Poison Sleep by T. A. Pratt Page B

keep enough money to be comfortable. Retirement was unlikely, though. Most chief sorcerers didn’t retire to anyplace but the grave.
    “You can play it like chess,” Ted said, setting up the pieces. “The chariots are rooks, the elephants are bishops, the vizier is a queen, the soldiers are pawns, the horses are knights. The rules of chatrang are different, but not as much fun, honestly. Would you like to play?”
    “I do like the game,” Marla admitted. “But I’m not very good. I don’t get to practice much.” Rondeau didn’t have the attention span to play without getting bored and wandering off halfway through, and Hamil refused to play chess. His powers of sympathetic magic made it dangerous for him to play games. If he started to lose at a chess game, his real-life fortunes might fall in tandem. Marla’s old mentor, Artie Mann, had taught her the game, but he hadn’t been very good, either. He used to tell Marla it didn’t matter—”Even Napoleon Bonaparte was a lousy chess player!” he’d exclaim each time she toppled his king, as if by losing at chess he was practically imperial himself.
    “I used to teach chess club at a high school before my…fortunes fell,” Ted said. “But a lot of the kids were better than me, so don’t worry.”
    “All right, we can play while we wait for the food to get here,” Marla said. Why not? Maybe it would distract her from thoughts of Genevieve. And the impending division of Susan Wellstone’s property. And her inappropriate and magically motivated attraction to Joshua Kindler. And rogue slow assassins wandering her city. And all the other bullshit.
    Marla played white, in her usual aggressive, hack-and-slash style, but before long she found herself pinned down across the board by a fence of Ted’s pawns, all backed up with other pieces and limiting her movements, pushing her into a corner of the board, sniping at her pieces and whittling down her defense steadily. As they played, Ted told her a little about the history of the game; annoyingly, his little history lesson didn’t seem to impede him when it came to kicking her ass. He checkmated her, and she scowled. “Another game,” she said, and he agreed. This time she started killing his pawns right away, and when the food came, Marla paid the delivery guy impatiently.
    She was so into the game that she almost forgot about the vial Langford had given her. She took a moment to open up the boxes and pour the cancer cure into Ted’s food, knocking a few drops into her own as well—it couldn’t hurt. Then she hurried back to the board, eating while Ted concentrated on his moves. He didn’t seem to notice any odd taste in his own food, which was good. No need to tell him he was sick. It would require too much effort to explain at this point—better if he just started to feel better, and never knew why.
    Marla was concentrating on setting up a sweet fork with her knight, hoping to make Ted sacrifice his rook to save his queen, but somehow he wiggled a bishop down the far side of the board and got her in check. In two more moves she was doomed. She tipped her king over to concede defeat and started in on an egg roll. “You’re good at this, Ted.”
    “You’re a very romantic player.”
    She lifted her eyebrow. “I’ve been called a lot of things, Ted, but ‘romantic’ isn’t usually one of them.”
    “I mean the romantic school of chess. The earliest grandmasters played in the romantic style. They set traps, used pieces cleverly in combination to attack, and made bold sacrifices to gain advantage. They valued beautiful moves over winning. If you were playing in the nineteenth century, you’d be considered very good, I think. But that style was supplanted by positional chess, where control of the board is more important. It’s a slower, less dramatic way to play, but a positional player can almost always beat a romantic. That’s the only reason I won. I don’t claim to have a deep understanding