by Laura Powell
And the bird swooped into Cat’s opened palms.
She gasped in shock, but reflexively closed her hands around its body. The bird didn’t struggle. She could feel its heart beating, warm and steady within the frail puff of feathers, as it looked up at her, its eyes bright as blood. The Root of Air was cupped within her hands.
Shakily, she stood up. To her immense relief, the foliage jungle had thinned, and she could see the path only a few steps away. Cat stepped out from under a canopy of jasmine, to find the other three also emerging: scratched, sweaty, bleary-eyed.
It seemed impossible that they could ever have lost their way among these fragrant bowers and neat paths. The orange tree and cage were as they’d left them; the water still babbled and the music played. Cat walked up to the cage and carefully placed the bird inside. Her captive seemed perfectly content, cooing softly as she fastened the latch. Close up, she saw that the cage was octagonal, to match the conservatory, with a little dome on top.
“One down, three to go,” Cat said to the others, her voice trembling a little as she refastened the pendant around her neck. Then she took out the die. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
THE CLOCK HAD STOPPED at five minutes to midnight. Moonshine illuminated the glass panels of the giant dial, which, at about twenty feet in diameter, dominated the bare brick tower room.
“OK, so this is weird,” said Toby. “Weirdly familiar, I mean.”
“You know this place?” Blaine asked.
“A very watered-down version of it. The clock tower at my old school got pulled down by the Ace of Pentacles. I guess the Arcanum side of the threshold survived the quake.”
“Well then,” said Flora, after a slightly confused pause, “given the scenery, I suppose the card here could either be the Triumph of Time or the Tower.”
“If it’s Time, then I think its clock needs some new batteries,” Cat observed. The bird in its cage cooed, as if in agreement.
The Nine of Pentacles already felt far away. After Cat had thrown the die, they had found the threshold sign carved in the bark of the orange tree. Here, it was welded to the axis of the hour hand. This was made of wrought iron, as were the Roman numerals around the clock’s rim. It didn’t look as if it had moved in a long while.
Broken cables—presumably once connected to the bells at the top of the tower—lay in a tangle of plaster and fallen masonry. The inner workings of the clock were housed in the room below, and a spiral staircase ran between the shafts that attached the mechanism to the hands on the dial. The section of the stairs that continued up to the belfry had either rusted or been wrenched away and came to a jagged end about two feet off the floor.
Toby peered out of the clock face. A number of panes were missing; beneath the tower, bare sands spread in every direction. “At least now I know what prize Mia and Marlow were competing for,” he said to Cat. “It has to be Time; it’s a really popular triumph. Whoever wins it gets the chance to turn back the clock and change something about their past. Useful, huh?”
Flora had overheard. “Useful but limited,” she said. “It’s only your own past actions you can alter. Nobody else’s.”
Cat shifted the cage under her arm. She didn’t want to think about the past, or all the things she longed to change about it.
“Look,” she said. “There’s writing around the frame of the dial. More Latin slogans.”
“ ‘Infima summis, summa infimis mutare gaudemus,’ ” Flora read aloud slowly. “ ‘We make the lowest … turn to the top, the … highest to the bottom.’ ”
“We delight,” said Blaine.
“I’m sorry?”
“Gaudemus. We delight.” Blaine’s voice was deliberately colorless. “Fortune, the ‘royal we,’ or Time, delights in making the downtrodden rise and the stuck-up fall.”
“Um … yes. Right. How …?”
He smiled slightly. “So now I know what it takes to shock you.”
After a brief hesitation, Flora swept on as if she hadn’t heard, although her cheeks had reddened. “We need to get on. Toby thinks the Ace of Pentacles has been played here, which means we’re looking for the Magician’s poker chip.”
“I’ll check the other room,” Toby volunteered, his hands already on the broken rail of the stairs. The other three continued to poke around the dial but there wasn’t much more to see, and a few minutes later Cat went to join him.
She descended the rickety spiral very cautiously, her movements hampered by the birdcage she was carrying. The stairs ended in a platform over the middle of the clockwork, with ladders down to the floor.
Cat wasn’t the technical type, but even so she was impressed by the size and complexity of the mechanism, an intricate system of weights, wires, wheels and drums. It was contained within a cast-iron frame that took up most of the space in the room.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Toby had got out his mini flashlight and was shining it across the frame. “See—there’s three series of interlinked gears: the time train, the striking train, and the chiming train. That one should be connected to the bells. And there’s the handle for winding it all up.”
Cat ran her hand along a dusty brake shaft, imagining what the works had been like when in motion. A sharp-edged engine of ticks and turns: not just for measuring time, but driving it …
“Got anything?” Blaine thumped carelessly down the stairs and along the creaking platform.
“Toby’s giving a lecture on gear trains.”
“And talking of lectures,” Toby said, “what was with all the gaudy/gaudier/gaudiest stuff back there? Had you seen the slogan before?”
“No.”
“So you really could translate it?”
Blaine looked about to snap back, then seemed to think better of it. “I used to live with a Latin teacher,” he said shortly.
“Whoa. That can’t have been much fun.”
“You could say that.” He absentmindedly rubbed his right arm.
“What’s this for, Toby?” Cat asked, sensing the need for distraction. She gestured to a ten-foot rod with a circular weight at one end.
“It’s the pendulum.” He pointed his flashlight, and they saw the weight had two neat stacks of coins on top of it. “Pennies! That’s how they adjust the timekeeping in Big Ben’s clock. You add or subtract coins to speed up or slow down the pendulum; it’s not the weight of the coins that makes the difference, but the height of the stack. It moves the center of gravity, you see.”
“Fascinating,” Cat yawned.
But Toby was looking thoughtful. “Coins … It can’t just be a coincidence. I wonder if …” He leaned forward and shone the flashlight directly on the stack. “Aha. The one on the left isn’t a coin at all! It’s our Ace of Pentacles!”
“Toby, wait. We should—”
It was too late. He was already reaching to pick it up. A second later, the pendulum began to swing and the gears shifted into life.
Toby looked confusedly at the small clay disc in his hand. “But it shouldn’t make any difference—it’s not the pendulum that drives the clock.”
“Since when did the Arcanum make any sense?” Cat snapped. She had a bad feeling about this. “We’ve got the second ace, so it’s time to make our exit. Flora!” she called, as her free hand fumbled for the die. “Let’s get out of here!”
“All right, all right, I’m coming,” said a voice from above. “What on earth have you done to the clock?”
Flora began to climb down the spiral stairs. When she was about three or four steps from the platform that bridged the clock work, a bell began to toll. First one, then two, then a whole cacophony. Midnight.
Toby didn’t need to tell anyone that this shouldn’t be happening. They’d all seen the broken cables. And the sound of the bells themselves was wrong, too: harsh, discordant, thunderous.
Flora cried out as the stairs began to shake, reverberating in time with the clanging bronze. There was a sound of smashing glass from upstairs, and a sandy w
ind came whipping through the clock face. For a few moments, she clung to the rails like a sailor in a storm, before there was a great screech of metal and the stairs pitched out over the mechanism.
Somehow, Flora had managed to keep on top of the crush of iron, but the slightest movement on her part could bring everything down into the thrumming, spiky mass of machinery below. All the while, the bells rang on, louder and louder.
“We have to jam it!” Blaine shouted.
The next moment, he had climbed onto the frame that enclosed the clockwork, leaning dangerously far out to make a grab for a pole that was broken and dangling after the stairs’ collapse. Flora’s white face stared out from the wreckage. Even if they could use the pole to seize everything up, there was no way of knowing how long the brake would hold. The mechanism, like the bells, had acquired a crazed life of its own.
Blaine lunged at the pole, and missed. Only Toby grabbing at his waist kept him from tumbling into the clockwork himself. But with the next lunge he caught the end of the shard. Cat and Toby pulled behind him, adding their weight. By now, the noise of the bells was almost unbearable, and their faces were stinging from blown sand. The bird thrashed within its cage, half maddened with fear.
Somehow, with the three of them tugging, they managed to wrench the pole down so that it stuck, quivering, into the center of a gear train. With a shudder and shriek that could be heard even over the bells, the machinery ground to a halt.
“Cat—be quick—raise a threshold,” Blaine gasped.
As she fumbled with the die, the stairs gave way and Flora leaped for the platform. Blaine was there to gather her in.
The clockwork might have stopped, but the bells, if anything, got louder. The noise was like a hammer striking at the flesh and brain, bursting through the blood, swelling unstoppably through the body. Sand was pouring in from the room above in a blizzard of grit. Cat could barely open her eyes to see a silver wheel glowing on the brick behind them. But she managed to trace the circle, throw the coin, and a few agonizing seconds later it was all gone.
AT FIRST, THEY WERE afraid the bird was dead. Its eyes were closed and it was bunched up stiffly in a corner of the cage. But when Cat tapped on the bars, it croaked faintly and opened a crimson eye.
The bird wasn’t the only one feeling battered by their last move. Everyone was ashen-faced; for a while they just swayed on their feet, waiting for their heads to clear and their ears to stop ringing.
They were in a stony mountain valley, under a sky blazing with stars that were much brighter, and more thickly clustered, than any they had seen before. Tiny white flowers formed the sign for the threshold and were scattered underfoot. A series of pools glimmered before them.
“I think I know where we are,” Flora said dazedly. “This looks like the Star, the triumph for health.”
“It does seem sort of refreshing,” Toby agreed, sniffing the air. It was very cold, but invigoratingly so. “I already feel a lot less tired than I should be.”
“That doesn’t mean there isn’t a nasty surprise in store,” said Cat.
“And here it comes,” Blaine muttered, as a stumbling figure came into view.
He was a tubby, youngish man in a pinstripe suit, clutching a small stone urn to his chest. When he saw the four chancers, he gasped, and staggered.
“No—you can’t stop me!” he choked out. “Stay away!” He clasped the urn tighter and began to back away, his eyes darting fearfully. “Did the King of Swords send you? Because the courts can’t intervene, not now. I played my ace fair and square.”
The four of them exchanged glances. “What did the ace do?” Toby asked.
“A—a wave appeared, from one of the pools. A flood that turned to ice … I didn’t want to use it.” Now the man looked almost petulant. “The Ace of Cups was all I had! It was him or me, two rivals for the same triumph. The Game Masters set us against each other. The other knight gave me no choice …”
“It’s all right,” said Cat. “We’re not going to interfere.”
“I wouldn’t let you!” he said defiantly. “If I fail, I have to play a whole new round.”
“What’s in the pot?” Blaine asked.
“Spring water, from the grotto. Whoever takes the urn and pours its water onto the threshold wins the triumph.”
“The gift of health,” said Flora softly.
“Not for me—my wife. She’s ill—the doctors are useless—and I—I promised her—there was no choice.” He dragged one hand over his face, groaning. “God forgive me …” But with his next words, the whine of defiance was back in his voice. “If he’d had the ace, Swords would’ve acted as I did. You would have, too.”
Then he turned his back on them, and lurched on down the valley.
After five minutes’ walk in the opposite direction, they found what the ace had been used for.
They had already passed two shallow pools, their surfaces silver with starlight. The third, however, was solid ice. Its depths were clear enough for them to see the man encased within: his hands petrified in a futile gesture of defense, his face frozen in a twist of fury and fear. His eyes stared out from his prison; it was horribly difficult to drag their own away.
“Do you think he’s still … alive?” Cat faltered.
“I dunno,” said Blaine. “But since the Magician turned our ace into an ice cube, I reckon it’s in there with the knight.”
“We could hack the ice with a rock or something,” Toby suggested.
Flora shook her head. “It will take more than that to undo the Ace of Cups.”
“So what’ll we do?”
“The knight had an urn of spring water. That’s what they were fighting over, he said. And since this is the triumph for miracle cures, that water probably has some kind of healing power.…”
“And we might be able to use one kind of watery force to cancel out the other.” Toby nodded. “It’s worth a try. Well, the knight came from this direction, so if there is a spring, it must be somewhere up in the rocks over there.” He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a hip flask with a Magician-like flourish. “We can carry the water back in this.”
“Got any more tricks up your sleeve?” Cat asked.
“Sure. Flashlight, chocolate rations, compass, whistle …”
Blaine snorted. “Camping stove, encyclopedia, kitchen sink.”
Actually, Cat thought that Toby had the right idea. The flashlight had already come in handy, and she found herself wishing she’d equipped herself with more than a few tissues and a packet of chewing gum. “OK, let’s go climb some rocks.”
“Um, if you don’t mind,” said Flora, “I think I’ll wait for you here.” She smiled apologetically. “My ankle is still a little weak from when I twisted it the other day, and I wrenched it again on the clockwork.”
“We can’t just leave you! Look what happened when we split up in the other move,” Toby protested.
“I’ll be fine. The Star is one of the most benign cards in the deck.”
“Tell that to Mr. Freeze.”
“C’mon, it won’t take four people to fetch a bottle of water,” Blaine put in. “Us two will go find the spring. Cat and the bird can stay with Flora.”
Toby passed Cat the whistle. “In that case, you’d better have this. Blow twice for a distress signal, and me and Blaine’ll come to the rescue.”
“So you get to be Boy Scouts, and I’ll play nursemaid,” she said, but under her breath. The truth was, she’d be glad of a rest.
By unspoken agreement, the two girls moved away from the tomb of ice, settling instead by a pool where the water was clear and fringed with flowers. Flora went down to the water’s edge and set about washing her face and hands. Then she took a comb from her pocket, smoothing out her hair and tying it back in a neat ponytail. Finally, she applied a slick of cherry lip balm.
Cat watched in fascination. There was no doubt they were all in a state: grimy and disheveled, speckled in scratches from the Nine of P
entacles, gritty with sand from the Triumph of Time. But given the circumstances, Flora’s grooming routine struck her as perverse.
Flora caught her eye and passed over the lip balm. “Granny always told my mother, ‘Put some lipstick on and you’ll feel better.’ And actually, I think she was right.” She laughed humorlessly. “Of course, gin is Mummy’s pick-me-up of choice.”
Cat remembered the wild shouting. The crack across the mirror, ugly as a scar.… She swallowed, tasting the faint scent of cherry on her mouth. “Is that why you’re in the Game? Because of—of your parents?”
There was a long silence, and she thought Flora wasn’t going to reply. Perhaps she was angry at being asked. But when the other girl did speak, her voice was calm. “No,” she said. “I’m in the Game because of my sister.”
She tilted her head toward the star-studded sky. “You know, I’ve been in this move before. It looked different, of course, but the principle was the same.”
Cat didn’t follow the change of subject, but she nodded anyway.
“I went to the spring that time,” Flora continued. “I even got some water and took it home across the threshold. I brought it to my sister. I thought it might help.”
“Is she … ill?”
“No,” said Flora. “She’s sleeping. She’s been asleep for five years.”
“Grace is seven years older than me, and beautiful. Clever, too. All the time she was growing up, she had that … shining quality, a kind of radiance, which people are drawn to without quite understanding.
“With such a big age difference, you might have thought that she wouldn’t have much time for me. But it wasn’t like that.
“When I turned ten, Grace invented a special storytelling game. We pretended that there was an enchanted land waiting around the corner, where there were fabulous cities and creatures, and dreams came true. Grace said the only way to enter the land was with a magic coin. I couldn’t go and play there—I was too little, she said. But she used to draw me pictures of the adventures she had had, and tell me stories of kings and queens, knights and knaves. A world of complex rules and fabulous quests.
