by Claire North
I rolled up from behind the bar and started firing, happy now in the thought that the only people I could hit were enemies. Glass popped and burst, couches puffed their upholstery into the room, filling it with falling foam, and I think I killed two of them before a man I hadn’t even seen, moving behind an overturned table which had once been adorned around the edges with the lacquered shape of dancing birds, got a shot off which slammed into the centre of my vest and knocked me to the ground.
Chapter 38
Bits and pieces.
I lay in bits on the ground, while pieces slotted into place around me.
They took my guns, my knife, my phone.
They pulled off my flak jacket, inspected their handiwork – the bullet embedded in the vest and the vast purple bruise already flowering above my heart. They picked me up and carried me through rooms of the hotel. Two men in body armour, helmets and boots, and a third who walked before, his face hidden by a balaclava, an assault rifle slung over his back.
They deposited me on a floor of clean tatami mats in a room smelling of incense. I rolled onto my back, turned my head either side, saw candles burning in long troughs of water that ran round the walls, a hundred little floating points of light, saw orchids in full bloom at the feet of a little shrine, no icons, no images except the flowers, the candlelight, a woman kneeling before it, head bowed like one in prayer. Her head was covered with a veil of white, her robes were white, white gloves covered her hand and she was silent, still.
I lay where I was and looked at the ceiling – faux wooden beams and panels – and listened to nothing at all.
The gunfire had stopped.
The city was dark and strangers were dead. How many had we slaughtered to come to this moment? How many lives had we destroyed?
I felt something in my pocket, a thing that my captors had not removed.
A tiny Roman coin.
Luck is sometimes merciful; the game never is.
I waited.
Then the woman said; “I’m very sorry it ends like this. I truly am. You were a great asset in the game, while it lasted, but even the best pieces must sometimes be sacrificed.”
She didn’t turn her head, didn’t raise her voice, but stayed contemplating the candlelight. I looked up at the three armed men, too marked by death to be in this flower-scented place, and thought I recognised in one of them a certain bulk, a certain height, a certain aging about the eyes that reminded me of a man I’d once known. He pulled a gun from his holster, levelled it at my head and I, lying on the floor, started to laugh.
I laughed, and couldn’t remember when laughter last had passed my lips.
I laughed at this moment and the way it was going to end. I laughed at the path that had brought us here, her and I, at the things which had then seemed so serious, and now meant so little. I laughed, and no one laughed with me, and caught by the solemnity of their silence I stopped laughing, tears rolling through the blood on my face, and looked up again into the masked features of the man who was going to kill me and wheezed, “Mercy.”
Silence.
He did not move.
“Mercy.”
He held the gun in a two-handed grip, pointed it at my head and did not move.
Then she spoke, my goddess, my lady all in white, my enemy, my love, she, the Gamesmaster, who still would not turn her head to look at me as I died, and she said, “The game is not merciful.”
I half turned my head to see her better and, seeing that she would not move, I looked back again at my executioner, met his eyes, knew them, knew him, and said, “I know.”
His finger tightened around the trigger, and he fired.
The first shot killed the soldier who stood to my left; the second killed the soldier to my right. They fell, too astonished to scream, but one of them was still breathing so he put two more shots into the man’s head, kicking the rifle away from his crawling fingers. Now the Gamesmaster was on her feet, face still hidden, body thin and stiff, a rippling in her robes as they settled about her.
The man in the mask looked at her, and me, then pulled the ammo from his gun and threw it away. He unclipped the helmet from his head, tossed it across the room, pulled the mask from his face to reveal dark brown hair, a face that had lived too long, travelled too far, forgotten what it was to be itself. I could name that face, had met it a dozen times before, played a few friendly games with it, helped it once, saved it even, given it cause to doubt and reason to rejoice, and it was the face of Remy Burke, sometime player, piece in the Gameshouse’s hand. How long had I fought to reduce her forces to that point where she would have to call on his? How many years had I spent positioning the board for just this moment, to be certain that his hand was on the gun?
Decades.
Centuries.
As long as he had been alive.
Remy Burke: a piece in my hand. The last piece I had to play; the last move I had to make.
He looked down at me and said, “My debt is paid.”
I nodded, an effort from the floor.
He let the mask fall to the ground, looked once more at the Gamesmaster, did not look at me and walked away.
Silence in the house.
She stood; I lay. Groaning with effort, I rolled onto my belly, pulled the gun from the holster of the nearest dead man, held it close to me.
She did not move.
I crawled into a sitting position, levering my body backwards until it was propped against the wall. One of the corpses was bleeding slowly, a pool seeping into the mats of the room, sticking to the bottom of my thighs where I brushed the red liquor. Blood on my hands was drying to sticky brown streaks. Blood on my face was crisping to an itchy coat. I tried rubbing some of it away, but that only spread the crimson, didn’t clear it.
In this state we remained, she and I, waiting.
I looked for words, and found none.
She waited.
I raised the gun to her, and nothing moved beneath the veil, not a shimmer, not a sound.
I lowered the gun again, letting it fall into my lap.
She waited.
At last I said, “Give her back to me.”
A pause, a moment while she considered the question. Then: “No.”
I raised the gun, two hands around it now, steadying the shot. “I have won,” I breathed. “I won the game. The house is mine to command. Now give her back!”
Her head tilted gently to one side. “No,” she repeated, confidence rising in her voice. “There are only two outcomes from this situation. You can kill me and the house will be yours to do with as you will. Or you can put on the white, take up my office and I will be free to go elsewhere, and the house will be yours still and you will belong to it. These are the only choices.”
My arms were shaking, the gun gripped too tight. I looked inside for the laughter that had been there a moment ago, and it was gone.
“You must become the Gamesmaster.” Her voice was soft, calm as she moved nearer, squatting down a little in front of me. I thought I saw the shape of her face through the veil, but perhaps I only imagined it, imposed some long-faded half-dream of what I thought she had once looked like on that empty white. “The Gameshouse shapes humanity. We are the soul of reason, the pinnacle of intellect; through the game we excel ourselves. You have excelled yourself, Silver. You have achieved an intelligence – and through that intelligence, a power – that exceeds that of the house itself. You must become the Gamesmaster; this is how the house grows, how humanity evolves.”
“I don’t want to be the Gamesmaster.”
“Then kill me and burn the house – but know that there will always be a game, and there will always be those who play it. While the one called Bird is still alive, there must be a centre that fights him, a force to oppose his madness.”
I lowered the gun, finding it now too heavy to hold, couldn’t look at her white veil, turned my face away. “I just want her back,” I said. “The house can do whatever the hell it wants.”
“It cannot be love,” she chided, so close now, her face level with mine. “Not after all this time.”
“Can’t it? Maybe you’re right. After a few hundred years, after I’d walked round the world, slaughtered men, butchered kings, burned philosophers as heretics and made prophets out of madmen – after I lost my name – I think I began to forget the meaning of certain words. Guilt; grief; remorse; revenge; regret; happiness; joy; sorrow; love. They became merely…attributes…to be played on a piece to achieve a victory, and that victory was more powerful and more addictive than any opiate. To win – to be smarter than anyone else, and to win – that is the greatest joy a player has, truly, when all other joys are lost. Maybe that’s the reason we’re here now. To prove to you, who was always so much smarter than I, that now I’m a player worthy of your affection. Or maybe because playing you is the only victory worth achieving.”
A sense of a smile behind her veil, her hands open wide for me, though her arms were pressed in tight, like a bird unsure if the offered morsel is food or poison. “Not the only victory,” she breathed. “There is still one game greater than all the rest. This game we play now – it shapes the players of the next, prepares them to fight the adversary.”
“Bird?”
“Bird,” she agreed. “Take the Gameshouse, take the white, guide humanity to something better. You know him better than most; you can see what he is, how…obscene…the world would be if he was allowed to roam free, Silver.”
Her fingers reached out, brushed the side of my face. I flinched, drawing in breath, then grabbed her fingers tight before she could pull them away, held them to me, felt that strange, burning thing inside me that had lost its name, a thing that might have been grief, might have been something wonderful.
“Do you remember my name?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me?”
“No,” she replied, so soft, so very kind. “That is not the game we are playing.”
I closed my eyes, unable now to look at that white nothing, the not-woman, not-human, not-thing that stood before me. Then I heard fabrics move and opened my eyes again, and she had lifted up her veil and was smiling. She smiled at me, and the tears fell across my face to see her, and I couldn’t look away as salt dripped off the curves of my cheeks.
“Silver,” she murmured, “when I defeated the Gamesmaster, when I made the house my own, I never thought of you as anything more than a piece. I want you to understand that, now that we are at the end.”
I wept without noise. She smiled and I wept, and was all that there was between us for a little while.
I said, please…
But she lowered her veil, pulled her fingers from my hand, turned away.
Please, I said, and found that the rest of the words could not come with the sound. Please, my love, please, my wife, please, have mercy, have mercy.
(Luck is sometimes merciful; the game never is.)
But she was cold and white, unreachable, lost to me a long time ago.
“I love you!” I said, choking on the sound, kneeling at her feet with a gun in my hand. “Please: I love you!”
You love the game, she replied. That is all.
No, no, I love you, I love you, you, always you, all this I did for you, I did to set you free, to bring you back to me…
No. That isn’t why you played. Perhaps once you played for love, but now you only play for the win. If you loved me, the choice would be easy. Take the white; set me free.
Silence.
I knelt at her feet and had no more words, no more sounds, no more feelings. Where had I been, and how had I come to this place? It seemed to me that memory was a distant thing, a film played about someone else’s life, a stranger I did not know. I remembered the skin burning on my back as I half drowned in the Atlantic Ocean, could conjure up the taste of camel milk in my mouth, smell fish frying on a sandy beach, hear the laughter of children and the last breath of dying men, but in this moment, at this time, it was as if I watched these events, godlike, from far away, a ghost on a cloud witnessing the unfolding of other people’s lives, impassive as the air. Only this; only this moment was real.
“Do you want to be free?” I asked, and she did not look at me. “Say it: say that you no longer want to be Gamesmaster and I’ll take your deal. I’ll wear the white, play the game, and you can go and live your life somewhere else, and die in some other place, and there will be no more games played by you or with your life. Say that’s what you want and I’ll do it. I will.”
“You won the game,” she replied. “You are what the white requires to further the game.”
“Not you, dammit!” I shouted. “Not the Gamesmaster, not you! You, you my wife, you, the woman I married: if there is any piece of you left inside then tell me, tell me you want to be free and I’ll do it, I’ll be the Gamesmaster, but you tell me!”
Silence.
A silence heavier for the fact I had been screaming before.
Again, weaker now, I said, I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
The words died on my lips.
Silence.
I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up the picture of a man whose life I had once dreamed was my own. He was so young, lost so far in my memory, and he had sworn, before the game, that he loved his wife too. How had that love felt? Was it the love of a beautiful victory on a complicated board? Was it the ecstasy of snatching success from defeat? Was it the thrill of a heart pumping as you wait for your opponent to walk into your trap, to make the decisive to move? Was that love?
“I love you,” I whispered, and even as I said the words, I realised I wasn’t sure what they meant. Not now; not like this.
I pressed the gun against my own heart, finger against the trigger.
She – the Gamesmaster – turned and said, “No. You are too good a player for that to be your move.”
And of course she was right.
My wife is dead, and I gave up on grief a long time ago. My friends faded, the world changed, the coin turned and only I remained. I lowered the gun.
Climbed to my feet.
Legs shaking, lungs hurting, gun at my side.
She waited.
“I lost my name,” I said, “and am only a player. My wife is dead also: only the Gamesmaster remains.”
So saying, I raised the gun, pointing towards her, and as I did, something small and metal slipped from my jacket, rolled to the ground. We stared at it, she and I, startled by the appearance of a thing so remarkably clean in this room coated in blood. Then slowly, keeping the gun still trained on her, I bent down and picked it up.
A little Roman coin.
(The coin turns, the coin turns. Everything changes and everything stays the same.)
My eyes went up and I imagined I felt her gaze meet my own from behind the veil.
“You wouldn’t,” she breathed. “Not like this.”
I pressed the coin tighter in my fingers. “You tell me that the game goes on, no matter what I do. I could kill you and destroy the Gameshouse, and Bird will have won a victory – maybe not the war, maybe not that – but for a while, I imagine, the blood would flow and the fires would burn and the only word on men’s tongues would be greed and war, until another Gamesmaster came, another figure all in white to restore the balance of things. Of course, by then, I’d probably be dead, my life run out without the Gameshouse’s halls to play in, so maybe I wouldn’t care. Maybe Bird would set his men on me and have them eat me whole, as they would have all those centuries ago, because flesh is rich and no one told them no. It is not a pleasant future that you present me, but at least you are dead and I am free.”
She said nothing, eyes still fixed on the coin. I held it up between thumb and forefinger for her to see more closely, then crushed it back down into my fist, squeezed it until I thought skin might bleed. “Or I take the white,” I went on. “Become the Gamesmaster, the guardian of reason, of logical outcomes and rati
onal thought, the ultimate utilitarian for whom the death of millions is merely statistics, pieces on the board…and the old, unfamiliar words as truth, hope, justice, love…merely patterns of human behaviour to exploit for a more reasoned end. In theory the idea is appealing: I see why you took the offer. But you see,” – my finger tightened against the trigger – “the Gameshouse killed my wife. She was wonderful; she was simply wonderful. And the Gameshouse made her a monster, so in love with the game that she would rather die than be set free. I loved her. I loved her. But I find in this present circumstance, constrained as I am by the rules of the game, that I no longer know what mercy is.”
I pinched the coin between thumb and index finger, balanced it on top of my closed fist.
“You wouldn’t,” she whispered. “You wouldn’t.”
“I see nothing but bad choices,” I replied.
“You are a player: you choose between bad choices all the time.”
“What would you have me choose now? To kill my wife? To kill myself? To let the game go on? What could you live with?”
“There is no guilt in the game, only the board…”
“There was me!” I screamed, voice cutting through her words, gun shaking in my hand. “There was me! You took the white and I was left behind; you read the board but you didn’t see me!”
The coin wobbled on top of my fist, ready to fall; she raised her hands, steady, calm, spoke quickly. “I see you, Silver, I see exactly who you are. You are a player, a great player, there is no higher aim. The house, the game, the game, everything calculated, logic, reason, intellect, every move, every piece – we play the game, we calculate the vectors of the human soul and by playing, we make it better. We make people better.”