The Grandmaster's Gambit

15. No Essence, No Piece

[Day-8 (22:30)]

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

Kai set the last stone on the flagstone and took his hand away.

The courtyard was asleep. Oren had talked until ten, about nothing, in the loose bright voice he kept for after a clerk had left. Then he had stopped in the middle of a word and begun to snore. Kai had waited until the snore sounded honest. After that he had gone down the stair without touching the rail and picked three stones out of the drain.

The moon had found the gap between two roofs and laid one pale tile on the cobbles. The stove stood in the dark beside it, cold. Above the stove the leaking pipe let go of a drop every few seconds into a tin.

He crouched on the strip of flagstones under the pipe. The biggest flagstone was his board. A flake of black slate in the far corner was the black king. A chip of brick, two rows down and one across, was the white king. A grey pebble at the other end of the stone was the rook.

*Black king on a8. White king on b6. Rook on h1. White to move.* The rook slid to h8, and the black king had nowhere to go. A child with a club book could find it.

In the cold hall in Peckham where he had played his first tournament, the club's missing black rook had been a bottle top. Nobody had thought it strange. A stone was no worse.

He did not play the move. He asked for it. *What is the move?* He put the question into his head as plainly as he had ever put anything, and waited.

The pipe dripped into its tin. Seven drops. Nothing came.

*Mate in one. Anything that plays chess would say it. It said nothing, so it does not play. In the yard I never gave it a puzzle. I gave it a place, and I named the pieces in it, and I meant it. People were going to die in that position. This one is a toy.*

Across the courtyard something ticked.

It came from the roof opposite, two floors up, a small dry sound like a nail on a cup. Kai looked up. The long slate roof had a chimney at each end and nothing moving on it. Slates gave up their heat at night and ticked as they cooled. He knew that.

*I have been ticked at once already today.*

He asked anyway. *Who is on that roof?* It was a real question about the real world, and it had a real answer.

A line of pale light drew itself near the left chimney. It made a square no bigger than one slate. The line was thin and solid and a hair out of true, as if someone with a better eye than the roof's had set it down. It wrote nothing. It lay over its slate for one breath, and then it went out like a match in a draught.

Pressure settled behind his eyes, as if a thumb had found a bruise.

He watched until the drops in the tin had counted a long way past two hundred. No head rose over the ridge. No cat crossed it. Slate by slate he went over the roof again and found only that the one by the left chimney sat a finger out of line.

*I asked who. It showed me where. That is not an answer. It is a finger. Maybe it is a cat. Maybe I will never know. Write it down, and do not build on it.*

There was a rule for a position that would not give up a second idea. You stopped calculating and went to bed. He stayed where he was. He wanted the thing from the yard to write again, so that he could look at the writing properly, in a quiet place, with nobody dying. That was a reasonable thing to want. It was also how most things started.

"Do it again," he said, out loud this time, to the dark.

He set his teeth. He gave the roof a name in his head. *Bishop.* A man who sat far off and watched down a long line and never touched. He meant it as hard as he had meant the yard.

"Your move."

Letters began to grow in the bare air in front of his face, one stroke at a time. They were bone-white. Each stroke had its scratch, dry and patient, like a quill on old paper. There was no square this time. The words hung at the height of his eyes, as they had in the yard.

**No essence.**

The scratching went on. A second line formed under the first.

**No piece.**

They held for a breath. Then the edges greyed, and the ash drifted down onto his hands, and it weighed nothing.

Behind his ear something dry clicked, like a piece set down on a board that was not there.

Warmth ran over his lip. His knees went. They did not give out at once. They sagged, politely, like men who did not wish to make a scene, and he sat down on the cold stone beside his three stones. A drop of blood hit the flagstone and ran toward the grey pebble. He moved the pebble. It seemed rude to bleed on the rook.

He tipped his head forward, not back, because he knew that much. The pressure behind his eyes had spread into a headache that meant to stay the day.

*Two statements. Two missing things.*

*No essence. I have heard that word once. The clerk at the pit said it. "The Hunter's essence. The count is off by one." Doss's orange, Tobin's fire, Penhallow's blade lit along its length like lamp oil: they were all spending something. It has to be some kind of energy. I think that is essence. They have it and I do not. All right. That one I can read.*

*No piece. A piece is what stands on a board, and I have no board. Or I have no piece of something. Of what?* He turned it over, and it kept two faces. *Two words, two meanings, and it will not say which one it meant.*

*It will not help me until I have both. And it made me pay to be told.* He caught the blood on his sleeve. *It took blood to say it had nothing to sell. It reads my head and charges rent for the reading.*

The Hunter's husk had come up one short on the clerk's dial. Orme's needle had come up one over in a room of three. *One short at the pit. One too many in my room. Whatever I am - whatever this thing is, the books do not close around me.*

He made himself be orderly. He could not use a thing until he knew its rules.

*It ignored the puzzle and answered the roof. It rules on what is real, and it will not touch a game. So it is not a helper. It is the man in the glass box in London, standing by the clocks and clearing his throat. He never played a move. He decided what was legal. The arbiter.*

It was a small word, in lower case. It fitted, and that was the worst thing about it.

*Rule one: it is not a servant. I asked, and it said no. Rule two: it cannot be talked into things. I pushed until my nose bled, and it did not care. Rule three: it knows what I am missing. A thing that knows what I lack knows what I am. Rule four: if it ever says what it wants, I believe the first thing it asks for.*

His hand was already back on the flagstone, with the thumb against the grey pebble, ready to try a different question. He looked at it until he took it away.

*That is how it starts.* He had known a player in Peckham who could not sit down without one particular pen. He had been good. By thirty he could not write a move without it, and then he could not write a good move with it.

*Never again, unless the other choice is dying. The price is not the nosebleed. The price is that I will start to need it.*

A door scraped on the stair side of the courtyard.

Oren stood in it with a grey blanket over one arm and a rag in his hand. He had left his coat upstairs. Without it he made no sound at all, and Kai had never heard him walk like that.

He crossed the cobbles and stopped. He looked at the stones, and at the dark drop beside them, and at Kai's face.

"You were talking to the air," he said.

There was no joke in it, and Oren always had a joke.

"I was swearing at it," Kai said.

Oren held out the rag. It was the clean one he kept for the porridge pot, and it smelled of barley. Kai took it. Oren looked at the blood on the flagstone, and at the stones, and did not ask what they were.

"Nosebleed," Kai said. "It's the dust."

"Sure."

Oren let himself down onto the flagstone, knees cracking, and shook the blanket out over both their shoulders. It smelled of coal. Under the edge of it his thumb ticked once against his fingers.

*He is counting. He has been counting all week. The left hand, the spoon, the hand that shook. Now a man who talks to the dark. He is not going to tell me the total.* A pause. *Neither am I.*

Kai had three answers ready for the next question. Each one was a little better than the last. Oren asked nothing, and the answers went unused.

They sat. The drip kept time in its tin. Across the courtyard the long roof lay black under its chimneys. One slate near the left stack sat a finger out of line. It had probably always sat like that.

The second day had been a Sundial, which made tomorrow another. The Row would shut, and the bell would ring from the Basilica. The long ward beside the Almonry would be full of people being looked after. Tobin was in it, if Kai had read the cart right. Tobin had lit lamps for forty years. He would have said the word *essence* every working day without hearing it.

Kai would go in the morning. He would ask it sideways, the way you ask when the answer might be dangerous.