The Master of Misrule (13 page)

A dark car purred along the road and pulled in a little way down from the bus stop. A man got out and walked up to Arthur’s front door. He rang the bell repeatedly, hung about on the doorstep for a while and peered into the ground-floor windows.

Blaine watched this with some interest. Arthur didn’t have many visitors; Helen, none. The man had noticed him watching, and came over to where Blaine was sitting. “I’m after Arthur Wh-white,” he said. “I don’t suppose you know him?”

The man wore an expensive-looking coat and had a hooked, handsome face, with silvering hair. Blaine wondered if he had something to do with the school where Arthur taught—a governor, perhaps.

“Arthur White? Sure I know him. I know he’s a vicious maniac and the police are after him.”

The man stiffened. “P-police?”

“Yeah. They were around here yesterday. Looks like he’s given them the slip.”

“And where do you think he could have s-slipped to?” he asked softly.

“Rumor has it he’s joined a cult.”

The man looked down at Blaine’s lap and the open notebook. His eyes lingered on the sketch of the card. “How interesting.” He gave a half smile. “You’ve been most h-helpful. Thank you.” Then he got into the car and drove away.

At the end of the week, there was still no sign of Arthur. Blaine went to see his mother, with Liz there to supervise. Helen’s face was mottled with tears and tiredness, and her nails were gnawed down to the quick. When Blaine came in, she flinched away and sat crouched in the corner of the sofa, thin arms wrapped around her body, as she rocked and wept.

“No, no, I mustn’t see you. He wouldn’t like it. He told me, he
warned
me, he’d leave if we weren’t good enough. You pushed him to the edge and now you’ve driven him away. All he ever wanted to do was take care of us, and what will happen to us now? I can’t
bear
it, oh—”

Liz walked Blaine to the door. “She’ll come round,” she said wearily. “But I’m getting the doctor to visit later. It may be that your mother needs to be looked after … professionally, for a while.”

Blaine nodded dumbly. He wished he had never gone into the study, never found the card.

And yet he carried his torn corner with him at all times, as if for luck. The top of the dancer’s head was visible above the tear, and there was part of the first line of writing on the back:

Following his visit to Helen, however, Blaine wanted to forget about Arthur and everything else. He went to walk on the seafront.

Like most of the town, the promenade’s row of seedy bed-and-breakfasts and discount shops had seen better days. The amusement arcade that lined the rusting Victorian pier was closed at this time on a Sunday. Nonetheless, a group of people were sitting around one of the plastic picnic tables outside the entrance. They looked exotically out of place.

There was a blonde in a sharp white suit and sunglasses, even though it was a dour winter’s afternoon. She was seated opposite an older, darkly glamorous woman in an evening gown. A young man lounged beside her, fashionably disheveled. He had a sleepy smile and tousled hair. The fourth was a black man, dressed as if for a business meeting, grizzled and stern.

As Blaine drew closer, he noticed two things. One, that the group appeared to be playing a card game of some sort, and two, that although they were talking among themselves,
the sound was small and blurred, as if he was listening to something far away. The chill wind that had begun to whip off the sea didn’t ruffle their clothes or hair, let alone set them shivering.

Out of some instinct, Blaine felt in his back pocket. As he did so, the black man rose to his feet and put out his hand.

“I believe you have something belonging to our Game.”

His voice was heavy as granite. The other three didn’t even look up. Without quite knowing why, Blaine proffered his bloodstained piece of card.

“I want to find the man who’s got the rest of this card,” he said.

“He has joined the Game as a Knight of Wands, and become lost in the Arcanum.”

“Arc-what?”

“The place where our Game is played.”

“Will he come back?”

“He could. He has everything to play for.”

“Then I’ve got to go find him.”

Below them, the gray sea sucked and mumbled on the gray stones. A seagull cawed. But for Blaine, everything except the man in front of him had faded into the distance.

The man looked at him carefully. “You have brought only a scrap of card. You cannot become a knight of our courts or compete for our prizes.

“However, your actions have altered the State of Play. You are responsible for this Knight of Wands joining the Game, and because your intervention was by accident, we
have no choice but to let you into the Arcanum. Your role in the Game will be that of a chancer. Some call it the Fool.”

He picked up a new card from the table and gave it to Blaine. This one showed a figure dressed in motley-colored rags, poised at the brink of a precipice. The lettering on the back was the same as on Arthur’s.

“Temple House? Where’s that?”

“There are many cities with a quiet square, an ancient house, a door that is just ajar. All players in the Game of Triumphs will find their way to it.”

Blaine tightened his grip around the gilt edge of the card. His hand was shaking slightly. “And … and who are you?”

“I am Ahab, king of the Court of Wands. And these are the Game’s other masters: Alastor, King of Swords; Odile, Queen of Cups; and Lucrezia, Queen of Pentacles.”

At this, the other three looked up at him and smiled. The wound on his arm flared. Blaine was suddenly afraid, and turned to go. When he looked back from the end of the street, the four cardplayers had gone.

Arthur White became the subject of an official missing-person inquiry. The police traced his credit card to a petrol station in central London, but that was three days after his disappearance, and there had been nothing since.

Blaine took the train to London at the end of the week. Someone from school had a brother living in Hammersmith, and Blaine arranged to stay on his sofa for the first
few nights. After that, who knew? Ever since meeting the King of Wands, nothing felt real to him except his pursuit of Arthur. He did not really question what the game was, or what would become of him when he entered it.

He had slipped away without saying goodbye to Liz, to spare her having to try and persuade him not to leave. Instead, he left her a thank-you note, with a vague story about trying to track down his father. He left a letter for Helen, too, for when she got out of the clinic where she was “resting.”

And so Blaine went to London and found his way to Temple House, Mercury Square, and all the strangeness of the Arcanum. But nearly a year later, he had found no trace of Arthur White.

In the warm peace of the Seatons’ basement, the drum of the dryer spun slowly round. Blaine was staring at a sketch of Fortune’s Wheel. The lines of poetry written at its side thrummed through his head, as if in time to the machine’s
cycle. He had soon realized that Arthur’s research contained only red herrings and dead ends. Yet he kept the notebook with him anyway, as a kind of talisman.

Occasionally, Blaine would call Liz and tell her lies about what he was doing and where he was staying, but his mother rarely came to the phone. In Arthur’s absence she had set herself the task of proving to him that she was everything he wanted her to be. Part of her penance was exiling her son.

And this was Blaine’s fear: that Arthur would find a way to come back, triumphantly and unbeatably, having escaped the Arcanum and won some great prize in the Game. Blaine must find him first. Not to destroy him—not at first. No, Blaine wanted to drag Arthur back to expose him, and make him face what he’d done. Arthur must be forced to let Helen see who the true monster was.

Blaine understood that by confronting Arthur with the notebook and card, and then involving the police, he had forced his stepfather to flee into the Arcanum. Such a cautious, canny man would never otherwise have taken the risk. Blaine was responsible, as Ahab had said, for making Arthur a knight and himself a chancer.

Now the reign of Ahab, King of Wands, was over. The nature of the Game had changed. But whatever it took to defeat Misrule, Blaine would do it, so he could pursue Arthur White across every square on the Arcanum’s board.

T
HE NEXT MORNING WAS FINE
and bright. A great day to save the world, as Toby remarked when he met Cat by the steps of Temple House.

Cat did not respond. She did not want to be in this dismal, ruined place. She did not want to hear more of the High Priest’s threats of doom. Her fears were evenly split between what was waiting for them in the Arcanum and whether Bel could be trusted to keep away from the scratchcards.

“Do you reckon Flora and Blaine will be at each other’s throats by now?” Toby speculated. “It’d be funny if they both turn up with matching black eyes.”

“No it wouldn’t. And anyway, those two get on OK.”

“They’re still a bit prickly, though. You know what I think it is? Unresolved sexual tension. After all, opposites are supposed to attract. First they bicker, then they kiss.…”

Cat gave his ankle a swift kick.

“
Ow!
What was that for?”

“To shut you up. Look, they’re coming.”

Flora was back to her usual immaculate self. Blaine looked better, too, less tired, and with some color in his face. What’s more, his layers of shabby sweatshirts had been replaced by a fleece jacket and blue polo shirt. Cat found herself disliking the change of clothes intensely.

There was no more opportunity for talk, for as soon as the other two reached the steps, the door to Temple House opened and the High Priest was glowering down at them from the entrance. He offered neither greeting nor comment, and turned to march across the hall and up the stairs without checking that he was followed.

The battered shutters in the ballroom had been flung open, letting a flood of morning light into the room. It gave a diamond brightness to the heaps of glass on the floor, as well as starkly exposing the pockmarked plaster on the walls. Of the mirrors that had once lined them, only one panel of glass still hung, though damaged, in the middle of the wall at the end of the room. As the High Priest advanced toward it, the chancers realized the panel must belong to the door that led to the crypt. Beforehand, the entrance had been concealed almost seamlessly within the mirrors.

Their guide took out a bunch of keys. One of them was small and silver, with an oval—or rather, a zero—forming the gripping end. “Oh,” Flora exclaimed. “That’s the same as the key we found.”

“I am the guardian of doors,” he replied stiffly. “It follows that I am the master of keys also.”

“That’s good for you, but I’m not going through any strange doors till I know what they lead to,” said Blaine. As the glass panel sprang open, he looked down the narrow flight of steps with suspicion. He had not been with the other three when they had discovered the hidden staircase to the crypt and found the Hanged Man suspended in his prison of tree and stone.

The High Priest shrugged dismissively. “You do not know what you seek, either. I am here to show you the paths you might take, but the choice is yours.” And he turned his back on them and began the descent.

Toby promptly followed him. After a brief hesitation, Flora went, too, then Blaine. Cat was last.

The stairs were steep and went on for a long time, down the height of the house, past its foundations and deep into the earth below. The five of them proceeded through what felt like miles of cramped darkness, until finally the blackness began to fade and gave way to a lamplit room.

Toby and Flora were some way ahead of Cat and Blaine, and reached the bottom of the stairs while the other two were half a flight or so behind. The stairs turned in at a right angle for the final descent, and so Cat was still in darkness when she heard Toby exclaim in anger and alarm. Flora’s voice was also raised in protest.