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Players of the Game
Players of the Game
Book Three of Shadow in the Storm
GRAEME K TALBOYS
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2017
Copyright © Graeme K Talboys 2017
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017; Cover design by Mike Topping; Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Graeme K. Talboys asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.
Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008103576
Version: 2017-01-17
For Susan Murray
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One: Move
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part Two: Countermove
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Part Three: Collision
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
A Guide to Pronunciation
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Graeme k Talboys
About the Publisher
Chapter One
There was no escape. Even on the high balcony, the smothering heat and dry, stale air sapped energy and sense. Jeniche rested a moment against the parapet to gather herself and looked out over the city of Alboran with a half-seeing eye. Beside her, a cat waited out the heat with the patience natural to any predator, head down and paws tucked in. Little had changed since she had last stood there. The sun had moved a fraction further west, hanging like a polished bronze plaque in a smoky room, but there were still no shadows anywhere in the city, just an umber gloom, a perpetual twilight that waxed and waned.
It was three days since the dust storm out of the south had passed. The heavy stuff had settled straight away, dark like dried blood. It had covered the rooftops, piled into corners, tainted wells, and coated the streets. Women had swept it from their steps; men had shovelled it into carts and taken it away to goodness knows where. The river had become sluggish, exuding a dull, underground stench and the sea had changed colour from translucent blue to a wine darkness that was only now starting to fade. But the fine stuff that got in their noses and mouths and made their eyes water, that stained their clothing and laced the air and their food with a stale flavour of metallic salts, that was still there.
It gave the city, spread out before her, an ancient and otherworldly feel, as if it was a painting made by an artist who only had the colours of earth to work with – ochres, reddy browns, clay yellows, silty greys. The sprawling complex of buildings that she could see from her vantage point dropped away in the south to the landward city walls. To the north, had she been able to see it from the balcony, the view was across rooftops all the way down to the docks and the coast. The wealthy quarter of the city was in the west where they could enjoy evening breezes; the poor lived in their maze of streets and alleys on the eastern slopes where the sun would wake them early.
She was reminded of Makamba, the place she had come nearest to thinking of as home. Mud-brick buildings, hot desert air carrying the blended aromas of ten thousand cooking fires, quiet afternoons and the whole place coming alive in the evening with lamps burning in the souks and alleyways; a roofscape that called out to be explored. Makamba, she added to herself, before the Occassans invaded and tore it apart in their search for her and the treasure she wore. She wondered how the city was faring, unconsciously fingering her pendant through the thin cloth of her tunic.
A faint movement of air made the cat sneeze. It cost a lot that breeze. Not as much as it would have in one of the shady, north-facing rooms up here on the top floor, but expensive enough. Too expensive. She turned and stepped back into the room. The cat jumped down from its perch on the balcony wall and followed her, waiting patiently until it was let out. It went and sat on the landing and had started washing behind one ear as she closed the door.
‘It’s always me, isn’t it,’ she said.
Alltud barely moved. ‘Well, who else is going to do it? I can’t think of any other way round this, and you know what I’m like with heights.’
The feeble, carmine ghost of the hot, dry breeze strayed in from the opening to the balcony. It made it halfway through the small room before it expired, leaving a tiny cloud of ochre dust to sift down to the bare boards. Jeniche watched it before she turned to the washstand and picked up the ewer.
Water splashed and formed complex wave patterns as it filled the wide, shallow bowl. She dipped one corner of her keffiyeh in the tepid liquid and squeezed the cloth lightly, dust washing away from the cinnamon flesh of her scarred fingers. After she had wiped her face and cropped raven hair, she stared at the faint muddy stains on the cloth with a resigned shaking of the head. The stuff got everywhere. She was not vain, but she liked to keep clean. Water, though, cost money. Especially here. Especially now.
‘Could we not, just once, do something that involves me sitting in the shade outside a tavern with my feet up while it’s you risking your neck?’
She turned and paced with silent steps along the narrow space to the other end of their room. It didn’t take long.
Alltud, sitting on his bed, had long since stopped watching her go back and forth. The constant movement of her diminutive form was too wearing, had started to make him feel queasy.
‘That won’t get us out of this predicament,’ he said to his hands where they clutched his knees.
Jeniche shrugged, her back to him.
He saw the twitch of her shoulders from the corner of his eye and his hands tightened their grip. ‘I’m not doing this on purpose, you know.’
‘No?’ she asked, turning.
‘It’s not my fault our money’s gone.’
‘Really? Stay in a cheap tavern, I said. More than once. Down by the harbour. Plenty there to choose from. But, no, you said. If we are looking for well-paid work, we need to keep up a front. Look respectable. But there isn’t any work, is there? Not up here. Not anywhere. Not for strangers, anyway. Not for outsiders. We’ve had that made clear enough on more than one occasion. Too many displaced people drifting in from the south with their families and not enough trade. Not enough goods coming up from wherever it is all those people have abandoned.’ She was back at the open doorway to the balcony long before she had finished.
‘I wasn’t to know that. Any more than you did.’
‘So, instead of having several more weeks to look for work or decide to move on, we’re here. In our fine little room. Putting on a front. But now we’ve nothing left to pay for our time here and virtually nothing left for buying food. And your answer? You want me to climb down a sheer mud wall. In the dark. With all our gear. While you saunter out the front door as if you owned the place. And then we go sneaking off in the night.’
Alltud looked up from his hands and surveyed their lodgings. Given how basic the room was – four square and simple, just big enough for a solid lockable door, two beds, a washstand, a lamp, a balcony, and room to pace up and down – it was difficult to imagine how bad a cheaper lodging could have been. Difficult, but not impossible. They had done cheap. They had done filthy. This was quiet, clean, secure and relatively cool at night. He didn’t regret the decision and Jeniche hadn’t fought that hard against it at the time. But he wasn’t going to bring that up. He didn’t have the energy. He didn’t have the heart.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I really am sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen.’
Jeniche turned in the balcony doorway and glared into the room. ‘I’m tired of it. I don’t like cheating people. It’s all wrong. And you needn’t look at me like that. Yes, I was a thief. And a good one. But I only stole from those who could afford to lose it. And I only did it to survive.’
‘What about that place in the south of Kamar? Oh, come on; don’t put on an expression of outraged innocence. I know you too well. Besides, it doesn’t suit you.’
‘I had nothing to do with that. I had very little to do with…’ She shrugged as she passed him on the way to the other end of the room. ‘All right,’ she added as she turned. ‘So I redistributed his wealth a bit. But that’s just my point. He was a bastard. Cheated his customers, including us, and treated his staff like something you’d step in after the cattle had been driven through. Which is why I don’t want to run out on this one.’
‘We don’t have much choice.’
She leaned against the wall by the washstand and rubbed her eyes. ‘Well at least you’ll look after your purse more carefully in future.’
Alltud looked up at the ceiling, perhaps well beyond. ‘I knew you’d bring that into it.’
‘Well, you had the rent money,’ she said, ‘and you would insist on taking it everywhere in that fat, fancy, tempting purse. I told you to keep it out of sight, but no. And some light-fingered guttersnipe gave up resisting the temptation. Which is pretty much the reason you are now proposing I climb out in the dark.’
She pushed away from the wall.
‘Be that as it… Would you stop!’
She stopped.
‘We couldn’t have left earlier,’ he continued. ‘Wherever we had stayed. Nobody was going anywhere during that latest storm. Nothing left the harbour and no one was venturing out on the roads. Besides. Where would we go?’
Jeniche looked down at him with a frown and wiped her face again. ‘I thought you wanted to go south,’ she said.
‘Only because you did.’
‘Me? When did I say that?’
‘You’re the one that suggested that boat out of Haynja.’ He looked up, her frown mirrored on his face.
‘Only because I thought that gang from Kamar had caught up with us and it was the only boat taking on crew that didn’t look like it would infect us with something deadly before it sank and drowned us. What are you sighing for?’
‘Nothing.’
Jeniche shook her head slowly and went back out onto the balcony. She rested her forearms on the balustrade and closed her eyes for a moment, aware of the deep ache in her limbs. They had been bickering all through the afternoon heat when everyone else, at least anyone who had any sense, was resting or sleeping. The whole thing had been conducted in angry whispers, like sparring snakes. Quite aside from the fact it was far too hot to engage in an all-out shouting match, they were anxious to avoid drawing attention to themselves. At least that had gone in their favour.
She leaned out over the mud wall at the end of the balcony to get the benefit of the faint stirring of air before it expired. From there she could see four floors down to the narrow, crooked alley that ran along the side and back of their lodging house. Out of habit, she looked for a route down. She had done it as soon as they had arrived a fortnight before. Checked that the locking bar on the door worked and couldn’t be opened from outside; checked for ledges and handholds on this outside wall. Had ambled out into the alley and looked it over from ground level. But it was as well to be certain. There might not be time to think about it when she made the climb later on. As she knew she would.
When she eventually stepped back into the room, Alltud was still sitting on his bed, only now he was staring at the floor between his feet. His hands, which had been resting on his knees, were otherwise occupied – holding up his head.
For the first time it really struck her just how grey his hair had become, how white his six-day growth of beard. And it wasn’t desert dust. That and the fact his once-rangy figure now simply looked half-starved drew the fire from her frustrated anger. She felt her own bone-deep tiredness again. Alltud looked every day of his fifty or so years. She was in her early thirties, as best as she could calculate, but with all the aches and pains she might just as well be the same age as him.
‘“Anywhere green,”’ he said, ‘“with a flagon of good white wine, fresh bread, a mature cheese, sweet apples and students courteous enough not to pester me while I doze.” Remember that?’ he asked and looked up, slowly straightening his back.
She managed a flat smile and nodded.
‘I’m feeling my age, Jen,’ he went on, as if he had read her mind. ‘It’s been two years or more since we left Ynysvron.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Nearly three. It was fun at first. I had finally achieved the goal of uniting the tribes and sending the Gwerin back to where they belong. Something I could not have done without you. We had no worries. There were new places to explore. But… I don’t know. The shine has worn off. We’ve been lost many more times than once, herded pigs, watched sheep, chased bandits, been chased by bandits, mistaken for bandits, dug ditches, dug graves, fought with considerable reluctance in three grubby little wars, marched who knows where with another army only to find the fighting was over, planted potatoes, planted cabbages, picked apples, been in far too many boats and bug-infested taverns, climbed too many high places and seen enough blasted ruins to last a dozen lifetimes. And do you know? I’m tired. Fed up with wandering in to villages and towns I don’t know, wondering what sort of welcome we’ll face; being cold, getting wet, going hungry. And all that walking. Now this. No money. No prospect of work. I don’t want to end up a mad old beggar on the streets of some dusty town where I don’t even know how to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to the natives. I don’t want to die alone in some desert or get cut down in someone else’s war. I’m sorry, Jen, but I want to go home.’
Exhausted, she sat on her own bed, facing him. ‘You too?’
Chapter Two
Embraced by the hot, starless night, Jeniche sat in the dark and relaxed for the first time in… She tried to remember the last time she had really been at her ease and thought of the sunshine on the stable roof by the Great Hall in Gwydr. Despite the many hardships and bloody battles in Ynysvron, the northern homeland of Alltud, it was the aftermath she remembered best; the spring weather, watching them tear down the Great Hall which had been too stained with blood ever to use again, watching them rebuild it as the country knitted itself back together. It seemed a lifetime ago, sitting up there admiring her new boots and wondering what life would bring next. Now she knew.
Knees up, back wedged into the corner of the balcony walls, the sounds of the city at work, the voices calling, laughter and song, the tantalising smells of jostling humanity that reached through the stale air… all drew her from her reverie. Her stomach rumbled as she caught a hint of spices, of something frying. Perhaps later.
For now, she was alone. Alltud had gone. The door was locked. And their packs kept her company where she sat in the darkness on the balcony. Listening. Waiting for Alltud’s signal.
She allowed herself a smile, thinking back to the first time she had come across him, all those years ago in Makamba, the night the Occassans invaded. It had been dark then as well, death dropping from the sky, the only light from burning banners and buildings.
His voice had emerged from the darkness of an alley where she was sheltering for a moment. Having just escaped from prison she had been wary. He had sounded drunk. Had smelt disgusting. Not a promising start. Especially as the legs she had fallen over had been those of a corpse. One day she would ask him about that. One day.
Someone was whistling in the alley below. It was a melancholy tune, a traditional song of Ynysvron. There were words, something about the road that takes you away being the same one that will lead you home. Alltud had been singing it quietly to himself a lot of late. Time to move. She hoped there wasn’t a corpse this time.
Leaning over the mud-brick balustrade, she looked down into the alley. With eyes long accustomed to the gloom she could just make out the shape of a figure standing directly beneath. She waved and the whistling repeated softly again.
Happy that it was Alltud, she found his pack and the end of the cord to which it was attached. They couldn’t afford any rope, so Jeniche had gone out and helped herself to a length of washing line. It probably wasn’t long enough, but it would have to do. She pushed Alltud’s pack off the edge and heard bits of grit tick and clack as they fell.
Taking the strain, she lowered the pack, keeping it away from the wall so that it didn’t make any noise. Not for the first time she wondered what he kept in there that was so heavy. Even now when he had all his travelling clothes on.
The line ran out and the pack had not reached the ground. Looking over again and listening to be certain no one else was about, she let go. A second’s silence was followed by a muffled thud and an equally muffled grunt that might just have been an obscenity. Alltud had broken its fall. She grinned for a moment and then remembered it was her turn.
In the dark she put on the harness that held her swords and buckled it tight. She followed it with her pack, adjusting the straps so it was comfortably settled and her arms were free. As a last, almost reflex, action she reached back, drew her swords, and swivelled them once to get the feel of them, enjoying the way they managed to find light to reflect even in this starless gloom. They were back in their scabbards in an instant and she climbed over the balustrade, placing her feet on the ledge on the other side.
From the first she knew that what should have been a simple climb was going to be difficult. Every little foot and handhold was piled with dust. Fine dust that was slick and made it difficult to get a decent purchase. Even on the comparatively broad ledge on the outside of the balustrade, she lost her footing. The toe of her boot seemed secure, but as soon as she put her whole weight on it to move to the next hold, she felt it begin to slide.
With a secure handhold, she let it go and shifted her weight. At least it was dust and could be brushed away. If it had rained, this stuff would have set solid and made the climb impossible. Instead it was just dangerous. But she had grown used to that over the years.
So, rather than a straightforward descent that should have taken no more than a couple of minutes, she had to scrape carefully at each crevice and protuberance to clear away as much dust as possible. Handholds were easy. Her boots, however, were not designed for it.
Halfway down, a figure appeared on the balcony just below her level. Light glimmered faintly from a lamp inside the room, painting a vague outline of someone taking what little air there was to be had. There was a voice from inside and the person on the balcony replied.
Jeniche clung as best she could to the wall. Her left hand was twisted with the fingertips jammed into a shallow vertical crack. Her left foot seemed to be resting on thin air and prayers to whatever gods were listening. It wasn’t the fall that worried her so much as being discovered.
The person on the balcony rested themselves on the parapet as if settling for a while, but the voice from inside must have called them in because they stood, turned, and disappeared. A moment later, the lamp went out.
Without waiting to see what happened next, Jeniche continued down. She hadn’t gone much further when a substantial foothold broke away from the wall and she fell amidst a shower of grit and dust.
Braced for impact with the hard ground, her fall was broken by something marginally softer that prompted, in an urgent undertone, what were definitely obscenities, a lot of them, not to mention the inventive string of imprecations hurled against her parentage, intelligence, and general behaviour.
Pushed to one side, she rolled onto the packed earth of the alley and sprang to her feet.
Alltud stood as well and brushed dust from his clothes. ‘Anything else you’d care to drop on me? I’ll be black and blue for weeks.’
Smiling to herself, Jeniche grabbed his sleeve and pulled him along toward the rear of the building.
‘I’m fine. Thanks for asking. Someone is leaving by the front,’ she added when Alltud grunted. ‘Best if we cut through this way for now.’
‘Do you know where…?’ he began. ‘Silly question.’
Letting himself be dragged along, he followed her through the maze of shadowy alleys that cut between the backs of the buildings. What little light there was filtered through thin curtains, shutters, and the open doorways of houses and taverns. Conversation and cooking smells filled the space and reminded them both that a meal was long overdue.
