The Master of Misrule (19 page)

The rest of the house was stripped out and deserted, but otherwise intact. Its surrounding streets were much less ravaged than the neighborhood Toby had first found himself in; there were even some bedraggled civilians about. He saw patrols of soldiers, too, whose uniforms bore the insignia of a silver sword on a black background. Although he knew he should be downcast at the enormity of the task ahead, he felt a warm thrill as he looked around, knowing that all this
activity—every face, every stone, every sight and sound—had been conjured into being on his behalf.

He found the Ministry of Operations around the next corner: a fortified block of ugly brown brick, with a tattered sword flag hanging from the top story. A dusty stretch of grass occupied the center of the square outside, but there was no church behind it or in any of the streets nearby. All that remained of the drop’s location was a smoking crater and a few shards of stained glass.

OK, Toby reasoned, time for plan B. He could see people working in the windows of the ministry; one of them must be his target. Perhaps if he got past the sentries and into the building, the Arcanum would provide its own clues? After all, he had his Ace of Wands, the Root of Fire, to fall back on if things went wrong.… But thinking of the ace gave him an idea. He didn’t necessarily have to deliver the Seven of Swords to anyone. The card wasn’t valuable in itself. It was just a signal to the agent to proceed with the mission, whatever that might be. To win the move, Toby simply had to find a different means of communication. He had to give another sign.

Grinning to himself, Toby slipped back to the house with the tunnel, and the underground storage area. Here he collected one of the canisters of paraffin and put it in a plastic bag. He already carried matches in his pocket. It was comforting to have the die there, too, as his own personal escape route, but it occurred to him that if he fell into enemy hands, the Seven of Swords might be incriminating, so
he decided to leave it behind. As he concealed the Ace of Wands inside a tear in the lining of his jacket, he briefly wondered what the other three chancers were facing. Whatever it was, he thought smugly, he’d bet it couldn’t compete with espionage in occupied territory.

Once he had returned to the square, Toby made for the far north end from the ministry. He spent a while scuffing the grass with his feet and loitering about in what he hoped was an innocuous manner. Then he used his keys to puncture a hole in the bag and the bottom of the plastic container inside. When he had made sure the paraffin was seeping out in a clear and steady trickle, he walked—trying to look as aimless as possible—in a straight line to the other corner. From there, he turned and trudged in a diagonal direction across the lawn, squeezing the container to ensure that the liquid was leaving a substantial trail along the grass.

Out of the corner of his eye, he was aware that the sentries outside the ministry were looking at him and conferring among themselves. One of them stepped forward to the edge of the grass.

“You! Boy! Come over here.”

Increasing his saunter to a jog, Toby covered the last few feet of his course. There was only just enough paraffin to finish it. Already, two of the guards were moving to intercept him. His hands trembling in fear and excitement, Toby lit a match and dropped it on the ground.

For a horrible moment the match just smoldered, weakly. Then, with an excitable whoosh, the grass lit up and fire raced along the trail of paraffin that Toby had laid: a long
diagonal line leading up to a short horizontal one. Within seconds, a giant 7 blazed across the square. Well, he thought, if that doesn’t get the message across, nothing will. Already, the windows of the ministry and the other surrounding buildings were crowded with people watching the display.

There was no time to savor his success. Toby had managed to sprint only a few yards before a kick from one of the guards swept his feet from under him, sending him crashing down onto the pavement. Almost before he knew it, his hands had been wrenched behind his back and his captors were searching his pockets. One of them held up the die. “A gambler, eh?” he jeered before stamping it under his boot.

The next moment, Toby was bundled through a side entrance to the ministry and marched into the basement. Cells lined the corridor. Most were empty, but as he passed one on the left, a woman’s face pressed against the bars. Underneath the mash of blood and bruises, he thought he could make out the features of Lucrezia, Queen of Pentacles. But before Toby could react, he was hustled on and shoved into a windowless cell. The door slammed shut behind him.

He didn’t know how long he was left to sweat it out. It could have been three hours, or one. He sat on the floor, his back against the wall, and tried to hold his nerve. Without his die, and with no sign of a threshold, he was trapped. At least they hadn’t found his ace, he told himself. He still had a powerful defense. The weapon of last resort … But the longer he waited, the harder it was not to fill his head with
gruesome imaginings of what that last resort might be. Lucrezia’s pulpy face was warning enough.

It was almost a relief when the two guards returned. Without speaking, and barely looking at Toby, they unlocked the door and hustled him down hallways and up long flights of stairs. From what he could see of it, the place was run-down and chaotic: a warren of badly lit rooms filled with people huddled over screens and switchboards. At the top of the building, he was shown into a small office lined with maps, where a man in military uniform was working at his desk. Toby had to wait a further five long minutes before he looked up from his paperwork.

“Ah yes. The arsonist. Perhaps,” he said with chilling quiet, “you would care to explain what your demonstration in the square was in aid of?”

Toby attempted a careless shrug. “It wasn’t in aid of anything. I like setting fire to things, that’s all.”

“So you would have us believe you are just a common hooligan.”

“Yeah.”

“And the significance of the seven?”

“It’s a lucky number.”

“Hmm. I do not think, however, it will prove to be lucky for you.” The interviewer leaned across the desk. “I am a reasonable person,” he said. “And a patient one. Other members of this administration are not so patient. You will find explaining things to me is much more … bearable … than having to talk to my colleagues. Do you understand?”

Toby paled in spite of himself. “There’s nothing to explain,” he said defiantly.

“Very well.” The man smiled coldly. He called to the guard outside the room. “Take our young friend down to the interrogation suite. I’m sure a few hours there will make him more conversational.”

He went back to his paperwork.

Toby’s guard escorted him along the corridor. The other guard was just ahead, at the top of the stairs. Toby’s stomach twisted. Was this the right point to play his ace? He wished he had a better idea of what starting a fire up here would do—what chance of escape it would give him. But perhaps the Arcanum would provide its own way out, after all.…

Before they reached the stairs, they had to pass a door on the right. Toby hadn’t really taken it in on the way up, but he noticed it this time because it was open. It revealed a small storeroom. As they approached it, Toby darted inside, closed the door and twisted the key in the lock.

It was done on impulse, with the vague hope of buying time. It was only when he stood with his back against the door, breathing hard, that he realized there was a window.

He pushed the handle. The window opened onto a courtyard at the back of the building, five floors below. From this height, it felt like miles. Meanwhile, the door thumped and rattled. He would have a minute at most before the guards forced their way in.

Toby grasped either side of the window frame and pulled himself up. On the brink of the drop, giddiness
churned through his head. He saw that the roof sloped down to either side of the window, with a lead gutter running along its edge, almost in line with the window’s ledge. He was slim and slight. Could it take his weight?

Quaking all over, Toby forced himself to stand on the narrow ledge, hands grasping either side, looking into the room with his back to the courtyard. Then he began to shuffle toward the gutter.

Inside, the storeroom door burst open with a shout from the guards. Hugging the slope of the roof, Toby left the last few inches of the window ledge—so perilous before, now a haven of stability and refuge—and put his weight on the gutter. It sagged, but stayed firm.

A soldier’s head came through the window. He tried to grab Toby by the leg but Toby managed to lean out of reach, clutching at the roof’s stone tiles. The gutter creaked and protested at the strain, and his heart stuttered with terror. The man’s fingertips brushed his ankle. Toby’s hands scrabbled over the tiles, searching for some kind of grip. Ivy wound across the tiles, its roots thick and fibrous, and he dug his fingers into it. Come on, he told himself.
Work
. He screwed up his eyes, sweating and grunting, and sought new handholds, thrusting his cramped fingers through cracks in the stone tiles, scrambling around the gnarled ivy roots. The muscles in his arms burned all over. Slowly, torturously, he hauled himself up the slope.

There was a valley in between the two peaks of the roof, and after he’d slithered down, he lay there for a few moments, panting, but also giggling weakly to himself. Spider-Man,
eat your heart out. A siren was already wailing, though, and the sound of voices sent Toby scrambling to his feet again. More soldiers had accessed the roof from a skylight at the other end of the building: pursuit was not far behind. And to escape onto the roof of the next building, he would have to leap over the alley between them. It would mean a running jump of about six feet.

There was no time for hesitation. Toby sprinted along the tiles, and hurled himself into the air.

At first, he felt that he was moving in slow motion, speeding up only as he fell. Before he knew it, his feet hit the ledge of the roof, and for a few hideous seconds he hung there upright on the edge, his arms flailing for balance. Gravity tipped him forward, the smack of his hands on the lead sheeting sending shocks trembling through his body.

But as Toby resumed his flight, ducking and diving through the parapets and peaks and chimney stacks, he felt no fear. Now it was like his last time in the Arcanum, at the end of the Chariot, when Mia had given him his quest. Confidence and luck sparkled through his veins. The bombblasted, smoking city spread around him was like the biggest film set in the world. He wasn’t even surprised when he felt pins and needles on his palm. Of course a threshold must be in reach. He found its wheel built into the brick patterning of a chimney, and when he raised the coin, he actually laughed aloud.

After all that, he thought, I didn’t even have to use my ace!

C
AT WAS DROWNING
. The flood that had engulfed the Minotaur had caught up with her before she could manage to toss the threshold coin, and now she was sinking helplessly into its depths. She thrashed around in the muffling dark until her confused senses realized the air wasn’t being strangled out of her by water, but by cloth. She was swaddled in thick, heavy folds of the stuff. At last, she fought her way free, to find herself standing in a swath of gold brocade just inside the entrance to Temple House.

Something strange, though, had happened to the hall. The marble floor, checkered in black and white, had grown impossibly wide, or else Cat had grown impossibly small. It was as if she was a pawn standing on a giant’s chessboard. And yet she was also bestriding a toy landscape of miniature mountains, forests and rivers, towns and plains, whose scurrying figures were as small and inconsequential as ants.

Black and white. Large and small. The empty board, the teeming landscape, the marble hall. One and the same.

Cat closed her eyes on the confusion and groped for the way out.

Except that Temple House was no longer in the city she knew. The square outside and the buildings surrounding it were utterly strange. Yet she knew that she was not in the Arcanum. This was indisputably her own world.

Standing at the bottom of the steps to the house was Alastor, King of Swords.

There was no trace of the wounds inflicted by the Minotaur, yet he did not look like the man Cat knew. Alastor appeared thin and worn, and older than she remembered.

He looked up to where Cat stood in the entranceway, lapped by her swirl of golden drapes. She expected to see hate and bitterness, but his gaze was empty as a dead man’s. The wheel on Cat’s palm burned as, one by one, cards began to slip out of Alastor’s pockets and dance through the air. They spun toward her hand like iron filings to a magnet, and in the twists and turns of their flight, she glimpsed a scattering of triumphs among the cards of the Swords suit. But the moment they reached her grasp, the cards melted away.

For the last time, the queen of the Court of Swords faced its fallen king. As Alastor stared past Cat into the hall and the great checkerboard, the despair that suffused his face was more frightening than anger. He stretched out a hand, hungrily. The door slammed shut between them.