The Master Of Misrule Part 3

The embroidery silk was still in her hand, a fragile scarlet filament winding through the white-dappled dark. Flora began to stumble up the hill. Her feet were numb and clumsy; her eyes watered and cheeks stung. It didn't matter. She drew in jubilant gulps of icy black air, laughing giddily as she slipped and scrambled through the drifts and along the tunnel of trees leading up to the house. Grace was inside, talking, dancing, sparkling.... Grace was waiting at the end of this thread. Above her head, branches creaked under their burden of ice.

The smell of the clinic, a mixture of expensive flowers and antiseptic, was as familiar to Flora as that of her mother's perfume or the school dining hall, and she automatically braced herself for it as she went through the main entrance. But the building had reverted to its plush country house interior and all its hospital trappings were gone. Furthermore, it seemed that she had arrived at the late, disorderly stages of a black-tie ball.

The crowd was grandly dressed, yet in a state of considerable dishevelment. The women's hair straggled around their faces and their lavish makeup was smeared. The men weren't much better: flushed and moist-looking, with ties and collars askew. People were greeting each other with bellowing enthusiasm, bawling jokes and waving their gla.s.ses so wildly that the drink sprayed everywhere.

Flora hovered at the edge of the crowd, with a backward look at the silk strand zigzagging down the steps. She was used to the Arcanum's crowds; in fact, there was a pleasurable recklessness in being swept up in gatherings conjured by the Game. Afterward, she would tell herself that none of it mattered because it was all illusion anyway.

This was different, because every guest was someone she recognized. Among the baying throng she could see her hairdresser, several teachers and the priest from their local church, St. Bernadine's. And all the people who had been at the Avoncourts' were here, in a kind of grotesque parody of the party she'd left behind.

The Arcanum version of Charlie was leaning lecherously over the Arcanum version of Georgia, who was looking up at him with an inane grin, her dress falling off her shoulders. His handsome brother, Will, was downing shots alongside Mrs. Avoncourt as they coughed and spluttered and shook with mirth. Lady Swinton was pawing greedily at a man in a white cravat. Then she realized it was her father.

Of course it wasn't really him. None of these people truly existed. They were phantoms conjured by the Game. But it was horrible, just the same. All those familiar faces turned ugly and foolish, with slurring mouths and gla.s.sy eyes ... eyes that slid over her without acknowledgment or recognition.

Meanwhile, the fires roared in the grates and the party roared through the rooms. The clinic's staff break room had been set up with an extravagant buffet. Tumbled piles of shrimp lay on wilting lettuce leaves; haunches of meat squatted on silver platters between mashed-up trifles and sweating wedges of cheese. Just looking at it made her feel queasy, and she longed to be rid of the place, so that it was just her and Grace, walking home through the clean, cold silence of the hills.

But Flora had to find her first. She struggled on through the melee, trying to concentrate on the thread she still followed, trying to ignore the damp heat of her coat and the chafing of her shoes. She took comfort in the thought that Grace had been due to attend a ball on the night of her "accident." This setting was, in a skewed sort of way, appropriate. It was surely part of re-creating the conditions for her sister's return.

Her resolve wavered when she caught sight of her mother by a window in the larger of two reception rooms. She couldn't bear the thought of looking into her mother's face, blurred by drink, and being met with only blankness. It was too close to the reality on the other side of the threshold. In her anxiety to avoid the moment, Flora turned away. It was then that she saw her.

A slope of white neck. A loop of golden hair. The scooped back of a scarlet gown.

Grace.

Grace.

She was weaving her way through the throng, untouched by the mayhem all around. Flora, however, couldn't move. She was rooted to the spot, though shaking so violently it seemed impossible that the whole building wasn't trembling with her. The far side of the room opened onto a small stairwell. When Grace reached it, she looked over her shoulder and smiled at Flora. It was the first time Flora had seen her sister's eyes open or her face mobile in five years. The smile was one of serene welcome. Then Grace turned her back, and glided on.

Flora found she was clutching the thread so tightly it cut into her palm. She was terrified she'd drop it, that the silk would fray or snap beneath somebody's heel before she could catch up with her sister. She called Grace's name but her voice was immediately swallowed up by the din. Finally, she began to push against the barrier of hot, obstinate flesh until she was kicking and struggling, shouting obscenities....

At last, she fought her way to the stairwell, just in time to see Grace disappear through a set of doors on the second floor. It was a relief to close them behind her and shut out the sights and sounds of the party. She was now in an area of the building that was completely unfamiliar to her, either because she had never ventured this far in her visits to the clinic or, more likely, because she had reached a part that was entirely constructed by the Arcanum.

Flora padded down a long, curved corridor whose carpeting was so thick that she strained to hear Grace's footsteps ahead. Still, she had the thread to guide her and, just occasionally, a flicker of scarlet skirts disappearing round the corner. It must be that Grace couldn't stop or slow down because she was leading her somewhere, somewhere they would both be safe.

She came to another corner and another staircase. It was steep and spiraling. Up she went, higher and higher, until she felt dizzy from all the turning and her heart banged in her ribs. She couldn't hear the party any longer, but there was another sound: a whirring and clacking....

Something had happened to the embroidery silk. As she climbed the stairs, it darkened in color, from red to burgundy to a kind of burnt maroon. It felt thicker and more fibrous, too. By the time she reached the top of the stairs, the line of thread running through the gap between the door and the floor was black. And the whirring noise was much louder. As she opened the door, the whirring noise intensified.

The turret room was small and bare. In front of the window, three women were grouped around a spinning wheel. The youngest, who didn't look much older than Flora, was turning a crank to keep the wheel in motion. A woman of her mother's age was feeding raw yarn into the spindle, while an old lady wound the spun thread into little bundles. In spite of the antiquated nature of their task, they looked as if they belonged to the party downstairs. All three were identically dolled up in black c.o.c.ktail dresses, lipstick and pearls.

Flora took all of this in without really registering it. The only thing she could think about was the fact that Grace was not there.

"Where's my sister?"

"I'm afraid you've taken a wrong turn," the spindle-woman replied coolly.

The girl turning the wheel smirked into her sleeve.

Whirr, whirr, clack, clack.

"The thread led me here. There must be a reason for it," Flora said, taking care to keep the tremor from her voice.

"Then I'm sure you'll find it," the old lady said peaceably as she straightened one of the bundles on her lap. Her face was creased like rumpled tissue paper, but in spite of her age, she was upright and trim and wore the same cosmetic flourishes as her younger counterparts. Their lips were painted in a crimson Cupid's bow, their faces powdered white, their eyebrows penciled in a thin black arch, and each wore her white-blond hair coiled high. All three were regarding her with their heads slightly tilted to one side, mouths pursed, an identical glint in their bright black eyes. As if, Flora thought uneasily, she was being measured for something.

She pushed the disquiet away and reached for the card, holding it up in front of her. "The reason is my sister. I'm here to take her out of this move. It's my prize, and I have the right to claim it."

"Do you indeed?" said the young girl sharply. "And how many wrongs has it taken to win this 'right'?"

"Hush now, Skuld." The old lady turned to Flora. "You'll have to excuse my sister-she can be a little quick-tempered at times."

"Your sister?"

"Well, of course, dear. Can't you see the resemblance? Three sisters as like as three peas in a pod!"

Skuld's lip curled. "There's small wonder she's un.o.bservant, Urd. Why, I don't think the girl even realizes what she has done."

Flora returned her stare. "So tell me."

But it was the woman at the spindle who replied. "You plucked your prize from the ashes of Yggdrasil," she said without taking her eyes off the yarn. "And Yggdrasil is the tree from which our wheel was made."

The wheel was about five feet tall and crafted of dark polished wood. It had many more spokes than the emblem of Fortune's Wheel and seemed an ordinary wool-spinning mechanism. As Flora looked closer, she saw that the thread she had been following was attached to one of the little black bundles at the old woman's feet, and that these were actually a kind of doll, made by winding layers of thread around a stick man of bent wire. She thought of the trussed-up figure in the Eight of Swords, and was afraid.

Flora stepped back toward the door, and this time, she took care to keep her tone conciliatory. "I'm very sorry the tree was destroyed."

"Oh, Yggdrasil's roots go deep and it has many saplings," said the old lady. "It will seed again. But the Game is a different matter: you tried to cut it down, and now it grows crooked.... Verdandi, is the yarn ready yet?"

"A full skein," the middle sister replied with satisfaction. "Smooth and strong. It'll do nicely."

For the next few moments, the three women were preoccupied with the business of removing the bobbin from the spindle, unwinding the spun thread and setting up the wheel again. Flora felt herself forgotten.

"Please," she said, "I don't want to disturb you, and I apologize if I've done something wrong, or made things ... crooked. But if you could-please-if you could just tell me where my sister has gone?"

Verdandi glanced at her indifferently. "As I said before, you took a wrong turn. You climbed up our stairs while she went down them. She won't have gone far."

"But before you leave," said the old woman, "you'll need to take this."

Urd picked up one of the little manikins. It was the one attached to the black thread that still lay across the floor, the thread that turned scarlet on the stairs and that Flora had followed for so far and so long.

"Skuld, the scissors, please."

The younger woman took a pair of silver shears and severed the thread. The blades made a crisp swishing sound.

"Here you are, my dear," Urd said, holding out the doll. "It's what you came for. Though I'm afraid we'll need to have that pretty card in return."

The manikin was no bigger than the palm of her hand, a crude thing of coa.r.s.e black wool. Flora was still holding the Eight of Swords, and for a few moments she hovered in indecision, looking from the doll to the blindfolded woman on the card and back again. Meanwhile, the wheel had been set in motion again; the whirring and clacking sound, though soothing in itself, made it difficult to think.

"Is this thing ... is it ... her?"

"Take Dolly home with your sister, dear. It's only as far as the threshold in the park," Urd replied. "Just a hop, skip and a jump away!"

The three sisters pursed their crimson lips, arched their high black eyebrows and nodded their pale heads. The difference in age between them was less noticeable, though whether this was because Skuld was looking older, or Urd younger, was impossible to say. Verdandi put out a hand for the card.

Flora pa.s.sed over the Eight of Swords, then reached for the manikin.

"Aah!"

She had p.r.i.c.ked her finger on a tiny spike of wire that was sticking out of the thread. A fat, shining bead of blood trembled on her fingertip before dropping onto the doll. As one, the sisters let out a long, soft sigh of pleasure and release.

Whirr, whirr, clack, clack.

The room spun and blurred, as if Flora was a spoke on the wheel. And her head was still spinning as she watched the doll maker take out two long silver pins from her hair and begin to twist them into a little stick figure.

Slowly, deliberately, smiling all the while, Urd knotted a new piece of thread to one end of the wire....

She looked up directly at Flora and her smile widened. And then it hit her: "The new doll is me," Flora whispered, and flung herself out of the room and down the stairs.

Even in the midst of her helter-skelter descent, Flora found time to think. There were several layers of wool on the doll she clutched. It would take time to finish the binding on a new one. She would just have to find Grace, take her and the doll to the threshold and then- Was she imagining it, or were her legs already beginning to move more sluggishly?

At least she didn't have to fight her way through the party again, for when she reached the bottom of the spiral staircase, it was to find that the entire laughing, drinking, shouting crowd had fallen asleep. Every room was filled with inert bodies collapsed on chairs, slumped against walls or tangled on the floor in snoring heaps, snail trails of drool around their chins. The air was stale with the fumes of alcohol and sour breath. In her rush, Flora trampled over limp hands and tripped over unprotected heads. They were the hands of her friends, the heads of people she knew and loved, but she had to tell herself that it wasn't real and didn't matter, that nothing mattered except to keep moving while she still could. "Grace," she shouted. "GRACE! Where are you?"

Verdandi had spoken the truth. Grace was indeed downstairs. And she was not asleep-or not yet. She was propped against the doorway of the larger reception room, eyes closed, and humming a s.n.a.t.c.h of lullaby.

"Oh, Grace!" Flora flung her arms around her sister, her face hot and wet with tears. "Thank G.o.d! I'm so sorry-everything's gone wrong-we have to-"

"h.e.l.lo, Flo-Flo. I didn't know you'd been invited," Grace replied sleepily. "Isn't it a lovely party?"

"No. It's not what you think it is. That's why we have to leave, Grace. We have to leave now. The Spinners-"

"Did they make you a doll, too?"

"Yes. And I've got yours. Come on, we've got to go."

Grace's forehead creased in thought. "If the Spinners are binding a doll, then you haven't got much time," she said. "It only takes seven layers." She seemed to be trying to remember something, but then she yawned, and the dozy blankness returned. "Funny ... you look different, Flo. How have you grown so tall?"

"Never mind that." She tried to drag Grace to her feet, but her sister sagged limply, and smiled her vacant smile. Flora's own body felt unnaturally clumsy.

"What's wrong with you?" she cried furiously. "I'm here to take you home, out of this. Out of the Eight of Swords."

"The Eight of Swords," Grace repeated vaguely. "Oh yes ... You helped me home before, I remember. When you gave me a thread and I used it in the maze."

"Maze? What maze?"

"I'm not exactly sure.... There were briars, I think.... Or were they swords? A maze of briars with the Spinners in the center. Yes. But my thread broke, and by the time I found it again, it was too late." She nodded and smiled, proud at having worked it out, then closed her drooping eyes.

Flora shook her roughly. "But you must have escaped the maze. You reached the threshold. You got out of the Arcanum."

"Ah, but not before the Spinners had tied the last knot. That's when I woke up here, you see.... Such a lovely party ..."

"No-don't you dare go to sleep. Grace!"

"Mmm?"

To her shame, Flora found she was crying again. She was now too weak to push, let alone carry, her sister, and the longer she stayed, and the more layers of thread the Spinners bound around the wire manikin, the worse it would become. "How do I get you out of this place?"

"You take the dolly, of course," Grace replied serenely. "Over the threshold in the park. I have to stay at the party. Don't worry, it's quite nice here-except when I'm back among the briars, of course. And sometimes I'm asleep in a strange bed and can hear all sorts of people talking.... Even you, occasionally." She stretched a little and looked at Flora with hazy, heavy-lidded eyes. "You know the trick, don't you, Flo?"

"The trick with the doll?" Flora gave her sister's shoulders another shake. "GRACE! What trick?"

"The trick ... The trick with the maze."

A brief struggle showed in her face, and suddenly Grace was staring at Flora with wakeful and desperate eyes. It was like watching somebody come out of water after being submerged almost to the point of drowning. "Every turn is left," Grace gasped. Her face was white and taut, and her voice hoa.r.s.e with effort. "Remember that. Remember."

"I-I will. I promise. Grace, you must- NO! Don't go to sleep-no-please-"

But Grace was already closing her eyes and sinking down on the floor of the hall. "There's no more time, Flo-Flo," she mumbled. "The binding's half done. You have to ... you have to ... run...."

Flora hesitated for one long, agonizing moment, then clambered to her feet. Her tongue felt hard and clumsy but she managed to speak through her tears.

"This isn't over. Next time you wake up, you're going to be home. I swear it."

"Such a lovely party," Grace murmured, lost to dream.

Somehow, Flora made it out of the main entrance of the house, lurched across the lawn, down the avenue and into the open countryside beyond. There was no doubt that her body was slowing down, its intricate mesh of nerves and muscles starting to stiffen.

Thank G.o.d-the clump of trees that marked the beginning of the park was in sight. It had stopped snowing while she was in the house and the sky was clear. A minute or so later, she could even see the dome of the summerhouse glinting in the moonlight.

Breathing hard, Flora tottered toward its steps. It was then that the smooth white expanse immediately in front of her became oddly speckled. Something was rising up from under the snow-little black shoots and buds....

The briars were growing.

At first the shoots were so small that they looked like flecks of soot on the snow. But quickly, very quickly, they knotted themselves into spreading snarls of spikes. Sharp black spikes that thrust wickedly against the soft white-dark tangles that grew so thickly and so fast that in moments there was an impenetrable circular hedge, nearly seven feet high, around the threshold.

Flora's first instinct was to push her way through the thicket, but she was immediately forced back, her arms and wrists scored with dozens of b.l.o.o.d.y scratch marks. With horror, she saw that each thorn was in fact a tiny, glinting sword.

In her desperation she began casting about for a fallen branch, or even a stone, to fight her way through. It was then that she spotted a small gap in the hedge a few yards to the right. There was an increasing time delay in moving her limbs, as if the signals from her brain were slowing to a crawl, but she managed to squeeze clumsily past. "Oh G.o.d," she said aloud as she found herself in a narrow, winding lane between the hedge and another wall of briar-swords. "It's the maze."

The snow on the ground gnawed icily into her wet feet. Her eyes watered. The scratches on her arms stung. But she welcomed the pain and the cold: they were signs of life. It's not over till it's over, she told herself grimly as she dragged her body along the twisting path. Every turn is left, Grace had said. Her sister had given her the key to the maze, and her only hope of reaching the threshold.

It was a simple trick, really. One of those things that should be easy when you know how. But as Flora's progress became limited to a cramped hobble, even her thought processes started to stultify. There were moments when she began to forget what she was supposed to be doing, what the point of all this wearisome movement was. It seemed as if she had been wandering in the web of briars forever-that this was the only world there was, and all that she had ever known. She didn't care even when the thorns caught her clothes and tore her skin. They had stopped hurting now. When she couldn't recall if she had gone left at the last turning or not, it didn't seem to particularly matter. Nor did the little bundle of wire and thread that she was for some reason cradling to her chest.

White snow, black thorn, red blood. Turn and turn again. Except that sometimes it was the ground that was powdered black, the sky a scalding white, with black blood on the red thorns. Was she in a maze of briars or a cage of swords? Turn and turn again....

It was when Flora rounded the last corner out of the maze that disaster struck. At the sight of the threshold, her senses recovered a little, and she was able to lurch forward on a brief energy surge. But her balance was gone and she fell stiffly to the ground. She tried to put out her hands to steady herself, and the doll tumbled from her weak grasp, becoming snagged on the briars at the base of the thicket. When she tugged at it, the wool only became more deeply ensnared.

Her fingers were too clumsy to untangle the thread, her hands too feeble to free the doll from the piercings of countless tiny black swords. She knew that this was a dreadful thing, a calamity, but as the swaddling lethargy increased its hold on her, she could barely remember why. And the more she plucked at the doll, the more hopelessly snarled its threads became, until it no longer resembled a manikin, just an untidy nest of black wool in a bramble hedge.

Flora tried to call out to her sister, but she couldn't open her mouth properly and the words emerged as a whimper. More than anything, she wanted to lie down in the white softness, let darkness and stillness bind themselves into every fiber of her being, coc.o.o.ning her in peace. But the thought of Grace pushed her onward, even though she had only the faintest memory of her now. And so, just as her sister had done five years before, Flora began to crawl toward the summerhouse, inch by hopeless inch.

And when her nearly rigid fingers traced the sign of the threshold, and the Arcanum coin emerged from her palm, she could no longer remember her own name, let alone Grace's, or why, with the last spark of sense left in her, she felt compelled to jerk the coin into the freezing air.