the space.

She did not push. She took a cloth and wiped her hands. They were pale and long, with ink and ash under the nails. She worked on the cloth for longer than the cloth needed.

"Green is for mending," she said, to the cloth. "Whoever's name is on it. Don't mind the colour. It dims when I'm tired. It'll be back by the bell."

"I wasn't looking at it."

"You were." There was no sting in it. "You've a bruise coming up under that eye, and you're breathing like a man with a cracked rib. Low on the left."

"Yes."

"I know. You held a leg for me yesterday and never asked what it was worth." She looked at him, then at his hands round the cup, and her face did not change. "Not tonight. I've given what I had since the bell, and I'd do you worse than good. Come back tomorrow. The bruises need a second look."

The want let go as she said it.

It did not fade. It opened, all at once, the way a hand opens, and left his chest holding the shape of what it had carried. He breathed in and the air went all the way down. The cup shook in his fingers and he put it on the barrow.

"Drink that," Senna said, "and go home."

The tea was weak, and sweet, and tasted of nothing he could name. It was the best thing anyone had given him in two days. He was ashamed of that. It was a stranger's kindness, and he had taken it with a stranger's hands.

He thanked her. She said "Mm" and settled to wait for the next patient, her hands in her lap.

He walked home. Nothing leaned on him. He could have gone any way he liked. He took the plain way, past the cat, which had not moved.

*It stopped when she spoke. That is data. A kind voice in the dark, the only one on the Row: that is an ordinary thing, and I would like it to be that.*

He climbed the stair. The three locks turned for him in order, and the door opened without a sound.

*It is also an invitation. I do not like being invited.*

He lay down on the boards facing the chair. He did not know why the want had let go at her voice. He knew only that it had, and that tomorrow, at the bell, he was going to find out whether he wanted to go back.