by Laura Powell
“I was too old for make-believe, really. Far too old to believe my sister was having adventures in a different world. Even so, I was obsessed by her stories. She made them sound so real. I used to go through her things, looking for a magic coin. I waited up for her when she was out late; I even tried to follow her a couple of times. Needless to say, I never got very far.
“In the week before Christmas, Grace seemed unusually preoccupied. Even our parents noticed that she was on edge. I think they thought it must be something to do with a boy. On the evening of the nineteenth, she came to find me in my bedroom. She was excited: fizzing with energy. But she was nervous, too.
“ ‘I’ve been lucky so far,’ she told me. ‘I’m good at this game, and the cards have been kind to me. And I’m so close, Flo—so close!’
“Then she started pacing up and down, biting her lip. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this next move, though. I don’t know.…’
“I was just happy she was playing our game again. She hadn’t talked about it for a while; I was worried she had become bored of it.
“When she found me, I was doing some homework on the Greek myths. We had to read the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. ‘Theseus had a test,’ I told her. ‘He got lost in a maze and had to fight the Minotaur. But the princess gave him a thread to show him the way, and he killed the monster and escaped and became king. You’ll be like him: like a hero.’ Grace shook her head and smiled. ‘Sometimes the heroes came to bad ends,’ she said. I didn’t beg her to take me on this new quest. I knew that wouldn’t get me anywhere. But as a joke—though I meant it half-seriously—I gave her some red embroidery silk from my ribbon box. I told her it would help her find her way home.
“My sister laughed and hugged me, then left me to my book. She was supposed to be going to a party that evening. A midwinter ball. Our parents were out, too; I was staying at home with the housekeeper.
“I couldn’t sleep that night. In the end, I got out of bed and went to the window. It had started to snow, and I saw that the door at the bottom of the garden was ajar. I knew it shouldn’t be left open, and all of a sudden I was afraid.
“Even though I didn’t want to be alone in the dark, I felt I had to face this by myself. Like the heroes. So I put on my boots and coat over my nightgown and went to the end of the garden, and through the door into the deserted park. There was something—someone—lying by the summerhouse on the hill. It was Grace, all spread out in her scarlet evening dress. The snow was already settling on her face.
“I can’t remember much of what happened immediately after. Everyone seemed to arrive at once: my parents, the paramedics, the police. The only thing we knew for certain was that Grace was in a coma. Nobody knew what she was doing in the park or what had happened to her, except that she never turned up to the ball. She had no injuries, no signs of illness, alcohol or drugs, though they tested her for everything. She was … untouched.
“I didn’t show anyone the card I had found by her side, a picture of a woman bound and blindfolded inside a cage of swords. I knew it was Grace’s secret and that she wouldn’t want me to tell. At first, you see, we thought she would wake up.
“My parents left me at home while they went in the ambulance with Grace. And that morning, very early, I went down to the garden and out into the park again. It had snowed heavily during the night and everything was covered in white. I was carrying the card I’d found with my sister, trying to work out what it could mean. Then I saw something red fluttering by one of the columns on the summerhouse.
“It was a broken strand of silk. The same silk I’d given Grace when I told her to use a thread to find her way home, like Theseus in the labyrinth. She must have tied one end to the summerhouse before she used the threshold there. I don’t know why. A superstitious impulse, perhaps. Or maybe she only did it to please me.
“A young man and a blonde were sitting on the other side of the summerhouse, drinking hot chocolate. I remember thinking how beautiful the woman was, all wrapped up in white fur. ‘I’m glad you could make it,’ she said, and took my card.
“ ‘What have you done to my sister?’ I asked.
“ ‘She took a wrong turn,’ the man replied. ‘Her move is incomplete.’ That’s all they would tell me about Grace. Then, or ever. And they said that because I had intervened in their Game, I could now join it. But not like Grace. Not as a knight. I was just a fool.
“Grace’s last move was the Eight of Swords. It is a card of imprisonment. I think my sister was trying to escape some kind of trap, and she used my thread to guide her home, but part of her—the living, laughing, waking part—is still captive in the Arcanum.
“My parents think their daughter has spent the last five years in a coma. They have given up hope. They’ve stopped talking about the day when she will come back to us. I know better. Every time I go past that threshold, I feel my palm burn, and I know my sister is waiting for me on the other side. I just need the right card to take me in and complete her move.
“And as long as the threshold remains, I know my sister can still be saved.”
Flora’s narration had been so matter-of-fact as to be almost expressionless. Cat didn’t know what to say; it might have been easier if Flora had broken down and cried. At least then she would have had a cue.
Cat thought of the Arcanum’s other victims and wondered what all-consuming hopes and fears had driven them into the Game. Then there were the people they had left behind, never to know their loved ones’ fate. She understood what Flora was playing for, but what about Grace, the girl who had everything? And what about her own mum and dad? If they had had the chance to play, what prize would have been worth the risk?
It struck her that she and Flora were not so different after all. In spite of the glossy friends and doting parents, Flora was someone else who walked alone. Perhaps Toby was right to say that the burdens and mysteries of the Arcanum were better shared. Her own wariness was defensive; recognizing another’s, and reaching past it, was something new.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last, and inadequately.
Flora didn’t seem to hear. “Of course I’ve kept looking, but not as hard as I could have. I’m afraid, you see, that if I go into the Arcanum too often I’ll discover why my sister loved it so.” Then she gave her head a shake, as if to wake herself up. “Really, Cat, I can’t think why I’m boring you with all this. It’s certainly not your problem.”
“My parents were mixed up in the Game. They got killed because of it.”
God—why had she blurted it out like that? Cat could feel herself turning red.
Flora regarded her gravely. “Then I am sorry, too.”
She gave a small, bleak smile, which Cat returned. For the moment, it was enough.
Toby was the first to return, zigzagging breathlessly past the boulders, and brandishing the hip flask above his head.
“Hey, guys! Look what I’ve got! Jeez, it was a total nightmare climbing over the rocks—until we got to this really cool grotto with a naked goddess statue and everything. I think the water made my insect bites better. Or maybe not. How’s your ankle, Flora? I wanted to try the spring water on it, as a test, but Blaine said we should save it for the iceman.”
An unwelcome thought had occurred to Cat. “Wait—what about the no-intervention rule? If the other knight drowned this one to win, we don’t want to mess things up by getting him out again.”
“This move’s finished,” said Blaine impatiently. “Knight Number One’s already taken his water to the threshold. He’ll be safely home by now.”
He was standing at the ice’s edge. The figure within, stuck in his moment of terror like a fly in amber, was all the more grotesque for being surrounded by the beauty of the valley and its diamond-bright sky. It was hard to imagine the ace’s act of violence in such a peaceful place. Yet it had turned a quiet pool into a tidal surge, liquid into solid, life into death.
“I’d like to do it,” Flora said, holding her hand out f
or the flask. Toby looked disappointed but he passed it over. Steadying herself on Cat’s shoulder, Flora unscrewed the cap and leaned over the ice so that the water fell in a sparkling arc.
It was as if she had poured a flask of acid. The ice hissed on contact and there was a burning, sulfurous smell as the water ate through its glassy surface, dissolving it into slush. The prisoner twitched, then began to flail about, choking and thrashing—and very much alive.
Blaine waded into the pool to pull him out. The man’s skin was mottled white and blue, and he couldn’t speak for shaking. But once they settled him on dry ground, the shudders subsided and the color returned to his face with remarkable speed. In fact, Flora had only just begun to wrap her coat around his shoulders when he shook her off roughly and leaped to his feet.
“Where is he?” he shouted. “What have you done with him?”
“It’s fine,” Toby said soothingly. “You’re safe: the other knight’s long gone.”
The Knight of Swords’ face contorted with rage. “All the triumphs in all the Game won’t be any help once I’ve caught up with him. Dirty snake!” He grasped Cat by the shoulder. “Where did he go, girl? Back to the threshold?”
“I’m not sure.…”
But the man was already sprinting away, still dripping, with savagery in his eyes. A pearly white mist had begun to wind through the valley, and his figure was soon obscured from view.
“You’re welcome!” Toby called after him. “Huh. What an ungrateful sod.”
“That’s all the thanks we need,” said Flora, pointing. “Our Root of Water.”
For the pool was evaporating before their eyes, until there was nothing left but a shard of ice in a grassy hollow. When Flora picked it up, it was cold and wet, but it didn’t melt in the warmth of her hand. It had drowned a man in eternal winter, yet the closer they looked, the more its depths shimmered with rainbows, and light.
THE SKY ON THE OTHER SIDE of their next threshold was low and gray. Shabby buildings loomed around a threadbare patch of grass and shrubs enclosed by a fence. A trash can on the pavement overflowed abundantly, as if to compensate for the barrenness everywhere else. They were back in the garden at Mercury Square.
For Cat, it was doubly familiar. The exhausted-looking apple tree in the center of the garden was encircled by a ring of scorched earth. A crushed beer can lay underneath a bench where, until recently, a tramp had snored. Looking toward Temple House, she half expected to see herself doubled over by the railings, retching with shock.
Blaine was watching her. “Seems just like yesterday, doesn’t it?” he said.
It was the first time he’d acknowledged how they’d met. Cat still didn’t know if, like her, he had wandered into the move by accident, thanks to Temple House’s overlap with the Arcanum, or if his visit was a deliberate part of searching for his stepfather. She was momentarily dizzy with the remembrance of it all: the helplessness, and the horror.
This time, however, there was no visible blurring between the two of sides of the threshold. The move in play here might not have required any fantastical shifts in scene, but was unmistakably part of the Arcanum landscape in the way that aspects of the familiar world seemed exaggerated, others less defined. It was shrouded in silence.
The quiet didn’t last. A rustling by the railings made them draw together, faces tense, as a figure edged out furtively from behind a shrub. Cat immediately thought of the guys with the hooded sweatshirts and truncheons. However, whoever it was seemed even more nervous than they were. A boy of eighteen or nineteen, with a sharp bony face and close-cropped hair.
“You,” he said, half accusing, half panicky. “You just come from nowhere. I seen you do it.”
“Er, yeah. There’s a threshold over there,” Toby replied.
The new arrival stared. “What’s he talking about?” Then, plaintively, “It’s not right. Nothing’s right. Why’s it so quiet? Where’s everybody gone? They must’ve been and closed off all the streets for miles around. Here”—his face creased in alarm—“you don’t reckon we’re in one of them terrorist alerts, do you?”
“He’s a chancer,” said Flora wonderingly.
“But he can’t be,” said Cat. “There are only four of us in the Game. The Hanged Man said—”
“That comes later. The Magician’s die is taking us back into the time as well as place where the aces were last played, remember? And this is the move where you and Blaine first met, isn’t it?” Cat nodded: she had told Flora about their encounter when she’d agreed to try to find the fourth chancer. “Well then. This boy might have been one of us last Saturday, but”—she lowered her voice—“anything could have happened to him afterward.…”
“Hey—I’m not ‘this boy.’ I’m Liam.” He looked from one to the other, gnawing his lip. “Who are you people?”
“We’re like you,” Blaine said shortly. “Tell us what happened. About what happened to you this afternoon.”
“I dunno!” he replied, exasperated. “I dunno nothing. All I did, right, was follow some bloke into one of them houses. Over there.” He pointed toward Temple House. “Because he left the door open, see, and it was all very nice inside, a class act, you know? So I thought I’d best go in and warn him about the security risk. Opportunistic theft. After all, you can’t be too careful in this neighborhood.” He sniggered a little. “And then—then—all this weird stuff kicks off. There’s crazies waving cards and droning about Fate and Forces and suchlike, and I thought, stone me, it’s them doomsday-cult nut jobs. So I exited sharpish and when I come out, things was different. Different like this.”
“But how did—” Blaine was beginning, when his eye was drawn by movement at the end of the square. The light was fading fast, but they could just make out hooded figures gathering in the shadows of one of the streets leading off the north corner. The Knaves of Wands had returned.
“Quick. We have to get out of here,” said Cat urgently, hurrying to the garden gate and casting around for an escape route or hiding place.
“This way,” said the new chancer. He darted ahead and up to one of the windows of a shut-up house. One of the boards was loose, and he was able to pry it open without difficulty. “Got no idea what’s going on, but I knows trouble when I see it. Pretty good at getting out of it, too.” And he grinned, flashing a mouthful of yellow teeth.
One by one, they squeezed through, clambering down from the sill into the disarray of an abandoned office. It looked as if it had lain undisturbed for years. The tops of the filing cabinets and desks were furry with dust.
Cat put her eye to the gap in the boards and watched as the four knaves swaggered into the dusky garden. One squatted down to inspect the scorched earth around the apple tree, while the others muttered in a huddle.
There was a yelp from behind her. Liam was sucking a finger and scowling at the birdcage, which Cat had set on top of an ancient photocopier. “I didn’t know birds bit! Usually travel with your budgie, do you?”
“It’s our team mascot,” said Cat distractedly, still peering at the knaves.
Flora came to join her. “I think we’re OK; they’re here for the knight, not a few stray chancers.” She turned to Liam. “Did you see anyone else before we arrived?”
“Nobody but some old wino. That’s how I knew to come in here—I seen him scramble through the window.”
“So the knight must still be in the building!” Toby exclaimed. “I wonder if our ace is in here, too.”
“Now then,” said Liam. “I can see how you’re anxious to avoid the gang out there. But there’s no harm in us having a poke around the place, right?” He appeared to have got over his earlier fears. In fact, he looked almost cheerful. “You never know what the movers might’ve overlooked—could be some good gear lying about.”
He was already moving toward the dilapidated reception area. But after picking their way past mounds of moldering folders and broken computer equipment, they found that the main stairs were blocked by a fallen boo
kcase. It looked as if their explorations were confined to the lower levels of the building.
“Here, Cat,” Blaine said quietly in her ear. “About our first time in this move: how many knaves did you see?”
“Uh … four, I think. Plus you at the other end of the garden—though when you came up to me later, I figured you were, you know, ordinary. From the home side.”
“But I was never in the garden. I was staying well clear, behind that Dumpster.”
“Oh.” She thought back to the boy who’d been throwing pebbles at the cat, and had stared at her with such intensity. A vague shape in a baggy sweater, too far away to distinguish his features properly. She had just assumed that he and Blaine were one and the same. “OK then: there were five of them. That makes sense. Five of Wands, like the card.”
“Yeah. So why’re only four out there now?”
“Shhh!” Flora hissed from ahead, as they shuffled past stacks of storage crates and yet more filing cabinets. Light glimmered from a door just a little way down the passage, behind which a slurred voice was raised in song.
“ ‘Luck—hic—be a laaady toniiiiight …’ ”
Liam turned to look at the other four huddled behind him, his face pallid in the gleam of Toby’s flashlight. He put a finger to his lips and winked conspiratorially, before turning the handle on the door.
It opened into a small bare room lit by a single bulb. A man was slumped on the floor in a heap of ragged clothes and wild gray hair. His hands and feet were bound with an old electrical cord. “Wha—wha?” he mumbled, blinking up at them with bloodshot eyes.
“Brought you some company, old man,” said Liam. He grinned. Then, in one swift shocking movement, he drew out a knife and held it to Cat’s throat.
