The Master of Misrule (18 page)

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 prick 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 button 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. Grass grew there. A hill was rising out of the city, a rolling wave of soil and grass 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.”

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 grass, 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.

T
OBY 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 glass 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 hit 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 scraped 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 shell 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 unobserved, 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.