The mechanical effigy of Pallin was sombre as she seated herself before the board, suggesting that new crises were to be unfolded. She might have shown some visceral joy at her new incarnation, but now it seemed like a mockery. Once, often, many times she had indulged herself in drink to remind herself that there were more immediate and practical fulfillments than hope, but she ignored the flasks of liquor. on offer. The game was her object and if she was trapped in the paradox of facility and emptiness, then she knew that she might find her way free through its own complicated paths. She seated herself and arranged the folds of the robe about her new contours in a way that she hoped was flattering and fingered the rosary nervously before putting it aside. She had tried to make a joke of things, but the black urn sat there scolding her with its silence.

What did that mean? Meaning seemed to radiate from it like invisible light, but she could not read it. She had wanted, when she awoke the first time, to live forever in blissful anomie, but that was not to be. The urn represented a silence that must be unlocked and Pallin was the closest she had to a key.

“Tell me of these things,” she demanded as the game began. “The Watchers, the Eaters, the web, the eye of the storm, the knot, the sea.”

“Your courting.”

“Ah.” She thought of the processions where she had been the garnished centerpiece. “I was made Queen on the cycles of misrule and Queen and court are made as spoke and wheel,” she said, amused at her pun and thinking it profound. “Is that not true?” Even as she spoke it sounded glib. “You were proud, you were cruel; a bouquet was offered and you threw it upon the ground and cried aloud.” “So I turned about?”

“Yes.”

“Hmmm. Tell me of my suitors. I remember my mortal ones: Metenn, Galen… others.”

“Scyrr.”

A discordant note in the melody of names. Meyr felt a twist of recognition somewhere and nodded. “Ah, yes. A suitor of a kind. I remember… certain events.” Images flickered by, connecting to each other in random order: dancers, bees, flowers, butterflies, droplets of red wine spilled from a silver chalice as it was flung into an abyss. These were all beautiful bright, glittering motes of colour caught up in something vaster than themselves and over them a pair of black eyes hung like a double moon; black eyes reflecting stars lost from an empty sky. “So, the Watcher…”

“Yes.”

She leant and spread her fingers over the board, looming a little like a Watcher herself. A roll of flesh in her lap brushed against her thighs and she scratched an imaginary itch. The new weight of her breasts dragged at her ribcage – two white moons, ha! The board presented a bleak map, perhaps, but there is an analogy of fertility in this, she told herself. “Fascination… an offering.”

“Yes.”

Meyr moved a few pieces and turned wheels that shifted blocks of the board about, seemingly and then truly at random. She slouched back and drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. Something did not fit. “My piece does not match my moves,” she grumbled.

“No, it does not.”

She looked quizzically at the bust on its pedestal. “You are a machine and yet I detect a very human note of understatement in your tone. I think that there may be more to be said.”

“If not insolence, my Lady?”

“Oh, am I your lady?”

“You have ritual and real suitors, Meyr. Perhaps you should select an appropriate piece.”

Her forefinger hovered over a selection of pieces. Now which one would it be? The bride? The maiden? Either choice would be a reactive one, a response to an external challenge. “Ah, dear Pallin, I suspect that you have just manoeuvred me…”

“Manoeuvred but not mated perhaps.”

She gave him a sharp glance and leant over her pieces again. “I will remain the maiden, I think. Divinity is described, possession assumed, but I will make the other players at this table wait yet.”

“They refuse to wait, Meyr.”

“I know,” she said.