The Master of Misrule (4 page)

In seconds, Toby’s hair was plastered down over his head, and his tweed jacket had become heavy and sodden. He curled his hand protectively over the card in his pocket. A row of streetlamps lit up, as if to suggest his route.

Toby hastened through the deluge to the end of his road and then around the corner, in what he thought was the direction of the nearest tube station. He soon realized, however, that the lights were guiding him toward another local landmark.

A glossy new shopping center had been opened that autumn with much fanfare. And here it was again, brought to new life in the Arcanum. Just as on the home side of the threshold, its sprawling glass walls were shiny with light, and piped Muzak floated out from a row of revolving doors. But here the building marked the end of the city, for there was nothing beyond it except pavement, stretching endlessly into the pouring rain.

Toby surveyed it with dismay. Of all the possible settings for his triumph, this had to be one of the least appropriate. He knew that the Arcanum brought cards to life in
all manner of ways, most of them unexpected, yet he had nonetheless imagined a battlefield or king’s castle, somewhere inspired by the plains of Troy, the halls of Camelot. Instead, he got … a
shopping mall
?

“I’ve already won,” he said aloud as rivulets of water ran down his face and into his eyes. “I’m here to take my prize. That’s all that matters.”

He saw a figure within, moving toward the entrance of the building. He stiffened his back, ready to face whatever was expected of him.

“Hello, Toby. It’s been a while.”

It was Mia. She was standing underneath an umbrella as the mechanized doors purred round behind her.

“Uh, y-you r-remember me.…” The moment was both overwhelming and ridiculous.
He
was ridiculous. A drowned rat, shivering on the pavement.

“How could I forget?” She hadn’t taken her eyes off his face. “Come inside.”

Toby followed her into the glossy atrium. Two escalators hummed softly in the background while the rain hissed on the domed roof. In the center of the hall was a fake-marble fountain, over which giant silver-and-crimson baubles had been suspended. Swags of plastic holly and ivy hung from the rails of the first-floor gallery, while the piped music played a souped-up version of “White Christmas.”

Mia drifted in the direction of the escalators, past shops that displayed nothing but bare shelves, blank signs and stripped mannequins. Toby’s leaky sneakers squeaked
horribly on the floor. He cast around, desperately, for something to say.

“So,” Mia said at last. “How have you been?”

“Good, thanks. Yeah, good. I mean, there’s obviously been a lot to, y’know, get my, um, head around.”

They had reached a seating area by an empty food stand. A faint scent of syrup and coffee lingered in the air. Mia pulled out a chair and patted the table in front of her invitingly. “Don’t be shy.”

Toby wasn’t delusional. He would never have expected Mia to fall to his feet in gratitude or greet his arrival with cries of joy. She was three years—and several social leagues—above him in school. He knew, too, that his involvement in her move had been more accidental than heroic. But nonetheless, since it was his intervention that had saved her, Toby had felt that if they were ever to meet within the Arcanum, there would be an implicit acknowledgment of the bond between them. Mia’s casual manner put all this in doubt.

Part of the problem was the setting, he thought aggrievedly. It was like a parody of some lame high school comedy, when the geek and the prom queen hooked up by a soda fountain.

“I expect you’ve got some questions for me,” she said.

Yes. What am I doing here? What are you doing here? And where is my prize?

But in the face of her cool amusement, he couldn’t launch into any of these. “Um, I suppose I always wondered why … you … how you—”

“How I joined the Game?”

Toby nodded. It was a place to start.

“There’s not much to tell, really. I found a Triumph of Eternity card in the school chapel, in one of the hymnals. There was an invitation to Temple House on the back:
Throw the coin, turn the card
, it said. And then, written in gold ink,
What will you play for?
” Mia’s expression turned dreamy at the memory.

“So what did you choose?”

It was the wrong thing to say. “That’s private,” she said austerely.

“Right. Sorry.”

She waited for a while before going on. “I knew right from the start the invitation wasn’t a hoax, that it was meant to be.… It was like I’d found something I’d been searching for my whole life without realizing it.”

“Same here! Same
exactly
. But, uh, the thing is, you weren’t the only person at school who was in the Game, were you?”

“No.” Mia touched her hand to her forehead. The skin around the scar there still had a new, pinkish look. “I knew pretty quickly that Mr. Marlow was in it as well. You get an instinct for other players. Later, I saw him at one of the gatherings at Temple House. But though we never acknowledged each other as knights, the thrill of the Game was always between us … part burden, part privilege. Our secret.

“And then it turned out we were going for the same prize, at the same time. We were evenly matched, too: each with a complete round behind us. The fifth and final move in a round is always the triumph you want to win. So the
Game Masters told us we had to compete within the same card. Winner takes all.”

“Like a duel,” breathed Toby. “You went to the threshold in the school clock tower, ready to play the move, but Marlow tried to knock you out before you could even enter the Arcanum. And when I came and pulled him off you, he tried to wipe you out with his ace instead! What a dirty trick.”

Mia shot him a swift look. “How did you know we were there, anyhow?”

“I overheard you arranging to meet. Of course, I didn’t know about the Game. I assumed it was something to do with the Chameleons.”

“The Chameleons? Oh … that silly secret society.”

He winced. Once upon a time, that “silly” society had meant everything to Toby. It had been his creation, his vision, and it had been stolen from him.

Although Toby was not a natural loner, at boarding school he had found himself treated like one. Forced to hide out in quiet corners, he had spent a lot of time in accidental eavesdropping. That was how, in the library one lunchtime, he’d overheard a group of seniors talking about their legacy for the final year. They wanted to do something for the school to remember them by. They should form a secret society, they decided, but what for?

It was at that point that Toby had popped up from behind a bookshelf. “The society could be about dares,” he said.

The older kids had stared at him with a mixture of pity
and contempt. The ringleader, Seth, had sneered. But Toby made them listen. “Most dares are for short-term stunts, to do something silly or dangerous. What if you drew straws to actually change people, to upset the natural order of things?”

“How d’you mean?” Seth asked.

“Like, how about a dare for two completely incompatible people to start dating? Or a dare for a player on a sports team to start losing games? Or for one of the prefects to start breaking the rules? Think how it would shake this place up!”

And he was right. The society, and the games they played, became a runaway success. A success that Toby was given no credit for.

“I thought if I followed you that night,” he explained to Mia, “the Chameleons might let me join them.”

Finally, he was able to tell her his side of the story. He had stopped fretting about his prize. The only thing that mattered now was Mia, listening to him intently with her chin propped on her hands.

“I’m just glad I could, you know, help out,” he finished.

She screwed up her mouth in an odd little smile. “You did more than that. You changed my fate.”

“Well, you’re safe from Mr. Marlow now. You won.”

“Not quite. I never got the chance to play that final move, you see. To win my triumph, I would have to start a whole new round. And there’s not much chance of that. The old ways of winning are gone.”

“Gone?”

“Gone, changed, lost.” Mia leaned across the table. Under the intensity of her gaze, he felt his own begin to waver. “And all because of
you
.”

Then she suddenly rose to her feet, her voice brightly social. “Come on. I’ve got something to show you.”

This time she led him to the back of the mall, past more empty shop fronts and through several sets of swinging doors, until they were outside the delivery entrance to the building.

The concrete plain spread out ahead of them, as far as the eye could see, but in contrast to the bareness inside the mall, their immediate vicinity was crowded with abandoned merchandise and discarded window displays. It was half dump, half depot. Wide-screen televisions, still in their boxes, were piled up alongside limbless mannequins and banners proclaiming
SALE! SALE! SALE!
A huge Christmas tree, its needles soft and brown among shreds of tinsel, was propped up inside a Dumpster. For a nasty moment, Toby thought there was a body lying among the trash bags, until he realized it was the life-sized Santa mannequin from the mall’s grotto, lying facedown with one plastic arm drunkenly outstretched.

Mia moved among stacks of boxed microwaves and coffeemakers, designer sofas and racks of men’s suits, all waterlogged. The rain had slackened, and she didn’t seem to think her umbrella was necessary, even though she was wearing only a cotton tea dress over leggings and worn-down ballet flats. Toby was shivering in the drizzle.

When he caught up with her, she was standing by
a larger version of the gaming table in his room. This one’s terrain was much more intricate, however: a chaotic hodgepodge of model mountains, forests, rivers, towns and plains, each of which, though beautifully detailed, had been built to a different scale. The figures, too, were of contrasting shapes and sizes, and although he saw a couple of knights and goblins that could have come from his collection, there were also old-fashioned lead soldiers, Lego men and the kind of plastic animals sold with toy zoos. All were hopelessly entangled in the landscape and with each other, for the display was in even greater disarray than his one at home.

Mia swept her arm over the table in an oddly formal gesture. “Behold, our Field of Play.”

“Is this … is this supposed to be … the Arcanum?”

“And look at the state of it,” she said severely. For it was true that, quite apart from the strewn figures, the miniature landscape was badly chipped and cracked, its painted details streaky with rain. One of the legs was wonky, so that the table tilted dangerously. “Look what you’ve done.”

“I don’t understand you. The Arcanum has been set free. Not … 
broken
.”

“Free! What does
free
mean?”

“That the Game is fair for the first time. The kings and queens have been kicked out, along with their stupid rules.”

“So who is going to be umpire?”

“Well, the man I—we—released, the Hanged Man—”

“The Lord of Misrule.”

“Yes,” Toby said uncomfortably. “If that’s what he’s calling himself now. But he’s not a tyrant like the old kings and
queens. He’s more of a new, improved Game Master. A Master of Misrule—without any of the point scoring and punishments.”

“He’s not interested in dealing cards and awarding prizes, either, let alone fair play. And where does that leave all the other knights adrift in the Arcanum?”

“They’ll be free to do what they want. Everyone in the Game is.”

“Everyone and anyone,” Mia echoed. Her face was bleak. “Heads to win, tails to lose. Yes … we won’t be the chosen few for much longer, Toby. The Game is growing, finding new players, and the old rules and boundaries are falling away.”

“The rules were wrong,” he said stubbornly.

“The rules imposed limits. Some of those limits weren’t there to constrain but to protect.”

Before he could respond, Mia had shaken her head impatiently and moved on.

He found her waiting for him behind the Dumpster with the Christmas tree.

Another prop from Santa’s grotto was there: a red sleigh, festooned with tinsel and drawn by two white fiberglass reindeer. Mia was enthroned in the sleigh, lolling against its high back.

She turned to survey him, eyebrows raised. “Well, I suppose it would be more impressive with sphinxes.”

Toby took out his card, and looked from the tacky novelty carriage to the warrior’s chariot, the winged creatures at
his reins, the canopy of stars. From inside the mall, “Jingle Bells” was playing. The song floated through in snatches, jumbled as the figures on the toy landscape.

If this is the punch line, then I am the joke, thought Toby. And he flushed red with shame and bitterness.

“Tell me, Toby, what did you imagine your reward would be?” Mia asked him, leaning down from the chariot to reach for his card.

But the truth was, he’d never thought very hard about how the abstract qualities of his triumph would translate into real life. The most he’d come up with was a soft-focus vision of himself striding through moves in the Arcanum, rescuing damsels in distress, making judgments, completing quests.…

“Heroism isn’t much good in the ordinary world,” she said, as if she’d read his mind. “Not the kind you’re thinking of, at any rate. Not these days.”

“I guess not.” He hung his head.

“The Game needs it, though. In fact, you could say that heroism is one of the few prizes that work best in the Arcanum rather than outside of it.”

At this he looked up, newly hopeful. Mia was sitting straight and proud now, as the tinsel garlands at her back quivered in the night breeze.

“This is an empty move, Toby. The Charioteer has abandoned his chariot. The boundaries between the moves are breaking down, and with them the Arcanum. So if you want to keep playing, you’re going to have to put the Game to rights first. You’ll soon see how corrupted it has become … and then you’ll have to
fight
for it, you hear?”