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There are times when she suspects that all the stories about him are true, and that he was made outside of time. Younger than she, yet formidable enough to have once been her mother's right hand. He insinuates as easily as he talks. And he loves to talk.
It is he who suggests the game of chess. The sex earlier was antagonistic, and she accepts, reminding herself that Mr. Sark is no gentleman. He will not play fair if he can help it. Setting the black and white pieces ready in opposition, he starts a casual conversation in Russian, those self-contained eyes challenging her, amused.
"When I was a boy," he says eventually, after rescuing an unguarded bishop. Those words are enough to pull her gaze up, her hand still resting on the pawn on c2.
"I was taken on a wolf hunt, to watch. I was barely six years old. It was the opinion of my father and his associates that the war between man and beast ignites, by its very bloodthirstiness, the brave and noble Russian spirit." Sark pauses to move his queen to the bare edge of defensibility, before picking up his wineglass. "The highlight of that delightful excursion was when one man's rifle discharged accidentally while he was driving the last pair in the pack, and I watched as the bullet took the head of the driver of his snowmobile."
She wipes her palm on the hearthrug, suddenly longing for a drink other than wine, and sets her rook down in front of him. "Check."
"The snow in those forests, Sydney." Deftly, he sacrifices a pawn. "You don't have to imagine. Anyone can be a poet."
"I didn't know you were an environmentalist."
"I believe that nature in the end aborts all our species' hubristic attempts to domineer it. And I never fall into the error of thinking that we can find our worst menace in the Urals, in a Rambaldi device, or in space or chance." With a thin smile Sark takes the last of her knights. "Nature is cruel. But nothing is deadlier or more dangerous than us."
Or me, she thinks. More deadly and dangerous than me. If the prophesy is right.
"You would welcome the apocalypse then, wouldn't you?" she says angrily. "Surely nothing could be more fitting, or right." Her Muscovite accent trips a syllable.
Sark is unreadable. "All men have the equal right to die, but some are more equal than others."
