The Master Of Misrule Part 19

The theater heaved with excitement and alarm.

Back onstage, the misty turrets and pinnacles of a fairy-tale castle had risen out of the threshold. The dragon swooped back toward the stage-where Flora and Toby ducked, clutching at each other for support in spite of themselves-and blew a plume of its breath at the battlements. More sparks flared from its mouth, and the hazy towers began to crumble, then melt away. So did the dragon.

Out of the dry-ice swirls of the ruined castle, a ghost emerged. It led a host of featureless fog-specters, wringing their hands and wailing piteously, who swept across the stage to float upward and outward into the theater. Their lamentation was so loud that Flora had to put her hands over her ears; the audience, too, cowered from the howling advance.

It was another vision that came to their rescue: an angel crowned with a garland of leaves, and with wings nearly as large as the dragon's. As the whirling ghosts ranted and sobbed, loud enough to make the chandeliers shake, the angel drew a cloudy sword and cut through the throng.

Ghosts and angel alike then dissolved into a shower of jewels, their sparkles falling thickly as confetti through the air. People leaped to catch the gemstones, clambering over their seats and scuffling in the aisles. But all they grasped was handfuls of smoke.

The dry ice ebbed away. The spotlight wheel switched off. The stage was once again bare. Silence fell.

Shakily, Flora and Toby walked to the footlights to take their bow. The entire building seemed to be holding its breath.

Then, from far away, high in the back of the upper circle, somebody started to clap. Three slow, deliberate smacks that echoed around the theater like the shots of a gun.

As abruptly as a switch being flicked, the theater erupted into applause.

THE DOORS TO THE MAUSOLEUM were closed. Cat and Blaine both hurled themselves against them at the same time, hardly daring to hope they would open. But the two of them got inside and bolted the doors behind them, shutting out the horror.

A knight's tomb lay in the center of the mausoleum's black-and-white checkered floor. This effigy was lifeless. His body was carved from gray marble and he bore a shield emblazoned with four swords. Candles burned at the windows, which were high and arched and filled with jewel-bright gla.s.s.

"c.r.a.p. The only Sleeping Beauty who the sword won't summon," said Cat. "Of course he'll be the one we want."

"At least we're near a threshold."

Blaine pointed to the base of the memorial, where the sign of the wheel had been worked into a marble wreath. Then he gave the base a kick. "C'mon, mate. Time to rise and shine."

They tried shouting at the knight. Tugging his arms. Prodding him with the sword. Drawing the sign of the wheel, commanding him to Rise in the Name of the Game ... They would have felt ridiculous if the situation wasn't so desperate. At one point Cat caught Blaine's eye and almost giggled.

A moment later, there was a sc.r.a.ping, clinking noise at the window. They froze. The clinks and c.h.i.n.ks continued, followed by a crash. One of the stained-gla.s.s panes had been broken, and a wizened black arm was stretching in.

"It's no good," said Blaine tersely. "We can't wake him. Maybe it's the wrong knight or the wrong card. Either way, we should use that threshold and get out of here."

"None of it's wrong. You know that as well as I do. There's got to be a way."

More tinkling gla.s.s as another window broke. More withered hands clawed at its frame. The openings were too narrow for a normal body to squeeze through, but skeleton shoulders were a different matter.

"If we wait much longer, there'll be two new statues in the graveyard."

"If we give up on this, we're lost anyway."

They glared at each other helplessly. A scabbed skull, still trailing wisps of hair and flakes of skin, chattered its teeth at them from behind broken gla.s.s.

"All right," said Blaine suddenly. "All right. I see it now. This here is our last chance."

He seized Cat by the arm and roughly pulled her toward him.

"Kiss him."

Cat drew back.

"That's how it works in the fairy tales, right? Sleeping Beauty, you called him. Yeah, the conventions are screwed up, but so is everything. He's a knight; you're a queen. Wake him up with a kiss."

"This isn't-what if-" What if the statue's mouth turned to dust, and then decay, that sucked her into a last, festering embrace? But the alternatives were no better. She took refuge in insouciance. "OK. Whatever. Guess there's nothing to lose."

Cat stood by the knight's head, and lightly put her finger to the curve of his lips. As she did so, she forgot about the throng of horrors outside, and the bone shoulders already wriggling through the window behind. The carved stone face was strong and serene, as a prince's should be. She bent low and, very gently, put her mouth on his.

Blaine tensed as the girl's warm lips met the man's cold marble ones. His own breath was quick and light. Cat looked up; her hair tumbled and fell across the fearful brightness of her eyes.

The air shivered, and candle flames danced. Stone lethargically sc.r.a.ped on stone, and there was a long, soft sigh.

The sleeper was waking.

Unlike the effigies in the graveyard, he did not shake off his marble casing, but moved in it. The living statue blinked his stone eyes, flexed his stone hands and slowly swung his stone legs over the side of his platform. Then he knelt on the floor in front of Cat. "My Queen," he said.

Though she hardly knew how or why she did so, Cat touched the tip of her blade to his shoulders.

"Arise, Sir Knight," she said, and handed him the sword.

It was not a moment too soon. A skeleton had just sprung from the window onto the checkered floor, with a clatter of yellow bones. Its grasping fingers were only an inch from Blaine's neck when the knight lunged at it with his blade. The intruder disintegrated into a brittle ivory heap.

Cat and Blaine climbed onto the deserted tombstone for safety as their defender cleared the besieged mausoleum. Just as the dead lumbered at a stilted, unsteady pace, the man of stone did not move quite as quickly as a man of flesh and blood. But there was a heavy grace to his motion and a relentless precision to every stab and slice of his blade.

Less than a minute later, all the invaders had been dispatched, and calm had been restored. The knight strode toward the doors and crashed them open.

The rest of the dead were waiting outside in the torchlight, a ghastly army of the d.a.m.ned. Some of the corpses murmured, others called out and stretched their shriveled arms, but none of them made any further advance on the mausoleum.

The knight held up his shield, and struck his sword against it four times. The iron clanged on the stone and the ground seemed to tremble.

A fine, pale dust began to swirl off the bare slabs and empty pedestals of the abandoned tombs. The breeze blew it around emaciated flesh and bones, where it settled in a thin layer. As the dead stiffened where they stood, the layers grew thicker, softening angles, restoring weight and covering the rot with marble smoothness.

"Come," said the knight, striding forward. Cat and Blaine found themselves following him down the avenue, toward the sword's original platform. Both tried to avert their eyes from the frozen throng of half specters, half statues that crowded their path.

Cat felt another wave of tiredness. After the struggle with the Minotaur and the flight to the mausoleum, her limbs were heavy and sore, and about halfway down the avenue she began to fall behind. She had just started to catch up with Blaine when she heard a human voice. One of the stone-corpses was speaking to her.

"P-please," it stammered.

Under a film of dust, the thing-person-looked intact, with no evidence of decay. The stone powdering had not yet obscured his hooked face and silvery hair. She thought it must be a player who had only very recently failed this move.

"I b-beg-" the man croaked grittily. The marble had already hardened as far as his waist and more dust was swirling into his mouth and eyes.

Cat couldn't bear to watch. She hurried on to where Blaine and the knight were waiting by the sword's plinth. "There's a man back there, a player, who's still alive. His body's whole, anyhow."

"So?"

"So we can't leave him to rot away inside a statue. We can still save him." She turned to the knight in appeal. "Can't we?"

He regarded her gravely. "As long as the dust has not settled."

"What do I need to do?"

"It is breath that gives life, even to a stone heart. And it is breath that may blow the dust away."

"I'll come with you," said Blaine.

"No, stay here. I'll do it myself."

It was hard to explain, but Cat felt, as Queen of Swords, that this was her responsibility. The Four of Swords was a card from her suit, and it was her predecessor who had dealt it to this poor man-and all the other people beyond her help. Before Cat could suppress it, she saw the image of another card, the Ten of Swords, showing a different kind of corpse: a man with a cl.u.s.ter of swords in his back. That had been the first card to draw her into the Game, and the first player she had failed to save.

When she returned to the statue, she thought it was already too late. Every part of him appeared solid marble. Yet when she looked closely, she saw that faint traces of powder still swirled over the figure's carved surfaces. After a moment's hesitation she leaned and blew softly into his face. Her breath stirred the dust, which started to float away again, almost imperceptibly at first, then in pale, thick drifts. "You'll find a threshold in the mausoleum," she told the player as his fingers began to twitch and eyelids flicker. "Good luck."

Cat didn't wait to see the whole process of transformation. Surrounded on all sides by statues, she felt isolated and exposed. In her eagerness to finish the move, she hastened away and didn't look back.

Blaine was waiting for her. "Everything OK?" he asked anxiously. "Are you all right?"

The shadows under his eyes were like bruises. He was exhausted. So was she. But he looked at her with an intensity that made her heart stammer.

Before he could say anything else, she came up to him and kissed him. It seemed to happen of itself, like blinking against dust. They clutched at each other, wordlessly. In this world of chill marble and dead flesh, their own warmth had never felt so powerful or so fragile, so fearfully alive.

Afterward, Cat drew away, and smiled at him through her tumbled hair, as she had by the knight's tomb. The rest of the graveyard and its effigies were motionless. The flames were bright, the marble smooth, the night air free from any taint of corruption. From the plinth, the gray knight was watching over his kingdom.

"Now," he said, "I am free to offer myself to you. This time, my sacrifice shall be a willing one."

He knelt down and turned the sword so that the point of its blade was aimed at his stone breast.

"No!" Cat exclaimed.

She started forward, but Blaine held her back. "He knows what he's doing."

The knight bowed his head. "Farewell, my Queen."

Then he thrust the weight of his body down on the blade. His face remained as serene as ever.

There was a deafening crack. The stone around the sword's piercing began to crumble and turn to dust. Yet when the sandy powder blew away, no underlying body was revealed. Instead, all that remained was a stone chess piece. A gray knight.

The applause rang on and on.

It pounded at Flora and Toby's ears. It rattled their heads long after the curtain had fallen; it tingled through their veins.

"Not bad," p.r.o.nounced Mistress Cybele. She sauntered over with the lion, Androcles, on a leash. "The act needs polish, of course, but on the whole, yes, quite an amusing little piece."

"You're too kind," said Flora dryly.

Cybele flung back her tawny head and laughed. "I expect I am."

She led them through the back of the theater to the stage door. It opened onto a savanna of silvery gra.s.ses under a midnight sky. Cybele sniffed the air appreciatively, then handed Flora the lion's leash.

"Sacrifice is not always about payment or suffering, however ritualized. Sometimes it is simply a release."

Flora nodded to show she understood. The lion waited quietly as she reached into its coa.r.s.e, warm fur to unclip the leash.

Free at last, the King of the Beasts shook out its mane and, in one great bound, leaped away from the theater, into the wild gra.s.ses. Its former mistress watched impa.s.sively.

Flora was left holding the leash. Now that she could look closely at the clasp, she saw that the fastening was decorated with a polished yellow gemstone, carved in a lion's form.

Jewel lion, stone man.

Black and white.

Large and small.

The empty board, the marble hall, the teeming landscape ...

As Flora took the lion and placed it on her black corner-square, and Cat took the knight, placing it on her white, the chessboard violently heaved. It was as if someone had picked it up and shaken it. In their separate moves, Toby and Blaine felt the world shudder, jerking them to the ground. For a brief moment the kings and queens faced each other from the four corners of the board.

There was another thunderous crack and rumble, like breaking rocks, and the print of the wheel on their palms glowed silver-bright. It was the only light in a void of darkness. There was a rushing sound, like the beating of mighty wings.

The cherubim had been summoned.

But when the quake and crashing stilled, and light returned, each of them was alone, and outside the Arcanum. The chessboard had thrown them off.

WHEN THE COMMOTION SETTLED, Blaine found himself standing in a run-down shopping street. The scene was shocking in its ordinariness.

Perhaps they had failed, then, and the earthshaking tumult that had brought him here had expelled him from the Game. Or maybe it was some trick of Misrule's.... Blaine rubbed his hands over his face, trying to steady his thoughts.

How long had he been in the Arcanum anyway? Hours? Days? Longer?

He turned to a grandmotherly type who was just coming out of a launderette. "I'm sorry," he said blearily, "but I ... er ... What day is it?"

She looked at him curiously. "The thirty-first, dearie. New Year's Eve." Curiosity turned to nervousness as she took in his strained face and disheveled appearance. After the Arcanum treatment, the clothes he'd borrowed from Flora didn't look that different from his castoffs.

Blaine had to lean against the wall to collect himself. He didn't know what to think. He was sure he was back in his own time and place. This was the London of the everyday world. And yet ... something wasn't quite right. Off-kilter.

"You've dropped your postcard, dearie."

Blaine looked down. There was a playing card at his feet: an enthroned goat-G.o.d with black horns and jagged wings. Dumbly, Blaine picked it up.

The Devil.

The most fallen angel of them all.

But an angel nonetheless, he realized. One of the cherubim. One of the fallen G.o.ds of the Game's city. Like an echo of memory, the High Priestess's prophecy came back to him: Only you can release them: outside the Arcanum, where the Game's play meets the play of your other world.

So Blaine's last move in the Game of Triumphs would not take place in the Arcanum. He had summoned the Devil and now he must play his card. The other three must be facing their own final moves, too, somewhere else in the city. Though how releasing the Devil into the world would bring about the Triumph of Eternity and defeat of Misrule was anyone's guess.... I hope the High Priestess knows her stuff, he thought grimly.

Meanwhile, the old lady peered at the card. Her face sharpened with alarm. Blaine had grown used to people taking a second look at him and backing away, but her fearfulness shook him, all the same. He had a futile impulse to call after her, tell her it was OK. That he wasn't whatever she was afraid of.

The wheel on his palm began to glow steadily. He sensed the essence of the Arcanum underneath every surface, as close and secret as a second skin.