The Grandmaster's Gambit

13. Open Palm

[Day-8 (08:15)]

(Weaver's Courtyard, Chandler Court, Sector 9, Alexandria)

"Lesson one," Oren said. He held a wooden spoon up like a priest's staff. "You are a man who has hit his head really hard. Say it with me. *Ow.*"

"Ow," said Kai.

"Good. You're a natural."

The courtyard stove was a squat iron barrel in the middle of the cobbles, with a pipe that climbed two floors and leaked at every joint. Twelve doors shared it. A chalked list on the wall gave each door its hour, and for six days the seven o'clock slot had said AERON in Oren's round hand. Nobody had rubbed it out.

Oren had moved in on the third day without asking. His blanket roll lay against the wall under Aeron's window, and he slept in his boots with his face to the door. His own room was cold, he said. Twice Kai had woken in the dark and found Oren's eyes open and fixed on the shape on the floor. Both times Oren had shut them at once and started to snore. The days between had gone to small work. Broken stone came off Foundry Lane at two tokens a day, then three, then four, when the foreman saw that Kai did not stop to talk.

Kai sat on an upturned crate with a bowl on his knee. He had come in from Senna's table a quarter of an hour ago. The bruise on his cheek had faded from black to the colour of old tea. The rib had stopped being a knife and become a loud opinion. Senna had looked at both, said "Mm," and taken one token, as she had every morning since the third day.

"One," she had told him that first time, tapping a token with a slot cut in the lid. "The token takes one and no more. Charge more and people save up before they come to me. Then they come too late."

The pull was smaller too. It had shrunk to a thread that eased when he sat at her table and drew tight again by evening. He had written *do not trust this* beside it in his head. He went anyway, every morning.

"Right. Hands," Oren said, and put the spoon down.

Palm out at chest height, fingers together, thumb folded in: that was the first half. Then Oren closed it against his heart. "Nothing hidden, nothing owed. The other man says 'Hands' back. You said it fine the other day, so I'm worried it's the doing you've lost. Your go."

Kai raised his palm. Halfway to his chest the fingers curled shut, like a man catching a fly.

"You are not catching a fly."

"I know."

"You're showing him you're not holding one. Open first. Then close it at the heart. Again."

Kai did it again. Oren answered in a deep, grave voice, "Hands," and Kai saw that it was meant to be someone.

"Who's that?"

"The coal man. Four days ago you told him 'pleased to meet you.' He asked if you'd been ill."

"I had been ill."

"That's what I told him. Now for the Basilica." Oren touched two fingers to his brow and lifted them as if raising a lamp. His voice climbed into a thin, sweet flute. "Light keep you. You say, 'Fair weight.' You don't say 'You too.' The last man who said 'You too' to an acolyte got blessed for a full hour."

He rapped one knuckle against the stove. "For the Rampart. You don't say words. You tap the nearest wall, once. Don't tap the picket. The picket is the nearest wall that can hit back."

Then his whole face went slack and bored, and his voice flattened like a plank. "Name. Block. Next." He thumped the spoon on the stove lid. "*Thunk.* Next."

A laugh came out of Kai, short and cracked, from low in the ribs. It hurt. It was the first one since London. Naomi would have laughed with her hand over her mouth, and then she would have made Oren do the Registry again.

He stopped.

The stove was a dead man's stove. Aeron had stood at it every morning at seven for years, and Kai sat on his crate laughing at the porridge.

"I feel like a child," he said.

"You hit your head." Oren sat back on his heels. "Everybody knows. I've been telling them for a week. If anyone asks, you hit it twice."

"Twice?"

"People believe twice. Once is bad luck. Twice is a story." The grin came and stayed. "Eat. It'll set."

He tossed the spoon across the stove without looking, the way you toss a thing to a man you have tossed it to a thousand times. Kai caught it. He caught it with his left hand, before he knew he had moved.

The spoon was in the wrong hand.

He moved it to his right. The right took it in a knife grip, thumb along the back of the handle, like a man about to cut a strap. It felt like lifting a stranger's tool. He had eaten like that for six days, and he had never once looked at how it must appear.

"Left," Oren said, lightly. "You eat left. Cut right, eat left, write left. You're a mess, honestly. I wasn't going to say, because of the head. You've been eating porridge like it owes you money. And I thought, well, if the head is - if it's only the head, then -" He stopped and started again. "Eat."

*Left. I'm right-handed. I have eaten right-handed all week, and he has watched me do it and said nothing.*

Under the lip of the stove Oren's thumb ticked once against his fingers, the way it did when he counted tokens twice.

Kai changed the spoon back to his left. It fit. The handle lay in his hand as though it had grown there. The porridge went down easily, and that was worse.

*Everyone here is being gentle with a man who isn't here. I should hate it. Instead I want to stay in it a little longer. That's the worst part. I'm enjoying being loved by mistake.*

"I'm off to my gate," Oren said, and stood, and his coat clinked in six different notes. "It's your turn to buy. Barley, salt, a bundle of candles. Don't let her sell you the grey candles."

Kai did not ask which gate. Every morning Oren stood outside the Almonry for the length of one bell, and every morning a sister at the gate told him the boy had eaten.

Market Row had put its canvas back. Most of it was scorched at the edges, and one stall was roofed with a sheet stamped REGISTRY SALVAGE, which nobody mentioned. The rope still hung across the road to the Rest. Nobody looked that way, so Kai did not either.

The barley woman had forearms like a baker's and a brass balance on a chain from her roof pole. Her prices were chalked on a slate on a nail. BARLEY 4. SALT 1. CANDLE 2.

The slate could be read from ten paces. Oren had taught him fourteen ways to say hello and had not thought to teach him this.

*A price on a board is a promise. On Earth it's the law. Fine.*

"A quarter of barley," he said.

"Four." The scoop was already moving.

Four tokens went into her dish, counted one at a time. She stopped with the scoop in the air.

"That's it?"

"That's the price on the board."

She looked at him, then at the tokens, then at the slate, like one of them had made a joke at her expense. She tipped the barley into the pan and set two brass weights against it, taking long enough that he understood she was giving him time to say something. He said nothing.

"Four," she said at last, and pushed the bag across. "That's the Forty-Four price, you know. Three tokens a cart at the arch, or ninety minutes on the rubble gang, and every carter puts it on the sack. You're meant to curse the Registry at me first."

Two stalls along, a man was filling a can from a barrel and did not look up. A small gold lamp inside a ring was pinned at his shoulder. Nobody argued with his prices. "Curse the Rampart too. Half a night late, with the whole Row on the kerb."

"They came, though," the woman said. "Six days of boots and lamps. Every wall from here to the Ring is clear of Weepers, and the hole's sealed. Late, but they came."

"Arch is back up." The oil seller still did not look up. "Slower than the Greys broke it. Two clerks on every card."

Kai said nothing. He turned the number over once and put it away. *Forty-Four.*

The woman shrugged and wiped the balance pan with her thumb. "You've never been this rude to me."

"I didn't mean to be."

"Nobody does." She almost smiled. "I hear you hit your head."

"Twice, I'm told."

"Twice. Everybody's heard." She nodded at the sack. "Go on."

He went. At the next stall a woman was selling thread and buttons, and at the front of her table stood a tray of red cloth pincushions. Each one bristled with pins in tidy rows. A strip of sun came down between the canvas roofs, and every pin head caught it, one after the other.

Kai stopped.

He did not choose to. The sack was in the crook of one arm, and the other hand found an awning post and held it. Somewhere in the Foundry Yard a cushion had burst, and the pins had run bright across the slag in a dying man's light. The woman who owned it had held the foot of a beam for an hour, because she had asked to.

Fingertips against the post, one at a time, because counting was what he did. *Doss. The ferryman. The seamstress. Penhallow.* Four fingers. Two of them had no names. He had stood in a yard with them through a whole night and had never asked.

The stallholder glanced at his knuckles and went on sorting buttons. Nobody on the Row asked anything of a man holding a post. They had all held one.

Across the lane a young woman stood at the milk cart with a shawl crossed over her chest, and the baby inside it slept with its mouth open. Ysolde. He had heard her give her name to a welder in the dark.

She was looking at him, and at the post. She nodded once and did not speak.

He lifted his palm to his chest and closed it over his heart. It was the first time he had done it right in front of anyone. She took her milk and left, one hand cupped over the baby's head as if it were raining.

He went back to the barley woman for the salt and the candles. She named a price for both. He said it was robbery, because it seemed to be the thing to say, and she looked more pleased than the sentence deserved. They settled a token under the slate. The candles were white.

He carried everything home on his left arm and did not notice which arm it was until the stair.

Oren was standing in the corridor outside the door.

He was not knocking, and he was not going in. He was reading the frame, and his lips moved. Under his chalked EAT, in square Registry capitals, someone had written a second line.

MUSTER VERIFICATION.

THIS HOUSEHOLD. TODAY. FOURTH BELL.

CARDS AND FILES TO BE SHOWN.

Oren, who had not stopped talking since half past seven, said nothing at all.

"What is it?" Kai asked.

"The census." Oren rubbed the end of the chalk with his thumb, and the word smeared. "After a breach they count every room. A clerk comes up with a warden, and they count heads. Name, block, card. If you're a contractor you show a file, and they match the file to the face." He swallowed. "You haven't got a file. That's fine. Scavengers don't. It's only that you're the scavenger from Block Seven that everybody has been talking about. The Registry listens to what everybody says."

"Fourth bell."

"Four hours." Oren turned, and his face was doing the loose, cheerful thing again, a little late. "Say less. Let me talk."

"I can't say less than I already do."

Oren looked at him for a long time.

"I know," he said. "That's what worries me."