Czernobog raised a craggy eyebrow. “Your master wants me to come with him. To help him with his nonsense. I would rather die.”
“You want to bet? Okay. If I win, you come with us.”
The old man pursed his lips. “Perhaps,” he said. “But only if you take my forfeit, when you lose.”
“And that would be?”
There was no change in Czernobog’s expression. “If I win, I get to knock your brains out. With the sledgehammer. First you go down on your knees. Then I hit you a blow with it, so you don’t get up again.” Shadow looked at the man’s old face, trying to read him. He was not joking, Shadow was certain of that: there was a hunger there for something, for pain, or death, or retribution.
Wednesday closed the Reader’s Digest. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “I was wrong to come here. Shadow, we’re leaving.” The gray cat, disturbed, got to its feet and stepped onto the table beside the checkers game. It stared at the pieces, then leapt down onto the floor and, tail held high, it stalked from the room.
“No,” said Shadow. He was not scared of dying. After all, it was not as if he had anything to live for. “It’s fine. I accept. If you win the game, you get the chance to knock my brains out with one blow of your sledgehammer,” and he moved his next white piece to the adjoining square on the edge of the board.
Nothing more was said, but Wednesday did not pick up his Reader’s Digest again. He watched the game with his glass eye and his true eye, with an expression that betrayed nothing.
Czernobog took another of Shadow’s pieces. Shadow took two of Czernobog’s. From the corridor came the smell of unfamiliar foods cooking. While not all of the smells were appetizing, Shadow realized suddenly how hungry he was.
The two men moved their pieces, black and white, turn and turnabout. A flurry of pieces taken, a blossoming of two-piece-high kings: no longer forced to move only forward on the board, a sideways slip at a time, the kings could move forward or back, which made them doubly dangerous. They had reached the farthest row, and could go where they wanted. Czernobog had three kings, Shadow had two.
Czernobog moved one of his kings around the board, eliminating Shadow’s remaining pieces, while using the other two kings to keep Shadow’s kings pinned down.
And then Czernobog made a fourth king, and returned down the board to Shadow’s two kings, and, unsmiling, took them both. And that was that.
“So,” said Czernobog. “I get to knock out your brains. And you will go on your knees willingly. Is good.” He reached out an old hand, and patted Shadow’s arm with it.
“We’ve still got time before dinner’s ready,” said Shadow. “You want another game? Same terms?”
Czernobog lit another cigarette, from a kitchen box of matches. “How can it be same terms? You want I should kill you twice?”
“Right now, you have one blow, that’s all. You told me yourself that it’s not just strength, it’s skill too. This way, if you win this game, you get two blows to my head.”
Czernobog glowered. “One blow, is all it takes, one blow. That is the art.” He patted his upper right arm, where the muscles were, with his left, scattering gray ash from the cigarette in his left hand.
“It’s been a long time. If you’ve lost your skill you might simply bruise me. How long has it been since you swung a killing hammer in the stockyards? Thirty years? Forty?”
Czernobog said nothing. His closed mouth was a gray slash across his face. He tapped his fingers on the wooden table, drumming out a rhythm with them. Then he pushed the twenty-four checkers back to their home squares on the board.
“Play,” he said. “Again, you are light. I am dark.”
Shadow pushed his first piece out. Czernobog pushed one of his own pieces forward. And it occurred to Shadow that Czernobog was going to try to play the same game again, the one that he had just won, that this would be his limitation.
This time Shadow played recklessly. He snatched tiny opportunities, moved without thinking, without a pause to consider. And this time, as he played, Shadow smiled; and whenever Czernobog moved a piece, Shadow smiled wider.
Soon, Czernobog was slamming his pieces down as he moved them, banging them down on the wooden tabl
e so hard that the remaining pieces shivered on their black squares.
“There,” said Czernobog, taking one of Shadow’s men with a crash, slamming the black piece down. “There. What do you say to that?”
Shadow said nothing: he simply smiled, and jumped the piece that Czernobog had put down, and another, and another, and a fourth, clearing the center of the board of black pieces. He took a white piece from the pile beside the board and kinged his man.
After that, it was just a mopping-up exercise: another handful of moves, and the game was done.
Shadow said, “Best of three?”
Czernobog simply stared at him, his gray eyes like points of steel. And then he laughed, clapped his hands on Shadow’s shoulders. “I like you!” he exclaimed. “You have balls.”
Then Zorya Utrennyaya put her head around the door to tell them that dinner was ready, and they should clear their game away and put the tablecloth down on the table.