The Gameshouse

by Claire North

  So much for the lower league; I do not slow my step for it. Next, the higher league: another hall, larger, where the ancient and the learned, the oldest players of the game, now gathered over TV screens and digital maps, plotting their next game. Why, there, one who wagered her good health on the price of gold and won—after some market manipulation—the excellent eyesight of the now-blind man who limps away. There, another who played battleships against an air force and lost his carrier in the first wave, now growing old and shrivelled as his life is forfeit. Why, she won a court case, he won a city; she won a state, he lost an oil rig and on, on the game winds, the game that covers the world, the game we tell ourselves we have played all these years for joy, all these centuries for joy, and which has, by our playing, changed the world in the Gamesmaster’s form for she…

  She.

  She is waiting for me.

  I climb the stairs at the back of the hall, and no one bars my way. Usually two umpires—all in white, their faces veiled, their fingers gloved—stop trespassers, but not tonight, not me. She is waiting upstairs, as she has been waiting for so long.

  She sits, her face covered, her arms in white, on a curved cream sofa beneath a shroud of silk. I have not seen her eat or drink or smile since she took the white, but she is still her, still after all this time.

  She says, “Is it that time already?”

  I find I do not speak.

  She offers me water.

  I find I cannot drink.

  She says, “You look tired, Silver. You look old.”

  “Not as old as I feel.”

  “It doesn’t have to be this way,” she murmurs. “As long as the house endures, so can you.”

  “Thank you; I have had my share of eternity.”

  The gloved fingers of her left hand ripple along her thigh, just once, a pianist warming up with a scale. “So,” she says, “shall we?”

  “Yes.” My voice is not my own; I speak again, louder, claiming the sound. “Yes.”

  “You do not have to. Once you make this move, there is no going back, and I know you are not ignorant of what will come when you fail.”

  “I will not fail.”

  “Will you not? You have spent centuries preparing for this, but the house is mine, the players are mine and of the two of us, I was always the stronger.”

  “I will not fail.”

  “The house will have you if you lose. It will have your soul. I would be… saddened… to see that become your fate.”

  “The house has me already, ma’am,” I reply. “I have been the house’s slave for almost as long as you.”

  I imagine a smile behind her veil, and that imagination perhaps leads me to hear it in her voice. “Very well,” she says. “Then make your move.”

  I draw in breath.

  I speak the words.

  “My lady of the veil,” I say, “my lady Gamesmaster, mistress of this house—I challenge you.”

  Chapter 5

  What is this?

  Are these…

  … tears?

  I walk away from the Gameshouse and there is a hotness in my eyes.

  What is this?

  I taste the moisture on my lips and it is salty.

  It cannot be sorrow, nor is it a useful response to fear. For so many centuries I have waited for this day, and grief faded with time.

  Or did it? Perhaps grief never leaves us but is merely drowned out by a flood of life overwhelming it. Perhaps the wound that bled once is bleeding still, and I did not notice it until now.

  I find the thought unhelpful, and walk away a little faster.

  There have been only three challenges that I know of against the Gamesmaster.

  The first was before my time and exists only in allegory and myth. I will not bother with its telling.

  The most recent was in 1774, and none of us expected the challenger to win. Nevertheless, for nearly forty years the Gameshouse closed its doors, and the Gamesmaster and her rival fought the Great Game, setting assassins, spies, kings, diplomats, armies and faiths against each other until finally, in 1817, the challenger was defeated, his princes dead, his armies smashed, and he vanished into the white. Who he is now, no one knows. Death is simple and the Gameshouse does not grant it easily—rather, it eats its victims whole, and somewhere beneath the white veils that are worn by the servants of the house, I do not doubt that he lives still, slave to the bricks and stones of that endless place.

  And the other?

  Why, the greatest challenge was made before, in 1208, and the woman who challenged the Gamesmaster was…

  … a player greater than any I have ever known.

  For twenty years they fought each other, the Gamesmaster and the player, and by the end of it no one could say for certain who had lost and who had won. All that was known was that the player vanished, some said into the service of the house, lost to the white, others said no, no, not at all! She vanished into victory, she conquered the Gameshouse, but who can really conquer that place? She is not the player any more, they said, but rather the Gamesmaster. In victory she became her enemy, and perhaps in this manner, her success was her ultimate defeat, for she is no longer herself but only the Gamesmaster again.

  Did she see it so? Could she see anything greater than the game? Could she see me?

  The coin turns, the coin turns.

  Let the game begin.

  Chapter 6

  We agreed terms long before I issued the formal challenge.

  She said, “Assassins? No—too crude. Hide-and-seek? Too juvenile, perhaps. Risk—it’s been a while since I played Risk.”

  I replied, “Risk lost its appeal with the onset of the nuclear age.”

  The Gamesmaster sighed. “Very well: chess it is.”

  Four weeks later, a player by the name of Remy Burke, a man who owed me a favour, sat down next to me in a bar in Taipei, put his elbow on the table, his chin in his hand and said, “Tell me you didn’t agree to play chess with the Gamesmaster.”

  “I can tell you a hard truth, or a comforting lie,” I replied.

  Remy let out a long, low puff of breath. “Silver,” he breathed, “the Great Game is one thing, but letting her play chess under Great Game rules is a death sentence.”

  “It’s still only chess,” I replied. “We eliminate each other’s pieces and position our own until we are in a position to capture the king; there is nothing remarkable in this.”

  “Except that you are the king.”

  “And so is she.”

  “And your pieces are going to be the fucking World Bank!” he hissed. “For bishop, read pope or ayatollah, summoning the faithful to crusade or jihad. For knight, read Mossad; for pawn, read the government of Pakistan, Silver! It’s not your death that troubles me here, though I am certain that you will die—it’s the death of every pawn, rook and queen the pair of you throw at each other as part of your game. Great Game rules mean you bring your own pieces to the table, and how long do you think it will be until she breaks out the big guns? Are you going to let countries fall, people die, economies crumble just to move a little closer to finding and capturing her for this game?”

  I thought about the question a while, rolling the cold stem of the glass between my fingers. “Yes,” I said at last. “To win the Great Game: yes.”

  He rolled back in his chair as if pushed in the heart, and for a moment he looked disgusted. I met his eyes and attempted to see my face in their reflection, my condition. Was there shame there? Did I feel a start of doubt at the lives that would be destroyed, the cities shattered, the countries overthrown, all for a game?

  He turned his face away and I realised that I did not.

  There are no cards dealt in the Great Game save those that you bring with you. There is no mercy either.

  I fled through New York.

  Fled in that it was my person, my body, which the Gamesmaster must capture if she is to win the Great Game. And not fleeing, not so much, in that already I was putting piece
s into play. I called the police captain whose services I won over a game of blackjack; the admiral who swore he would do anything for me, anything at all, if I spared him his forfeit when the last card fell; the arsonist whose burns I helped to heal when, gambling his life against a powerful man’s skin, he stumbled on the final move. I called the FBI agents who had assisted me when I played Cluedo in a house in Oregon, and whose lives I had saved before Colonel Mustard could finish his work with the candlestick. I called the senior engineer in the traffic control centre whose husband had bet his fortune on a throw of the coin, and whose life I had rebuilt after the dime had fallen.

  All these I called through a single number, for they were pieces which I had gathered in preparation for this moment, an opening move I had already prepared, and by the time I reached JFK airport and the chartered jet—one of nine—that would carry me to my next location, traffic in Manhattan was at a standstill, protests blocked the bridges, fires were blazing in Brooklyn and FBI agents were conducting drug busts on East 39th Street, where the Gameshouse stood.

  Or rather, where the Gameshouse had stood.

  For within minutes of my leaving it, it was gone.

  Chapter 7

  Preparations made on a plane out of New York City.

  In a lower league game of chess, you can see your king, the piece you must secure. In the Great Game, the board is the planet, the pawns are legion and finding your target can be as challenging as checkmate.

  The pilot on this chartered plane, on which I am the only passenger, is Ghanaian. He lost his licence when the father of his fiancée discovered their liaison and called the ministry and screamed that his would-be son was a Muslim and a terrorist and a villain and had dared to sleep with his beautiful girl. I gave him his licence back, and a plane, and his wife lived in Paris, and his children were seven and nine and knew they were going to be astronauts or dinosaur hunters and had never asked why granddaddy didn’t visit.

  “Where to?”

  I sunk into the co-pilot’s seat, handed him a slip of paper. “There are coordinates for an island in the Atlantic.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “I’m not sure it ever had a name.”

  “Father-in-law trouble?” he asked with a smile, a pain that he had made a joke.

  “More like fiancée.”

  “Oh man, you should never run away from love. If it has to end, it has to end, but don’t just leave things unsaid!”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “If you say so; it’s your life.”

  We flew for three hours.

  One thousand and eighty-nine kilometres off the coast of America, a senior officer in GCHQ (“sometimes the cards just don’t fall the way you want”) alerted me to a satellite re-tasking over my rough location.

  I alerted a cybercommunity called “Big Brother Lives”. Their leader (“I can beat anyone at this game; you just watch me”) responded within twenty seconds to my message, and launched the DDoS attack against the responsible servers.

  Forty minutes later we landed on an island with no name, little more than a basalt blip in the ocean, where I boarded the French coastguard vessel that was waiting for me and headed into the night.

  The captain said, his face lit from below by the lights of his control panels, “I didn’t even know this place existed. What is it—a villain’s lair?”

  “No—no hollow volcano, you see.”

  “Then why is there a landing strip and no people?”

  “It’s a long way from radar.”

  “That sounds villainous to me.”

  I smiled at the man, whose mighty beard and grubby cap declared that here was a man who served the oceans first and la belle France second. Poseidon was his god, the water was his lover, and Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité would be welcome on board only if they were willing to row. He didn’t know why he was here, and that was fine. The orders had come from higher up, from a man who had said, “Please don’t take my mind,” and whose mind I spared in exchange for favours yet to come.

  “It has some lovely and rather unusual diving birds on it,” I said at last by way of comfort. “I don’t know how they got there since they are better at swimming than flying—yet there they are—nature’s hiccup.”

  “Nature doesn’t have hiccups,” he replied seriously. “When she farts an island out of the bathwater, she does so deliberately.”

  My cabin was below decks, a hammock in a space made for pipes, no air save hot blasts from the engines, noise without cessation, rocking that would throw you from your bed if you fought it, soothe you to sleep if you permitted yourself to sink into its embrace.

  I had used some thirty per cent of my New York resources to escape the city, and deployed a GCHQ mole and an anarchist cyber group in my defence. She—my enemy, my lady of the veil—had tasked an NSA satellite to find me. Pawns played in an opening move, feeling out the shape of the board.

  This was acceptable—I could be patient in the early days. The Gameshouse had shut its doors and now somewhere she walked the earth, and being as she was, so very mighty and so very skilled, I didn’t need to make any great efforts to find her yet; not until I was secure in my own position.

  The more moves she made, the more pieces would be revealed, and the easier she would be to find.

  I closed my eyes to sleep.

  Chapter 8

  Moves made from Ville de Valverde.

  I set the FBI onto the NSA, attempting to trace the satellite that had tracked me down.

  The NSA wasn’t having any of it, and within forty-eight hours my agents were reassigned to desk jobs in Dallas, torn away from their friends, their families, their careers and their utility as pieces. Pawn takes pawn.

  I tried an alternative tack, pushing from GCHQ for intelligence, but the Americans simply ignored my requests. The Gamesmaster had her pieces well positioned in the NSA, and they deflected my assaults without a thought. Tactical stalemate.

  This being so, I settled back for a little while to consider. Villa de Valverde is a capital city, population 1,691, little white houses on a little green hill. Walking round it took approximately twenty-five minutes before returning to the tiny room above a taverna which served as my headquarters, resolved to try another tactic. The more pieces I threw at the NSA, the more pieces I risked compromising, revealing my hand to the Gamesmaster.

  Instead, I deployed a mercenary and his handler in Sri Lanka, flying them to the U.S. to attempt to kidnap a likely NSA employee who might be in the Gamesmaster’s employ. This they succeeded in doing, and held him for all of twenty-two minutes before a SWAT team broke in and took them down.

  Three hours later, the mercenary, pushed full of what chemicals I knew not, confessed to having received his orders from a man in Colombo who matched my description—which indeed he had—and I waited with baited breath for what doom might come.

  Very little doom came indeed. Colombo remained distressingly uninteresting for nearly four days until finally a journalist for Al Jazeera knocked on the door of my double, asked if he could have an interview and, told no, simply shrugged and walked away. A pawn, sent to test whether there was indeed a king hiding in the city. The Gamesmaster was not willing to risk bigger pieces on unlikely outcomes yet. She was moving carefully, feeling out the board; a slow opening game.

  On my ninth day in Villa de Valverde, my landlady asked me if I wanted to join her and her husband for dinner. She was seventy-three and had the energy of a twenty-year-old; he was eighty-one and relied on the twice-monthly medical drop from Santa Cruz to supply the drugs and oxygen that he needed to stay alive. She cared for him constantly with unflagging cheerfulness, and it seemed as I sat at their uneven wooden table in their tiny kitchen smelling of fish, that her great energy had been drawn, vampire-like, from him so that as one waned the other waxed, though her waxing was all, all of it, in love for him as she grew to fill the void that his decline created.

  She cooked with divine inspiration, fish
and beans and wine, prawns bigger than my fist, sauce to lick from the cracked blue plates on which it was served, and as she cooked she talked constantly, a merry litany of stories and adventures from the tiny island in the middle of the sea.

  Many tourists, she said, many indeed but not so much, not so many as Tenerife and people said that was a bad thing, a tragedy, a shame, but she preferred it, it made it better, and what tourists you did get were a better class, not the kind to just sit on the beach but the kind who cared where they went, what they saw, yes, better, so much better. And you, Mr. Vagar, what about you, you come here but you never seem to leave your room—is it not the sun, the climate, the people, the sea…?

  Writing a book, I explained.

  A book; how marvellous; what on?

  Mathematics.

  Mathematics! That sounds… very nice. What kind mathematics?

  Decision theory. I used to study zero-sum problems, where the outcome of a decision by one agent led to an equal and direct loss of material in another. Now the times have changed—we look at asymetrical models of decision-making, stochastic outcomes, differential games and so on.