The Master of Misrule (35 page)

“Get away from us.”

“Hmm … Is she as much t-trouble as you, I wonder?”

The man moved closer, dusting pale powder from his hands as he nodded a greeting at Cat. “You did me a good turn in the graveyard. A pity you’ll soon be g-going there yourself.”

His hand moved toward the inside of his jacket, but before it got there, Bel bared her teeth and lunged at him, giving a strangled cry. He struck her across the face, a crashing blow that sent her hurtling off balance. The second smacked her head against the wall. Her body slid downward in a limp heap.

Alec Crawley pulled out a gun.

Cat didn’t cry out. She didn’t rush to Bel. She stayed exactly as she was, mesmerized. Here he was at last. The murderer. The monster. The man of her darkest dreams.

“So what are you playing for?” she asked.

“Tough kid, aren’t you?” he remarked, not unappreciatively, before swinging the gun around from Bel’s head to her own.

“You killed my mum and dad to get into the Game. I’d like to know what prize they died for.”

“Justice, as it h-happens.”

How apt. How pitiless. Cat bit her lip until she tasted blood.

“B-bribery and corruption don’t go as far as they used to,” he explained. “With Justice in my pocket and the law on my side, I’d be unt-touchable. Crime without fear of punishment. Not that you’re doing so b-badly yourself.… Queen of something, I heard.”

“Queen of Swords.” She fixed him with her cool gray stare. “Orphans tend to be high-achieving. We’re used to making our own way.”

“So what happened to your predecessor?”

“He came to a bad end.”

“He won’t b-be the only one.”

On the floor, Bel twitched and moaned. Cat didn’t even glance toward her. All her energies were fixed on proving herself a Game Master to be reckoned with. A Queen of Swords, as chill as any blade.

For she had one sliver of hope: Alec didn’t know what had happened to the past kings and queens. That meant he must have been trapped in the Four of Swords for some time, perhaps long enough to have missed the Hanged Man’s resurrection as the Master of Misrule. He did not know that the old ways of doing things were gone. Maybe, just maybe, she could turn this to her advantage.

Meanwhile, he surveyed her approvingly. “The Game brought me to you,” he said. “After you released me from the graveyard, it l-led me to a grave of my own making, where I found a scratchcard on the g-ground. It is luck that delivered you to me, the p-power of the Game.”

He smiled. “And now we are g-going to Temple House, where you will award me every triumph you possess.”

Cat could almost have laughed. Temple House was indeed the place of prizegiving: a triumph came into effect only once its winner carried the amulet of their court through its door. So, yes, the power of the Game was at work—but not in the way Alec Crawley imagined. He had captured a queen with no prizes to bestow. Except for Misrule’s gift of Justice, that is. Cat looked from her aunt to Alec Crawley and felt the bitterness burn through her, like acid.

Bel was still unconscious when they left. The rest of the people in the casino might have been unconscious, too, for all the attention paid to them. Cat and her family’s murderer walked out of the door together and through the West End.

She half expected to see Death riding his white horse up Regent Street. Her nightmare had proved a better prophecy than the High Priestess’s oracle. She felt the card edges of the angel that was supposed to wheel out Eternity, but it was only a piece of colored paper. Just like that other card, the Triumph of Justice, which she had carried so far and so pointlessly. The scent of lilies and sound of water had gone. The farther they walked, the more she began to give up hope of escape, let alone punishment, or any kind of resolution.

Mercury Square was often curiously elusive, and hard to locate. This time, however, as Cat and Alec Crawley wended their way through Soho and toward Bloomsbury, they were moving as part of a general crowd. There was a steady drift of people clutching silvery-blue-and-black flyers, laughing and talking self-consciously, like guests on the way to a party they weren’t quite sure about.

The Arcanum was very near. Its closeness was not like the natural overlap at Temple House: there was an almost physical sense of tension. It made Cat think of the transformation of the Minotaur into two separate beings, how the struggle of a human body could be seen both within and outside the bulk of the animal one. She could hardly believe how the people around her remained oblivious.

“What’s going on?” said Alec Crawley in her ear. The gun barrel ground between her ribs, and she caught the
smell of decay. Close to, his skin was clammy and pallid. The rot from the Four of Swords had already set in.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re a Game M-Master.”

“The Game has changed.”

Cat had been part of several gatherings at Mercury Square, but tonight’s crowd looked too disunited and individual for an Arcanum throng. Locals and tourists of all ages and descriptions were flocking in, while a few stray policemen and a TV crew wandered about, looking as if they couldn’t quite think how they’d got here or what they were supposed to be doing. A fairground jingle added to the party atmosphere. It was New Year’s Eve, after all: a night for gatherings and festivity, and happy-go-lucky adventuring. Most of the anticipation was focused on a Ferris wheel that towered in front of Temple House.

Cat’s mind swarmed with the visions from the High Priest’s mirrors, of blue fire and whirling cards, yet they seemed curiously flat and far away. Even the image of Bel slumped on the floor seemed barely real to her. I’m so tired, she thought. I can’t think or do anything, not anymore.

Dumbly, because there was nothing else to do, she began to work her way across the square. Alec Crawley was close on her heels, the gun pressed hard in her back. They went behind the wheel and through the broken door of Temple House before she was ready for it, or anything.

The wreckage left by Misrule’s revels had been cleared from the hall, and the black-and-white marble was as smooth
and polished as it had ever been. Knight and queen faced each other from their separate squares.

“Now,” said Alec, “you will give me my p-prize.”

As Flora held the thread in her unwilling hands, the breeze cascaded through the sun-drenched trees, so that their glade became a prism of leaf-light. Her sister was bathed in its rainbows.

“Follow the thread. Please, Flora. It’s my only chance.”

“Where will it take me?”

“I don’t know. But we are near its end.”

And so Flora followed the line of red silk along the wall, through blossom and birdsong, dewy ferns and lacy petals, until she came to a weather-beaten door. Grace walked with her.

Flora pushed the door open, and found herself in a marble hallway.

Blaine was lost in the mists again. The Arcanum was reaching out for him: its air in his lungs, its haze in his eyes. The sharp edges of the playing card dug into his hand. It would lead him to his quarry, he was sure of it. And although he was hunting a different man than before, as the damp fog-shapes coiled and billowed, it seemed this was what he had been doing, always. Chasing phantoms through mist.

And then the mist cleared, and he found himself at the north corner of Mercury Square.

Blaine shouldered his way through the crowd, ignoring the indignant protests of those around him. Just as he reached
the other side of the garden, the fairground music crackled into static. It returned at an ear-popping pitch of competing melodies that were both jarring and piercingly sweet. At the same moment, the rim of the Ferris wheel burst into flame. The crowd gave a collective jump.

He pressed on through the confusion, and into Temple House.

Blaine saw Cat and the Knight of Wands face to face in front of him. He saw Toby at the foot of the stairs. He saw Flora emerge from the door to their right. He saw a dazzle of blue sparks, and Misrule appear in the center of the hall.

The Master of Misrule’s face was joyous and welcoming. His motley robes shook and shimmered as he clapped his hands in delight.

“Ah, my angels! I knew you’d bring them to me.”

They moved together, instinctively, even Alec Crawley. All were dazed and bewildered, as unprepared for their sudden reunion as for the intervention of Misrule. Before anyone could react further, Misrule snapped his fingers. At once, the four playing cards released themselves from clothes and hands, and flew through the air to their new master: Temperance, Love, Fame and the Devil.

“I don’t understand,” Toby croaked. “Does this mean you—you wanted us to get Eternity all along?”

Misrule smiled radiantly. “The Game is already mine; I have no need for the Great Triumph. When you summoned the angels, you brought them out of the Arcanum. Yet you failed to finish your moves, and failed to release them into
the world. And since they are still part of my Game, I shall take their powers for myself. Behold—” He ripped all four cards in half.

Cloud billowed, light blazed, as the noise of beating wings and rushing wind roared through Temple House. Kings, queens and knight reeled from the onslaught.

Misrule, meanwhile, stood tall and proud. In a commanding movement, he brought the thumb and forefinger of his left hand together, holding them up to make a circle in the air. The writhing, rushing, feathery cloud was sucked into it, like thread being pulled through the eye of a needle. There was a sound like the clash of cymbals and the crack of rocks as the space ringed by Misrule’s thumb and finger glimmered and solidified.

Now he was holding a silver coin. He tossed it into the air, where it hung, suspended, and did not fall. As the coin began to spin, sparks shot out of the Ferris wheel’s spokes. Misrule himself grew taller, brighter, more terrifying than before. Blue fire glittered in his eyes, flashed at his fingertips.

He lifted up his arms, and the wheel outside rose at his bidding, until it hung high above the square, huge and whirling and burning bright, like the eye of God.

Beneath it, the unwary crowd oohed and aahed as if at any normal fireworks display.

The Master of Misrule laughed to hear them. “They cannot yet see all the wonders I have worked, but they will not be in ignorance for long.…”

He turned from the doorway to look at the four kings and queens. The coin still hung in the air above his head, tumbling over and over yet never falling. Laughing heads and serpents’ tails flashed in and out of view.

Misrule put his excitement aside; he was as solemn and peaceful as when they had first met. “You have had a fine run, but the Wheel has turned and your hand is played out. Will you renounce your mastery?”

The four of them had faced loss and defeat before, but this was different. This was everyone’s defeat: a whole world’s worth of it. Yet the disaster was too huge and too sudden to comprehend. Misrule’s triumph had not shaken them out of their individual crises. All Flora could think of was Grace, Cat of Bel, Blaine of men with knives and guns.

Only Toby kept his focus. His hand grasped the card he had kept back for a final gamble, the moment of last resort.

“You should be so lucky,” he said to Misrule. “Hold on to me,” he told the others. Then he took out the Triumph of Time.

The triumph that Mia and so many others had struggled to win was one of the most potent, and unpredictable, cards
in the deck. Toby had once been in its move, and barely escaped with his life. Now he was going to play it the same way he and Flora had played the Seven of Cups, by bringing its powers out of its own move and into Temple House.

He tore the card across. There was the sound of chiming clocks, breaking glass, and running sand. And everything revolved backward.

M
ERCURY
S
QUARE WAS SILENT
and empty, the rustling shadows behind the garden rails illuminated only by the glow of the streetlamps. Wind gusted, driving sleet into Cat’s face, and she looked down at the damp pavement, imagining her old self shivering on the corner. She had returned to the first night she had come to Temple House.