The Grandmaster's Gambit

5. Six Tokens

[Day-1 (16:48)]

(The Collector's Rest, Market Row, Sector 9, Alexandria)

The pot was still on the boil.

Kai saw the steam first, a white column standing straight up into the amber light. Every other stall on Market Row had been left in a hurry. Canvas flapped on empty frames. A fish vendor's ice ran out of its crate in a bright line toward the gutter. At the corner of the crossing, one black cauldron the size of a bathtub sat on a brazier and cooked lentils.

The walk had taken forty minutes, with a grille down on every third street.

The Rest was a four-way crossing with a ring in the middle. The ring was black glass, ten paces across, where the cobbles had fused into a single sheet long before the Registry kept records. The stalls kept back from its edge at an even distance, as if a rope had been strung there. Oren touched the doorframe of a shuttered stall as he passed it. He did not look at the ring.

People poured south past them with the hard silent walk Kai remembered from the stairs. Nobody ran. Running was for people who had stopped counting.

Doss manned the brazier with a paddle as long as an oar. He was a short, wide man in his thirties, gone soft at the middle, in a cook's apron over a vest. He had a face built for swearing to a weight. He fed the fire with one palm held flat above the coals, and the coals brightened. A jagged orange pattern ran up his wrist under the skin and sank away. Across the pot a boy of nine or ten stirred from a crate, with both arms and no rhythm.

"There he is." Doss did not stop stirring. "Dead behind the dye-works, Oren says. Gutted. And look at him, walking about."

"I said he'd be under something," Oren said.

"Before you start." The paddle pointed at Kai. "Six. I know it's six. I told Oren, tomorrow."

"Tomorrow's fine," Kai said.

The paddle stopped.

Doss looked at him the way a man looks at a scale that has just given an honest weight. "He didn't call me a thief."

"He's in shock," Oren said.

"Hm." The paddle started again. Whatever Doss had seen, he put it down somewhere. "Nobody's himself today." He dug in his apron pocket and flung.

Kai's hand caught the lot, one-handed, without being asked, and put it away in a pocket. Dried plums, wrinkled and dusty, still warm from the apron.

"Same hands," Doss said, watching them. He grinned, and the grin did not reach his eyes. "Short-weight tomorrow, extra plum today. Don't tell people."

The paddle slopped as it left the pot. Lentil water ran across the cobbles and spread over the edge of the glass in a thin bright skin. Kai's boot had found the rim. The body shifted his weight back onto stone, a half-step, as you step off a wet stair.

"Mind the ring," Doss said. "Greasy as a duck."

"Where are the wardens?" Oren asked.

"Counted the Row an hour ago and went south to count something that pays. Rampart's twenty minutes out."

"They've been twenty minutes out since I was born."

"So here I am. Somebody's got to keep the pot on. Hob, off the crate."

"The pot -"

"The pot will live."

Up the north road a bell began to clang, flat and fast, like a bell struck with whatever was to hand.

The crowd thinned and stopped, like a tide going out.

Behind the stalls, somebody had tipped a barrow on its edge for a screen. A woman knelt there with three wounded men from the north. She wore a plain dress with the sleeves rolled, and her forearms were bruised purple from wrist to elbow, old bruises yellowing and new ones blooming through. Under them ran soft nested arcs of green light, faint as a lamp behind a curtain. She was in her thirties and thin, her dark hair pinned up and coming down. She rubbed her fingers together as she worked, getting dust off them.

"Senna," Oren muttered. "Her table's been on that corner since I was eighteen. Three breaches."

Doss laid the paddle across the pot and wiped his palms down his apron. He walked to the north lip of the ring and planted his feet. Ahead of him the road squeezed between a shuttered chandler's and a bonded warehouse, three barrows wide. A throat. "Weepers," he said, not turning round. "Only Weepers, by the sound. They can't count."

It was a sound trade. One pawn on the one open file, buying every tempo the south road needed. Kai had made trades like it a hundred times. He had never once had to watch the pawn wipe its hands.

The orange climbed Doss's arms in jagged lines, brighter than at the brazier. The air above his palms began to ripple. He muttered two words Kai did not catch, and fire stood up out of his hands like grass.

They rounded the chandler's corner in a bunch. *People,* Kai's mind said first, and the knees corrected it. They bent where no knee bends. They wore what they had died in: a baker's smock, a docker's vest, a nightshirt. Their faces ran wet, and under the wet each skin held a sheen, teal on the baker, like a pond on a dull day.

A woman had wedged a pram in the mouth of the road. The baker passed her without a glance. *This is the second time.* Then it bore down on Doss, and the others with it.

Doss met the first flat-palmed, as a man shuts a door on a draught. The smock caught fire. The Weeper walked three more steps as a torch, then folded at the knees, still reaching. He did the second the same. His fire was plain, hot and blunt and close, and it never left his hands. By the third press his breath had a rasp in it.

The next was bigger. Plates of dried-clay scab covered it, split to show raw red beneath. Doss's palm landed square on its chest. The plates blackened and smoked and did not care. It took his left forearm in one hand, and Kai heard the bone before he understood the sound.

Doss did not scream. He swore at it, at length and with invention, while it walked him backward. His heel found the stall's corner. The pot sat at his shoulder, and his rune stuttered like a lamp on a bad wick.

Then he looked at the ring, and at the pot. Kai watched him do the sum.

He turned his whole body into the grip, which should have torn the arm off. His free hand took the pot by its handle. Heat did not touch him, and forty pints of boiling lentils weighed nothing in that hand. He swung. A sheet of scalding water and lentils crossed the mouth of the road and spread over the north rim of the glass.

The plated Weeper put its foot down on the wet. It did not fall so much as lose an argument with the ground. It landed on its back and slid, still holding Doss's arm, until the slide pulled the fist open. It shot past him across the ring and into a canvas awning forty feet off.

Doss stood over the empty pot with lentils steaming on the stones. "That's eleven years," he said. He did not say it loudly.

Then the rest crossed the wet and fell one by one, and he burned them where they lay.

One had swung wide. The baker had not been sold the argument. It worked along the stalls, away from the glass, toward the tipped barrow. It paid no attention to the men on the ground. It was looking at the green.

Kai was moving before he had counted the distance.

His body did not run at it. It walked, quick and ordinary, a little behind the thing's left shoulder, like a man going the same way. The baker's head turned from the barrow for exactly as long as it takes to ignore a lamp-post. Kai watched it ignore him. The hook went in under the jaw from behind and pulled. Black blood sheeted down the smock. The Weeper took two steps and sat.

Kai wiped the blade on its thigh without looking and sheathed it. His body had known the rule for years. Kai had learned it twice that afternoon. He knew where the next stroke would have gone, if there had been a next, and he wished he did not.

Behind the barrow the woman looked up at last.

"Aeron," Senna said. She did not sound surprised. "If you're staying, hold the leg."

He knelt and held it. The man under his hands was sweating through his shirt. Senna's fingers rubbed together once, and her right hand traced a small circle in the air above the wound before it touched him. Kai's breath went in and did not come out for a second. He did not know why. His body had opinions about her. He assumed they were the usual kind. It was inconvenient, and it was not his business.

She looked at him for a beat longer than the leg needed. Then she tied the knot.

"Next," she said to the air. The man under Kai's hands said thank you. She said it again.

When Kai looked up, the lines under Doss's skin had gone from orange to a pale yellow-white, the colour of iron left too long in the fire. Doss studied his own wrist and said, "Ah."

He crossed to them with the broken arm held against his belly. Oren had Hob by the hand. The boy was pulling away and Oren did not let go.

"Aeron."

Doss dug in the one apron pocket without plums. He counted into Kai's palm with his good hand, one at a time, as if measuring grain. "Two. Four. Six." The tokens were grey and worn smooth and warm from his body. "I said tomorrow." The grin came again, and this time it reached his eyes. "Look at that. Early."

"Doss -"

"Get the boy out. We're square." He peered at Kai. "You're better company like this, you know. Gutted and all."

Kai's mouth opened.

Doss was already walking back to the ring. From the north road rose the sound of a handcart with one bad wheel, a woman's voice and a man's, both shouting numbers. They hauled a grandmother on a heap of bedding round the corner, and behind them the road was grey and moving. "Come on," Doss told the cart. "You're nearly through. Come on, then."

The cart rattled past him. He dragged his good hand along the cobbles, and fire rose across the whole width of the road, wall to wall, as high as a door. It was the biggest fire Kai had ever seen a person make, and exactly as big as Doss could afford. The jagged lines ran out of his arms ahead of it and did not return.

The wall held for one slow breath. Then it thinned from the top down, like a held note ending, and the orange left his skin all at once, wrist first. He was a man in an apron, for the first time all day.

The street went dark without getting darker.

The heat left the stones. The canvas stopped flapping. A shadow lay across the Rest and nothing overhead threw it. Then the first wing rose over the chandler's roof. It was a long arc of black char with ember running through it like cracks in a hearth, and the slates beneath began to smoke. A second opened behind it. Kai stopped counting at four.

His body had dropped to one knee, head down, one hand flat on the stones. All round the crossing the street was doing the same, with the ease of a lesson learned before birth. Oren had his big hand over Hob's eyes. "Don't look," he said, into the boy's hair. "Don't look, don't look."

Kai looked. Eyes were opening along the wing edges, dozens of them. Each was a coal the size of a plate, and each moved on its own. None rested anywhere for long. It did not look at the street. It read down it, as you read down a column for the one figure that is wrong. He had felt that kind of attention once before, in a sky over London. He had not expected to meet it again so soon, or so small.

The eyes passed over Oren, who stopped breathing. They passed over Kai. A coal hung on him for a count of one, then moved on, as a lamp moves on from a wall.

A last tongue of flame from Doss's wall rolled across the glass toward the thing, the way fire rolls toward an open door. It passed through the nearest wing and out the other side. The wing did not darken.

Doss had not knelt. He stood with his arm against his belly and his head up. He looked at the pot, on its side with the lentils going cold on the glass, and said in an ordinary voice, "Never off the boil." It was not funny. He said it as if it should have been.

It took him the way you draw a wick from a lamp, in one steady pull. A thread of orange light left the middle of his chest, bright as a flame. The nearest wing closed round it. The thread was gone.

Doss sat down. He had not been dropped. He sat like a man whose legs have remembered what day it is.

The wings folded back over the roofs one after another, like a lid. The canvas flapped. Heat returned to the stones, the ordinary heat of a late afternoon in a bad sector.

"Up." Senna was on her feet with a hand under a wounded man's arm. "Up, all of you. Walk if you want to live. He turns in a minute and I'm not carrying anyone who stays." She kept her eyes off the ring. She turned them on Kai for one beat, and then she hauled.

"Move," Oren said. His voice had no breath in it. He lifted Hob onto his hip with the boy's face turned into his coat. "Move, Aeron. Don't look back. It turns. Nobody should watch it turn."

Kai did not look back.

He did not open his hand until the north was out of sight. Six grey tokens lay in it, worn smooth at the edges. One had a bite in it where Doss, long ago, had tested it for no reason, out of habit. The warmth was leaving them. By the time the road bent south they were the temperature of any other tokens.