Free The Fire by Katherine Neville Page A

he stepped over the threshhold, he was shaking loose snow from the high fur collar of his coat. His eyes met mine, and he smiled – a cold smile, a smile filled with danger. It was no more than an instant before I understood why.
    Standing there before me, in my mother’s isolated mountain retreat, as if we two were completely alone in time and space, was the man who had killed my father.
    The boy who had won the Last Game. Vartan Azov.

Black and White
    It is here that the symbolism of black and white, already present in the squares of the chess board, takes on its full value: the white army is that of light, the black army is that of darkness…each of which is fighting in the name of a principle, or that of the spirit and darkness in man; these are the two forms of the “holy war ” : the “lesser holy war” and the “greater holy war,” according to a saying of the prophet Mohammed…
    In a holy war it is possible that each of the combatants may legitimately consider himself as the protagonist of Light fighting the darkness. This again is the conse-quence of the double meaning of every symbol: what for one is the expression of the Spirit, may be the image of dark “matter” in the eyes of the other.
    – Titus Burckhardt, The Symbolism of Chess
    Everything looks worse in black and white.
    – Paul Simon, Kodachrome
    Time had stopped. I was lost.
    My eyes were locked with those of Vartan Azov – dark purple, nearly black, and bottomless as a pit. I could see those eyes as they gazed at me across a chessboard. When I was a child of eleven, his eyes hadn’t frightened me. Why should they terrify me now?
    Yet I could feel myself slipping down – a kind of vertigo, as if I were sliding into a deep, dark hole where there was no way out. Just as I’d experienced so many years ago, in that one awful instant in the game when I’d understood what I had done. I could feel my father then, watching me from across that room as I had slowly plummeted into psychological space, out of control, falling and falling – like that boy with wings who’d flown too near the sun.
    Vartan Azov’s eyes were unblinking now, as always, as he stood there in my mudroom looking over the heads of Lily and Nokomis, looking directly at me as if we were completely alone, as if there were only the two of us in the world, in an intimate dance. With the black-and-white squares of a chessboard in between. What game had we been playing then? What game were we playing now?
    ‘You know what they say,’ Nokomis announced, breaking the spell as she tilted her head toward Vartan and Lily. ‘Politics makes strange bedfellows.’
    She’d kicked off her boots, tossed off her parka, yanked off her cap – releasing that waterfall of black hair that tumbled to her waist – and she was marching from the mudroom past me in her stocking feet. She plopped down on the hearth wall, shot me a wry smile, and added, ‘Or perhaps the motto of the United States Marine Corps?’
    ‘‘Many are called but few are chosen’?’ I guessed gamely, knowing my friend’s compulsive predilection for epigrammatizing. I actually felt relieved, for once, to play her game. But she could tell by my face that something was not as it seemed.
    ‘Nope,’ she said with raised brow. ‘ ‘We’re just looking for a few good men.’ ‘
    ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ asked Lily as she stepped into the room. She had stripped to her skintight ski outfit, which clung to every curve.
    ‘Consorting with the enemy,’ I suggested, indicating Vartan. I grabbed Lily by the arm, took her aside, and hissed, ‘Have you blanked out all of the past? What were you thinking, bringing him along? Besides, he’s young enough to be your son!’
    ‘Grandmaster Azov is my protégé,’ Lily announced indignantly.
    ‘Is that what they’re calling them these days?’ I cited Key’s earlier observation.
    Pretty unlikely, since Lily and I both knew that Azov’s ELO ranking was two