Jandell and the Strategist stood opposite one another, perhaps ten paces apart. Silence fell across the giant stadium.
‘You killed me,’ the Strategist said. ‘You thought you killed me. Your own mother.’ She flicked her hand, and a flower appeared in her fist, a dark, glossy thing with purple petals. It seemed to grow within Drayn’s mind, until its thorns and its petals filled her up. But this was not a flower. This was a memory, born from poisoned soil. She saw a vision of Jandell, in his terrible cloak, holding a woman aloft. Drayn could not make out this woman’s face, but she knew who it was. Strategist. There was a scream, and the vision fell into rotting petals.
‘You tore me from my host,’ the Strategist said, trembling upon the table. ‘You made me into nothing. Only my daughter stayed by my side.’
Another woman appeared on the table, a red-haired creature in a green dress. She wore a white mask, through which a pair of eyes were visible, the same colour as her dress and burning with a hunger. All the while they focused on one person: Jandell.
‘Now I am whole,’ the Strategist said. ‘I have become one with my host. She has given me strength, and Father has given me power. But it is only a taste, only the smallest taste, of what I will become.’
She raised a hand, and Jandell fell to his knees. His great cloak began to coil around his frame, the faces glaring out at the Strategist, enraged and terrified.
The Strategist paced forward, to stand directly before her trembling son.
‘I love you,’ she said. She reached out a hand and touched him on the top of his head. ‘But I must destroy you.’
Coldness. It fell across them all, the ice of a deathstone, a frigid, grasping power. Snow fell from the dark sky, and each flake was a memory.
‘No,’ Jandell said. He stood, and the snow fell away from him. ‘Ruin is not here yet.’ He gave a sharp nod and his cloak curled forward, the faces snapping and growling, burning with a new ferocity. The dark material curled around the Strategist, and the faces began to leap from their prison.
The Strategist smiled. She reached out and plucked a face from the air, holding it between her thumb and forefinger: a piece of strange material, cut into the features of a wailing man.
‘A terrible memory, that, terrible, terrible.’
Drayn turned, startled. A man was by her side, old and bearded in appearance, but a creature of the past like all the rest of them. The Strategist’s snow was lying on his head.
‘He doesn’t like the things he’s done,’ the old man said, nodding at Jandell. ‘He regrets so many things. The cloak means he can never forget the creature he once was.’
The old man smiled at her, before fading back into the crowd.
‘I do not fear your cloak, Jandell, and I do not fear your little faces,’ the Strategist said.
Mother was as tall now as five Jandells, as tall as Thonn House. She reached out a great finger and held it just above Jandell’s head. She began to move it in tight little circles, and the cloak moved too, retreating from her and coiling itself around its owner. The faces were back in their prison, watching the Strategist with fearful gazes.
‘No,’ Jandell said. But that was all he could manage, as the dark material gathered around him, tighter and tighter, suffocating him. It shifted around his neck, and he closed his eyes. Death is coming.
The Strategist clapped her hands together and shrank before their eyes. Jandell tumbled forward, collapsing onto the table, utterly still. Drayn felt a shadow gathering within her, and all around the crowd. Strange, but she did not feel fearful. Instead, she was seized with a sense of dread inevitability. It was always meant to be this way.
But then something rose within her, pushing against this notion. Always? Why always? Because these parasites tell us so?
She stepped forward. ‘Stop it,’ she said to the Strategist.
‘Ah. The Fallen Girl.’ The Strategist grinned at her. ‘The destroyer of Squatstout. A brave thing, like my own host in so many ways. Perhaps I will keep you, as a spare.’
Drayn raised a hand and sought that feeling of power she had used before, the weaponry she had deployed against Squatstout. But she had not even begun, when the Strategist struck her down.
CHAPTER 21
‘The game is over.’
Aranfal was in the Circus, the new version that had been built for the Strategist. The sky was dark, but light flickered from distant torches. Purple rags hung from the walls, and statues of Katrina Paprissi stared down at them. All was the same as before, but all was utterly changed. The Circus now was gigantic, the statues monstrous. The table he had seen before – the one the Operators used to play the game – was now a vast outcrop of stone. The symbols that had danced across its surface were gone, and it was nothing but cold rock.
He looked around for the Strategist. She was speaking to him, though he sensed she was far away.
‘The game is over,’ she said again. ‘But it was not a game at all, was it, Aranfal? The Old Place wanted you to find the First Memory.’ She laughed. ‘The spectators are not pleased. They came to watch a game of old, not that … nonsense.’
Aranfal heard a great roar. He looked in the direction of the sound and could just make out movement, the shuffling of a great crowd. He remembered the creatures he had seen before, when he was in the Circus with Shirkra and the Gamesman: minor Operators, come to watch the game.
‘Did I fail you?’ he asked aloud.
The face of Katrina Paprissi appeared in his mind.
‘Fail?’ She said the word dreamily, as if she had never heard it before, as if it was some new language. ‘No, Aranfal. There was no way to fail in that charade. Everything has always been going in one direction: to Ruin. You were wonderful.’ She grinned. ‘And now we are almost at the end. Come – watch me destroy my son, before the coming of Ruin.’
Aranfal looked again. He could just make out movement, far away on the table. There was a hint of purple. He climbed onto the board and began to walk across the stone.
‘Strategist,’ he whispered.
‘Yes, my torturer?’
‘Who won the game?’
The Strategist laughed.
‘There is no winner but Ruin. And soon he will have his prize.’
The table seemed to grow before Aranfal as he walked. The stone was cold through his boots.
There was a roar of sound, a din of conversation at the side of the table. The spectators. He could not make out individuals; it was a great choir of noise. What did they want, these creatures? What entertainment did they seek? He concentrated and, for a moment, he thought he heard questions coming from their distant ranks. Who are you, Aranfal and Aran Fal, you man of two parts? What memories do you hold?
‘I am a torturer,’ he said. Shame tapped at his shoulder. I am a torturer. Why was he ashamed now, in this place, after all his years in the Bowels of the See House, scraping answers from the agonised? You have always been ashamed, you fool. You put it away for too long. But these things always come back.
It was such a simple feeling, such an obvious little emotion. I feel bad about the things I have done. Even here, in this outrageous pastiche of the Circus, he could not escape it. A parade of victims danced before him. The ones he tortured were often guilty of nothing at all. That was the whole point. The guilty wouldn’t talk, many times, until their loved ones were with me. Then they talked, all right. Some of them took longer than others but, in the end, almost all of them talked.
But not all. A man floated into his mind’s eye, a man who did not talk. He was not the toughest-looking inmate Aranfal had dealt with in the Bowels. Not the toughest looking. But looks meant nothing. Aranfal had seen so many big men cry, men with muscles on their muscles, men with filed teeth. This one had none of that: he was a plump sort, innocent looking, with a mound of blond curls. But he hadn’t talked. Not even when his children were brought before him. Not even when his children bled.
Aranfal squeezed his eyes closed.
‘There is no escaping the past. In the new world, the past is all that will matter.’
Someone was at his side. It was someone the Watcher knew all too well: a younger version of himself, from another age. This boy wore a black gown over clothing of the same colour. His face was unlined, and even his blond hair seemed to hold a youthfulness that the man of today had long since lost. Yet the difference between them was something beyond the way they looked. It was something beyond the years themselves. It was the space between Aran Fal and Aranfal.
‘Ruin is coming,’ said Aran Fal the memory man.
Aranfal reached out to Aran Fal and stroked his cheek. It felt real, but so had all the memories he had encountered.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And there’s nothing to be done.’
Aran Fal cocked his head to the side. ‘You cling to me: your former self.’
‘I know you’re gone, and never coming back.’
‘No. You long for me. Aranfal wants to be Aran Fal again. Blaming others for your transformation. Blaming her.’
Brightling came to his mind’s eye.
‘I blame no one but myself. I turned myself into this. I cut you out.’
Aran Fal laughed. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. I never existed. The boy who came down from the North was not as you remember. Nothing is ever as we remember. He was a complex thing. But he was always Aranfal. You didn’t change. You were always the same man. It just took you a while to realise.’
Aranfal nodded. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I’ve always been the same.’ He turned from Aran Fal and looked along the table. Far away, he could just make out a small group of people. Among them was the Strategist, that twisted version of Katrina Paprissi. He could sense her from where he stood.
‘Ruin is coming,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Aran Fal. ‘The spirit of our worst memories: the things we hate and the things we hide. He’s like you, Aranfal.’
The Watcher twisted his head towards this memory of his younger self. ‘What do you mean?’
Aran Fal laughed. ‘He sees goodness in himself, despite everything he has done. He was born from anger, forged from pain. He was built as a weapon from the darkest impulses of humanity. He cannot be anything except what he is. Of course he sees goodness in himself. He is the weapon of the Old Place. When he takes it over—’
‘The world will be a procession of our most hated memories – the things he loves,’ Aranfal said. ‘And he will not be satisfied with the past. He will hurt us, to make new memories. He will twist them into something new, something worse. It is what he is, and there is no way to change him.’
‘He is what he is,’ Aran Fal said, ‘as are we. But perhaps we are different. Perhaps we can do something new.’
‘Yes. Something good, before the end. Something to help …’
‘Yes …’
‘But how?’
It was too late, then, for any more questions. Aran Fal had gone.
On he went, across the stone expanse. The cheers and chants of the crowd came to him like a mantra, the songs that ancient savages sang in a strange land long ago. He smelled death on the wind.
‘Your death.’
A being had appeared before him. He said being, though it looked like three people, three women formed of sand or dust, swirling before him, their feet vanishing in fogs of dark cloud, their features obscured under the mania of their beings. They wore crowns of glass.
‘Dust Queen,’ he whispered. He had seen this woman before, long ago, as an image in the Strategist’s garden. Even there, her power had seared him.
The three heads nodded. ‘You are going to your death, Aranfal.’
‘Good. I deserve to die.’
The Dust Queen sighed. ‘I have seen so many like you, over the long years. Cold, but conflicted. It always ends the same way.’ She nodded. ‘But you can write a different tale, Aranfal. You can choose your death. I see that before you.’
Aranfal knew, then, that he wanted to die. It was the only thing left that he could control. Even if his memories would live on forever, his flesh belonged to him alone.
‘I would like it to mean something,’ he said.
The Dust Queen smiled, and disappeared.
He met Aran Fal again, before he reached his destination.
‘Where are you going?’ the younger man asked.
Aranfal looked to the distance. He could see the Strategist clearly, now; her purple rags surrounded her, clawing at her frame.
‘Her,’ he said.
Aran Fal nodded. ‘Mother. Born from memories of fierce nurture; the lioness with her cubs.’ He chuckled. ‘Death is coming.’
Aranfal sucked in a long breath; the air of this strange place filled his lungs with the sparkling core of memories. ‘But we will choose our death, Aran Fal. It is the one thing we have left.’
‘Yes. Let’s make it a good one.’
‘I will.’ He nodded at the memory of himself, and set out on the final stage of his journey across the board.
‘And now the torturer arrives, in all his twisted glory.’
Aranfal knew where he was. This was where the Portal had once been, though now it was covered with the stone of the board. The crowd were closer, gathered at the side. Occasionally he could make out faces amid that grey gathering, leering at him.
The Strategist was standing near the edge of the table, her back to Aranfal. She turned to face him, and he staggered backwards. This was not the woman he had known. She was still that grotesque version of Katrina Paprissi, clothed in purple rags, her eyes sparkling with the same colour. She held her mask in her hand, that ugly face of a white rat, the same one she had worn since she completed her apprenticeship. But everything about her had changed. She burned with a new power; it was in her eyes, those purple things that saw everything at once. Her very frame trembled with possibility. He knew what she was thinking. I have won. Ruin is coming.
And Aranfal could see the source of her triumph. There, at her feet, entangled in his own cloak of a thousand faces, was Jandell: the Operator, the creature they had once treated as a god. He was perfectly still, and utterly defeated.
But he was not alone. To the other side of the Strategist was a young girl that Aranfal did not recognise, passed out on the table as well. She was a tough-looking creature, brown-haired and wiry, with a kind of regal air. He could always see things like that. He always knew where power lay, born or earned.
‘Torturer,’ said the Strategist. ‘You were a good pawn. But the game is over. We have all felt it.’ She gestured at Jandell, and then to the prostrate girl. ‘You have done better than many of the other players. Jandell did not even make it to the table in time, and his pawn did not go below.’
‘Where are we?’ Aranfal glanced around at the table and the crowd and the four statues of the Strategist, looming over them all. ‘Is this the Underland or the Overland?’
The Strategist laughed. ‘The walls are breaking down, Aranfal. Soon, there will be no difference at all.’
There came a great rumble from underneath his feet. Something is coming.
‘So here we have two of our players,’ the Strategist said. ‘Aranfal, the torturer, and this girl of Jandell’s. That means some are missing, does it not?’
‘Yes, mistress, yes!’
It was the woman in green: the wearer of the white mask. Shirkra. She was at the Strategist’s side, for all the world like a little child, eager to please her mother.
‘My one is missing!’ she cried, eyes flashing beneath her mask as she locked Aranfal’s gaze. ‘I watched her on the board. I watched her go into Chaos. Such a beautiful place, such a beautiful girl! Did you see her, Aranfal? Did she live?’
The Watcher’s instincts told him that Shirkra, who knew Chaos better than anyone, was aware of what had happened to her pawn.
‘She’s gone,’ he said. His thoughts lingered on the Shadowthings.
‘But another one lives,’ Shirkra said. She point
ed to Aranfal’s right. The Watcher turned and saw Canning, being dragged along behind two children. They giggled as they walked. The one-time Tactician for Expansion was encircled in black chains. Aranfal was reminded of the substance that the Shadowthings played with, that dark power of memories. It held Canning tightly, and there was no escape for him.
‘But we are missing one, Mother,’ said Shirkra. ‘We are still missing one!’
‘Yes,’ said the Strategist. She smiled. ‘The pawn of the Queen. But the Queen is coming. The game is over, and she will fulfil her bargain. She will show us the Machinery, and I will bring forth Ruin.’
Beneath their feet, the table shook again.
Death is coming. The words thudded through Aranfal’s mind, over and over. Death is coming. Death is coming.
He balled his hands into fists. It’s the only thing I have left to give.
CHAPTER 22
Brandione was on a table.
It stretched away before him, endless in scope. He knew this thing: a board he had seen, in those hazy moments when he had first entered the Circus and fallen below, to the game. He looked up and saw statues: four loomed overhead, one in each corner of this monstrous sea of stone. I am back in the Circus, though it has changed. It has changed so much.
‘The game is at an end,’ said the three faces to his side.
‘What now?’ he asked. The Queen seemed very old indeed: three frail women with faces of cracked glass and hair like the tendrils of clouds.
‘I must show Mother the Machinery,’ she said.
‘No.’
Three sets of shoulders shrugged. ‘I promised.’
‘What have you got from this bargain?’
The Dust Queen smiled. ‘I have brought everyone together: Operators and players.’ She nodded at him. ‘They will all bear witness.’
Brandione did not pretend to understand. He stared out into the distance and could just make out great crowds of people, somewhere far away, moving like shadows on a wall.
‘Come,’ the Dust Queen said. She reached out with one of her hands, touched him on the shoulder, and took him to another part of the board.
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