THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT. Well, it was a start.
Ajayi put her last domino down. Quiss hesitated before completing the pattern, suddenly unsure which end of the line of tiles to put his last one on.
The woman was getting restless, and soon, he guessed, it would be time to eat. And this would be another wasted, stupid game, like all the others, no matter what way he put this piece down. They should have come up with a solution by now, a good pattern, a logical arrangement that would satisfy whatever subtle mechanism existed within the small table. But they hadn't. Were they doing something wrong? Had something escaped them in their attempt to escape? They had checked and re-checked and didn't think so.
Perhaps they were just unlucky.
Already they had gone through three sets of the pieces; three times he had become so frustrated with the whole idiotic exercise he had just thrown the dominoes away, out over the balcony; once while still in their ivory box, once lifting the table and shaking it over the edge of the balcony (Ajayi had almost died of fright, he remembered with a grim smile; she thought he was going to throw the table away too, and there was only one table; no replacements. If it was destroyed or badly damaged then they were not allowed to play any more games, and therefore could give no more answers), and once he had just cuffed the bone pieces off the table surface and sent them scattering through the pot-bellied slatework of the balcony's balustrade. (However, now the seneschal was saying he would have the table bolted to the floor.)
Well, what did they expect? He was a man of action. This constipated, decaying puzzle-palace wasn't his sort of place at all. Ajayi seemed to enjoy it at times, and he would have to sit sometimes, fidgeting, while she expounded on some philosophical or mathematical idea she thought might get them out of their predicament. He wasn't going to challenge her on what was more or less her home ground, but from the little that even he knew of philosophy, he thought that her smug positivism sounded too soulless and logical to be much use in the real world. What the hell was the point of trying rationally to analyse what was fundamentally irrational (or a-rational as she, splitting hairs as usual, would sometimes admit)? It was a way to arrive at personal madness and despair, not some universal understanding. But he wasn't going to put this to Ajayi; she'd smile tolerantly and shoot him down in flames, without a doubt. Know your strengths; don't attack where you're weak. That was his sort of philosophy; military. That and an acceptance that life was basically absurd, unfair and - ultimately -pointless.
The woman read a lot. She was going downhill, even trying to understand one of the common languages she had found in the books on the games room floor and in the walls. It was a bad sign, Quiss was sure. She was starting to give in, not taking the games they were playing seriously. Or taking them too seriously; the wrong way. The appearance was taking over the reality. She was getting caught up in the surface of the games, not their real meaning, so that instead of getting the games over with as quickly as possible and so getting to their real goal - another crack at the riddle - she was starting to behave as though the playing, the motions and apparent choices, mattered.
He wasn't going to give up, but he did need to escape this dead, desperate feeling the games and the woman gave him. He had escorted her round the castle for a while, showing her the odd places he had discovered, the one or two odd characters who existed in the place (the neurotic barber was his personal favourite), but gradually she had gone off more and more by herself, then seemingly become bored with it (or frightened, somehow, he wasn't sure), and stopped.
He still visited the castle's lower floors and storeys, journeying down to the kitchens and even beyond, so far below he guessed he was almost down to the level of the snowy plain itself, deep inside the rocky crag the castle proper stood upon. There were a few strange things down there, and, past a certain level, a suspicious number of locked, stout, metal-banded doors.
He had a few attendants he had partly befriended and partly terrorised into acting as guides for him. He told them he would put in a good word for them with the seneschal if they did what he wanted, but that if they didn't he would have them transferred to the slate mines or the ice-gathering expeditions. Apart from these bribes and threats (none of which he could deliver on as he had no influence whatsoever with the seneschal in such matters) he relied entirely on personal charm.
The stunted minions led him to new places in and under the Castle of Bequest, and even told him things about themselves; that of course they too were exiles from the Wars, but from a somewhat lower scale than he and Ajayi. They even coyly revealed the secret of their physiology; Quiss listened patiently though in fact he knew all about their physical make-up, having taken one of them apart not long after he first arrived in the castle, trying to torture the truth out of it. So he knew that these failed soldiers had no solid bodies at all; he had peeled layer after layer off the one he was interrogating, robe after robe after vest after vest after tunic after tunic, taking off finer and finer layers of gloves and little socks and clothing, taking off mask after mask only to find smaller and smaller masks inside, and a sort of ubiquitous gooey stuff which permeated all the fabrics and in places acted like some silicone mixture, flowing easily but cracking when hit sharply. This whole, weird stripping process was accompanied by the gradually diminishing screams of the wretch he had tried his experiment on. The bits of it he tore off and threw to the ground moved weakly of their own accord, as though trying to reassemble themselves, while the bit he still held, slowly getting smaller and weaker and thinner as he went on, struggled hopelessly.
Eventually he was holding nothing more than a sort of squidgy sack, like a sort of sticky fabric balloon from which a clear, odourless fluid wept, while all the rest of the layers and pieces of clothing trembled and spasmed on the glassy floor around him, their movements attracting the slowly writhing shapes of the luminescent fish in the waters below. He hung the whole scrappy assemblage out to dry, eventually, on a makeshift washing line. The wind moved the pieces so that he could not tell whether the thing was still in some dismembered way alive, or not. A few crows had pecked at the remains, but not for long. When he brought the bits back in to try and reassemble them, they had started to smell, so he just threw it all away.
He had asked the minions if they knew of anything the castle kitchens produced - or any other part of the castle produced, for that matter - which could get a chap merry? You know; drunk, happy, smashed, out of one's box? Did they?
They looked at him, mystified.
Drink? Fermented something-or-other. Brewed or distilled; boiling off vapours to leave alcohol behind, or even freezing water off...fruit, vegetables, grains... no? Any plants they knew of which, when you dried the leaves...?
The minions had never heard of such things. He suggested they investigate, see if they could set something up. He met a few of them every now and again, and was even fairly confident that he could have picked them out in a crowd of the things. They weren't all identical, after all; they had slightly different patterns of stains and scorch-marks on their little robes which helped one to identify them, and of course their boots seemed to be colour-coded to their precise duty in the castle's service structure. The ones he had made contact with, this gullible gang, tried to do what he asked them. They stole food from the kitchens and hid bits and pieces of kitchenware under their cloaks. They tried to set up a still and a fermentation vat, but it didn't work. They produced a liquid at one rendezvous which made Quiss throw up just from the smell, and when he ordered them to take him to their equipment so that he could look it over and set it up properly, they explained that they had set it up in the only place they thought was safe from the prying eyes of the seneschal; their own quarters, where the cramped scale of their tiny cells and corridors made it impossible for the seneschal - and, alas, Quiss - to enter. They refused to set it up anywhere else. The seneschal would do much worse things to them than what Quiss was threatening. This was all strictly illegal and against the rules, didn't he know?