"Walking on Glass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Banks Iain)

ONE-DIMENSIONAL CHESS

Quiss paused near the topmost window in the winding-stair. His old body, for all its girth, thick size and seeming weight of muscle, was less than fit, and not so warm either. The cold air of the castle fumed from his mouth as he rested, gathering breath. It was dark in the turret stair, the only light coming from a small open window just round the twist in the rising steps. The steamy clouds of his breath were first caught in the light from above, then pulled slowly away in a draught from the same source. He wondered if Ajayi had finished the game yet.

Probably not. Prevaricating woman. He sighed and set off up the stairs again, pulling himself up by his hands on the thick, frozen rope fixed to the outside of the staircase, the castle's concession to their earlier request for a handhold on the often ice-slicked steps.

Ajayi was in the games room still, hunkered over the small table in her furs, huge as a bear, perched on a small stool all but hidden beneath the furs and cloths which smothered her old frame. She didn't look up as Quiss - panting heavily - appeared at the top of the stairs and made his way down the length of the dimly lit room. She seemed to notice him only as he came closer, up to his chair, facing her across the small, four-legged table with the dully glowing red jewel in its centre. Ajayi smiled and nodded, perhaps at the man, perhaps at the thin, wavering line of squares which seemed to hang in the air over the small circular table.

The thin line of squares - alternately black and white, like tiny isolated tiles of shadow and mist - stretched over the table, through the air on either side of it, and disappeared into the distant side walls of the broad games room, over fallen slates and past rusting columns of wrought iron. The flat string of squares flickered slightly, just sufficiently to show it was a projection, nothing real; but although it was apparent the line of squares itself was merely an image, on its surface sat seemingly real and solid wooden chess pieces made from black and white wood, and set on that strange line like tiny isolated guard towers on a chequered frontier wall.

Ajayi looked slowly up at her companion, her old lined face gradually contorting into a smile. Quiss looked down at her. Maybe there's something of the reptile in her, he thought. Maybe she slows down in the cold. As though I didn't have enough problems.

"Well?" the old woman said.

"Well what?" Quiss said, still breathing hard from his walk up the stairs from the castle's lower levels. What was she asking him questions for? He was the one who should be doing the asking. Why hadn't she finished the game yet? Why was she still just sitting looking at it?

"What did they say?" Ajayi asked patiently, smiling a little.

"Oh," Quiss said, shaking his great bearded head quickly as though the whole subject was of too little consequence to be worth discussing, "they said they'd see what they could do. I told them if we didn't get more light and heat up here soon I'd tear a few more of them apart, but after that they only started acting all stupid, and anyway they'll soon forget; they always do."

"You didn't see the seneschal himself then?" Ajayi said. She sounded disappointed, and a small frown creased her forehead.

"No. He was busy, they said. Just saw the little bastards." Quiss sat down heavily on his small chair, wrapping some more furs around himself to keep warm. He stared mournfully at the bright strip which appeared to float in the cold air over the small table. In the centre of the table's delicately carved surface the jewel, which was the colour of blood, shone like something warm.

Ajayi pointed at one of the wooden chess pieces - a black queen - and said, "Well, I think you're too hard on them. That's not the way to get results. By the way, I think that's checkmate."

"You don't know -" Quiss began, then gave a start as the last part of what his adversary had said sank in. He frowned deeply and peered at the narrow line of black and white spaces hanging in the air in front of him. "What?" he said.

"Checkmate," Ajayi said, her old voice slightly cracked and uneven. "I think."

"Where?" Quiss said indignantly, sitting back with a smile somewhere between annoyance and relief. "That's only check; I can get out of it. There." He leaned forward quickly and took hold of a white bishop, placing it one black square further forward, in front of his king. Ajayi smiled and shook her head; she put her hand just to one side of the glittering, projected line of squares and seemed to fumble with something invisible in the air. A black knight appeared, as though out of profound shadow, on the surface of the ultimately narrow board. Quiss took in his breath to say something, then held it.

"Sorry," Ajayi said, "that's mate." She said it quietly, but then wished she hadn't spoken at all. She frowned to herself, but Quiss was too absorbed glaring at the board - looking desperately up and down its length for useful pieces that were not there - to notice what she'd said.

Ajayi sat back in her little stool and stretched. She put her arms out from her sides and back, arching her spine and wondering vaguely as she did so why it had been thought necessary or relevant to give them such old bodies. Perhaps to keep the idea of the passing of time, simple mortality, to the forefront of their minds. If so, it was a redundant measure, even in this strange and singular place, even given their odd, frozen state (as the castle was frozen, so were they; as the castle was slowly crumbling but they stayed in their stasis, so their hopes, their chances decayed). She got up stiffly from the table, with one last look at the scowling form of the man trying to work a way out of his hopeless situation, then walked slowly, limping a little, over the scratched glass floor of the room to the bright chill of the balcony.

She leaned slackly against the square pillar in the middle of the row of columns which divided room from terrace, and looked into the snowy distance.

An unbroken plain of white stretched to the far horizon, only the faintest shadings of light indicating any variation in the almost dead flat land. To the right, Ajayi knew, if she leaned out from the balcony (which she did not like to do as she was a little afraid of heights), she would be able to see the quarries, and the start of the thin, also snow-covered and treeless line of stunted hills. She didn't bother to lean out. She had no particular desire to see either the hills or the quarries.

"Aaah!" Quiss roared behind her, and she turned in time to see him sweep his arm over the surface of the thin, artificial board in a gesture of fury and frustration. Chess pieces scattered from the board, but blinked out the instant they dropped below the level it was on, as though falling beneath some invisible beam. All except a couple of knights, which vanished as soon as they left the board itself. The board flickered for a second or two, then slowly faded until it was gone, and Quiss was left sitting looking angrily at the small wooden table. The faint glow from the jewel in the middle of its filigreed surface dimmed, went out.

Ajayi raised her eyebrows, waiting for the man to look at her, but he did not; he simply sat, torso perched forward, one elbow on his knee, hairy chin in one hand. "Fucking stupid knights," he said at last. He scowled at the table.

"Well," Ajayi said, leaving the open entrance to the balcony as a light wind picked up and blew a small flurry of snow around her booted feet, "at least the game's over."

"I thought we had a stalemate." Quiss seemed to be addressing the table, not his opponent. "We had an agreement."

"It was quicker this way." Ajayi sat down on the small stool on the other side of the table. Light from the ceiling moved uncertainly over the carved wood Quiss was still staring at. Ajayi looked at her companion's face in the dimness. Quiss had a broad, dark grey face, covered with mottled black and white hair. His eyes looked small and yellow, set in a tracery of deepening lines which seemed to radiate from his eyes like waves in a small still pool. He still did not look at her, so she shook her head slowly, resignedly, and looked about the room.

It was long and wide and very dark, with many pillars. Most of the light came from the openings onto the balcony. There should have been light from above and below, but in fact there was almost none, and it was partly because of that, and because it was also rather colder than it had to be, that Quiss had set off something like an hour before to find some of the castle's attendants. He was supposed to have asked politely for more heat up on their level, but from what he'd said Ajayi suspected he had been his usual brusque and threatening self. She would have gone herself, but her leg was stiff and sore again and she wasn't sure she would have been able to manage the stairs.

She looked up at the ceiling, where one of the room's many odd columns flared into the flat, thick, pale green glass. A single sinuous shape, shedding milky light, moved in the cold, murky water overhead.

It was one of the castle's many peculiarities that the interior lighting was produced by several species of luminescent fish.

"Where's the bell?" Quiss said suddenly, sitting upright and looking about the room. He got up from his seat as quickly as his thick furs and old muscles would allow, kicked some slates and books out of his way across the glass floor and started inspecting a pillar a few metres away. They've moved it again," he muttered. He started looking at some of the nearby pillars and columns, his boots scraping on the glass slabs of the floor as he moved. "Ah," he said, when almost out of sight, back in the depths of the room, not far from the small winding-stair he had entered the room by a few minutes earlier. Ajayi heard a distant scraping noise as Quiss pulled on the bell-chain.

Ajayi picked up a small, thin slate from the floor at the base of the pillar behind her. She turned the slate this way and that, trying to understand the curious markings scratched on its black-green surface, wondering idly which part of the walls the slate had fallen from. She rubbed her back at the same time; bending to the floor had hurt her.

Quiss came back to the table by way of another small, though taller, table over on the far side of the room, where a few dirty cups and cracked glasses stood in a small tin basin under a dripping tap. The tap was joined to a slightly bent length of pipe which appeared from a wall seemingly composed of tightly compressed paper. Quiss poured himself a glass of water, drank it.

Back at the games table he sat down in his straight-backed chair and stared across at Ajayi, who put down the slate she was studying. "Of course the damn thing's probably not working," Quiss said gruffly. Ajayi shrugged. She pulled the furs more closely around her. The wind moaned through the balcony window.

The castle had two names, as befitted its dual ownership. The side Quiss belonged to called it Castle Doors, Ajayi's side named it the Castle of Bequest. Neither name seemed to mean anything. As far as they could tell, it was the only thing which existed here, wherever "here" was. Everything else was snow; the white plain.

They had been there... they did not know how long. Quiss had found himself there first, and after a little while, when he realised that there was no night and day, just the one flat, monotone light always there beyond the windows, he had started to keep a tally of the number of times he slept. The record was scratched on the floor of a small cell in a corridor off the games room; his bedroom. There were nearly five hundred scratches on the glass floor now.

Ajayi arrived, seemingly deposited on one of the castle's high, flat, rubble-strewn roofs one night, when Quiss had made eighty-three scratches. They had bumped into each other that "day', and were delighted to find each other. Quiss had been lonely with only the castle's shy and dwarfish attendants for company, and Ajayi was pleased to find somebody who already knew their way round the cold, forbidding stump of rock, iron, glass, slate and paper which was the castle.

It had taken them only a short time to realise they were from opposite sides in the Therapeutic Wars, but it had caused little friction. They had both heard of this place, they both knew why they were here. They both knew what they had to do, and how hard it was going to be to escape; they knew they needed each other.

They had been Promotionaries, on their respective sides of the Wars (which were not, of course, between Good and Evil at all, as non-combatants of every species always assumed, but between Banality and Interest), with great things expected of them once their training and indoctrination was completed; but they had each done something silly, something which called into question their very suitability for exalted rank, and now they were here, in the castle, with a problem to solve and games to play, being given one last chance; a long shot, an unlikely appeal procedure.

And an unlikely setting.

What strange architect had designed this place? Ajayi found herself wondering every so often. The castle, rising on a single outcrop of rock from the plain, was built very largely of books. The walls were mostly slate, apparently quite normal, grained rock produced by a perfectly standard physical process of alluvial deposition. But when you loosened one of the slate blocks from the castle walls - an easy job, as the castle was slowly crumbling away- and split it open, on every surface so exposed a series of cut or engraved figures was revealed, arranged in lines and columns, complete with word and line breaks and what looked like punctuation. Quiss had demolished a significant part of the castle when he first discovered this, unwilling to believe that the stones, every one of them, all the tens of thousands of cubic metres the castle must be composed of, all those kilotonnes of rock really were saturated, filled full of hidden, indecipherable lettering. The castle's stunted squad of masons and builders were still working to repair the damage the old man had done by tearing down walls in his attempt to prove these hidden glyphs were isolated aberrations, not - as they indeed were - ubiquitous. This caused much grumbling and complaining, as the masons considered they were anyway fighting a losing battle against the castle's accelerating decay without its guests adding to their workload.

"You called?" a small, cracked voice said. Ajayi looked up at the door to the winding-stair expecting to see an attendant, but the voice had come from behind her, and she could see Quiss's face starting to turn red, his eyes widening, the lines around them spreading out further.

"Fuck off!" he shouted over Ajayi's shoulder towards the balcony. The woman turned round and saw that the red crow was perched on the balustrade, flapping its wings like a man trying to keep warm and looking in at them, its head cocked to one side. An eye like a small black button glittered, fastening on them.

"Given up on the game then?" the red crow croaked. "Could have told you the Silesian Defence wouldn't work in One-Dimensional Chess. Where'd you learn to -?"

Quiss stumbled out of his seat, almost falling, scooped a flat piece of slate from the floor and threw it at the red crow, which screamed and jumped out of the way, spreading its wings and dropping away, flying into the cold clear space below the balcony, its final call echoing briefly, like laughter. The slate Quiss had thrown sailed out through the balcony doorway after the bird, a stony imitation of its flight. "Pest!" Quiss spat, and sat down again.

The rooks and crows which lived in the decaying stumps of the castle's high towers could talk; they had been given the voices of Quiss and Ajayi's respective rivals, unfaithful lovers and hated superiors. They would appear from time to time and taunt the old couple, reminding them of their past lives and the failures or mistakes which had brought them to the castle (though never detailing them - neither Quiss nor Ajayi knew what the other had done to justify sending them here. Ajayi had suggested they swap stories, but Quiss demurred). The red crow was the most malicious and cutting, and was equally proficient at taunting either of the elderly pair. Quiss was the more easily riled, so he tended to suffer more than his fair share of the bird's abuse. He shook with fury sometimes, as much as cold.

It was cold because something had gone wrong down in the castle's boiler room. The heating system was breaking down, needing repair. Hot water was supposed to circulate beneath and above every floor. In the games room, supported by slate and iron pillars, a tracery of iron girders held the low glass ceiling. Inside the glass was water, about a half-metre or so of slightly cloudy and salty water the boilers were supposed to keep warm. The same went for the glass underfoot; another half-metre of water lay underneath the transparent slabs which made up the floor, gurgling under the scratched surface and around the slaty pedestals supporting the columns above. Long gelatinous-looking bubbles of air moved like pale amoebae under the false ice of the glass.

Luminous fish lived in the salt water. They swam like long rubbery strip-lights through the water's gentle currents, and kept the rooms, corridors and towers of the castle bathed in a silky, pervasive light which sometimes made distances hard to measure and gave the air a thick sort of look. When Ajayi had first arrived the games room had been just right, held at a pleasant temperature by the warm fluid circulating above and below, and enjoyably light as well, thanks to the fish. The odd system had seemed to work.

But now there was something wrong, and most of the fish had retreated to the castle's still warm lower levels. The castle's black-cloaked seneschal had scowled darkly on the previous occasions when Quiss had tracked him down in the kitchens and asked him what was going on and what he intended to do about it; he made dour excuses and talked of the corrosive effects of salt water and what a mess it made of his pipes and anyway materials were very hard to come by these days - What days? Quiss had exploded. There was only one day, wasn't there, or did they have days here but they were just very long? The seneschal had gone quiet at that and sunk his thin grey face back into his hooded cape, while the huge human stood glaring at him, quivering with impotent rage.

Time was another problem in the Castle Doors. It went quicker the closer you were to a clock. The further away from a time-piece you were, the more it not only seemed to but did drag. The clocks in the castle were immovable, and erratic too, going sometimes faster, sometimes slower. There was one great clock mechanism buried deep in the warmer depths of the place, some vast assemblage of gears and creaking cogs which powered all the clock faces in the ramshackle shell of the castle. Rotating shafts buried in the walls transmitted the energy from the central machinery to the faces, and rumbled in some places, squeaked in others, and leaked oil ubiquitously.

The oil mingled with the warm salty water which leaked from places in the ceilings, and that was one of the reasons they had asked for some sort of banister rail to hold on to in the narrow winding-stair. The smell of oil and brine permeated the castle, making Ajayi think of old harbours, and ships.

Why time should go faster the closer you were to a clock, they didn't know, and none of the castle's waiters and attendants had any explanation either. Quiss and Ajayi had carried out experiments, using identical candles, lit at the same time, one hard by the face of a clock, the other in the middle of the room with them; the candle by the clock burned nearly twice as fast. They had formulated some vague ideas which would let them use this effect to shorten the perceived time it took to play the games they had to play, but the castle clocks, or perhaps the castle itself, seemed unwilling to cooperate. Taken near a clock, the table stopped working; the red jewel in the middle stopped glowing, the projection of the board and the pieces disappeared. Added to this was the fact that the clocks themselves were so erratic; every so often they slowed down, so that time went more slowly the closer you were to them.

Whatever was affecting the rate time passed at seemed to obey the inverse square law, the phenomenon apparently radiating from each clock face, while at the same time there was a more generalised sort of effect emanating from the huge central mechanism buried somewhere in the castle's many lower levels, making everything down there happen more quickly.

The chaotic kitchens, where the seneschal had his office and where vast quantities of food were continually being prepared in conditions of the utmost confusion, noise and heat, seemed to be the worst affected place of all. Ajayi could smell the cooking odours from Quiss's ragged furs as they sat, waiting.

"Ah, here you are then," said a small voice. Ajayi looked, Quiss turned, and there at the head of the winding-stair stood an attendant. The attendant was short, about half the height of either of the two humans. It was dressed in a sort of grubby grey cassock knotted with red string at the waist. The cassock had a thin hood, held in place over the attendant's head and face by what looked like the brim from an old and worn red hat; it was squeezed down over the attendant's head, the top of the hood showing through where the hat's crown should have been. The attendant's face was hidden by a papier mache mask, as worn by all the attendants and waiters. The mask was set in an expression of abject sadness.

"Well, better late than never," Quiss snarled.

"Dreadful sorry," the attendant squeaked, shuffling closer. Little red boots, quite shiny, flickered under the hem of its cassock as it moved. It stopped near the table and bowed, putting its small gloved hands into the opposing cuffs of its robe. "You've finished the game then, oh, good. Who won?"

"Never mind who won," Quiss barked. "You know why we've sent for you, do you?"

"Yes, yes, I think so." The attendant nodded, its high voice not altogether as certain as the words. "You've got an answer, no?" It lifted its shoulders slightly, or dropped its head a little, as though frightened of being struck if its supposition was wrong.

"We've got an answer, yes," Quiss said sarcastically. He glanced at Ajayi, who smiled back and motioned towards the small attendant. Quiss cleared his throat and leaned forward towards the small figure, which shrank away without actually stepping back. "Right," Quiss said, "the answer to the question is: You can't have both in the same universe. Got it?"

"Yes," nodded the attendant, "yes, I think I've got it: 'You can't have both in the same universe.' Very good. Very logical. That sounds like it to me. I thought that. That sounds - "

"We don't care what you thought," Quiss interrupted, baring his teeth and leaning closer towards the small attendant -who shrunk back so much further Ajayi felt sure it was about to overbalance and fall backwards- "Just do whatever you have to do and let's see if we can get out of this filthy place,"

"As you say, right, yes, will do, will do," the small figure said, backing off, half-nodding, half-bowing as it made its way back- wards to the winding-stair. It tripped on a book and almost went flying, but it just succeeded in remaining upright. It turned and hurried away into the darkness. They heard its steps clattering and fading in the distance.

"Hmm," Ajayi said. "I wonder what it does, where it goes."

"Who cares as long as it's the right answer," Quiss said, shaking his head and then scratching his chin. He turned to look back at where the doorway to the stairs stood in the gloom. "I bet the little idiot forgets."

"Oh, I shouldn't think so," Ajayi said.

"Well, I do. Maybe we ought to follow it. Find out where it goes. We might be able to short-circuit this whole ridiculous process." He turned and looked speculatively at Ajayi, who frowned at him and said,

"I don't think that would be a good idea."

"It'll probably turn out to be something really simple."

"Would you care to bet on that?" Ajayi said. Quiss opened his mouth to speak, but then thought the better of it. He cleared his throat instead, and traced some, of the pattern on the top of the small wooden table between them with one stubby, yellow-grey finger. Ajayi said, "Perhaps we could just ask one of them. Ask that one when it comes back; see what it says. It might tell us."

"We shouldn't need to ask it anything, not if that's the right answer," Quiss said, looking at the old woman. 'This was your answer, remember."

"I remember," Ajayi said. "The next one can be yours, if this one isn't right, but we did agree to do it this way; it was just luck it's my answer first. We agreed to do it this way, do you remember?"

"That was your idea, too," Quiss said, not looking at her, but lowering his eyes to watch his finger moving over the table's cut patterns.

"Just don't start any recriminations, that's all," Ajayi said.

"I won't." Quiss widened his eyes, held his hands up and out, his voice suddenly high in protest, so that he reminded Ajayi of a very large young child. "It's going to be a long time before we get another chance though, isn't it though?"

"That's just the way things have been set up," Ajayi said, "that isn't my fault."

"I didn't say it was your fault, did I?" Quiss said.

Ajayi sat back, putting her gloves back on. She looked doubtfully at the man on the far side of the table. "All right then," she said.

It had taken them almost two hundred and fifty of Quiss's "days" to discover what the way out was. They had to answer a single question. But first they had to play a series of odd games, working out the rules for each one in turn, playing each one to a conclusion, without cheating or colluding. At the end of each game they had one chance and one chance only to answer the riddle they had been set. This was their first game, their first attempt to answer the question. One-Dimensional Chess hadn't been all that difficult once they worked out the rules, and now their first answer was being carried or transmitted or processed - whatever - by the small attendant with the little red boots.

The question they had to answer was quite simple, and they had been told by the seneschal that he had been told that it was an empirical question, not a purely theoretical one, though he had also said he found this difficult to believe, as even the mysterious powers and forces which moved the Wars themselves could not control such absolutes... The question was: What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?

Simple as that. Nothing more complicated or obtuse; just that. Ajayi thought it was a joke, but so far all the castle's inhabitants, all the attendants and waiters, one or two other subsidiary characters they had discovered, the seneschal himself, and even the ever-facetious rooks and crows which infested the decaying upper storeys had treated the question with extreme seriousness. That really was the riddle, and if they got the answer right they would escape from the castle, be taken from this limbo and resume their duties and positions in the Therapeutic Wars again, debt paid.

Or they could kill themselves. That was the unspoken alternative (or at least unspoken by all except the red crow, who cheerily brought the subject up on every third or fourth visit), that was the easy way out. It was a long drop from the balcony of the games room; the castle apothecary carried a line of lethal poisons and draughts; there were ways out of the castle, a postern or two, and a narrow winding path through the fractured rocks and fallen masonry all tumbled round the castle's plinthed base like scree, then a long cold walk into the snowy silence...

There were times when Ajayi considered that way out; not as attractive then and there, but for when - if - there ever seemed to be no hope, at some time in the future. Even so, she found it hard to imagine ever becoming so desperate. Time would have to drag on a lot longer than it had, she would have to get a lot more fed up and tired with this old, time-frozen body before suicide became a serious alternative. Besides, if she went, Quiss would be abandoned. The self-destruction of one partner meant that the games could not go on. The other one could not play on alone or find somebody else to play, and if the games could not be played and ended, the riddle could not be answered.

"Ah... excuse me..." They both turned to look at the winding-stair door, where the small attendant was peeking round the side, most of its body hidden in the twisted darkness beyond.

"What?" Quiss said.

"Ah... sorry..." the attendant said, in a small voice.

"Eh?" Quiss shouted, his voice altering in pitch. Ajayi took a deep breath and sat back on the stool. She'd heard. She thought Quiss had too, but he didn't want to admit it to himself. "Speak up, you wretch!" Quiss roared.

"That wasn't it," the attendant said, staying in the doorway. Its voice was still small; Ajayi found herself straining to catch its hesitant words; "that wasn't the right answer. I really am -"

"Liar!" Quiss rose off his seat, shaking with rage. The attendant yelped and disappeared. Ajayi sighed. She looked up at Quiss, who stood, fists clenched, glaring at the distant, empty doorway. He turned, whirled round to look down at her, the scraps of fur around him flying out. "Your answer, lady," he shouted at her, "your answer; remember that!"

"Quiss -" she began quietly. He shook his head, kicked the small chair he had been sitting on, and marched off across the squeaking, grating glass floor, heading for his own apartments. Before he left the games room for the short corridor which led to his rooms, he stopped by the side wall of the room, where more conventional paper and cardboard books lined the slate fabric of the castle - the masons" lame attempt at insulation. Quiss clawed at the wall, tearing the faded, yellowing books away from it, throwing them behind him like a dog digging a hole in the sand, bellowing incoherently and tearing and swiping at the wall, baring the green-black slate beneath as the torn, ripped pages fluttered away behind him, falling to the grimy glass floor like some flat, grubby snow.

Quiss stormed off, slamming a door somewhere, and Ajayi was left alone. She walked over to where the just-savaged books lay strewn across the floor, and stirred them with the toe of her boot. Some of the languages she knew, she thought (it was hard to tell in the uncertain light, and she was too stiff to be bothered bending down), and some she did not recognise.

She left the pages where they lay, one-dimensional flakes littering the murky floor, and she went to stand by the balcony window again.

Against the unending, unaltering whiteness of the plain, a flight of dark birds flew. The same sky looked down, blank and forgettable and grey, itself unchanging.

"And what next?" she asked herself in a low voice. She shivered and hugged herself tighter. Her short hair refused to grow any longer, and her furs had no hood. Her ears were cold. What was next, they knew already from the castle seneschal, was something called Open-Plan Go. Goodness knew how long that would take them to work out and play, assuming Quiss came back from his sulk. The seneschal had muttered something about this next game being the closest analogue of the Wars themselves, which worried Ajayi for a start. That sounded awfully complex, and long.

She had asked the seneschal where the ideas for these odd games came from. He said from a place which was the castle's chosen Subject, and had hinted, she thought, that there was another way to get to this place, but refused to be more specific. Ajayi was trying to cultivate the seneschal's acquaintance (when her sore leg and stiff back let her get down to the basement levels where he was usually to be found) whereas Quiss had started out trying to intimidate him. When the man had first arrived he had tried to torture information on how to escape from one of the waiters. It hadn't worked, of course, just made the others frightened.

Ajayi's belly rumbled. It must be mealtime soon. Waiters would appear shortly, if they weren't too frightened of Quiss being in a bad mood. Damn the man.

Open-Plan Go, she thought, and shivered again.

"You'll be saw-ree!" croaked a passing rook, cruising past on black wings and using the voice of an old, bitterly remembered lover.

"Oh, shut up," she muttered, and went back inside.