The Master Of Misrule Part 24

In a flip and flash of metal, he was gone. With a feathery rustle, the thick shadow that followed him was gone, too. The second angel had been released.

Misrule's coin faltered, and began to sink.

Cat and Blaine looked at each other.

"What-what card did he get?"

Blaine flicked through the remainder of his deck. He raised his brows.

"Death."

As soon as Flora realized where she was, she was sure that everything was going to be all right. Misrule's cataclysms faded into insignificance. Here and now was what mattered. Dirty traces of snow rimmed the gra.s.s within the railings, pavement and road alike were churned with icy black sludge and brown grit, but all Flora's attention was fixed on the red thread she still held. The end of it was tied across the threshold of Temple House, and Grace was on the other side, framed in the doorway. Beyond her was the garden: golden-green, luminous.

"It's my first night," said Flora, exultant. "The first night I came to Temple House and joined the Game. It means we can go back to how we were. I've brought you home."

She waited for Grace to step out of the doorway, under the thread.

Grace, however, remained where she was. "This isn't home."

"It must be. Time's gone into reverse. At last, the Game has given us our very own miracle. Come here. Come to me."

But her sister shook her head. "I can't, Flo," she said very quietly. "I took a gamble and my gamble failed. The Arcanum has held me for five years. I am too much a part of it now to come home."

"I can still save you-"

"You have already saved me. How else could I have escaped the Spinners and got here?" She indicated the garden behind her, with its roses and rainbows and s.h.i.+ning leaves. "Only Love could bring me this far."

"Yes," said Flora, crying, "because Love conquers all."

"No," said Grace with a great and terrible tenderness, "it doesn't."

She reached out and stroked Flora's hair, as she had before. "Listen to me. You must be the one to cut the thread. Not to banish me, but to set me free. From the Arcanum, from everything."

Flora screwed up her face against the drowsy murmur of the bees, the warm scent of honeysuckle. "I won't do it. I won't." Her voice cracked. "You said you'd be with me to the end."

"This is the end. And you have to reverse it. For our mother and father, for Will and Charlie, for everyone you've ever known, and a world of strangers besides."

"We already failed-"

"It's not too late. The cherubim can still be released. There is still time for another sacrifice." She held Flora's hands across the thin red silk. "Please," she said softly. "Let me go."

The leaves whispered, the suns.h.i.+ne welled.

"I love you," said Flora.

"I love you," said Grace.

"Forever." Flora wept as she snapped the thread that tied her to her sister, and the angel to the Arcanum.

Across the threshold, Grace smiled. She bloomed with even greater life and beauty, but it was the beauty of the garden, glowing through her, growing ever richer, brighter. Everything was caught in its prism of leaf-light, leaf-shade; the curve of its flowers and honey of its breath; the dew and the dazzle; the dazzle of her-dancing, loosening, losing itself in a last uncontainable loveliness.

CAT, BLAINE AND FLORA stood together in the hall at Temple House.

Toby stood in the doorway to the square, staring up at Misrule's wheel. Although they were used to the building's s.h.i.+fting interiors, they had never seen the place look so large or so empty.

The three of them felt emptied out also, but this came with a sense of freedom, not hollowness. Blaine felt the lifting of a dark shadow; Cat felt cleansed by sweet waters. Flora felt sun on her face, drying her tears. She could still hear a silvery note ringing in her ears: the chime of Misrule's coin as it fell to the ground.

She turned to the other two. "Did we do it, after all?" she asked. "Are the angels ... are they ... free?"

"Not quite," Blaine answered. He pointed to the floor. "Look."

The silver coin was rolling steadily, purposefully, toward where Toby was standing.

"What's he doing?" Cat looked again, and frowned. "And who's he with?"

The disappointment of the Triumph of Time had been crus.h.i.+ng, especially since at first glance, Toby thought he'd pulled it off. The wilted brown gra.s.s in the garden ... the traffic fumes and summer heat ... Everything was how it had been the first evening he'd found Mercury Square. Then, like Cat, he had looked through the door and seen the other side of the coin, and realized that the world was doomed just the same. Even so, he hadn't hesitated. He had raced across the hall in desperate haste to do something, anything. A final gesture. A last stand.

Outside in Toby's city, people were dancing in the streets, under the glare of the wheel. Midnight was not far away. Men, women and children, friends and strangers, were singing and laughing together, feverishly happy. There was a lurid blue light in their eyes. Helplessly, Toby tried to warn them. To tell them to wake up, to get away before the chaos started, before everything changed. n.o.body listened. n.o.body cared.

In the end, he came back to the steps of Temple House. There was nowhere else to go. It seemed like fate to find that Mia was there, too.

"I had to come," she said eagerly, turning to greet him. "I couldn't wait on the sidelines any longer. Now I see how wrong I was before. Oh, Toby, I didn't know it would be so beautiful!"

Then he, too, looked up at the wheel, properly this time, and as it whirled and flamed, the light seemed to burn through his eyes and into his skull. At once, the nightmares conjured in the High Priest's mirror were exposed as the lies they were. The center of Misrule's wheel glittered with visions of every move ever played in the Game, and every move still to come, in all their beauty and madness. He had reached the heart of the mystery itself.

If this was defeat, then Toby couldn't think of anything more glorious.

Blaine, Flora and Cat hurried to the door. Toby was holding Misrule's coin clamped in his fist.

"Toby," Cat exclaimed breathlessly, "we've still got a chance of winning Eternity. There's just one more angel that needs to be released. Then we'll be able to destroy Misrule and the Game-"

"Destroy it?" A spark of blue flickered within his eyes. "Why would we want to do that?"

"You know why. Because it's mad, it's out of control, it's-"

"That's what you say." Toby's voice was cold.

"They don't understand," Mia put in. "They still don't see what's at stake." She turned to the other three, and they saw that her gaze held the same strange glint of blue. "I used to be like you: afraid of the Game, even more afraid of Misrule. All that's changed."

Blaine stared. "Is that a fact?"

"Success and failure are the same to me now. I don't care, so long as I can keep playing. I don't care about anything. Even Toby spoiling my plans for the Ace of Pentacles-it was meant to be."

Toby blinked. "Your plans?"

"Oh yes." Mia laughed. "I'm afraid you got our duel the wrong way around: Mr. Marlow was the player you saved by your intervention, not me. I ambushed him. It was me, too, who played the ace. But I wasn't as angry with you as I should have been. In some ways, you see, it was a relief. I hadn't ever tried to kill someone before." She squeezed his arm affectionately. "Not that it matters anyway. We're all in Fortune's hands."

He frowned.

"There," said Cat disgustedly. "You see what your precious Game does? It creates madmen and murderers. For G.o.d's sake, Toby! Don't you under-"

"No," Toby shot back. "You don't understand me. None of you do. You've always laughed at and patronized me, right from the start. None of you understand what this means to me, how much I-"

"Hush," said Mia, lips parted and eyes bright. "It's beginning."

The Master of Misrule appeared on a platform in the axle of his wheel. He lifted up his arms, and his voice rang jubilantly around the square.

"My friends, I know how uncertain this world is. I myself have suffered imprisonment and torment. I have been called a traitor and charlatan, condemned by false laws. Yet my luck turned, and now I want to share the fruits of my victory with you.

"This is not my city yet, but I know its heart like I know my own. Every city is sacred to the fortune hunters, those who hope against hope to turn a corner and find a pavement of gold. These are my people.

"Some of you have played the cards in my Lottery of Luck. Some of you have lost; many more have won. Those of you dealt adversity by the serpent's tail, do not despair, for Lady Fortune's Wheel turns in the blink of an eye.

"My new Lottery will be free, and open to everyone, for I guarantee prizes for all. Prizes more potent, more exhilarating and strange than you could imagine. But every one will enrich your lives.

"All of you with hopes and dreams, fears and follies, ambitions and tragedies ... bring them to me, and I will transform them with my Game."

As the wheel spun and the music played, cards began to float out from between its spokes. The crowd leaped to catch them.

"I'm going to join in," Mia cried. "I want to be in the heart of it, always."

She ran down the steps and into the center of the square.

Toby looked after her, dazed. The blue spark in his eyes trembled. Flora came forward.

"The Game isn't real, Toby. It's what we do outside of it that matters."

He shook his head groggily. "Not what I do." Resentment strengthened his voice. "You don't know what it's like."

"I know the freedom and thrill of the Arcanum. My sister did, too. That's why we lost her. We lost her because she began to love the Game more than she did us, or reality, or even herself."

Flora took his hand. "I don't know what our lives will be like, what we will do with them or the sort of people we will become. Sometimes this excites me, sometimes it frightens me. But that's because even the most ordinary life is a gamble. Its possibilities are infinite."

Toby stared down at the silver coin. Misrule's head laughed up at him. "So ... so are his."

"Misrule offers prizes, and with them possibilities," said Blaine. "But they're his dreams, not yours. Don't let them take you. Don't give us up."

Toby looked up and met Cat's eyes. She nodded.

"You're worth too much."

Gently, Flora uncurled his fingers from around Misrule's coin. "Let it go, Toby. Let it go."

And, as all over the city its clocks struck midnight, Toby let the coin fall. With it, he released his hopes of heroism, his dreams of fame and the last of the four cherubim.

There was a sound of trumpets. Sad and sweet: the Last Post. The doorway of Temple House filled with cloud once more. When it cleared, its frame enclosed a life-sized playing card. Fame, the angel with the golden horn. The ill.u.s.tration melted away, revealing the Devil enthroned. Love, with the burning wings. Temperance and her chalices.

The angels who stepped out of them were nothing like their cards. They were huge and winged, only vaguely human in form. Their movements were sinuous as smoke and their bodies were covered in s.h.i.+mmering scales of every color and none.

They spoke as one, in the same lofty, cold tone as the High Priestess's voice of prophecy.

"The offerings are complete. You have summoned us, and you have released us. What would you bid us do?"

"We want-we want the Triumph of Eternity," said Toby, though his voice shook.

"Which of you claims final mastery of the Game?"

"None of us," said Cat. The words came easily, although they did not feel like her own. "The Game has been fought and won, and now it is finished. The board must be put away."

The G.o.ds of the Game's city bowed their heads.

"Then you must throw the last coin to turn the last card."

The lost card, and the last: Eternity.

Humbly, Toby faced his fellow king and queens. "May I?"

They nodded. What had once been Misrule's coin lay where it had fallen, its metal now blank and dull.

The King of Pentacles grasped the coin and tossed it up into the heavens.

The walls of Temple House began to soar upward at the same time as the floor stretched out on every side. Soon the building had grown to twice, three times its original size. It was a great temple indeed.

Outside the enlarged doorway, there was nothing but sky. An endless indigo night, in which the stars were concentrated so brightly that the constellations looked ready to burn through Heaven itself. Misrule's wheel outshone them all. He was spread-eagled in the center of it, his white hair streaming, his blue eyes blazing, his mouth open in an anguished howl as the cherubim surged toward the wheel, rolling hoops of fire before them. Strange creatures gleamed within.

As for the wheels, it was cried unto them in my hearing, O wheel.

And every one had four faces: the first face was the face of a bull, and the second face was the face of a man, and the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle.

O wheel.

O wheel- The four rolling wheels spun into the greater blue one. The moment of impact was a mighty starburst, its explosion soundless, though the sky itself seemed to rock, sending a deep crack ripping through the floor of Temple House. The tangle of wheels and cherubim churned and whirled, faster and faster, a spinning globe.

Finally, it stilled.

Now there was only one wheel, or only the rim of it: a circle that moved and writhed, its s.h.i.+fting scales like a serpent's, s.h.i.+mmering with every color and none.

A naked dancer was in the center. Neither man nor woman, neither flesh nor spirit, and moving joyfully to the music of the spheres.

The music had no melody, no phrase or rhythm, nor anything else that its human listeners could understand. The senses it spoke to were different from the ones they knew, for its harmony was somehow beyond sound. But just as it became almost too beautiful to bear, both music and dancer faded into the stars.

Only a ring of silver light remained. It now held a woman in the shadow at its heart.

The four kings and queens stood on the edge of the temple's cleft floor. They were p.a.w.ns on a giant's chessboard. And yet they were also overlooking a confusion of landscapes, and a jostling crowd.

The High Priest and the High Priestess. The Emperor and Asterion and Cybele, the robed Inquisitors, the hatchet-faced nurse, the beaming mayor ... A magician in a top hat and a soldier in camouflage, three sisters winding a thread ... A man with a cl.u.s.ter of swords in his back, another one hanging from a tree ... Each king and queen saw every being they had ever encountered in the Arcanum, and countless others that were strange to them, yet familiar, too. For every face bore the mark of the woman within the Wheel of silver light.

Fors Fortuna, Imperatrix Mundi.