The Master Of Misrule Part 11

And suddenly the hill glimmered before Blaine's eyes, and turned transparent, so that he saw his own body lying broken at the foot of the building. A bloodied smash of flesh on concrete.

"It's just another trick," the doctor said gently. "You're trapped in your own mind, and now your own mind wants you dead."

Blaine looked back into the building, at the dour nurse and the ward of lunatics behind her, at the shining point of the doctor's syringe. He hesitated, swaying, on the brink.

"I don't care if it does. This is still better."

With that, he dropped out of the window, onto the green slope that flickered between solid ground and gaping void. Except that the moment his body fell onto the ghost-hill, it solidified, and he was tumbling on warm earth. With each rich scent of summer gra.s.s, Blaine could feel the poison in his blood grow weaker. The suffocating green haze had cleared. And he half rolled, half ran, down the daisy-sprinkled slope toward the wheel.

TOBY RECOGNIZED THE SETTING, or rather, he recognized the part of London that the Arcanum had adapted it from. It was St. James's, the imposing Westminster street lined with nineteenth-century gentlemen's clubs. Their well-heeled patrons would hardly have known what to make of it now. The stately buildings were blackened by explosions and pockmarked by bullets; some had gaping holes torn out of them, while the road was strewn with gla.s.s and rubble.

As Toby watched from the shelter of a doorway, a soldier in camouflage brought a rocket launcher forward. Three more gunmen ran into the street, firing continuously to give him cover. An explosion followed, and the rocket seared across the road, sending a military jeep up in flames. In response, sniper bullets. .h.i.t the street in front of the soldiers, whipping the air with ricochets.

Toby felt as if he could have been in the middle of a news report on one of those distant, dusty battles in distant, dusty countries. This bit of the Arcanum was a lot better than the one with the shopping mall. In fact, he thought approvingly as he looked at his card, it was the kind of setting he would have expected for the Chariot.

The Seven of Swords depicted a man sneaking away from a military camp with a bundle of swords in his arms. In the distance a small group of soldiers emerged from a dust cloud. Colorful pavilions gave the battleground scene the glamour of chivalry, in stark contrast to the wreckage around him.

"Ow!"

Someone had grabbed his leg. Toby twisted around to see a man in civilian clothes slumped against the wall a little farther in. His face was contorted in pain and there was blood on his shirt and in his hair.

"You need to-to get back," the man rasped. "Take proper cover. This is no-place-for sightseeing."

As if to prove his point, there was an eerie whizzing sound and the ground immediately outside the doorway shook with smoke and dust.

With a groan, the man managed to drag himself upright. "Mustn't let army find us. We have to go-farther-farther in," he said. "Help me."

The man slung an arm across Toby's shoulders, and by supporting some of his weight, Toby helped him to hobble deeper into the building. The place had been so completely gutted that only the bare structure remained, littered with burst sandbags and chunks of masonry. At last, they came to a room at the back of the house overlooking a narrow street, and the man collapsed onto the floor.

"Our insurgency is gathering pace," he mumbled. "Occupiers can't hold city for long. Here"-his hand fumbled toward Toby's playing card-"you've got to make the drop. Take the card. I tried ... got caught in cross fire ... too late ..."

"What do I do with it?"

"Deliver to our agent-our agent-on-on the inside. Ministry of Operations." He licked his cracked lips. "Seven of Swords gives the sign-proceed with mission."

There was a thunderous bang from the front of the building. It was followed by shouts. Toby tensed, and glanced out the broken window into the street.

"Soldiers'll be here soon." The man roused himself a little, though the effort made him gasp and screw up his face. "Listen. The drop's in occupied territory: Church of St. Savior. Leave the card-in the confessional."

"St. Savior's? Where's that?"

"Behind the ministry. You'll need to ..."

"Yes?"

Toby was afraid he was losing him. He put his hand on the man's shoulder and shook him.

"There's a supply tunnel," he murmured, closing his eyes with a grimace. "Turn right-end of street, two blocks up, alley left of department store. It'll get you-under-under the checkpoints. Don't ... delay...."

Toby shook the man's shoulder again, but his body sagged and he didn't respond. A little blood trickled out of his mouth. He was gone.

There was a thump of approaching boots and the crackle of a transistor radio. With one last look at the body on the floor, Toby scrambled out of the window.

In his haste, he landed awkwardly and sc.r.a.ped his leg, but it wasn't bad and he kept going, bent double, expecting to feel the whiz of bullets around his head at any second. Turning right down the street, he reached a row of dilapidated apartment buildings, which, he was relieved to see, didn't resemble any part of London he recognized. The anonymity of the city made it easier to think of himself as moving through a film set or computer game.

The Seven of Swords had taken him into a shattered urban landscape strewn with mangled vehicles and rubble. Bombs had gouged huge fissures in the ground, and columns of smoke and dust clouds filled the sky. Although he appeared to be moving away from the line of battle, the sound of gunfire and explosions echoed everywhere. It was a glaringly bright afternoon, hot and colorless. There seemed to be a lot of flies. Bodies, too.

From fear of snipers, Toby kept to the shadows as much as he was able, hugging the sides of buildings and darting between the precarious shelter offered by burned-out cars and the remnants of makeshift barricades. In spite of everything, he found he was enjoying himself. This was what the Game was about-the snap of adrenaline, the running of risks that made one feel so dangerously alive....

Eventually he reached the department store the man had told him about, a hulking sh.e.l.l of a building with a couple of mannequins still propped in its blasted windows. There was a drain cover in the alley to its left. After checking that he was un.o.bserved, he tugged the grating open, revealing an unpleasantly dark hole with thin rungs set down its side.

With a sigh, Toby got out the pocket flashlight attached to his key ring. This wasn't the first time it had come in useful in the Arcanum. Once he had lowered himself through the hatch, he found himself in a narrow tunnel, so low that he had to crawl on his hands and knees.

After about fifteen minutes, he came to a slightly wider section, which had been used for storage. There was a small pile of ammunition, bundles of tools and tarpaulin, and canisters of paraffin. About ten yards farther on, he found a ladder and a trapdoor. He waited a few anxious moments before cautiously pushing up the hatch. It opened into a cellar, completely empty except for a piece of matting that had been laid over the tunnel's entrance.

The rest of the house was stripped out and deserted, but otherwise intact. Its surrounding streets were much less ravaged than the neighborhood Toby had first found himself in; there were even some bedraggled civilians about. He saw patrols of soldiers, too, whose uniforms bore the insignia of a silver sword on a black background. Although he knew he should be downcast at the enormity of the task ahead, he felt a warm thrill as he looked around, knowing that all this activity-every face, every stone, every sight and sound-had been conjured into being on his behalf.

He found the Ministry of Operations around the next corner: a fortified block of ugly brown brick, with a tattered sword flag hanging from the top story. A dusty stretch of gra.s.s occupied the center of the square outside, but there was no church behind it or in any of the streets nearby. All that remained of the drop's location was a smoking crater and a few shards of stained gla.s.s.

OK, Toby reasoned, time for plan B. He could see people working in the windows of the ministry; one of them must be his target. Perhaps if he got past the sentries and into the building, the Arcanum would provide its own clues? After all, he had his Ace of Wands, the Root of Fire, to fall back on if things went wrong.... But thinking of the ace gave him an idea. He didn't necessarily have to deliver the Seven of Swords to anyone. The card wasn't valuable in itself. It was just a signal to the agent to proceed with the mission, whatever that might be. To win the move, Toby simply had to find a different means of communication. He had to give another sign.

Grinning to himself, Toby slipped back to the house with the tunnel, and the underground storage area. Here he collected one of the canisters of paraffin and put it in a plastic bag. He already carried matches in his pocket. It was comforting to have the die there, too, as his own personal escape route, but it occurred to him that if he fell into enemy hands, the Seven of Swords might be incriminating, so he decided to leave it behind. As he concealed the Ace of Wands inside a tear in the lining of his jacket, he briefly wondered what the other three chancers were facing. Whatever it was, he thought smugly, he'd bet it couldn't compete with espionage in occupied territory.

Once he had returned to the square, Toby made for the far north end from the ministry. He spent a while scuffing the gra.s.s with his feet and loitering about in what he hoped was an innocuous manner. Then he used his keys to puncture a hole in the bag and the bottom of the plastic container inside. When he had made sure the paraffin was seeping out in a clear and steady trickle, he walked-trying to look as aimless as possible-in a straight line to the other corner. From there, he turned and trudged in a diagonal direction across the lawn, squeezing the container to ensure that the liquid was leaving a substantial trail along the gra.s.s.

Out of the corner of his eye, he was aware that the sentries outside the ministry were looking at him and conferring among themselves. One of them stepped forward to the edge of the gra.s.s.

"You! Boy! Come over here."

Increasing his saunter to a jog, Toby covered the last few feet of his course. There was only just enough paraffin to finish it. Already, two of the guards were moving to intercept him. His hands trembling in fear and excitement, Toby lit a match and dropped it on the ground.

For a horrible moment the match just smoldered, weakly. Then, with an excitable whoosh, the gra.s.s lit up and fire raced along the trail of paraffin that Toby had laid: a long diagonal line leading up to a short horizontal one. Within seconds, a giant 7 blazed across the square. Well, he thought, if that doesn't get the message across, nothing will. Already, the windows of the ministry and the other surrounding buildings were crowded with people watching the display.

There was no time to savor his success. Toby had managed to sprint only a few yards before a kick from one of the guards swept his feet from under him, sending him crashing down onto the pavement. Almost before he knew it, his hands had been wrenched behind his back and his captors were searching his pockets. One of them held up the die. "A gambler, eh?" he jeered before stamping it under his boot.

The next moment, Toby was bundled through a side entrance to the ministry and marched into the bas.e.m.e.nt. Cells lined the corridor. Most were empty, but as he pa.s.sed one on the left, a woman's face pressed against the bars. Underneath the mash of blood and bruises, he thought he could make out the features of Lucrezia, Queen of Pentacles. But before Toby could react, he was hustled on and shoved into a windowless cell. The door slammed shut behind him.

He didn't know how long he was left to sweat it out. It could have been three hours, or one. He sat on the floor, his back against the wall, and tried to hold his nerve. Without his die, and with no sign of a threshold, he was trapped. At least they hadn't found his ace, he told himself. He still had a powerful defense. The weapon of last resort ... But the longer he waited, the harder it was not to fill his head with gruesome imaginings of what that last resort might be. Lucrezia's pulpy face was warning enough.

It was almost a relief when the two guards returned. Without speaking, and barely looking at Toby, they unlocked the door and hustled him down hallways and up long flights of stairs. From what he could see of it, the place was run-down and chaotic: a warren of badly lit rooms filled with people huddled over screens and switchboards. At the top of the building, he was shown into a small office lined with maps, where a man in military uniform was working at his desk. Toby had to wait a further five long minutes before he looked up from his paperwork.

"Ah yes. The arsonist. Perhaps," he said with chilling quiet, "you would care to explain what your demonstration in the square was in aid of?"

Toby attempted a careless shrug. "It wasn't in aid of anything. I like setting fire to things, that's all."

"So you would have us believe you are just a common hooligan."

"Yeah."

"And the significance of the seven?"

"It's a lucky number."

"Hmm. I do not think, however, it will prove to be lucky for you." The interviewer leaned across the desk. "I am a reasonable person," he said. "And a patient one. Other members of this administration are not so patient. You will find explaining things to me is much more ... bearable ... than having to talk to my colleagues. Do you understand?"

Toby paled in spite of himself. "There's nothing to explain," he said defiantly.

"Very well." The man smiled coldly. He called to the guard outside the room. "Take our young friend down to the interrogation suite. I'm sure a few hours there will make him more conversational."

He went back to his paperwork.

Toby's guard escorted him along the corridor. The other guard was just ahead, at the top of the stairs. Toby's stomach twisted. Was this the right point to play his ace? He wished he had a better idea of what starting a fire up here would do-what chance of escape it would give him. But perhaps the Arcanum would provide its own way out, after all....

Before they reached the stairs, they had to pa.s.s a door on the right. Toby hadn't really taken it in on the way up, but he noticed it this time because it was open. It revealed a small storeroom. As they approached it, Toby darted inside, closed the door and twisted the key in the lock.

It was done on impulse, with the vague hope of buying time. It was only when he stood with his back against the door, breathing hard, that he realized there was a window.

He pushed the handle. The window opened onto a courtyard at the back of the building, five floors below. From this height, it felt like miles. Meanwhile, the door thumped and rattled. He would have a minute at most before the guards forced their way in.

Toby grasped either side of the window frame and pulled himself up. On the brink of the drop, giddiness churned through his head. He saw that the roof sloped down to either side of the window, with a lead gutter running along its edge, almost in line with the window's ledge. He was slim and slight. Could it take his weight?

Quaking all over, Toby forced himself to stand on the narrow ledge, hands grasping either side, looking into the room with his back to the courtyard. Then he began to shuffle toward the gutter.

Inside, the storeroom door burst open with a shout from the guards. Hugging the slope of the roof, Toby left the last few inches of the window ledge-so perilous before, now a haven of stability and refuge-and put his weight on the gutter. It sagged, but stayed firm.

A soldier's head came through the window. He tried to grab Toby by the leg but Toby managed to lean out of reach, clutching at the roof's stone tiles. The gutter creaked and protested at the strain, and his heart stuttered with terror. The man's fingertips brushed his ankle. Toby's hands scrabbled over the tiles, searching for some kind of grip. Ivy wound across the tiles, its roots thick and fibrous, and he dug his fingers into it. Come on, he told himself. Work. He screwed up his eyes, sweating and grunting, and sought new handholds, thrusting his cramped fingers through cracks in the stone tiles, scrambling around the gnarled ivy roots. The muscles in his arms burned all over. Slowly, torturously, he hauled himself up the slope.

There was a valley in between the two peaks of the roof, and after he'd slithered down, he lay there for a few moments, panting, but also giggling weakly to himself. Spider-Man, eat your heart out. A siren was already wailing, though, and the sound of voices sent Toby scrambling to his feet again. More soldiers had accessed the roof from a skylight at the other end of the building: pursuit was not far behind. And to escape onto the roof of the next building, he would have to leap over the alley between them. It would mean a running jump of about six feet.

There was no time for hesitation. Toby sprinted along the tiles, and hurled himself into the air.

At first, he felt that he was moving in slow motion, speeding up only as he fell. Before he knew it, his feet hit the ledge of the roof, and for a few hideous seconds he hung there upright on the edge, his arms flailing for balance. Gravity tipped him forward, the smack of his hands on the lead sheeting sending shocks trembling through his body.

But as Toby resumed his flight, ducking and diving through the parapets and peaks and chimney stacks, he felt no fear. Now it was like his last time in the Arcanum, at the end of the Chariot, when Mia had given him his quest. Confidence and luck sparkled through his veins. The bombblasted, smoking city spread around him was like the biggest film set in the world. He wasn't even surprised when he felt pins and needles on his palm. Of course a threshold must be in reach. He found its wheel built into the brick patterning of a chimney, and when he raised the coin, he actually laughed aloud.

After all that, he thought, I didn't even have to use my ace!

CAT WAS DROWNING. The flood that had engulfed the Minotaur had caught up with her before she could manage to toss the threshold coin, and now she was sinking helplessly into its depths. She thrashed around in the m.u.f.fling dark until her confused senses realized the air wasn't being strangled out of her by water, but by cloth. She was swaddled in thick, heavy folds of the stuff. At last, she fought her way free, to find herself standing in a swath of gold brocade just inside the entrance to Temple House.

Something strange, though, had happened to the hall. The marble floor, checkered in black and white, had grown impossibly wide, or else Cat had grown impossibly small. It was as if she was a p.a.w.n standing on a giant's chessboard. And yet she was also bestriding a toy landscape of miniature mountains, forests and rivers, towns and plains, whose scurrying figures were as small and inconsequential as ants.

Black and white. Large and small. The empty board, the teeming landscape, the marble hall. One and the same.

Cat closed her eyes on the confusion and groped for the way out.

Except that Temple House was no longer in the city she knew. The square outside and the buildings surrounding it were utterly strange. Yet she knew that she was not in the Arcanum. This was indisputably her own world.

Standing at the bottom of the steps to the house was Alastor, King of Swords.

There was no trace of the wounds inflicted by the Minotaur, yet he did not look like the man Cat knew. Alastor appeared thin and worn, and older than she remembered.

He looked up to where Cat stood in the entranceway, lapped by her swirl of golden drapes. She expected to see hate and bitterness, but his gaze was empty as a dead man's. The wheel on Cat's palm burned as, one by one, cards began to slip out of Alastor's pockets and dance through the air. They spun toward her hand like iron filings to a magnet, and in the twists and turns of their flight, she glimpsed a scattering of triumphs among the cards of the Swords suit. But the moment they reached her grasp, the cards melted away.

For the last time, the queen of the Court of Swords faced its fallen king. As Alastor stared past Cat into the hall and the great checkerboard, the despair that suffused his face was more frightening than anger. He stretched out a hand, hungrily. The door slammed shut between them.

The crashing noise reverberated in her head. With every echo, Cat seemed to see the door swing shut again and again, each time closing on a different view. She glimpsed Lucrezia, Odile and Ahab, each looking up at her with grief and loss and terrible longing.

The door slammed shut for a fifth time, leaving Cat alone in blackness. There was nothing except the sound of her quick, shallow breathing, and an unseen weight of stone. Then one lamp, then another, winked into life, and she was back in the crypt, looking into the strained, pale faces of the three other new kings and queens.

They left the Hanged Man's chamber in silence. Speech of any kind would have felt irrelevant. But when they reached the room with the golden curtain, a new shock awaited them. The High Priest was lying sprawled on the ground in front of the arch. There was a single crumpled playing card clutched to his chest.

Flora knelt beside him to check for signs of life; Toby, to prize the card free. He was not breathing, although they could find no sign of injury. His eyes were open in the same trapped, unblinking gaze as the past Game Masters had when they last sat around the table.

There was no one around it now. Instead, they pulled back the curtain to find the Master of Misrule sitting cross-legged on the table, tearing greasily into a chicken leg. The hair that flowed to his shoulders was as soft and white as thistledown, and he was dressed in a rich and glittering version of the Fool's patchwork rags.

"Your Royal Highnesses," he said, bowing low from the waist.

"What've you done to the Priest?" Blaine demanded.

The Master of Misrule widened his already wide blue eyes. "His card has joined my discard pile. And there he will wait, until such a time as I see fit to reintroduce him into play." He tilted his head at them in mock concern. "What's the matter? Don't you like what I've done to the place?"

The wave of his arm indicated everything from Temple House to the boundless reaches of the Arcanum.

"Of course, I couldn't have managed it without you!" He laughed merrily, and gnawed some more on the chicken leg.

"Without cheating us, you mean," Flora muttered.

"Cheated? But I bestowed the prizes you asked for! It is no fault of mine if they were not quite what you expected ... for didn't I warn you that every card has two sides?" The curve of his cheek and the gentleness of his smile were like a child's, yet something cold and ancient seemed to peer out from behind his face. "Have no fear, my friends. You will soon see how glorious our Game has become."

"The High Priest already showed us," said Cat, lifting her chin, "and I don't think much of it. There's more than enough bad luck and random nastiness in the world as it is."

"Wisely spoken, Your Majesty." Misrule clasped his hands together and nodded eagerly. "Why indeed should some men live in comfort and ease while others starve in gutters? What absurdity dictates the tyranny of birth! How capricious opportunity is, how narrow the span of one man's destiny!

"Chance has always been at the root of men's fortunes, good or bad, but its influence is flimsy and fleeting. I seek to redress this imbalance. And so my Lottery shall render every man, woman and child equal in vulnerability and opportunity alike. Each player will live an infinite variety of lives, suffer and celebrate a thousand destinies. The prince shall become the pauper. The sinner, the savior. The detestable may be beloved; the dying can rise again.... Until, that is, the next spin of my wheel, when the cards will once more set all at liberty from their fate."

Flora's face was pinched with loathing. "How can you talk of liberty? You're far more of a tyrant than any of the old kings and queens. You're out to play G.o.d."

The man laughed, showing even white teeth. His lips shone greasily from the meat. "A G.o.d at play is a generous one. I have no need of thunderbolts; I will impose no laws on tablets of stone. I have only to ensure that the wheel spins and the cards turn, for what lies on their reverse, and who receives them, is still Fortune's lot. I am her consort, not her conqueror.

"I once told you how the Game began, as a Lottery of the people. When I tried to advance its powers, I was cast down and condemned. And so my beautiful Game became a secret, hidden thing, crippled by boundaries and corrupted by false laws. But just as you released me, so will I release the Game. Beyond the thresholds of the Arcanum, its destiny will be fulfilled."

"Not if we can help it," Toby retorted.

"Ah yes ... your brave new round!" When he had talked of the Game's origins, Misrule had become grave and still, but now his lighthearted tone returned. "All manner of play delights me. I did not set the Game free only to frustrate its sport. You may wander the Arcanum for all Eternity if you wish. And besides," he continued, licking his chicken bone clean, "although Fortune loves a fool, she likes to toy with kings even better."

With that, the Master of Misrule took the drumstick between his hands and broke it. In a snap of bone, the room in the crypt disappeared, and the former chancers found themselves standing in Mercury Square.

"Well," said Flora shakily, "that was interesting."