The Master Of Misrule Part 10

"What was the Hanged Man's first name?"

Ooh, I don't know ... Harry? said Flora to herself, barely managing to stifle a snort of hysterical laughter. It took a minute or so to compose herself. "The Mas-" she began, and stopped herself just in time. The Hanged Man might be the Master of Misrule now, but that was not what his card used to be called. She had suddenly remembered what Cat had said outside Temple House after they'd seen Misrule in the mirrors, and the nearness of her miss set her trembling. "The Traitor," she answered.

The five heads nodded. "Your answer is accepted." Again, the gong rang. Again, the audience sighed in murmuring relief. Three down, two to go.

"In a game of dice with the Magician," said the fourth Inquisitor, "what would be the odds of you throwing a winning six?"

Flora remembered her meeting with the Magician, with his crooked grin and showman's patter, and smiled. "Zero," she said. "Because he'd have loaded the die."

Boiiing! Her fourth answer had been accepted. Her body tightened in readiness for the final challenge.

"Hear and consider your last question. Which card is the cross sum of Death?"

Flora frowned. Sum implied a mathematical calculation of some sort, and numbers were not Flora's strong point. Her mind was a roaring blank. Come on, come on, she implored herself. Think. Death was the thirteenth triumph.... All right ... so thirteen was an unlucky number.... What other numbers were like that? In the Bible, 666 was the number of the Beast-that is, Satan. And wasn't the Devil the sixteenth triumph? She couldn't remember. But there surely wasn't another card with such close a.s.sociations with Death. "Um ... that would be ... the Devil?" she guessed.

The congregation appeared to be holding its breath. The candles sputtered and the shadows danced.

Then: "Your answer is rejected," all five Inquisitors announced in the same dry voice.

The gong was struck again, but much louder this time, so that the noise clashed and boomed through Flora's head. She had to put her hands up to her ears. They were still ringing when the Inquisitor behind her spoke.

"The Trial by Inquiry has ended in failure. Yet you have one final chance to redeem yourself. It is time for the Trial by Ordeal to commence."

The people in the pews quivered and moaned; a few began to weep. Flora's hand curled fearfully around her ace and die.

The five Inquisitors rose from their seats. At their signal, the soldiers who had been guarding the wooden screen moved it away to reveal that a pyre had been erected in place of the altar. A gagged woman was bound to the stake. Her pale hair was dark with sweat, her white skin greenish with fear. It was Odile, the onetime Queen of Cups.

"Behold the heretic," said one of the robed figures as he lit a taper from one of the candles. "You, though, still have victory in your grasp. All you have to do is take this taper and set the pyre alight."

Flora looked around wildly. "I thought-but isn't-this is my trial-"

"The ordeal by fire is hers. Yours is an ordeal of choice. Or Free Will, if you prefer."

"You want me to choose to burn a woman alive?"

"We want you to prove your dedication to the Game. This is your last chance to win in it."

Odile moaned from under her gag. Flora had to look away. She was here to win on Odile's behalf, and so release her from her punishment. But what if Flora's only way of winning this move was to kill the person she had come to save?

The Five of Pentacles were watching her from under their hoods. The beggarly audience rustled in the pews.

"In our Game," the Inquisitor with the taper said softly, "a true winner knows that it is every player for himself."

"Herself, in this case," said Flora tartly. She had come to a decision. She took the taper, and stooped to put it to the pyre.

The wood was dry, and caught alight quickly. As the first tongues of flame licked delicately at the tinder, the choir began to sing, in darker yet more triumphant tones than before: In altum tollor, Nimis exaltatus; Descendo minoratus, Funditus mortificatus!

Very slowly, the five hooded figures of the Inquisition brought their hands together in stately applause. The soldiers joined in by hammering the b.u.t.ts of their rifles on the floor, while the congregation cowered and wept. Smoke plumed, and as the flames began to crackle and hiss around the Queen of Cups' feet, she writhed hopelessly against her bonds. The gag had slipped, and soon her screams could be heard even over the choir.

Flora tore her ace in half. At once, the Ace of Swords, Root of Air, unleashed a mighty wind that howled down the cavernous length of the building. The Inquisitors' robes whipped around in a flurry of scarlet as the gale sent them and their soldiers in a slithering tumble across the floor. The congregation clutched their pews like half-drowned sailors clinging to a wreck. With a clang, the bronze lectern fell to the ground. Only Flora was still able to stand. Wind roared around the pyre, and for a horrible moment she thought it would fan the flames so that they only flared more strongly. But the tempest was too great for any fire. In a matter of seconds, its flames were blown out, the woman's cries stopped and the building was plunged into darkness.

BLAINE'S NINE OF SWORDS depicted a person hunched on a bed with their hands held fearfully over their eyes, as if waking up from a nightmare. It wasn't nighttime here, though. The window on his left looked over an a.s.sortment of ugly modern offices on a dull afternoon. Below there was a small yard and a Dumpster daubed with a lopsided black wheel on one side. Although Blaine didn't like the look of his card at all, he was slightly rea.s.sured by the sight of a threshold. He felt for his die and was rea.s.sured some more. There would always be a way out.

He walked down the corridor into a lobby. Something about the place reminded him of school. The walls were painted the same sludgy inst.i.tutional beige and the floor was lined with the same scuffed linoleum. But the smell was different: sour and antiseptic, medical.

A hard-faced nurse was sitting at a table in front of a pair of double doors. "Visiting hours are over," she informed him without looking up from her charts.

Blaine set the card down in front of her. Eventually, she condescended to look at it before turning her inspection on him.

"All right. I suppose you'd better come through." She got to her feet, grudgingly, and entered a numeric code in the keypad beside the door. "They're restless this afternoon. Don't say I didn't warn you."

Past the doors, Blaine found himself in a hospital ward. It was more dilapidated than the corridor, with the linoleum stained and curling at the edges, damp patches on the ceiling and rust on the bed frames. All the beds were filled with people sleeping, although, as the nurse had said, there wasn't much rest involved. Most were drooling and muttering, twisting jerkily beneath the bedclothes. One old man near to Blaine began to thrash and shout, and another nurse, with the air of someone repeating a familiar ch.o.r.e, came and emptied a syringe into his neck. The man froze into silence.

Instead of a single person waking from a nightmare, it was a roomful of people in the midst of one. Blaine felt tension hum through his body. But the nurse on duty didn't pay him any attention. Her uniform was soiled, and her yawns were noisy.

The next ward was smaller, and more like a common room, with sagging armchairs grouped to face a television fixed high in a corner of the wall. The patients here were awake but barely conscious, all strapped to their seats and staring listlessly at a TV game show. One of them was the black man, Ahab, who had been King of Wands. His towering stature and grizzled hair were the same, but his expression was vacant as he drooled and mumbled in his chair.

With a shudder, Blaine increased his pace. Whatever test was coming, he wanted to find it and face it as soon as possible. He went down some stairs and into a gallery lined with cells. Through viewing panels of reinforced gla.s.s, he could see the inmates-dressed in the same thin beige pajamas as the other patients-howl and beg, and hurl themselves against the padded walls.

At the other end of the gallery, a creaking lift opened and the nurse who'd been on duty in the lobby stepped out. She looked at Blaine. "Are you ready for your visit now?" she asked.

This must be it....

He shrugged. "Sure."

"Come along, please." She rapidly led the way around corners and along corridors until they reached a plain white room. There were three women inside. One was sedated on a bed, twitching and drooling like the people in the first ward. Another was strapped to a chair, staring blindly into s.p.a.ce. The third was crouched in a corner, rocking from side to side as she chattered and cackled to herself. All three looked exactly like Helen.

Bile rose in Blaine's throat and he backed clumsily toward the door. "What's the matter?" asked the nurse disapprovingly. "Aren't you even going to say h.e.l.lo? She's been looking forward to your visit all day."

"No she hasn't," he muttered. His mother wasn't here. She couldn't, mustn't, be.

The woman on the bed moaned. The one strapped to the chair turned her head and looked at him emptily with bloodshot eyes. But the one in the corner leaped up and screamed, "Go away! You're a monster! Monster! Monster!"

"Let me out of here," Blaine said harshly. The nurse was standing in front of the door and he had to push her out of the way.

He staggered into the corridor, breathing hard. The scar from the knife throbbed and he could feel cold sweat on his back. It was like being in Arthur's study again, but worse. His very own living nightmare. The nurse took him by the arm as if to lead him back into the room, and he shook her off, swearing.

"There's no call for that," she said primly. "I think you need to calm down, young man."

"And I think you should f-"

"Now, now," said a genial voice. "What's all the fuss about?"

A rosy-faced, gray-haired gentleman in a white coat had come out of the room next door.

The nurse looked smug. "There," she said to Blaine. "Doctor will sort you out."

"I don't-" He lapsed into a fit of coughing and it took him a while to catch his breath. "I don't need to see a doctor."

"Oh, it won't take a minute." The man smiled and beckoned Blaine into his office. In contrast to the ramshackle state of the rest of the hospital-or asylum, or whatever it was-the room was inviting. It had a plush carpet and comfortable chairs, and flowers on the windowsill. The medicine cabinet on the wall looked out of place. Blaine remained, tense and mistrustful, in the doorway.

The doctor settled down behind his mahogany desk. "How are you feeling?" he asked in a fatherly way.

"OK."

"That's a nasty cough."

"It's getting better."

"You were very agitated back there. Something's obviously upset you."

"It was nothing. I'm over it now. She- It wasn't real anyway."

The doctor wrote something on his pad. "Hmm ... interesting."

"Like I said, I'm fine."

"Of course you are," the man replied with a humoring smile. "Still, perhaps we should both take a little look at what set you off. Just to straighten things out, you understand."

He got to his feet and opened a hatch in the wall near the medicine cabinet. It revealed a gla.s.s panel, like the ones in the cells, for looking into the room next door. "Can you tell me what you see in there?" the doctor asked.

Blaine hesitated. Knowing that this was a test didn't make it any easier to work out the right answer. Steeling himself, he went to take another look at the three Helens. It still made his guts cramp. He described the scene as briefly and impa.s.sively as possible.

When he'd finished, the doctor sighed and summoned the nurse, who had been waiting by the door. "You mustn't worry," he told Blaine. "There's nothing to be afraid of."

"I know. It was just the shock."

"The shock of an empty room?"

"But it isn't empty. I've just told you what-" Blaine stopped. Too late, he realized the trap he'd fallen into.

"Ah." The doctor looked at him regretfully. "The fact is, that room's unoccupied. There's n.o.body there."

"Yeah, there is," Blaine said uselessly. "And the nurse saw them, too. She brought me to the room as a visitor. She told me Hel-that woman, those women-had been looking forward to seeing me." Though he already knew it wouldn't be any good, he turned to the nurse in appeal. "That's right, isn't it?"

"It's right that you should see Doctor for your consultation," she replied blandly.

"You lying b-"

"Come, come!" said the doctor, still in the same genial manner. "First you told me that you were getting yourself into a state over nothing, and that you knew it 'wasn't real.' Now you're getting upset that no one else believes in this fantasy of yours! Next you'll be saying that all of us are illusions, too, and none of this hospital actually exists."

Blaine laughed shortly. "Stranger things have happened."

"Paranoid hallucinations," the doctor told the nurse in an undertone. "Very sad. We'll start him off on the lethecocytus chloride."

All Blaine's instincts shrilled a warning. Before the doctor could reach into his medicine cabinet, he swiveled round and began to sprint down the corridor. He needed a head start of only a minute or two to throw his die and raise a threshold. However, he didn't get even that. Two male orderlies had just emerged at the other end of the corridor, and at the nurse's shout they grabbed at Blaine as he skidded past. He lashed out but they were too strong for him, and a few moments later he was frog-marched back to the doctor's office. One of them wrested the die out of his hand. With both arms seized, he had no way of reaching his ace.

The doctor's plump pink face creased in concern. "It's for your own good, you know," he told Blaine as he filled a syringe with muddy green liquid. "And we'll get you something for that cough of yours, too."

Blaine pulled to the side, trying to wrench out of the orderlies' grip as the nurse began to roll up his sleeve. She tutted over the scar. "Dear me, you have been in the wars." The doctor moved forward, still calm and cheerful, so that Blaine was trapped between the point of the needle and the wall behind him.

Sagging limply between his captors, he hung his head. "I'm sorry," he murmured weakly. "I'm just really scared of needles."

The doctor smiled. "You won't feel a thing."

Blaine sagged some more and half closed his eyes. As soon as he felt the first p.r.i.c.k of metal on his skin, he jerked his leg up to knee the doctor in the groin. The man went "Ouff!" and doubled over, dropping the syringe on the floor. Blaine lunged out with his leg again. His arm stung, for the doctor had still managed to empty about half of the solution into it. The nurse darted away to press an alarm b.u.t.ton while one of the orderlies bent to retrieve the syringe. Blaine kicked it away and, in the resulting scuffle, managed to break free from his captors.

For the second time, he was sprinting down the corridor. An alarm wailed and the lights over the doors began to pulse a warning red. A couple of nurses attempted to get in his way, but he thrust a trolley of medical instruments at them. Once he was through the doors at the end of the ward, he pulled the trolley after him, and jammed it at an angle under the doors' handles. As a makeshift block it wouldn't hold for long, but it was the best he could do.

He had reached a small, dingy foyer. There were stairs to his left, a lift immediately in front of him and a window on his right. When he heaved it open, he found he was looking down at the other side of the yard he'd seen from the lobby. Relief rushed through him. If he was going to use the ace, he needed to maximize his chance of escape by playing the card as near to the exit as possible. And now he saw that the Dumpster with the threshold was only a few flights of stairs or a short lift ride away.

But it might already be too late. He could feel the drug beginning to work. There was a fuzzy green haze on the edge of his vision, swirling around the floor and creeping by the walls....

The next moment, there was a shattering clatter from the trolley as the doors burst open.

The doctor and nurse were standing in the entrance to the ward. Simultaneously, another nurse and two orderlies arrived at the head of the stairs.

"It's all right, son," the doctor told him, raising his hands in a soothing gesture. "You've done your best, but you're confused and you're tired. It's time for you to take a rest."

Blaine was about to retort that he was fine, thanks. But when he glanced at his arm, he cried out in revulsion. It was covered with blood, as warm and slippery as when Arthur had first slashed him with the knife. This couldn't be right: he'd had only a little injection, and there wasn't any pain. But blood was pumping out of his old wound nonetheless, a great crimson spurt pouring slickly onto the floor, where it dissolved into the sinuous green. He felt faint just looking at it.

The doctor's plump, rosy face merged into Arthur White's prim, narrow one. "You need me to look after you," murmured Arthur's tight mouth. "Only I can help you in the way you need."

"I can look-after-my ... myself," Blaine said with difficulty. "I'm not ... not my ... mother-"

The doctor regarded him sorrowfully. "It seems to me that you're in quite a muddle, young man."

True enough. The blood had stopped gushing from his arm and his flesh was clean and healed again, but this only made things worse. Nothing could be trusted as real or unreal. With a ping, the doors to the lift finally opened, but there was no rescue there. The interior of the lift was lined in a thicket of long, dirty needles. Their rusting spikes were like the spines of some monstrous animal.

Get a grip, Blaine said to himself. Don't let them fool you. Get in the lift and escape. But it didn't make any difference. A treacherous little voice was whispering that it wasn't the drug at all, that he'd been going mad even before he'd been given it, when he thought he saw three Helens in the ward. He looked back at the window, and the threshold so far below, and heard himself saying, like a little boy, "I want-I want to go home."

"If you're capable of discharging yourself," the doctor answered, in tones of infinite reasonableness, "then it's possible we got our diagnosis wrong. Prove to us you're sane. Leave our hospital." He smiled knowingly. "Win your move."

His staff moved away from the stairs. The exit was clear. But the stairs weren't any better than the lift. They were gushing with blood, as Blaine's arm had been doing just a moment before. Instead of concrete and linoleum, each step was a slab of flayed flesh. He reeled backward, gagging.

The doctor regarded him pityingly. "Poor boy," he said. "You've had a hard time of it, haven't you? A nice, long sleep will sort you out in no time." And he removed another syringe from the pocket of his nice white coat.

But the pocket reminded Blaine of something he'd almost forgotten in his confusion. His die had been confiscated, yet he still had a card to play. Panting with effort, he brandished the ace at the green haze in front of him, then tore it in two.

"Get away from me!"

It was the Ace of Pentacles, Root of Earth. It should have shaken the hospital to its foundations, pulled the building down in a quake and buckle of angry earth. Yet after the torn pieces of card fluttered to the floor, the bricks and mortar stayed exactly as they were.

More visions began to squirm out of the green mist. A gaunt and disheveled Helen who begged him, weeping, to be a good boy. The silver-haired man with the stammer. Arthur, smiling as he brandished the knife. In his desperation to escape them, Blaine lurched back to the window. Here, too, the view was changing. The patch of concrete far below was rippling into greenness. It was a different green, though: brighter, and fresher. Gra.s.s grew there. A hill was rising out of the city, a rolling wave of soil and gra.s.s and daisies, reaching up to his window. The ace's path of earth to the threshold ...

With a groan of relief, Blaine heaved himself onto the window ledge.

But the doctor shook his head sorrowfully. "The hallucinations will only get more vivid, I'm afraid. It's clear you've lost all sense of reality."