Declare

Seven-card-stud, high-low declare—the high hand wins Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga, the low hand wins the amomon procedure.” He held up his hand. “And—all three of the roots you brought are part of the amomon unit, and go in the pot. I know you brought one for yourself too, and one for Elena.”
    Philby was right, of course, beyond plausible contradiction— Hale had hidden two other inhabited roots in the journalists’ hotel in the Sad Sam.
    “Yes,” he admitted.
    Hale kept the angry frown on his face as he pressed the handkerchief to his scalp. But this was a rout. He had hoped to exchange one of the magical thistle roots for the diamond, and then go away on his own to meet Elena; now, though, the jewel seemed to be a lost cause, and it looked as though he’d be lucky just to be able to be the one to meet Elena! And Philby had cut a piece out of his scalp! For the first time, Hale had some professional respect for Philby as an agent-runner.
    Hale must at least seem passionately to want the amomon, for the sake of letting Philby seem to have won something by taking all three of the roots; but of course in the end Hale would declare high. He had brought along the two other amomon roots simply because he’d had them, and they had value; and because it had seemed too high-handed for Hale to decide, for Elena, that she did not want to avail herself of the magical longevity the amomon offered.
    But he was sure she would reject the option. She was, after all, a practicing Catholic, as Hale had been himself now for more than a year, and taking immortality from a fallen angel was hardly in accord with Catholic doctrine.
    In fact, Elena would almost certainly reject Hale, if he approached her in the cathedral. And the djinn-thistle, supplemented with Maly’s instructions, would probably give him genuine immortality, if he won it.
    Suddenly, sickeningly, Hale was very far from sure that he did not want to be the one to win the amomon .
    “You want,” he said carefully, “to deal a hand of—”
    “No, my boy, that would call for fresh rules, fresh definitions! Wild cards, cut-for-the-deal, dealer’s choice, no end of arguments! No, I simply want to finish the hand that was interrupted by the earthquake in 1948. Here are cards, here are the players—here’s the church and here’s the steeple, open the doors and see Elena! If you won’t play, if you forfeit the game, you lose —and I’ll at least be the one to go meet Elena in an hour, and I’ll have a good try too at getting the KGB to wring the dubok location out of you.”
    Hale’s forehead was chilly with a dew of sweat. “But those cards were scattered.”
    “I remember mine. And I remember what you were showing on the board—a three, seven, ten, and nine, of different suits. Do you remember?”
    Actually, Hale did remember the hand, with hallucinatory clarity; he remembered too the rain drumming on the corrugated steel roof of the little war-surplus Anderson bomb shelter, and the tan woolen Army blankets, and the bottle of Macallan Scotch that they had rolled back and forth between them. “Yes. And you were showing an Ace, four, six, and eight; the six and the eight were diamonds. But are we to— trust each other, to choose the same hole cards we held then?”
    “That’s an insulting remark from an Oxford man to a Cambridge man. And in any case it’s high-low—unless one of us declares both ways, each of us gets half the pot. The girl—or life everlasting.” Philby stretched, yawning. “I wonder if she’s kept her looks, our Elena? The white hair fetched me, I must say.” He smacked his lips and blinked at Hale. “You could probably kill me, right now—the old Fort Monkton skills—but of course then you’d never see Maly’s instructions. And I took the Fort Monkton course too, remember, and I do have my little knife.”
    It was riskier than Philby had said. The ranks of the hands would be almost superfluous, since Philby would certainly choose new hole cards to maximally improve his own hand in one direction or the other, high or low, and he would assume that Hale would do the same—it would be more important here to guess which way the other man would declare.
    Philby leaned back and spoke into the sky: “ ‘We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,’ ” he said, reciting from Chesterton’s Lepanto now, “ ‘of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done.’ ” He smiled at Hale. “That will