The Master of Misrule (3 page)

Aware that Bel probably had them under surveillance, Cat cleared her throat. “D’you, um, want to go sit down somewhere?” Whatever it was Blaine wanted to talk to her about, she had a feeling this wasn’t a social call.

He gave a half nod of agreement and they walked down the street, in the direction of Soho Square. Even though most of the businesses were closed for the Christmas break, the neighborhood still had an air of prosperous bustle. The first time Cat had wandered into the square and seen the gardener’s dainty half-timbered cottage through the trees, she had thought the place looked like something from a fairy tale. Of course, that was before she had fallen into a whacked-out fantasy of her own.

The two of them sat on a damp bench and watched the pigeons squabble over crumbs. They didn’t know each other well enough for the silence to be comfortable, and Cat found herself wishing that the others were here. Clever, twitchy Toby, not as much of a geek as he pretended to be … Prim and pretty Flora, with her sweet smile and nerves of steel … Thrown together in the Arcanum, four strangers—and rival players—had become allies in a common cause. Yet even now, there was so much the other three didn’t know about her. Or she about them, for that matter.

Cat and Blaine’s silence stretched on. Greg, Bel’s on/off boyfriend, had told Cat that one of the benches here was engraved with the lyrics from a song:

O
NE DAY
I
’LL BE WAITING THERE
N
O EMPTY BENCH IN
S
OHO
S
QUARE

The words kept running through her head, over and over.

Blaine coughed, interrupting the silence. “Have you been to Temple House since … everything?” he asked.

Temple House, in Mercury Square, was the headquarters of the Game Masters. It wasn’t far from here, but Cat would have been quite happy never to set foot in it again. She shook her head.

“And you haven’t gone to the Arcanum to take your prize.” He made this sound self-evident. “The Triumph of Justice.”

“No.… Not yet. It’s just … well, it’s such a big step, and I guess I haven’t felt ready for it. The thing is—I haven’t been sleeping and …” She trailed off, realizing how lame that sounded. “Never mind. You haven’t claimed your prize yet, either, have you?”

“Oh, I’ve cashed my card in, all right.”

Cat’s sense of foreboding increased. Blaine didn’t have the look of someone who’d just won their heart’s desire.

He had pushed up one sleeve and was tracing the line of a ragged scar along the outside of his right arm. Cat knew that the injury had been done to him by his stepfather.

“Blaine, your prize was meant to represent your stepdad, wasn’t it? The Knight of Wands.”

“Yeah.” His tone was reluctant. “I knew he was hiding out in the Arcanum. Biding his time, making his plans.… Getting ready for a big comeback, with prizes galore. And I couldn’t let that happen.” Blaine touched the scar again.

“So I went into the Arcanum to look for him. Move after move, card after card. I’d almost given up when you met me. And then—well, everything changed, didn’t it?” He was speaking quickly and angrily now. “The three of you seemed to have it sorted. You gave me all that motivational stuff about cutting the Hanged Man loose, and kicking out the kings and queens, bringing on our very own revolution.… You had me convinced, so I played along. There we were, the heroes, the winners, freeing the Game, saving the day. Just like we’d been promised.

“Then yesterday, I decided to make good on those promises. I’d been told the knight I was looking for was still in the Arcanum, and the Knight of Wands card would take me to him. So I rolled my die, and I entered the move.”

“What happened?”

“
Nothing
happened. He wasn’t there.”

Absurdly, Cat’s first reaction was to think of the song on the bench, its wistful promise that one day, the waiting would be over. “But—but there must’ve been something. Or someone. Or some kind of—”

“There was
nothing
,” he said again, with a kind of smothered violence. For a moment, he looked at her as if he hated her, and she thought he was going to get up and leave. He rubbed his hands over his face, swearing under his breath. But when he spoke again, his voice was calmer.

“Afterward, I went back to Temple House, looking for answers, explanations, clues. Christ, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s been trashed.”

“Trashed? Like how? I mean, I’ve seen it derelict before. Because the thing about Temple House is that it does change inside—”

“This is different. It’s been wrecked, deliberately. And there’s something else.”

He coughed again, then drew out a card from his pocket. It was trimmed with silver and illustrated with a four-spoked blue wheel on a black background.

Cat frowned as she read the words on the other side.

A few silvery specks clung to an icon of a curling forked tail.

“I think it’s a kind of posh scratchcard,” said Blaine. “But the tail was already uncovered when I found it.”

“In your last trip to the Arcanum?”

“No. That’s the strange part. It was lying in the street outside a supermarket this morning, and it wasn’t the only one.”

“It’s part of some marketing promotion, then, and the similarities with Arcanum stuff are just a coincidence. It
has
to be.” The emphasis sounded hollow and unconvincing, even to Cat. “Cards from the Game might turn up randomly, but they’re incredibly rare. They aren’t scattered around for anyone and everyone to pick up. It doesn’t make sense.”

Blaine took back the card. “Maybe not. But I don’t believe in coincidence. Something’s wrong with our prizes, and something weird is going on in the Game.”

Cat remembered her dream. The skeletal knight and the billboards that shimmered behind him.

Perhaps it had been a warning. Her prize would not bring Justice, but destruction: the Triumph of Death. And though she realized that everything Blaine was telling her meant that her hopes were ruined, that all their struggles had come to nothing, she didn’t yet feel the outrage that was due her. Instead, a kind of numb exhaustion seeped through her veins.

She drew a sharp, effortful breath. “So we’ve been cheated.”

“Yeah.”

“Either the Hanged Man didn’t have the power to give us real prizes, or he was never going to reward us in the first place. They were just bait so we’d do whatever it took to set him free.”

“Yeah.” Blaine’s cough rattled. “It wasn’t just about our prizes, though, was it? We released him so he’d make the Game fair and kick out the Game Masters. These scratchcards are making me wonder what he’s put in their place.”

“The Lord of Misrule …”

“What?”

“That’s what the Hanged Man called himself, remember? After he came and took charge. Lord of Misrule.”

A card has two faces
, he’d told them,
a die has four or six, and a man, even more.…
Cat thought of the blue fire in his eyes, how his smile had slanted when he made his promise of freedom and revelry.

“It’s hard to imagine that the Arcanum could get any
crazier,” she said. “But if the Game’s been messed with … Bloody hell! And what about Toby and Flora? Have they already tried to play their cards, or—”

Her senses, blunted by shock, now began to spark with alarm. Suddenly things were rushing forward again. She got out her cell phone. She tried Flora, then Toby. Nobody picked up.

T
HIS IS THE FIRST DAY
of my new life, thought Toby. He gazed solemnly at the poster over his bed, a print of one of Escher’s surreal labyrinths. It seemed to him that his face—imperfectly reflected in the glass—had a new maturity. The freckles were less noticeable; the sandy color of his hair appeared to have darkened. Even the line of his jaw looked more determined.

And no wonder. Hadn’t he taken on the Game of Triumphs and won? He, a Fool, had proved himself a champion.

Toby’s gaze moved to the gaming table, where miniature knights and goblins were lined up on a plaster battleground. The figurines were childish, but the self-conscious irony with which he’d arranged them was even more so. In one impatient movement, he sent them tumbling to the floor,
and reached for Malory’s
Le morte d’Arthur
from the shelf above.

A photograph and a playing card had been tucked into the pages at the back. The playing card was called the Chariot, the seventh triumph of the Greater Arcana—the hero’s triumph. It depicted an armored warrior standing beneath a canopy of stars on a chariot drawn by sphinxes.
Yours is the card that rewards all risks
, the Hanged Man had said to Toby.
The Chariot is the hero’s prize. I know you will be worthy of it
.

The photograph showed the cast from a sixth-grade production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. The girl third from the left at the front had played Helena. She was slim and curly-haired and (though you couldn’t tell from the snapshot) had a smattering of freckles on her nose. Her expression brimmed with suppressed laughter. Toby preferred to think of her this way rather than as she looked the last time he saw her. Then her face had been ice white, her forehead bloodied, as she staggered away from a falling tower.…

For in spite of everything Toby had witnessed in the Arcanum, his first glimpse of the Game was still the most potent.

Every detail of that summer’s night was pin sharp in his memory. The dusty grass of the school playing fields … The hot black air and thunder of falling stone … It had, literally, changed his world.

And so the other three chancers’ attitude to the Game—a mixture of fear and hostility—was something Toby found hard to understand. Of course the Arcanum was a dangerous place. Of course the risks were high. But as Toby closed
the door to his building behind him and contemplated the drab London morning he was about to spin out of joint, it seemed to him that he was the only one of them who truly grasped the Game’s possibilities for greatness.

Toby pictured the Arcanum as a giant chessboard, with each move taking place on a different square. What lay in wait in the square depended on the card a player had been dealt. First, though, you had to get onto the board—and that meant throwing a coin.

Coins were found at the Arcanum’s thresholds. But the four chancers each possessed a triangular metal die that could create a threshold whenever and wherever they chose.

As soon as Toby rolled the die, the wheel-scar on his palm began to prickle, letting him know that a threshold was near. He found its sign, another wheel, worked into the hubcap of a van parked down the road. With a tremor of excitement, Toby ran his finger along the lines of the raised chrome circle and its four spokes. As soon as he’d done so, the matching mark on his hand emerged and solidified into a coin. It was as dark and gleaming as the die.

A slow grin spread across his face. This was it. He threw the coin into the air, feeling the print of the wheel throb as his hand opened to receive it. The next second, the coin had vanished, the scar had faded and Toby was standing in the Arcanum.

The gray dawn he’d left had given way to a pitch-black night of pouring rain. Otherwise, the van with the wheel in
its hubcap was unchanged, and so were the physical structures of his street. This wasn’t so unusual, since every move in the Arcanum bore a resemblance to its threshold’s location in the ordinary world. Sometimes this could be seen only in the line of a wall or the print of a paving stone; at others, the new landscape would be an embellished copy of the old one. But although Toby’s surroundings were familiar, all the windows were dark and there was no sign of life in any part of the cityscape around him.