Col Buchanan - Stands a Shadow

He’d read of that name before, somewhere. Calhalee. Founding Mother of Tume, her twenty starving children the progenitors of the city’s major blood clans.

Che approached the open doorway and stepped inside. He descended a set of wooden steps and entered a long basement, barely large enough to hold the few hundred soldiers who filled it from wall to wall. The men were riotous drunk, all of them competing to see who could shout the loudest above the noise of the band playing on stage. He could taste the musty humidity of sweat in the air, amongst the smoke of hazii and tarweed that swirled thick as clouds.

Che could hardly hear himself think here, and he was glad of that. He stepped towards the bar that ran along the left side of the long room. Officers had gathered there, lounging on stools or standing against it, a host of prostitutes amongst them. His foot slipped beneath him and he looked down at a puddle of dark liquid, and saw that he stood upon a section of floor made from glass. A large well lined with wood had been cut through the deep foundations of lakeweed beneath them. Between pairs of boots, he saw glimmers of ghost-light in the waters deep below.

It was a gambler’s instinct that caused Che to push onwards until he reached the back of the room, where he saw a large oval table and a game of rash in play. The room was quieter at this end, the men intent on their cards.

He studied the game for a moment and saw that two players remained in the pot, a man in the purple robe of the Hoo and a short-haired girl in the black leathers of the Specials. The chairs were all taken, though one of the players sat with his head lolled back and his mouth open, soundly asleep. With a finger, Che gently pushed his shoulder until he fell sideways off the chair.

A few chuckles arose as he slid into his place like a jockey settling into the saddle. Cards were shown; the girl in leathers watched her coins being scraped away from the centre of the table.

‘What’s the limit?’ he asked those around him.

‘Our souls,’ rumbled a voice from his side.

The man was dressed in civilian clothing and was large around the stomach. He had a mug of wine and a plate of meat skewers laid out before him, and he licked his greasy fingers as Che offered him a nod.

‘High stakes,’ replied Che, and took his money pouch from his pocket. He slid a handful of coins into his palm, and settled them in a column on the table. They were local currency, silvers and a few eagles; his emergency stash.

The dealer dealt out a fresh round of cards while each of the players threw a copper into the pot. Che glanced at the girl sitting opposite him. Her eyes were closed now, but when the old soldier to her right looked at his cards and threw them away in disgust, she opened her eyes a fraction to study her own cards, her lips pouting as she did so.

A little young for a Special, thought Che, before he noticed the white band of a medic around her arm.

Carefully, she took a silver coin and tossed it towards the pot.

The man on her left looked at her askance, threw his own cards away. The folds continued around the table. When it came to the fat man’s turn he matched the bet, then scribbled something on a notebook before him.

The girl met Che’s gaze with her large, intoxicated blue eyes.

‘Are you playing or staring?’ she asked him.

‘A little of both,’ he told her, then looked down to study his own two cards; a three-armed black Monk and a white Foreigner.

Che considered his position. He wasn’t bothered about winning tonight. He was content enough to sit in the familiar environment of the gaming table and forget everything else for a while. On a whim he matched the girl’s bet, then raised her by throwing in two more silvers, wanting to see her reaction.

The girl half closed her eyes again, and settled back in her chair while she waited her turn.

‘Your accent. You’re not from Khos, are you?’ It was the fat man again, sipping wine.

‘I come from all over,’ Che answered casually.

The man wiped his hand on his woollen tunic and held it out to him. ‘Koolas,’ he said.

‘Che.’ They shook, and Che wondered if the man was merely gaining the measure of him.

‘What brings you here, friend?’

‘Some business,’ said Che. ‘And you?’

‘Me? I dabble in war correspondence, when I’m not writing my own impressions.’

‘Koolas?’ Che in surprise. ‘The same Koolas who wrote The First and the Last?’

The war chattero smiled proudly at that. ‘The very same,’ he admitted. ‘You’re well read, friend. They didn’t make that many copies.’

Che offered a modest tilt of his head.

The dealer spread four cards on the gaming table, face up. Che spotted a red Foreigner before he glanced at the rest. The other two cards were red too.

Again the girl bet first, this time even more strongly, throwing five silvers clinking into the pot.

Che sat back and tried to read her. Calm, he thought. She didn’t look as though she was bluffing. There was every chance that she had something, even possibly a flush.

They waited on Koolas, the big man studying his cards and those on the table, his left eye squinting. He glanced at the girl.

‘Nope,’ he said, flicking his cards away.

Che was enjoying himself. He knew that he was probably beaten here, yet still he reached for his stack of coins, and played with them for a moment, listening to their metallic clinks. She was pretending to ignore him as he stared at her, and he used the moment to glance down at her chest, its curves compressed by leather.

You can’t bluff this girl, he decided at last, and with regret slid his two cards forward. He gestured with his hand to the pot. It’s yours.

She retrieved her winnings without expression. Just once she chanced a look at Che, and a small smile tugged the corner of her mouth.

A damned bluff, he realized with a start. The little bitch had bluffed them all.

Che leaned back and barked with laughter. It felt good enough just then that he kept on laughing, the sound of it lost in the din of the crowd, and when he finally stopped he felt better for it, and another hand was already in progress. He caught the eye of one of the barmaids and called for her to bring some water, and good wine.

The wine she brought him was passable, the water tasted as though it had come from the lake.

‘How goes the evacuation?’ enquired Koolas.

‘Shouldn’t you be seeing it for yourself, correspondent?’

‘I’ve seen enough for now, thank you,’ the man replied quietly.

Che folded his next few hands, too worthless even to bluff with, wanting to see the run of play and the styles employed by the other players before he started working them.

A fight broke out near to the bar. A man was standing on top of it, his prick hanging out, waving it over the jeers of his friends. A table crashed to the floor spilling drinks. The drums of the band picked up a beat, and the music ran without pause into a different song, the singer wailing with urgency and passion now, her words a high ululation of purest old Khosian, almost Alhazii in their intonations. Che turned around to watch her perform.

The singer was dressed in a black, skin-tight dress of satin. Her hair was bound up by sticks of lacquered wood. Her eyes were lined with kohl. She swung her hips as she sang, moving in a way that caught the eyes of the men in the room, and the women too, so that they all gazed transfixed in desire of her, or desiring to be her. The woman held their stares, her arms cradling her head as she writhed amongst the coils of smoke.

‘Calhalee!’

Che turned to the table. ‘What?’ he replied to the girl.

‘Calhalee,’ she shouted again over the noise. ‘They say she owns this place.’ He noted how the girl spoke with the thick burr of a Lagosian accent.