On the other hand… Edie grinned tautly, recalling Mrs. Sekuni: Cheat, Edie. Cheating is much better than skill. Great skill improves your chances. Great cheating guarantees victory, which is why it is called cheating. And some people are so horrified by it that it is an advantage in itself.
“You’ve picked up a rummy habit,” James Banister said cordially as they approached one another. “Sort of a crouch. You look a bit… well, I’m sorry, but you look a bit Victor Hugo, if you catch my drift. Would you like to adjourn to a cathedral or something?”
“By all means, Commander, do amuse yourself while you can. I owe these scars to you, after all. You should get some satisfaction from them. Although I am depressed to see such a dear enemy giggling like a girl at a soldier’s wounds.”
Gotcha, Edie thought. Of course.
“Shem Shem Tsien,” she told the Opium Khan in her own voice, “I laugh because I am tired of you. I cannot imagine that you aren’t bored with yourself. There’s very little about this which is clever or funny. With all that’s going on in the world, with all that is possible and wonderful, this is what you do. You’re a sideshow. A hack. A waste of time.” His eyes bulged in absolute, stunned fury. Edie unbuttoned her shirt and opened it, baring a proud—if slight and somewhat foxed—bosom to his view.
Shem Shem Tsien himself was silent with what Edie took to be actual amazement. When he spoke, it was with a genuine, unaffected truthfulness. First real moment of communication we’ve ever had, Edie thought.
“Oh,” the Opium Khan said. “I honestly had no idea.” Then he swung at her, not to kill but to erase, and they were back on familiar ground.
She taunted him, drew him out into the open, keeping the wind at her back. It cut through her jacket and made her shiver, but it was in his eyes, and the ice on the ground made the fight a matter of footwear as much as skill. Edie was wearing steel toe–capped boots with discreet metal studs, the better to emphasise her masculinity and conceal her relatively small feet, and also because she liked unfair advantages. The Opium Khan, fresh from the gambling tables, wore dinner shoes. She attacked, and he slid towards her with that familiar ghastly smoothness, then lost his grip, skittering and sliding on the frozen stones while he wrenched his upper body around to guard against her. She threw a rusted iron chain at him, then followed it to drive her forehead into his face and grapple with him as bluntly and brutally as she knew how. Shem Shem Tsien, with his nose squashed to one side and his fine moustache clogged with blood, looked quite amazed. Edie took advantage of his hesitation and applied Mrs. Sekuni’s sixth wrist-lock, a working man’s pugilism which lacked elegance but got the job done, and cut off one of his fingers with his own knife. He lost the fight, but she couldn’t bring him down, and he fled. Even so, Edie had the sense that Shem Shem Tsien was having fun. To her this was work, and very hard. He was playing out his passage to godhood, and he enjoyed hurting people.
In April the North Atlantic Treaty was signed, and Moscow fumed. Abel Jasmine moved Frankie’s laboratory to the Lovelace and kept it moving, effectively making her disappear. Shem Shem Tsien faded away into Europe’s shadows, one more hateful little bastard in a forest of them. Edie could almost hear him shouting “You haven’t heard the last of me!” in the darkness of the winter sea.
And that much, at least, was certain. Nine years later, Edie stood on the lip of a chasm and stared downwards. She had battled with Shem Shem Tsien across the world, and it never changed or got any better. He did something awful, she went and tidied up; in Rome, in Kiev, in Havana. They fought on boats and in caves, on the roofs of houses and in alleyways. Sometimes one or other of them had an army, sometimes they were alone. It went on and on and it never settled anything. Shem Shem Tsien didn’t change, didn’t learn, did not accept that the new age had no space for him. Her body was a dictionary of woundings now, courtesy of his impossible speed, and she had learned to distract him, harry him, cheat him of her own death by guile. Once or twice, on good days, she had even survived him by skill. She tried not to think about how their addiction to this private, predictable conflict mirrored the ridiculous proxy wars the East and West were fighting with one another.
The wind brought the smell of sulphur and decay to her nostrils, and she gagged.
She was in Addeh Sikkim at the palace of the Opium Khan, except that the citadel was gone, replaced by a giant pit. The water which had powered Frankie’s machines roiled in a simmering lake heated by the Earth, and the whole place was walled and scaffolded in black iron. A pit of industry. A birthplace of monsters. Edie wrapped herself in a local shawl and coat and staggered down with the other women who went to work in the pit. The long circumference road was punctuated with heads on poles. Some were human. Others were elephants, the flesh long gone and the pikes bowed beneath the weight of bone.
At the bottom, Shem Shem Tsien had made a sort of factory and mine combined. Vast presses turned out metal sheets and slaves worked them into parts for mechanical soldiers like the ones Frankie had made. In the very centre, beneath his tents, there was a ring where they were pitted against one another. They were clumsy and hopeless, the same awkward chessmen Edie had seen before, and when he wanted blood, the Opium Khan was obliged to hobble a prisoner or blind him so that the machines could get close enough to strike. And yet, they were improving. Fractionally, painfully, whatever pattern Frankie had created to guide them was refining itself, and when an automaton fell, the animating mechanism was recovered so that it would learn from defeat. Already, they followed his minions around like dogs, lunged at whatever the minion indicated. One day they would work, Edie thought, and hoped she never had to see it.
She took photographs and went to the embassy in Dhaka to report. She was walking to her hotel when Shem Shem Tsien’s car pulled up next to her and the Opium Khan shot her twice in the gut.
“So nice to see you, Commander Banister,” he drawled at her as she bled into the gutter. “I do hope your visit was satisfactory? Are you dying, do you think, or shall we meet again? I should miss our little chats.”
She honestly did not know, and when her vision went grey at the edges and she felt cold, she was terribly, terribly afraid and alone. Shem Shem Tsien got back into his car and drove away, apparently content to leave the decision to Edie. She had no recollection, later, of the long crawl to the ambassador’s residence which stripped the skin from her hands and knees.
Edie woke in a hospital bed, and the first thing she saw was Frankie. She thought Frankie was so beautiful, so perfect, that she started to cry. Frankie stroked her face and told her it was all going to be all right, and Edie wanted to say “I love you.” But she fell asleep.
“Please do not do that again,” Frankie said sternly when Edie woke, “this getting hurt. I do not appreciate it at all. I would not like it at all if you went away and did not come back.”
Edie dutifully promised to try her best. Frankie growled that “try” was synonymous with “fail” and then—when Edie looked crestfallen—immediately apologised and embraced her, very carefully. Later, the nurse came, with a look of deep disapproval, to change Edie’s bandages.