"Well," Ajayi said, leaving the open entrance to the balcony as a light wind picked up and blew a small flurry of snow around her booted feet, "at least the game's over."

"I thought we had a stalemate." Quiss seemed to be addressing the table, not his opponent. "We had an agreement."

"It was quicker this way." Ajayi sat down on the small stool on the other side of the table. Light from the ceiling moved uncertainly over the carved wood Quiss was still staring at. Ajayi looked at her companion's face in the dimness. Quiss had a broad, dark grey face, covered with mottled black and white hair. His eyes looked small and yellow, set in a tracery of deepening lines which seemed to radiate from his eyes like waves in a small still pool. He still did not look at her, so she shook her head slowly, resignedly, and looked about the room.

It was long and wide and very dark, with many pillars. Most of the light came from the openings onto the balcony. There should have been light from above and below, but in fact there was almost none, and it was partly because of that, and because it was also rather colder than it had to be, that Quiss had set off something like an hour before to find some of the castle's attendants. He was supposed to have asked politely for more heat up on their level, but from what he'd said Ajayi suspected he had been his usual brusque and threatening self. She would have gone herself, but her leg was stiff and sore again and she wasn't sure she would have been able to manage the stairs.

She looked up at the ceiling, where one of the room's many odd columns flared into the flat, thick, pale green glass. A single sinuous shape, shedding milky light, moved in the cold, murky water overhead.