The Game of Triumphs

by Laura Powell

  FOR A WHILE, IT didn’t look as if the bouncer at the Palais Luxe was going to let her in. Not that she could blame him: quite apart from the fact that no one under eighteen was supposed to set foot inside a casino, she was finding it extraordinarily difficult to string any sort of sentence together. But after repeating Bel’s name for the fifth or sixth time, he did a series of mutters into his walkie-talkie and, suddenly, Bel was standing in the musty lobby. Saying her name. Asking if she was all right. Was she hurt, was she sick, was the flat—

  “No,” Cat said dazedly. “I’m not hurt. I just … I really need to talk to you.”

  Bel gave her a long look and a short nod. “In you come.”

  The bouncer was still grumbling about regulations and licenses, but Bel shooed him away with one hand, and hustled Cat up the stairs with the other. The next thing she knew, Bel was shepherding her into the tiny kitchen by Greg’s office. There she set about making two mugs of sweet, dusty-tasting tea. It was only after she’d watched Cat take an obedient gulp that she spoke again. “Now then,” she said. “What’s all this about?”

  Cat stared at the clock on the wall. Half past nine. She had been in the Arcanum for less than an hour. The clock ticked, the tea steamed, murmurs and exclamations came from the gaming floor below. Cat had hundreds, thousands, of things she wanted to say, all of them impossible.

  “I … I want to know about Mum and Dad.”

  “You … what?” Bel frowned. Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t this.

  “Caroline and Adam Harper. My parents.” The clock ticked on: twitch-tock, twitch-tock. “They didn’t die in a car accident, did they? Somebody shot them.”

  Twitch-tock, twitch-tock, twitch-tock. Bel made a small muffled sound. She put her hand to her throat. “How do—? Where—? Who’ve you been talking to?”

  “So it’s true,” Cat said dully. She saw the spill of hair and blood, swirls of brown and cream. The Arcanum hadn’t lied.

  Bel’s hand was still fluttering at her neck. “I’m sorry. Cat, I … God, I … I thought it would be better, you see. Better for you not to know. You were so small.…”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Christ.” Underneath the fluorescent strip that lit the kitchen, Bel’s face was sallow and tired; the tight polyester shirt she was wearing had damp patches under the arms. She took a wavering breath. “It was a burglary, see. A burglary gone wrong. The police figured some smackhead was looking for something to steal, and your mum and dad … well, they got in the way.”

  “Did—did they catch the person who did it?”

  “No. Could’ve been any old street scum. Odds are, whoever did it was lying dead in a ditch before the year was out. That’s what I like to think, anyway.”

  Cat pushed her mug away, feeling sick.

  Bel went on quickly, nervously. “Maybe I should’ve told you the truth, but how do you explain something like that to a three-year-old? I didn’t want to go scaring you witless about men with guns and whatnot. Jeez, I was practically a kid myself.… I did mean to tell you, when you got older, but it never seemed the right time. And what purpose would it serve?”

  Twitch-tock, twitch-tock, twitch-tock.

  “But I saw it happen,” Cat mumbled. “I saw them get killed, Bel. I—I remember now.”

  Bel was very gentle. “No, love,” she said. “No, you couldn’t have. You were staying round a neighbor’s that night, thank God. You probably just, I dunno, overheard someone talking about it when you were little? But … I don’t understand. Why would you remember now? What brought this on?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I don’t—I can’t—I—”

  Cat found she was crying again, a dry, almost mechanical heaving that she couldn’t seem to control. After that, things became blurred. She had a hazy impression of Bel in whispered conversation by the door, of being gathered up and taken back to the flat, where Bel undressed her and tucked her up in bed like a little kid, murmuring her name over and over, like a lullaby. And although Bel’s hug smelled of cheap perfume and cigarettes, it was the scent of apples that drifted after her into dream.

  Sunday morning was the most painful waking she had ever had.

  The truth was, if she’d found out about her parents’ deaths in the ordinary course of things—overheard gossip, an ancient newspaper clipping—she wasn’t sure how badly it would have affected her. She would have been angry, of course, and sad, but it would almost have been like overhearing a story from somebody else’s life. After all, she’d worked hard on forgetting her loss, until she became used to telling people that she couldn’t miss what she’d never known. She almost believed it, too. But the Six of Cups had given back memories that were too glowing and abundant with love to ever be lost again.

  And if she trusted those memories about Christmas trees and cake and the rest of it, she had to trust the other one. The one she shouldn’t—couldn’t—have. The memory of the third person she’d heard in the living room that final night, the man with the stammer. It is the only Game. And I intend to w-win it.

  If she closed her eyes, she could see the cozy darkness under her parents’ bed again, and relive the thrill of discovery as her chubby toddler’s fingers closed on the stiff colored paper with the gold trim. What was the card doing there? Did one of her parents plan to play the Game? The idea sickened her. Because their life had been perfect; the Six of Cups had proved that. Caroline, Adam and Kitty Harper had everything they could ever want. Her parents wouldn’t risk all that happiness in pursuit of some weird otherworldly prize.

  No. Probably one or the other of them had stumbled on the card without knowing what it was. There’s been some mistake—that’s what her mother had said. How the stranger knew about the card, and what had become of it, was another matter entirely.

  News of a twelve-year-old murder would be hard to track down, but not impossible. There was a twenty-four-hour Internet café on Berwick Street. It was, Cat decided, as good a place as any to start.

  It was barely daylight when she slipped out of the flat, moving quietly so as not to wake Bel. The Internet café was empty except for a couple of bleary-eyed backpackers, so she had a row of computers to herself. For the first ten minutes she didn’t do anything, just stared at her screen. Who was she kidding? She wasn’t ready for this. She never would be. All the same, she brought up a search engine and started to type.

  She began with her parents’ names, the northern industrial town where they had lived and the year that they had died. When that didn’t produce anything useful, she looked for a regional newspaper. The website she found only provided news items from a year or so back, but when she checked its archive, she was directed to an online research service, with links to “related articles.” There was a free three-day trial offer.

  A few seconds later, Cat was looking at the photograph she had framed on her bedside table: Caroline, Adam and Kitty Harper, picnicking in a sunlit park. Above her parents’ smiling faces was the tabloid headline: “Double Murder—Young Couple Slain!”

  She braced herself to relive the horror she’d witnessed in the Six of Cups. But the real pain of reading the newspaper reports was how bland they were: a clichéd mix of sensationalism and statistics. Neither the national nor local press suggested that the crime could be anything other than a robbery gone wrong. The Harper family had lived on a respectable residential street, but one which was close to an area plagued by drugs and gun crime. There was no mention of Tarot cards or mysterious games. “Broken society” was to blame.

  Numbly, Cat read that Caroline and Adam Harper had left behind a daughter, aged three, who was being cared for by relatives. Neighbors agreed what a nice, polite couple the victims were. Police urged witnesses to come forward. The local Member of Parliament wrung his hands. What a shock. What a tragedy. What a bloody shame.

  Yet the fact was, her parents’ deaths had had little impact on the wider world. They were newcomers to the town, where they had liv
ed quiet lives, absorbed with their child, and each other. Caroline’s mother and father were dead; Adam’s lived in Australia. They were dead now, too, Bel said. She and Cat were the only survivors.

  Photographs, postcards, a handful of knickknacks … her father’s hair and her mother’s eyes … It wasn’t much of an inheritance. Cat and Bel traveled light, always thinking ahead, careless of the past. If there had been any other clue to her parents’ fate, it had been lost long ago.

  Cat stared at her screen with unseeing eyes. She knew that whatever the police or Bel or anyone else believed, her parents hadn’t been killed by some crazed drug addict. It had been done by someone in control of themselves and the situation. Someone looking for an Arcanum card.

  Three-year-old Kitty and fifteen-year-old Cat … neither of them would have seen the murder if it wasn’t for the kaleidoscopic shiftings of the Arcanum.

  If the crime had been committed in the Game’s name, by one of its players, then Cat’s only hope of resolving it lay in the Arcanum. Would she be able to see more if she went back?

  Seven Dials at half past eight on a Sunday morning had the same air of abandonment as it had on the other side of the threshold the night before. The shop fronts and windows were all shut up, and the streets were deserted apart from the occasional taxi, or all-night reveler plodding off for breakfast and bed. When Cat approached the column, she found she was shaking all over. Grief and anger, but longing, too: the hope of returning to that golden house. Of going home.

  So when her palm remained blank, and no trace of carving on the column could be found, she refused to believe it. But no matter how many times she circled the sundial, alternately cursing and pleading under her breath, nothing changed. The threshold was gone, and the Six of Cups with it.

  Toby wasn’t as pleased to hear from her as she’d expected. In fact, their initial exchange was a series of grunts on his part. Cat thought she heard muttering in the background. “A friend,” Toby said, away from the phone. “Yes, I do have them, OK?” The background voice grew querulous in tone. “It’s none of your business who I—” Crackle of static. Footsteps, a slammed door. “Sorry about that. Parents, y’know?”

  Cat bit her lip. “Uh, anyway … I was thinking about yesterday and I think maybe you’re right. About going into the Arcanum, I mean.”

  This time, his response was more what she’d been expecting. “So,” he said in a hopeful rush, “do you want to come over to my place? We can throw some ideas around, draw up an action plan.…”

  Cat sighed, but if she was going to get any further, she needed a guide. And right now, Toby was all she had. She took down his directions and agreed to meet him in an hour.

  “One thing,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “How do most people join the Game? If chancers are rare, how do normal players—knights—get involved?”

  “Ah!” He sounded pleased with the question. “There’ve always been rumors about the Game: hints and gossip, speculation on the Internet, even. Some people spend their whole lives trying to find a way in. But invitations turn up randomly, so it’s completely down to luck.

  “Chancers begin with the Triumph of the Fool, but a knight is invited with a Triumph of Eternity card. Then he goes to Temple House and joins the Game—just like you did. Except he gets to choose what triumph to play for. Obviously, he can’t play on behalf of whichever court currently holds it, so the other three courts draw lots to see which of them he’ll join. Then they explain the rules, deal the cards, and his round begins.”

  “Right, fine—but back to the invitations—where do they come from?” asked Cat.

  “No one really knows. I heard there’s one book on this one shelf in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, right, which has the Triumph of Eternity tucked in its pages. And there’s a story that every time a certain Old Master painting comes on the art market, whoever buys it finds an invitation stuck on the back. On the other hand, there must be people who get a card but don’t follow it up.” He gave a disbelieving laugh. “As if a ticket to the Arcanum was just another bit of junk mail!”

  That might account for how an invitation came to be in her parents’ house. Even though it didn’t quite explain why the card had been hidden under the bed … What was junk to some was a prize worth killing for to others. After she said goodbye to Toby, Cat stared at her palm, thinking of the throb and burn that conjured metal out of flesh and spun the ordinary world out of reach.

  Bel shuffled into the kitchen just as Cat was getting ready to go out again. She didn’t look as if she’d slept much and she wore a hesitant, most un-Bel-like smile. Would Cat like to get a coffee? Do some shopping? Go for a walk? Or …? Cat felt bad, saying thanks, but no, she kind of fancied being on her own for a bit. But as she went to leave, Bel hugged her, fierce and hard, and suddenly things were better.

  Toby lived at the top of a grand redbrick building in North London. As Cat stepped out of the creaking elevator, she prepared herself for olde-worlde splendour, but the flat that Toby showed her into, although large, felt cluttered and uncared for. Books were everywhere, stacked high in teetering piles; dirty mugs, bric-a-brac and bundles of paper covered every surface. “Writers, both of ’em,” said Toby, with offhand pride. “It’s OK, though. Ma’s gone to the library and Pa’s holed up in his study. We won’t be disturbed.”

  Cat followed Toby through the hallway into his bedroom. It was much tidier than the rest of the flat, with pride of place given to a tabletop model landscape on which miniature knights and goblins were arranged in battle lines. Some kind of war game, she guessed, remembering the figurines from Dark Portal. There was a shelf of books, most but not all sci-fi and fantasy titles, and a collection of 1950s B-movie posters on the walls.

  Her attention moved from a poster for Revenge of the Mutant Swamp Blob!—buxom babes versus toxic slime—to a black-and-white print of a fantastic city. The city was a labyrinth of crazy angles and dizzy perspectives, where lizard-like creatures scuttled up stairs that led to nowhere, windows opened to impossible views and figures sleepwalked off precipices.

  “A postcard from the Arcanum?” she asked, being flip.

  But Toby took the question seriously. “Could be. The Game of Triumphs has been going for centuries. All sorts of people have played, including artists. Escher might well have been a knight. There’s always speculation about visionaries and prodigies—da Vinci, Darwin, David Beckham!”

  Toby laughed, but the idea that this thing had been going on throughout history sent a chill down Cat’s spine. Still, she reassured herself, this was why she’d come over. Toby was the expert.

  “So how long have our gang of Game Masters been involved?”

  “Nobody knows for sure. Apparently they were ordinary players once. But now, they’re said to be immortal. It’s one of the perks of the job.”

  “Immortal,” she repeated blankly. “Bloody hell … But—but—how did this happen? Were they knights who got promoted or something? Is that possible?”

  “Everything’s possible in the Game.” Toby lowered his voice in the way he did when he was trying to come over all dark and mysterious. “One theory is that if you catch one of the kings or queens breaking the rules, you can take their place. Then there’s a rumor that whoever finds the Triumph of Eternity in the Arcanum gets to be the top Game Master of all. But that really is just a rumor. Eternity’s on the invitation cards, but nobody seems to know exactly what the prize is or how you win it. It’s certainly not in the Game Masters’ collection.…

  “Anyway. The official route to royalty is to win all the triumphs held by the courts. But instead of claiming the prizes, you keep the amulets.”

  “Amulet? Oh … the little colored balls? From the prize-giving?”

  “The very ones. You cast them over the threshold of Temple House to take a triumph’s power. But a player who wants to be king saves them up. And when you have them all, the king or queen you’ve taken the most from is the GM you overthrow.”


  Cat was beginning to see how some people might think that winning a triumph was worth the risk of the Game. However, she could hardly imagine what it would take to win one triumph, let alone all of them.

  “That doesn’t sound much fun. All the pain and none of the prizes.”

  “Ah, but once you get to GM level, you won’t have much need for fame and wealth and the rest of it. You’re a god of the Arcanum!”

  “A supernatural member of the control-freak club.”

  “But the kings and queens aren’t in total control,” Toby said earnestly. “Yes, they deal the cards and, yes, they enforce the rules. But they can’t win the triumphs by themselves: it’s up to the knights in their court. And how the cards come to life, and how the knights play them, is completely out of their hands.”

  Cat’s head was spinning. It was all too much to take in—and she still had so many more questions to ask.

  “OK. Back up. So knights are dealt numbered cards to play in order to win a triumph card. And once you’ve played it, a share of its power is yours to keep. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “But what about the cards for the kings and queens, and knights and knaves, too? Plus the Fool card for us, of course. Can you be dealt one of those?”

  “The face cards represent players, not moves. But they can still be introduced into the Game. Imagine two knights are playing for the same triumph, and they finish the fourth card in their round at the same time. Instead of letting them try to win the triumph in turns, the Game Masters think it’s more entertaining if they play for it simultaneously. Knight versus knight, winner takes all. In which case, they’ll each be dealt their opponent’s card along with the triumph card.” He paused. “That’s actually how I first got involved in the Game.”

  “Really?”

  Toby looked smug. “I overheard this girl and a teacher at school talking about the Game. It turns out they were rival knights for the same triumph. I saved the girl’s life and got made a chancer as reward.”

  “Doesn’t seem like much of a reward to me.”