“No,” I replied. “We make them pieces or we make them players. That isn’t better.”
“It is – but it is. It is rational where rage isn’t, logical where love is not; I never loved you.” The words fell and I flinched, but the coin was still balanced on my hand, the gun still ready to fire. Her voice rose, higher, begging: “I never loved you; you were just a piece, so shoot me, shoot me, just shoot me but don’t do it like this, don’t decide on…on a whim! On chance!” She spat the word, veil billowing about her face with fury at the sound.
I smiled, remembered someone else’s words. “Luck is sometimes merciful; the game never is.”
Her hands were shaking but her voice, when she finally spoke, was stunned and cold. She said, “You won’t do it. I never loved you; only the game. You are a player. You won’t do it.”
I smiled again, stared into the empty whiteness where a person should have been, and for a moment saw myself stood there, dressed in that same veil. The image seemed laughable: why did I need a veil, who had burned away every piece of my soul so long ago? What was there that is human about me left which I could possibly need to hide?
(A memory of the ferry to Saint-Malo. Why are you crying? Why are you crying?)
(A policeman, gunned down in the dark. They are not my orders. They are not orders I recognise within the boundaries of the law.)
(Thene, her black and white cat coiling around a stranger’s legs, looking for attention. Who was that stranger, smiling at her there, eating omelettes with too much syrup? He had my face but no name, but if I concentrate it seems to me that I remember and…)
… there. There is he is. He reads a book on the beaches of Palmarin while children dance around him asking for money, money, American, money?
He crosses the Mongolian steppe with a family that knows itself to be the centre of the world, listens to the mothers whisper stories of the stars.
There is a man fleeing from the fighting in Jammu eating noodles with a pilot and her mother as he flies to Taipei playing dominos with strangers in Russia sat watching the waterfall in the mountains of Spain.
There he is, this man without a name, and as I look at him from this distant, cold place where now I have come, it seems for a moment that I am him, and he is me, and that after all, he does have a name.
“My name is Silver,” I said, softly at first, then again, a little louder. “My name is Silver.”
I raised my head again, looked straight into the whiteness where my wife’s face should have been. “I am a player. I am also something else.”
I slipped my thumb under the little coin, felt its weight on top of the nail.
“You won’t do it,” she breathed. “You won’t.”
I smiled, and was content. “My love,” I replied, “how little you know about people.”
I let the coin fly.
Chapter 39
The coin turns, the coin turns, the coin turns.
When it lands the world will change, and the house will fall or the house will stand, and she will live or she will die, and I will wear the white, or diminish and die of mortal old age.
Sometimes life deals a bad hand, and the prize was not worth the price you paid. Sometimes there is nothing in a choice.
The coin turns, the coin turns, the coin turns.
I am Silver, who played the Gameshouse and won. Did love, if love was a thing I felt, lessen or increase the odds of my success? Would a colder man have taken fewer risks, or sacrificed fewer lives, if he was not led by some nameless passion in his heart? Or is love only weakness, which reason shall erode, has eroded, has driven wholly from my heart?
I look inwards and I see only memories and deeds, and they too begin to fade.
A player has no need to be a person.
A player has no need for a name.
The coin turns.
There are greater games yet to be played, and the pieces we move across the board of this existence will not feel our white fingers touch them, will not know that their will was ours, their lives at our command, until maybe the very last, when they look back on their lives and wonder why. Why the currents of their lives pushed them left when they could have gone right.
They will call it chance, the people of this world, and for the most part they will be mistaken.
For the most part.
The coin turns; where it falls, nobody knows.
The coin turns, empires rise and empires fall, men live and men die, babies scream and dead men sigh; the world changes but people are always and are never the same.
The coin turns, the coin turns.
I am Silver.
I choose humanity.
The coin turns.
MEET THE AUTHOR
CLAIRE NORTH is the pen name of Catherine Webb. She currently works as a theater lighting designer and is a fan of big cities, urban magic, Thai food and graffiti-spotting. She lives in London. Find her on Twitter as @ClaireNorth42.
By Claire North
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Touch
THE GAMESHOUSE (EBOOK NOVELLAS)
The Serpent
The Thief
The Master
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Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2015 by Claire North
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: November 2015
ISBN 978-0-316-33605-5
E3
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Meet the Author
By Claire North
Newsletters
Copyright
rth, The Master