The Master of Misrule (17 page)

Boiiing! Her fourth answer had been accepted. Her body tightened in readiness for the final challenge.

“Hear and consider your last question. Which card is the cross sum of Death?”

Flora frowned.
Sum
implied a mathematical calculation of some sort, and numbers were not Flora’s strong point. Her mind was a roaring blank. Come on, come on, she implored herself.
Think
. Death was the thirteenth triumph.… All right … so thirteen was an unlucky number.… What other numbers were like that? In the Bible, 666 was the number of the Beast—that is, Satan. And wasn’t the Devil the sixteenth triumph? She couldn’t remember. But there
surely wasn’t another card with such close associations with Death. “Um … that would be … the Devil?” she guessed.

The congregation appeared to be holding its breath. The candles sputtered and the shadows danced.

Then:

“Your answer is rejected,” all five Inquisitors announced in the same dry voice.

The gong was struck again, but much louder this time, so that the noise clashed and boomed through Flora’s head. She had to put her hands up to her ears. They were still ringing when the Inquisitor behind her spoke.

“The Trial by Inquiry has ended in failure. Yet you have one final chance to redeem yourself. It is time for the Trial by Ordeal to commence.”

The people in the pews quivered and moaned; a few began to weep. Flora’s hand curled fearfully around her ace and die.

The five Inquisitors rose from their seats. At their signal, the soldiers who had been guarding the wooden screen moved it away to reveal that a pyre had been erected in place of the altar. A gagged woman was bound to the stake. Her pale hair was dark with sweat, her white skin greenish with fear. It was Odile, the onetime Queen of Cups.

“Behold the heretic,” said one of the robed figures as he lit a taper from one of the candles. “You, though, still have victory in your grasp. All you have to do is take this taper and set the pyre alight.”

Flora looked around wildly. “I thought—but isn’t—this is
my
trial—”

“The ordeal by fire is hers. Yours is an ordeal of choice. Or Free Will, if you prefer.”

“You want me to choose to
burn a woman alive
?”

“We want you to prove your dedication to the Game. This is your last chance to win in it.”

Odile moaned from under her gag. Flora had to look away. She was here to win on Odile’s behalf, and so release her from her punishment. But what if Flora’s only way of winning this move was to kill the person she had come to save?

The Five of Pentacles were watching her from under their hoods. The beggarly audience rustled in the pews.

“In our Game,” the Inquisitor with the taper said softly, “a true winner knows that it is every player for himself.”

“Herself, in this case,” said Flora tartly. She had come to a decision. She took the taper, and stooped to put it to the pyre.

The wood was dry, and caught alight quickly. As the first tongues of flame licked delicately at the tinder, the choir began to sing, in darker yet more triumphant tones than before:

Very slowly, the five hooded figures of the Inquisition brought their hands together in stately applause. The soldiers
joined in by hammering the butts of their rifles on the floor, while the congregation cowered and wept. Smoke plumed, and as the flames began to crackle and hiss around the Queen of Cups’ feet, she writhed hopelessly against her bonds. The gag had slipped, and soon her screams could be heard even over the choir.

Flora tore her ace in half. At once, the Ace of Swords, Root of Air, unleashed a mighty wind that howled down the cavernous length of the building. The Inquisitors’ robes whipped around in a flurry of scarlet as the gale sent them and their soldiers in a slithering tumble across the floor. The congregation clutched their pews like half-drowned sailors clinging to a wreck. With a clang, the bronze lectern fell to the ground. Only Flora was still able to stand. Wind roared around the pyre, and for a horrible moment she thought it would fan the flames so that they only flared more strongly. But the tempest was too great for any fire. In a matter of seconds, its flames were blown out, the woman’s cries stopped and the building was plunged into darkness.

B
LAINE’S
N
INE OF
S
WORDS
depicted a person hunched on a bed with their hands held fearfully over their eyes, as if waking up from a nightmare. It wasn’t nighttime here, though. The window on his left looked over an assortment of ugly modern offices on a dull afternoon. Below there was a small yard and a Dumpster daubed with a lopsided black wheel on one side. Although Blaine didn’t like the look of his card at all, he was slightly reassured by the sight of a threshold. He felt for his die and was reassured some more. There would always be a way out.

He walked down the corridor into a lobby. Something about the place reminded him of school. The walls were painted the same sludgy institutional beige and the floor was lined with the same scuffed linoleum. But the smell was different: sour and antiseptic, medical.

A hard-faced nurse was sitting at a table in front of a pair
of double doors. “Visiting hours are over,” she informed him without looking up from her charts.

Blaine set the card down in front of her. Eventually, she condescended to look at it before turning her inspection on him.

“All right. I suppose you’d better come through.” She got to her feet, grudgingly, and entered a numeric code in the keypad beside the door. “They’re restless this afternoon. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Past the doors, Blaine found himself in a hospital ward. It was more dilapidated than the corridor, with the linoleum stained and curling at the edges, damp patches on the ceiling and rust on the bed frames. All the beds were filled with people sleeping, although, as the nurse had said, there wasn’t much rest involved. Most were drooling and muttering, twisting jerkily beneath the bedclothes. One old man near to Blaine began to thrash and shout, and another nurse, with the air of someone repeating a familiar chore, came and emptied a syringe into his neck. The man froze into silence.

Instead of a single person waking from a nightmare, it was a roomful of people in the midst of one. Blaine felt tension hum through his body. But the nurse on duty didn’t pay him any attention. Her uniform was soiled, and her yawns were noisy.

The next ward was smaller, and more like a common room, with sagging armchairs grouped to face a television fixed high in a corner of the wall. The patients here were awake but barely conscious, all strapped to their seats and
staring listlessly at a TV game show. One of them was the black man, Ahab, who had been King of Wands. His towering stature and grizzled hair were the same, but his expression was vacant as he drooled and mumbled in his chair.

With a shudder, Blaine increased his pace. Whatever test was coming, he wanted to find it and face it as soon as possible. He went down some stairs and into a gallery lined with cells. Through viewing panels of reinforced glass, he could see the inmates—dressed in the same thin beige pajamas as the other patients—howl and beg, and hurl themselves against the padded walls.

At the other end of the gallery, a creaking lift opened and the nurse who’d been on duty in the lobby stepped out. She looked at Blaine. “Are you ready for your visit now?” she asked.

This must be it.…

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“Come along, please.” She rapidly led the way around corners and along corridors until they reached a plain white room. There were three women inside. One was sedated on a bed, twitching and drooling like the people in the first ward. Another was strapped to a chair, staring blindly into space. The third was crouched in a corner, rocking from side to side as she chattered and cackled to herself. All three looked exactly like Helen.

Bile rose in Blaine’s throat and he backed clumsily toward the door. “What’s the matter?” asked the nurse disapprovingly. “Aren’t you even going to say hello? She’s been looking forward to your visit all day.”

“No she hasn’t,” he muttered. His mother wasn’t here. She couldn’t,
mustn’t
, be.

The woman on the bed moaned. The one strapped to the chair turned her head and looked at him emptily with bloodshot eyes. But the one in the corner leaped up and screamed, “Go away! You’re a monster! Monster! Monster!”

“Let me out of here,” Blaine said harshly. The nurse was standing in front of the door and he had to push her out of the way.

He staggered into the corridor, breathing hard. The scar from the knife throbbed and he could feel cold sweat on his back. It was like being in Arthur’s study again, but worse. His very own living nightmare. The nurse took him by the arm as if to lead him back into the room, and he shook her off, swearing.

“There’s no call for that,” she said primly. “I think you need to calm down, young man.”

“And I think you should f—”

“Now, now,” said a genial voice. “What’s all the fuss about?”

A rosy-faced, gray-haired gentleman in a white coat had come out of the room next door.

The nurse looked smug. “There,” she said to Blaine. “Doctor will sort you out.”

“I don’t—” He lapsed into a fit of coughing and it took him a while to catch his breath. “I don’t need to see a doctor.”

“Oh, it won’t take a minute.” The man smiled and beckoned Blaine into his office. In contrast to the ramshackle state of the rest of the hospital—or asylum, or whatever it
was—the room was inviting. It had a plush carpet and comfortable chairs, and flowers on the windowsill. The medicine cabinet on the wall looked out of place. Blaine remained, tense and mistrustful, in the doorway.

The doctor settled down behind his mahogany desk. “How are you feeling?” he asked in a fatherly way.

“OK.”

“That’s a nasty cough.”

“It’s getting better.”

“You were very agitated back there. Something’s obviously upset you.”

“It was nothing. I’m over it now. She— It wasn’t real anyway.”

The doctor wrote something on his pad. “Hmm … interesting.”

“Like I said, I’m fine.”

“Of course you are,” the man replied with a humoring smile. “Still, perhaps we should both take a little look at what set you off. Just to straighten things out, you understand.”

He got to his feet and opened a hatch in the wall near the medicine cabinet. It revealed a glass panel, like the ones in the cells, for looking into the room next door. “Can you tell me what you see in there?” the doctor asked.

Blaine hesitated. Knowing that this was a test didn’t make it any easier to work out the right answer. Steeling himself, he went to take another look at the three Helens. It still made his guts cramp. He described the scene as briefly and impassively as possible.

When he’d finished, the doctor sighed and summoned
the nurse, who had been waiting by the door. “You mustn’t worry,” he told Blaine. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I know. It was just the shock.”

“The shock of an empty room?”

“But it isn’t empty. I’ve just told you what—” Blaine stopped. Too late, he realized the trap he’d fallen into.

“Ah.” The doctor looked at him regretfully. “The fact is, that room’s unoccupied. There’s nobody there.”

“Yeah, there is,” Blaine said uselessly. “And the nurse saw them, too. She brought me to the room as a visitor. She told me Hel—that woman, those women—had been looking forward to seeing me.” Though he already knew it wouldn’t be any good, he turned to the nurse in appeal. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“It’s right that you should see Doctor for your consultation,” she replied blandly.

“You lying b—”

“Come, come!” said the doctor, still in the same genial manner. “First you told me that you were getting yourself into a state over nothing, and that you knew it ‘wasn’t real.’
Now
you’re getting upset that no one else believes in this fantasy of yours! Next you’ll be saying that all of us are illusions, too, and none of this hospital actually exists.”

Blaine laughed shortly. “Stranger things have happened.”

“Paranoid hallucinations,” the doctor told the nurse in an undertone. “Very sad. We’ll start him off on the lethecocytus chloride.”

All Blaine’s instincts shrilled a warning. Before the doctor could reach into his medicine cabinet, he swiveled
round and began to sprint down the corridor. He needed a head start of only a minute or two to throw his die and raise a threshold. However, he didn’t get even that. Two male orderlies had just emerged at the other end of the corridor, and at the nurse’s shout they grabbed at Blaine as he skidded past. He lashed out but they were too strong for him, and a few moments later he was frog-marched back to the doctor’s office. One of them wrested the die out of his hand. With both arms seized, he had no way of reaching his ace.

The doctor’s plump pink face creased in concern. “It’s for your own good, you know,” he told Blaine as he filled a syringe with muddy green liquid. “And we’ll get you something for that cough of yours, too.”