The Grandmaster's Gambit

9. One Move

[Day-1 (21:15)]

(The Foundry Yard, Sector 8, Alexandria)

Kai gave the plan in four lines. Each one was short enough for a frightened man to remember.

"One. Tobin sits out in the open and lets his glow die down. The Hunter waits for glows to tire. When it thinks he is nearly finished, it comes in.

"Two. Once it is through the gate, Tobin stands up and lights. It walks straight at him. The slab is in its way.

"Three. The slab breaks, and the Hunter falls into the cistern.

"Four. I pull the lever by the east wall. The main empties into the pit."

Nobody spoke. The pipe hissed at its valve, and in the shed the baby had gone quiet, the way babies do when everyone around them has.

"It's nine feet of rock," said Wick. "Why would a stone break under it?"

"Kestrel's one step made that slab boom like a drum," Kai said. "It's hollow. Nine feet of rock on a bad knee will do more than one step."

"And the steam?"

That was Tobin. He sat on the iron pot with his hands wrapped in strips of Ysolde's shawl. He was looking at Kai the way he had in the lane.

"Because of Penhallow." Kai had finally finished the thought he dropped on Ring Road. "His sword was hot. The Hunter stepped into the trough and soaked its plates before it let him close. It didn't do that for fun. It's afraid of heat. A sword is a small heat. That main is a big one."

"Odds," said Tobin.

"One in three."

Kestrel made a sound in his throat. Tobin only nodded, like a man quoted a fair price.

"I've lit lamps in worse." He held out the long pole. The hook at its tip had a black rim from forty years of wicks. "Take it. That lever will be rusted solid. Hook it and hang off the end. Nine feet of pole doubles whatever you've got."

"You might need it."

"I don't need a pole to burn."

Kai took it. Kestrel stood at the shed door with one hand on the frame, looking at the wrapped hands.

"I said what I said," he told Tobin.

"You did," said Tobin. "Go and mind the door."

They had moved the pot out from the north wall, so that it stood on a straight line from the gate. Kai had walked that line eleven times. Twenty-five paces from the gap to the slab. Twelve more to the pot.

He went to the east wall and put his hand on the lever. Rust flaked onto his palm like dry skin. He leaned on it, only to learn how much it would take.

It did not move at all. His ribs told him what they thought of that.

*So it takes more than I have. That is what the pole is for.*

Tobin pulled his sleeves down to the knuckles and sat very still. The orange under the cloth sank from a lamp to a coal to a thread. It cost him nothing, because his hands were cooked and there was little fire left in him to hide.

Kai counted. After four minutes, the dragging step began at the end of the lane.

It stopped at the gap. For the first time, it stopped for a long while. The great wet face tilted toward the thread of orange, like a man trying to hear a clock in the next room.

"Soon," said the Hunter.

Every hour since Ring Road it had said one word. Now it had another. Kai's stomach turned cold. He made himself keep counting.

The step went away. For four minutes nobody in the yard breathed above a whisper.

Then the step came back, and it did not stop at the gap.

The right-hand gate leaf laid flat inside the entrance where it had fallen. The Hunter's first foot rang on it like a hammer on an anvil. The second foot landed on slag. A nine-foot body bent under the top of the gate frame and straightened inside the yard.

It had never come in before. Plates hung from it like slate, and the seams between them glowed a dull brown-red. The ruined left leg swung out in a half circle with every stride, like a door on a bad hinge.

*Twenty-five paces to the slab. Eleven seconds, at that gait.*

"Now!" Kai said.

Tobin stood. He did it slowly, like a man getting up in church. He shoved his sleeves to the shoulder. Then the fire rose, harder than it had ever risen in the lane. Two tall flames stood up off his hands. Orange light hit the walls, and every shadow jumped.

The Hunter's head turned. For an hour it had been slow on purpose. That was over.

It went from a walk to a lurch, and the leg swung wide, and the slag spat from under its feet. Kai put his eyes on the slab. It laid dead centre on the line, a flat grey square with an iron ring in its face.

*Six strides. Five.*

The air above the slag went pale.

Kai did not move. A square outlined itself on the ground, thin as a line of frost, no bigger than a paving stone. It laid on plain slag a pace east of the slab, and it was not where he had put the trap.

He knew it. He had seen it past h1 in London, with Naomi's two fingers at her collarbone in the fourth row. He had seen it in the dark between one place and another, and over Lane One. Now letters grew across it, a stroke at a time. They were bone-white, and a faint scratch followed each stroke, like a quill on dry paper. Nobody else turned a head. Whatever it was, it hung in front of him alone.

Your move.

*It is late. It is not on the slab. It is on the ground beside it.*

*If the Hunter is going to fall, its foot has to land on that square. The Hunter walks to Tobin. Tobin is the only thing I can move.*

He had two seconds. He used them.

*I tested the slab with my boot. I did not test the ground beside it. When Kestrel stepped on it, the boom ran away under the slag, on every side. I heard that and I let it go.*

*A lid is the strongest stone in a roof. The roof is old brick, and the brick is under my feet.*

*I put the bait on the one square that cannot break.*

It was the oldest mistake in his game: attacking the strongest point because it was the one you could see. He had no time to enjoy knowing it.

*My count says the slab. That strange square says beside it. My count is mine. The square is not. If I trust it and I'm wrong, Tobin is dead two paces from where I wanted him. If I trust my count and the square is right, he is dead where I put him.*

"Tobin!" His ribs screamed at the shout. "Two paces to your left! Left! Now!"

Tobin did not ask why. He stepped.

It was a small thing, two paces by a stiff old man in the middle of a roaring light. The Hunter followed the new line without slowing. It passed the slab on the east side, so close that its dragging foot scraped the stone.

Its right foot came down on the pale square.

The crust of slag cracked like ice on a puddle. Under it the old brick sagged a hand's depth, then gave way. The Hunter's right leg dropped through to the hip. A dry smell came up, the smell of a cellar opened after a hundred years.

Somewhere at the edge of his hearing, Kai heard a faint wooden click, like a piece set down on a board that was not there.

The Hunter did not fall. It pitched forward with its stiff left leg stuck out behind it, and both arms hit the slag. Plates shrieked on the broken edge. It hung there in the hole to its chest, with its face level with the ground and its shut eyes turned toward Tobin's fire.

Twelve paces away, Tobin stood with the flames running up past his elbows.

The roof crumbled around the Hunter's chest. It dug its fingers into the slag and began to haul.

Kai slid the hook of the pole through the lever's eye and hung off the end with his full weight.

It was like hanging off the wall.

The Hunter came up another hand's breadth. Its right arm swung back from the shoulder. A plate left it, spinning, flat and fast, and it was not aimed at Kai. It was aimed at the fire.

Tobin dropped on his face. The plate went over him and hit the east wall a yard above the pipe. The brick burst, and a chunk as big as a loaf struck Kai under the arm. He heard something in his side give with a small, clean crack. His legs folded under him. The pole slipped, and he caught it across his chest.

*Get up. It is coming out. Get up.*

Boots crossed the slag behind him. Kestrel's.

He had left the shed door, and nobody had told him to. He crossed the open yard at a heavy run. The Hunter's head did not turn for him. Kestrel took the pole above Kai's hands and dropped his whole weight on it.

"Together!" Kestrel shouted.

They hung off the pole like two boys on a branch. The lever shrieked. Rust flaked off it in sheets, and it dropped a finger's width, then a hand, then all the way.

Under the yard the main roared.

It went down the buried pipe and into the cistern with a sound like a train going through a wall. A moment later, a white column of steam burst up out of the broken roof around the Hunter's body. It rose past the plates and the shut eyes into the amber light, with Tobin's orange fire lighting it from one side.

The Hunter's mouth opened. Kai could not hear it over the roar. He saw the shape of it.

*Stand clear.*

His knees bent before he knew why. He was on the slag, with Kestrel's arm across his back, when the plates burst. They split outward along the seams, one after another, with a sound like chestnuts in a fire. Fragments slapped the walls.

Then it was quiet, except for the steam.

The red-brown light in the seams dimmed to a coal and then to nothing. The Hunter hung in the hole with one grey hand on the rim. The fingers had set like fired clay. It was not going to move again.

Nobody cheered. The steam thinned to a rope and then to a thread. Kai lay on his back with Kestrel's arm still across him, and neither of them said anything.

Then Kestrel's head came up. "His sleeves."

Tobin was still standing. The fire had not stopped. It had climbed his arms to the shoulder, and the cloth was alight. He did not seem to see it. He was watching the dead Hunter with a calm, strange face.

"Tobin," Kai said.

The old man looked down at himself. "Oh," he said. "It won't stop."

Kestrel was already running. Sand sacks still laid by the shed door. He tore one open and threw sand over the old man in great scoops. He shoved Tobin down and laid across him. The sand hissed. Kestrel's hands were black. He did not let go until the last flame was out.

Under the sand, Tobin's arms were raw to the shoulder, and the orange lines in his skin were gone. They did not come back. He laid looking at the sky and began to laugh. It turned into something else halfway through, and he let it.

Kai tried to stand and go to him. White crept in at the edges of his sight. His heart stopped, and then it started again too hard, and something warm ran over his lip.

He sat down because the ground was nearer than he had thought.

Letters grew in the air in front of his face, in the same bone-white script, with the same scratch.

Reserve depleted.

The words held for a breath. Then they greyed at the edges, and the ash drifted down onto his face. It weighed nothing.

He saw the survivors standing in the shed door. They were staring at him, not at the air in front of him. He saw Tobin, laughing and weeping under the sand. He saw the grey hand set on the rim of the hole.

Then the white took the rest.