wine, then deployed three of her pebbles, using them to flank one of his own, picking it up with her calloused fingers to place it next to her other captured stones.
‘I leave in the morning,’ he said, watching her eyes closely as he did so. ‘With the fleet. We go to wage war on the non-believers.’ Nothing. No change in her expression.
Ché carelessly drove his black stones against her gathered whites, now huddling for protection in one quadrant of the board. He allowed himself a few mistakes until his offensive stalled and she rallied with her own. She didn’t take long with her moves, as though she was hardly taking the game seriously herself. She seemed more interested in the wine.
He refilled her glass, and waited until she’d nearly finished that helping too. When next he caught her eye, he declared: ‘I’ve been told by my handler to kill the Holy Matriarch.’ And the words sounded loud in the dim quietness of the apartment.
Her eyes danced wildly, watching him. Ché could feel the sudden charge in the air between them.
‘If she runs from battle, that is. Or looks as though she might be captured. It seems they will not allow that. She must win or fall. Nothing else.’
He placed a pebble down, picked up another, placed it next to the first. A third snuggled in behind them. ‘Now, I mostly wonder who my handlers are. I wonder who I am really working for after all this time, if they can order the death of a Matriarch.’
Whisker’s face thrust towards him. ‘Hush now!’ she said with an uneven voice, the tones slightly off. Her hands gripped either side of the table.
For a moment, Ché was startled enough to say nothing. He simply swallowed hard.
‘What?’ he replied quietly, and gave a toss of his hand. ‘You think they’re listening in the walls?’
She looked up from his mouth, her chest rising and falling fast; a silent panting. ‘You will cause us both harm with talk like this. Why say these things to me?’ Her face was so close he could feel her hot breath against his own.
‘Because, I thought you couldn’t understand me,’ he said slowly. ‘You’ve been pretending as much since we first met. Pretending you couldn’t read my lips.’ And he fixed her with a hard, accusing stare.
‘I owe you no loyalty,’ she snapped back at him with her strange tone of voice. ‘I am not your wife, to be telling your woes to. And neither am I your mother.’
At once Ché’s mood darkened. It was like a lamp going out.
‘I know very well what you are,’ he growled, and of their own accord his eyes glanced at the slave collar about her neck.
Her eyebrows arched high. ‘Oh? And what is that, if not a slave of a slave, then?’ And her gaze darted around the walls of the apartment. ‘They afford you a finer cage than the rest of us, that is all.’
Slowly, Ché tipped over the ylang board until the pebbles began to slide one by one onto the wooden floor, where they clattered and rolled as the two players locked stares. As the final pebble settled and silence returned once more, he dropped the edge of the board back against the table with a snap.
Whiskers sat back trembling.
‘Are you working for them?’ he demanded. ‘Do you report to them about me?’
‘Who?’ the woman replied blankly.
Ché exhaled a long breath of air. He stared long at her, torn inside between anger and anguish.
‘Go,’ he told her. ‘Get out.’
She rose, lifting her slate as she did so. Walked without another word for the door.
‘Here,’ he snarled as she glanced back, and he corked the half-empty bottle of wine and tossed it into her hands. Her eyes widened in surprise for a moment, but then she composed herself. She took the bottle with her, closing the door behind as she left.
Ché leaned back in the chair, found that he was staring down at the scattered pebbles on the floor – something in the pattern of them he could not quite read.
CHAPTER SIX
The Bastards of St Charlos
The fat man guarding the top of the stairs fell into her arms with a groan of surprise. She tottered there against his weight for a few moments like a young wife handling a drunken husband, then helped his body to fold neatly and silently onto the landing.
Swan flicked the blood from her knife, inadvertently scattering some of it across the damp wall. The woman stared