Jo Clayton - Shadowkill

The Game went on and on.

At the close of Chapter 30, the end of the second day of playing, Autumn Rose sat like an icon of the Lady inside of walls of gold, piles of gold, a black, white and golden image with the fugitive glimmers of the crystal in her necklace.

While the attendant Dasuttras brought the gold she’d won in the last Chapter, she got to her feet and walked out surrounded by a tense and angry silence.

“Not taking it well, are they?” Kikun bit a piece out of a chunk of green from the salad bowl.

Autumn Rose snorted, jerked off the hood, threw it at the nearest chair. “They say they want, a good game, doesn’t matter win or lose. Hah! What they mean is I’m gonna break you to your last copper.” She backed up to him. “Unbutton me, will you? I want to get out of this.”

He wiped his fingers on a napkin, began unhooking the thread loops. “Sounds like you’re not enjoying it any more.”

She shrugged out of the dress, draped it over her arm.

“I’d forgot how boring Forty Chapter gets,” she said and went out.

“When you’re winning,” he murmured.

“I heard that,” she called from the bedroom. “Win, lose, after a while it’s all the same. Booooring.”

He ate more salad and waited.

She came out pushing her arms into the woolly robe, tieing it tight around her. “Goerta b’rite, I’ll be glad when this is over. One more day, Kuna.” She dropped into her chair, poured herself a cup of tea and reclaimed the salad from Kikun. “One. More. Day.”

“Hmm.” He broke open a roll, spread butter on it. “What happens when it is over?”

She snorted. “What do you think? Hadluk and Pulleet will try to kill me if they see a way of keeping all the gold. Sunhawk, our esteemed High Vaar, will give his best shot at disappearing me into his little place on the hill there. Barracuda will be torn between knocking me on the head and hauling me off or waiting till I walk out and letting his thugs do the job.”

He chuckled. “A piece to each, maybe?”

“Hunh.”

“So?”

“So, I think Jao is likely to squash Hadluk’s ambitions, I’m not going to bother my head about him… hmmmm, you’re stronger than you look, Kuna. Could you carry Barracuda any distance, like out back to his flit?”

“Why bother? I’ll liberate a rolling tray from the kitchen, fold him up on it and wheel him out.”

“Good enough.” She emptied her cup, refilled it. “One more day, Kuna.”

Restless after his long sleep, Kikun followed the cleaning maids from the Mewa room, went out and wandered the semi-streets about the Shimmery.

The crowds had left, gone home for the night.

That was usual. Once the sun went down, Tos Tous was dead. No lights and crazies in the shadows.

He wandered to the wharves near the Auction House. There was no sign Sai’s body had been found. No new ships in port. Quiet. Dull. Ropes slapping, wood creaking. Not even a strong wind.

The Harbor Watch as usual hung about the incinerators spread along the bayfront, standing in clusters of two or three, talking, drinking, taking a leak over the edge of the wharf, strolling out to look up and down for stragglers trying to sneak onto the ships or steal the rescue ropes hanging in coils from mooring posts at intervals of half a kilometer.

Kikun drifted near one of those groups, listened to the men talking.

Nothing about Sai. One man was cursing his wife who’d walked out on him, going on and on about what he was going to do with her when he found her. After a while the others got bored with this and shut him up.

At the next incinerator a man had a pair of lottery tickets and the others were hooting at him, telling him the things were always rigged, he wasn’t anyone’s nephew, he hadn’t a hope of winning.

“Better than that,” he said. “I got a bit of cloth from her dress, slept over it, and dreamed those numbers. I’m gonna win, you’ll see…”

“Who’d you buy it from, Djikki the Snot? He stole my wife’s sister’s skirt off the wash line, tore it up, been selling it to any fool who’d bite.”

“Naaa, I snatched it off a Angatine and she got it from some trip who tore it loose hisself. I saw the whole thing. I’m gonna win, I know it.”

“You seen the woman?”

“Yah. Tall, skinny thing, bet you’d do yourself a misery on those bones you tried to djink her. Not bad looking…”

Kikun moved on as the men traded comments on Rose’s attributes, not especially flattering ones. It was their way of rebelling against circumstances that set them down at the bottom of their world, discards, straw to be walked on and used by the powerful. He understood it, didn’t like it, was glad he didn’t have to deal with the anger disguised by those mocking debunking words.

He met more of that anger as he walked along. The men by the bricks admired and hated Rose, used her as a way of talking about tabu things, complaining about her supposed excesses as a way of getting at the powerful they didn’t dare speak against. The Players in that game of Topenga Vagnag could lose more than a hundred men could make in a year, a thousand men. Ten thousand like them. And who’d pay? They would, people like them. The Vaarmanta would squeeze their losses out of their people’s hides. It was a story he knew only too well. It was happening on his world, the conquerors acting like conquerors everywhere, the sweat of his people paid for Daivigili excesses, kept the eternal queen in luxury. It was why he’d come away with Lissorn, to find help, weapons maybe, knowledge mostly, someway, somehow to throw the Daivavig out of Keyazee, send them back to their hot, dry southlands.

He twitched his ears, scratched at the skin folds under his jaw. Soon. Like Rose said. One more day.

He went to the Rumach, used the spare key, and went up to the attic where he’d hidden their gear after Rose left.

He roped the travelsacs to his back, went shuffling through the streets, his NOT-THERE blasting out to keep the predators off him. When he reached the Shimmery, he went round to the woodshed beside the fenced-in flit park and stowed his burden up in the rafters where only the spiders went.

Back inside the Shimmery, he found an empty room and curled up to wait for morning when juhFeyn would open the Mewa again and he could get to Rose.

Autumn Rose stalked in, tore the hood from her head and flung it on the floor, plucked the pins from the knot she’d twisted her hair into and tossed them on the hood. She shook her head, scratched her fingers vigorously through her hair, turning it into a fright wig. She flung her arms out. “Aaaaghhhh!”

Kikun chuckled, tilted his head. “Well?”

“Well!”

“Clean ’em?”

“Near enough.” She scowled at a knock on the door, combed her hands through her hair, trying to smooth it down. “It’s not locked.”

Jao juhFeyn came in. Hadluk a shadow behind him. Jao bowed, straightened. “Autumn Rose, you are the sole net winner. Do you understand that you’ll be paying my full fee?”

“You made that quite clear.”

“Will you trust me with the count, or would you prefer to do it yourself?”

“Do it. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. What do you charge for using your credit-link?”

His eyes laughed at her, his teeth were very white between the black beard and mustache. “Be my guest,” he said. “My fee is large enough to embarrass even me.”

“I doubt that, but I’ll take your offer.”

“No no, this is a win that will make legends, Autumn Rose. There’ll be stories about it after we’re both dead.” He sobered. “You have your credit bracelet with you?”