Blackfoot

by W. R. Gingell

“You’re a very difficult person to talk to,” said Rorkin. “Why do you suppose that is?”

  “That? That’s because I’ve lived with Peter and Blackfoot for so many years.” Annabel sat herself cautiously on the easy chair, which was a lot dustier than she had originally drawn it, and crossed her legs. “And it’s why I’m going to keep asking you why you’ve been watching me through the windows. I’m not clever enough to get distracted by other important things, so you might as well answer straight away.”

  “Hah!” Rorkin said, unexpectedly. “I knew you were the right one! All right then, you blobby little thing: I was watching you because I was trying to make sure you didn’t die. And also because I’m grading your performance. It isn’t just you, though: I’ve been watching everything that’s been happening in the castle ever since your young friend gave proof of value to the castle.”

  “You were grading me? Grading me on what?”

  “Very handy, that proof of use,” continued Rorkin. “I’ll have to remember to thank him. Will I meet him today?”

  “No,” Annabel said. “What were you grading me on?”

  “How well you respond to things. I want to meet the not-cat, too.”

  “How well do I respond to things?” Annabel asked.

  “It ranges from ‘really quite well’ to ‘horrifically bad’,” said Rorkin.

  “Oh. Well, that’s not surprising. I’m not used to responding to much, actually. Mostly I respond to Peter, and he’s more annoying than anything, so I usually try to ignore him.”

  “No response is still a response,” Rorkin said. “It’s all in the eyes.”

  “Did I draw you back, or were you already here?”

  “Yes.”

  Annabel stared at him. “Yes to what?”

  “Yes to both.”

  “It can’t be both.”

  Rorkin shrugged. “That’s not my problem.”

  “All right then,” said Annabel, used to Peter’s deliberate unhelpfulness, “how is it possible?”

  “I was already here, but you drew me back, just the same. And while we’re on the subject, why’d it take you so long to draw me back properly?”

  “I didn’t know you were safe to draw back,” Annabel protested, because there was something of a reproachful tone to Rorkin’s voice. “If it comes to that, I still don’t know it’s safe. Besides, I couldn’t get your eyes to come out exactly right, and I didn’t want to draw you back wrong.”

  Those eyes went rather wide and round. “I hadn’t considered the effects of an artistic mind,” Rorkin muttered, but when Annabel said: “What?” he only added: “Anyway, if you’re being so cautious, you should have been more careful about who you let into my castle.”

  “Your castle?”

  “Well, it was until you let Mordion in, anyway.”

  “I didn’t let him in!”

  “Someone did, and it wasn’t me. I wasn’t even here.”

  “You said you were here all along,” muttered Annabel. “You should make up your mind.”

  “It’s not my mind you should be worried about making up,” Rorkin said. “It’s the castle’s.”

  “The castle’s mind?”

  “Ever since Mordion got in, the castle hasn’t been able to make up its mind about which one of us is really Rorkin. If I wasn’t drawn back this much, I’d probably be confused, too.”

  “Why does it matter who the castle thinks is Rorkin?” Annabel asked, passing over the rest of his speech as incomprehensible.

  Rorkin’s bright eyes rested on her face in a particularly disquieting look. “Because the castle will only follow Rorkin’s commands.”

  “But you’re Rorkin.”

  “Yes, exactly. You’d think the castle would know me better by now. It’s very confusing, and shouldn’t be happening.” Rorkin’s eyes flitted away from her face, and he wandered across the room to his window.

  Dazed almost into speechlessness by the first, inevitable idea that had occurred to her at Rorkin’s words, Annabel said: “Wait.” She thought about it again, and came to the same stunned, outraged conclusion that had first seared through her mind. “Have you been playing with us all this time? Switching the castle around, hiding my friend Peter, and letting Mordion in?”

  “Of course!” Rorkin said. “Well, sort of. Not really. And yet, I have been. I haven’t been here for all of it, though, so you’ll have to excuse my confusion.”

  “You said before that you didn’t let Mordion in.”

  “Neither I did,” said Rorkin with perfect cordiality, as if he hadn’t just agreed to the direct opposite. “Wasn’t even here.”

  “But you said–”

  “Oh, that’s really a bit irritating,” Rorkin said. “I don’t suppose you could not quote me to myself, could you?”

  With the vague idea that she had perhaps met her match in sheer obstinacy, Annabel muttered: “Then you shouldn’t contradict yourself.”

  “I told you it would be hard to understand.”

  Annabel blinked. “I suppose you did. All right. I’m Annabel, by the way.”

  “I know that,” Rorkin said, then tipped his head. “Or did I? I probably did. It’s the castle and the drawing back: it makes things confusing.”

  “Do you mean,” Annabel said cautiously, with the dim thought that she might, just possibly, understand, “that you were part of the castle before I drew you back in?”

  “That’s really very close to being not entirely wrong. Well done, you!”

  “What part of it wasn’t right?”

  “Almost all of it. I wasn’t part of the castle– well, the castle wasn’t part of the castle, so how could I be a part of it?”

  “All right,” Annabel said. “Let’s go back to the bit where you said you’d been moving the castle around and hiding Peter.”

  Rorkin, very accurately, said: “I didn’t say that. You said that.”

  “Yes, but you agreed!”

  “I did, didn’t I? Well, and it’s not entirely wrong, either. It was the castle that hid Peter away, but it was only doing what it was supposed to do.”

  “What is the castle supposed to do?”

  “It’s a playground. No, it’s more of a testing-ground.”

  “A testing-ground? What for? Were you testing Peter’s magic– wait, didn’t you say you were observing my reactions?”

  “Ha!” said Rorkin loudly. “There’s no need to test his magic! No, no, much more interesting watching you run about the castle. You’re quite the determined little blob once you get going, aren’t you?”

  “You were testing me? What for?”

  “It didn’t have to be you, you understand,” Rorkin said conversationally. “It just happened to be you. I probably would have picked you anyway, but the castle picked you first, so all’s well that starts with a happy surprise, as they say.”

  “They don’t say that.”

  Rorkin peered at her. “Are you sure? It sounds awfully familiar. I’m sure I’ve heard it somewhere.”

  “It’s the man who goes to bed with his boots on starts the day with a happy surprise.”

  “That makes no sense at all.”

  Annabel, who had often had to shake spiders and even the occasional toad out of her boots before she put them on in the morning, muttered: “Well, maybe if he hadn’t worn his boots, his surprise wouldn’t have been a happy one. Look, what do you mean by it didn’t have to be me?”

  “That? Well, it could have been any girl your age. So long as she was from one of a few specific families, anyway. And it alternates between male and female. This time it just happened to be female.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Should’ve drawn me back better, then, shouldn’t you? I might have made more sense.”

  There was no point in continuing that particular rabbit-trail, Annabel thought. She stared at Rorkin with her best expressionless face and said: “If I drew you back, where were you?”

  “I wasn’t,” Rorkin said
simply.

  Dimly, Annabel thought she might just understand. She had been used often enough in Grenna’s spells to recognise that people could sometimes be things and not people when it came to magic. She said: “Were you part of a spell to make the castle the way it is?”

  Rorkin beamed. “You clever little blobby thing! No, don’t do that with your face, it’s off-putting. I’m more of a power-source, actually. I built the scenarios into the castle to play out in certain ways depending on who came into the ruins, then I built myself into the magic to make sure it went on for long enough.”

  “Does that mean you can influence the castle?”

  “Supposedly. On a sub-dungeon level.”

  Annabel felt the spark of kindling hope. “Does that mean you can help us?”

  “That depends on what you need help with.”

  “Can you get us out of the castle?”

  “Well,” said Rorkin apologetically, “not exactly. Lately, the castle has been a bit standoffish. And when I say standoffish, I mean it seems to think Mordion is me, and now it’s following his commands instead mine.”

  “Do you mean,” Annabel asked, rather dazed, “that the whole castle is under Mordion’s control now?”

  “Not the whole castle. Well, a fair bit of it, I suppose. He’s having trouble with doorways, though. You’ll have to be more careful about those: don’t think I didn’t see you skipping through them merrily this morning. If it hadn’t been for Mordion, I would have been able to come back straight away when you drew me part-way back.”

  “You’re stuck here just as much as we are?”

  “Of course not. You’re free to leave if you can only find a way out through the changes Mordion has made. I can’t possibly leave, no matter what I do.” Rorkin sat on his chair again, and tilted it on its back legs. Quite cheerfully, he added: “I’m afraid it’s death and nothingness for me once Mordion has the whole castle.”

  Annabel very much wanted to tell him that it served him right. He’d allowed the castle to play with her and Peter and Blackfoot as if they were chess pieces, and now that Mordion was in the picture, the game was running away from him more quickly than he could grasp it.

  She wanted very badly to tell him that, but she found she couldn’t.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Rorkin, his brown eyes sharp. Annabel sank into her blank-faced fortress and didn’t answer. “You’re thinking that it serves me right. And you’re right, of course: I’m sorry about all the tests. I had to be sure that you were the right one, you see.”

  “You said that before. The right one to what?”

  “Be Queen, of course,” Rorkin said, in surprise. “And it might serve me right, but it doesn’t serve you right. Or that clever boy or the not-cat.”

  Annabel, dazed, faltered out: “What?”

  “I said, it doesn’t serve any of you right. Making a play for sympathy, you understand.”

  “No, the other thing!”

  Rorkin’s long brown face stared at her. “What other thing?”

  “The– didn’t you say that you thought I’m the– well, the Queen?”

  “I don’t think it, I know it,” said Rorkin. “But that’s not the important thing–”

  “I’m not the Queen,” insisted Annabel, shaken entirely out of her comfortably safe expression of stupidity. “There is no Queen. There’s no king, either.”

  “Well, that’s true enough. There isn’t any king. But you are the Queen.”

  “I’m not!”

  “Rubbish,” said Rorkin. “You must be. The castle chose you. More importantly, the staff chose you.”

  “What staff?”

  “The one in your pocket. The one you’ve been drawing with.”

  “It’s a pencil.”

  “Here,” said Rorkin, dropping the chair legs back to the ground and making an expansive gesture with his long arms. “Have a lesson. Are you ready? What you think you see is more important than what you actually see. No, that’s not right. What you actually see isn’t what you necessarily think you see. No, that’s not right, either. Anyway, people get so caught up with what they can see. It’s a limiting sort of attitude to have.”

  Annabel gave him one of her particularly flat looks, but decided that this rabbit trail wasn’t worth following, either. Instead, she said: “So from the time we got into the ruins until now, the castle has been testing me to see if I’ll be a good Queen? What if I’d died? I nearly did die! Why would you make a test like that?”

  “There were safeguards,” objected Rorkin. “I made sure of that: testing is all very well, but if your future Queen is killed, what’s the use of it? Besides, it’s wholly automated. I’m only here as custodian and power source while the castle does what it’s meant to do, so it had to have proper safeguards.”

  “Your safeguards aren’t working very well,” Annabel said. “Actually.”

  Not at all offended, Rorkin smiled brightly at her. “That’s because of Mordion taking over. Now that the castle thinks he’s me, it’s beginning to follow his orders; but it’s still programmed with its original directive, which is to test potential heirs. Mordion is using the castle to get to you, and the castle is using Mordion to test you. Which means the tests will keep getting harder, and– well, I suppose you could possibly die, after all.”

  Annabel, who had been living from day to day since she entered the castle ruins with the idea that any day could be her last, found that she could still be angry at this.

  “It also means that I could possibly die, which is more problematic.”

  “How is that more problematic?” demanded Annabel crossly.

  “If I die, how can I help you?” Rorkin said, with perfect logic.

  “You can’t help us, anyway. You said that the castle doesn’t think you’re you anymore.”

  “Well, on and off. Every now and then it knows I’m me.”

  “Wait,” Annabel said suddenly. “Isn’t it cheating, telling me about the castle and me being Queen? If I know they’re tests, won’t it invalidate the tests?”

  “Stop wriggling,” advised Rorkin, his eyes suddenly very sharp and understanding. “You can’t get out of it, no matter how much you wriggle. The staff chose you, and the castle chose you, and I probably would have chosen you if I’d been aware enough to do it. I’m telling you now because all the original conditions are out: if Mordion gets control of the entire castle we’ll all die. Anyway, the castle will still be testing you, and since all the safety measures are gone, that’s about as good a test as you could hope for.”

  “Hope for!”

  “Oh, that was a bad choice of words. Well, if you prefer–”

  “Don’t bother, it’s too late now. Look, I don’t want to be Queen.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “It does,” said Annabel flatly. “You can’t make me be Queen if I don’t want to be Queen.”

  “Sure about that?” Rorkin’s eyes still had that kindly and rather understanding look that was somehow more frightening than the brilliant kind of madness she’d seen in them earlier. “Are you really sure about what the castle can and can’t do right now?”

  Annabel fidgeted with the clasp on her satchel. “No.”

  “Neither am I,” Rorkin said unexpectedly. “But the staff and the castle both chose you, so there’s about half of no chance at all that you’ll be able to wriggle out of it.”

  “What if I get out of the castle?” asked Annabel. There was a heaviness somewhere around her middle that could have been either hunger or the weight of her heart. She was remembering just how long ago it was that she found her pencil: longer even than she’d known Blackfoot. It hadn’t ever grown shorter, nor had the eraser end ever grown any smaller. Nor, despite her carelessness and thoughtlessness, had she ever managed to lose it, even when she thought she had. “What if I get rid of the pencil?”

  “It’s a staff.” Rorkin wagged a long, knobbly finger at her. “Don’t confuse the two, or you’ll come un
stuck.”

  “The staff then,” Annabel said impatiently. “I’ll get out of the castle. I’ll leave the staff for someone else to find.”

  She knew as she said it that it wasn’t possible: the staff had been in her life—almost directing her life—for far too long for her to be able to escape it so easily. Annabel had the awful feeling that inasmuch as the castle had been a test for her to be chosen as Queen, she could never have gone any other way than to have entered it at that particular moment. That led to other, more unpleasant surmises; ones Annabel wasn’t prepared to think about at the moment.

  “Really? I bet you won’t.”

  Annabel hugged herself defensively. “Why? There are tunnels all around the castle. We nearly got out once, thanks to them. You shouldn’t have put them out if you didn’t want us to use them.”

  Rorkin gazed at her. “I didn’t put them out.”

  “The castle, then.”

  “The castle didn’t put them out.” Rorkin gazed a little more closely at her. “Are you laughing at me? Run a warren of tunnels through my perfectly nice castle! Who else would do it?”

  “I don’t know! Why would I know? It wasn’t me!”

  “Never said it was. I really thought you knew. This is all very interesting and explains a few things I wondered about. When are you going to draw the other one back, by the way?”

  “The other one?” Annabel stared at him, bewildered by the sudden change of subject.

  “Your cat. The one you’ve been drawing into your little book: the one without a mouth. You must have known it was him.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” Annabel said sulkily. That wasn’t quite true, of course: it was one of those thoughts she had just tried to push away, preferring not to think it was so. If it was so, it was too complicated to bear thinking about. “And it’s not true! Blackfoot is a cat. I don’t know who that other person is.”

  Rorkin’s bright eyes examined her. “Really? Now me, my left eyebrow starts twitching when I try to tell a lie, but you’re such a solid little thing: it’s hard to get a read on you. If you hadn’t noticed, why have you stopped drawing him back?”

  “Back? What do you mean, back?”

  “Fibber, fibber, lily-liver!” shouted Rorkin, at once. “You do know what I’m talking about! I saw you drawing him back and then stopping just before you finished the drawing. Why don’t you want him back?”