There was a click, as Czernobog picked up a black piece and jumped it over one of Shadow’s white pieces, placing it on the square on the other side. The old man picked up Shadow’s white piece and put it on the table at the side of the board.
“First blood. You have lost,” said Czernobog. “The game is done.”
“No,” said Shadow. “Game’s got a long way to go yet.”
“Then would you care for a wager? A little side bet, to make it more interesting?”
“No,” said Wednesday, without looking up from a “Humor in Uniform” column. “He wouldn’t.”
“I am not playing with you, old man. I play with him. So, you want to bet on the game, Mister Shadow?”
“What were you two arguing about, before?” asked Shadow.
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 make a 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 is?”
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 getting ridiculous,” he said. “I was wrong to come here. Shadow, we’re leaving.” The gray cat, disturbed, got to its feet and leapt 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 left 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 turn-about. 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 furthest 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 pieces 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 stock-yards? 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 pieces 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 table 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.
“We have no dining room,” she said, “I am sorry. We eat in here.”
Serving dishes were placed on the table. Each of the diners was given a small painted tray on which was some tarnished cutlery, to place on his or her lap.
Zorya Vechernyaya took five wooden bowls and placed an unpeeled boiled potato in each, then ladled in a healthy serving of a ferociously crimson borscht. She plopped a spoonful of white sour cream in, and handed the bowls to each of them.
“I thought there were six of us,” said Shadow.
“Zorya Polunochnaya is still asleep,” said Zorya Vechernyaya. “We keep her food in the refrigerator. When she wakes, she will eat.”
The borscht was vinegary, and tasted like pickled beets. The boiled potato was mealy.
The next course was a leathery pot roast, accompanied by greens of some description—although they had been boiled so long and so thoroughly that they were no longer, by any stretch of the imagination, greens, and were in fact well on their way to becoming browns.
Then there were cabbage leaves stuffed with ground meat and rice, cabbage leaves of such a toughness that they were almost impossible to cut without spattering ground meat and rice all over the carpet. Shadow pushed his around his plate.
“We played checkers,” said Czernobog, hacking himself another lump of pot roast. “The young man and me. He won a game, I won a game. Because he won a game, I have agreed to go with him and Wednesday, and help them in their madness. And because I won a game, when this is all done, I get to kill the young man, with a blow of a hammer.”