WHEN THE COMMOTION SETTLED, Blaine found himself standing in a run-down shopping street. The scene was shocking in its ordinariness.
Perhaps they had failed, then, and the earthshaking tumult that had brought him here had expelled him from the Game. Or maybe it was some trick of Misrule’s.… Blaine rubbed his hands over his face, trying to steady his thoughts.
How long had he been in the Arcanum anyway? Hours? Days? Longer?
He turned to a grandmotherly type who was just coming out of a launderette. “I’m sorry,” he said blearily, “but I … er … What day is it?”
She looked at him curiously. “The thirty-first, dearie. New Year’s Eve.” Curiosity turned to nervousness as she took in his strained face and disheveled appearance. After the Arcanum treatment, the clothes he’d borrowed from Flora didn’t look that different from his castoffs.
Blaine had to lean against the wall to collect himself. He didn’t know what to think. He was sure he was back in his own time and place. This was the London of the everyday world. And yet … something wasn’t quite right. Off-kilter.
“You’ve dropped your postcard, dearie.”
Blaine looked down. There was a playing card at his feet: an enthroned goat-god with black horns and jagged wings. Dumbly, Blaine picked it up.
The Devil.
The most fallen angel of them all.
But an angel nonetheless, he realized. One of the cherubim. One of the fallen gods of the Game’s city. Like an echo of memory, the High Priestess’s prophecy came back to him: Only you can release them: outside the Arcanum, where the Game’s play meets the play of your other world.
So Blaine’s last move in the Game of Triumphs would not take place in the Arcanum. He had summoned the Devil and now he must play his card. The other three must be facing their own final moves, too, somewhere else in the city. Though how releasing the Devil into the world would bring about the Triumph of Eternity and defeat of Misrule was anyone’s guess.… I hope the High Priestess knows her stuff, he thought grimly.
Meanwhile, the old lady peered at the card. Her face sharpened with alarm. Blaine had grown used to people taking a second look at him and backing away, but her fearfulness shook him, all the same. He had a futile impulse to call after her, tell her it was OK. That he wasn’t whatever she was afraid of.
The wheel on his palm began to glow steadily. He sensed the essence of the Arcanum underneath every surface, as close and secret as a second skin.
And ahead of him, a shadow was oozing slickly along the ground: a shadow of something that wasn’t there. It was already dusk, but the shadow was a deeper black than shadows usually are, with two long, curving horns and a jagged spread of something that might have been wings.
Blaine followed the Devil along the road.
The shopping street fed into a nondescript housing estate. Most people appeared to be indoors, preparing for the approaching New Year’s festivities. The yellow windows and blue flicker of television screens felt as distant to Blaine as the lights of an airplane winking overhead.
Soon the shadow had drawn him into a grid of increasingly lifeless streets. At the end of one, however, he could see people and movement, and a different kind of blue flicker. This one belonged to the flashing lights of a police car. It was parked outside a corner house with boarded-up windows and a tumbledown roof. The two houses next to it were similarly dilapidated. The patchy garden at the back was quietly teeming with activity, which had drawn a knot of spectators onto the road.
The oily black shadow poured itself into a gutter and disappeared.
Blaine stood at a distance from the other onlookers. The low garden wall gave them a good view of the mounds of earth inside, and the comings and goings of the police officers and forensic team. In spite of the bystanders’ mutters of dismay, their excitement was obvious as they watched a lumpy thing in a zip-up bag being put onto a stretcher.
Since the Arcanum, Blaine knew what death smelled like. He could smell it here, too. The faint, sweet stink of corruption …
“They say it was a dog, digging, that found the body,” somebody behind him was saying. “It’s been buried for nearly a year.”
“Shocking,” murmured somebody else.
“That’s modern life for you,” agreed their friend. “Country’s going to hell in a handbasket.”
“The neighbors can’t b-believe their luck,” the man nearest to Blaine observed. He was tall, wearing an expensive-looking coat, with a bony, hooked face and silver hair. “It’s even better entertainment than TV.”
Blaine looked closer. “I know you,” he said. “It was before last Christmas. You came looking for Arthur White. My stepdad.” He paused. “I’m looking for him, too.”
“Then,” the man replied, “it seems you’ve f-found him.”
Blaine swallowed hard. His eyes flinched away from the thing on the stretcher, though it seemed to him that he had already known what it meant. A dull inevitability closed around him. “But—we’re not in the Arcanum … are we?” He knew, instinctively, that the man would understand his question, just as he also sensed that no one else would pay them any attention at all. For all intents and purposes, the two of them were alone.
“Not quite. But then, the unfortunate Mr. White never got as f-far as the Arcanum. I went instead, you see.” The man gave a thin smile. “And I was doing very well, until my misadventure in the Four of Swords.”
It was then that Blaine realized that the smell of rot wasn’t blowing over from the sad, huddled body in the bag, or the freshly turned earth. It came from the man next to him. Glittering particles of dust still clung to his hair. He was the player whom Cat had freed from the statue in the graveyard.
You have brought a new player into the Game, and a new knight for my court.… That was what the King of Wands had told him. But the new knight wasn’t Arthur. It was this man. It was this man, too, who had been lost in the Arcanum. All this time, Blaine had been chasing a ghost.
The scar along his arm began to ache and he pushed up his sleeve to trace its familiar line. The oily black shadow pooled at their feet and stretched out again. Arthur was dead. Arthur was dead. He didn’t yet know what this meant or even what he thought about it. He felt light-headed and hollow. Nothing felt real—not yet.
“Tell me what happened.”
“Your stepfather had arranged to sell me his invitation to the G-Game. He’d stumbled on something he didn’t understand and had no use for, whereas I had been waiting for such an opportunity to c-come on the market for a long, long time.… And when it did, I took c-care to ensure mine was the highest bid.”
The Knight of Wands began to walk leisurely down the road. The black shadow followed him and so did Blaine. The damp in the air had begun to condense, forming small drifts of mist.
“When Mr. White failed to k-keep our appointment for the sale,” the knight continued, his voice gentle as ever, “I became concerned. That was when I went to his home and you were so k-kind as to inform me that the police were after him. My concern grew. The police and I … Hmm, let’s just s-say they have an ongoing interest in me.
“However, thanks to our enc-counter, I did have a lead. Or rather a line: Temple House, Mercury Square.”
With a rush of sickness, Blaine remembered the quiet suburban street and the bench at the bus stop. Arthur’s notebook, casually open to the sketch of his invitation card.
“It was not much to g-go on, but luck was on my side. I took a chance that Mr. White had g-gone to London, and managed to intercept him on his way to the square in question.
“I brought him to this place. I reminded him of our deal and requested my card. Unfortunately, your stepfather refused to listen to r-reason. He appeared to be in various kinds of t-trouble, and believed the Game was his only w-way out of it. His behavior was—well, unhinged. I regret to say that our subsequent d-disagreement grew violent.”
“Indeed. But you must understand that my search for an invitation to the Game has been long and d-difficult. It began with a card I won in a bet, and which was subsequently stolen from me. That was nearly t-twelve years ago.”
Blaine clenched and unclenched his fists. For the first time, he understood the true nature of his intervention in the Game. He had set in motion the train of events that led to this man killing Arthur and joining the Game in his place. But there was something more. Twelve years … a missing card … and a man who murdered for the Arcanum.
He was struck by a new and terrible inevitability. It took all his strength to ask the next question. “That first invitation card. Did you—” The words clogged in his throat. “Did you get it back?”
“No. But an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth … and two bullets for a stolen c-card.”
Two bullets … a stuttering man … was this the killer of Cat’s parents? Blaine stifled a gasp.
“Mind you, when I finally obtained a new invitation, it was worth it,” the Knight of Wands continued. “Even though I wasted months in my first move, l-lost in one of the Arcanum’s labyrinths. The second move was more easily won; the next was the Four of Swords. But here, too, Fortune f-favored me.”
He leaned closer, so that Blaine tasted a gust of rot. “I would offer c-condolences for the loss of your stepfather, but I doubt you need them. A ‘vicious maniac,’ I think you called him.… Would you like to hear how he died?”
Blaine backed away. “I—I—I don’t know.”
“Of course, it may be that you would have preferred to do the job yourself. But I can still tell you how he whimpered and sniveled and begged for m-mercy.”
“I didn’t want to kill him.…”
Or only in dreams, thought Blaine, like when I was lost in the fog. No, I wanted to drag Arthur back to face what he’d done. I wanted him to suffer and be shamed and for the whole world to see. I wanted Helen to look him in the face and call him a monster.
The hollowness inside had filled itself, grown heavy and scorching. “I’m not some psychopath,” he said hotly. “Not like you. Christ—what’s so great about the Game that you’re ready to butcher all these people just for a way into it? Once you’re there, everything’s a nightmare and a swindle anyway. You’d still be rotting in that graveyard if it wasn’t for Cat. The girl you orphaned. But she’s a Game Master now, she’s a queen, she—”
Then he stopped. Appalled, he listened to the echo of his words.
“Cat, you say? Well, well. Perhaps I should have known, however brief our encounter. The family resemblance was s-striking.”
The Knight of Wands laughed a little. “Life’s rich irony! So many tangled webs … and all their threads seem to l-lead back to this Game of ours.” His voice grew brisk. “But now’s the time to t-tie them up. Or cut them off, rather. I don’t like to leave loose ends.”
Fog rolled down the street, swallowing up all shapes and shadows, including the silver-haired man. Perhaps the Devil had spirited him away; perhaps he was the Devil himself. But Blaine no longer cared about the High Priestess’s prophecy or the fallen angel he was supposed to release. Leaving his final move unfinished, and its angel unreleased, he blundered off in the direction he thought the knight had gone, thinking only of Cat: the loose end in a murderer’s web.