He was out! He stood on the doorstep, almost in the street, and he'd escaped. "You mind how you go now, Mr Grout, won't you?"
"Oh yes," he said, and turned, took a deep breath, and set off down the street.
"Sure I can't dust your room while you're out, Mr Grout?" Mrs Short shouted from the still-open doorway when Steven was about ten yards away. He felt himself seize up; his legs stopped, his shoulders came up as though to tense for a falling blow. He turned round in the street, looked back at the stoutly smiling face of Mrs Short, and shook his head violently. There were no parked cars for about thirty metres; traffic was grumbling down the street in a ragged stream. He shook his head again.
"What's that, Mr Grout?" Mrs Short shouted, and put one chubby hand, cupped, to her ear. He stared at her, widening his eyes, shook his head as violently as he dared. "Can't hear you, Mr G," Mrs Short called to him. He was starting to run out of oxygen?-
He put his head down and walked back to the doorway, stood up out of the level of the laser-axles, and said straight into Mrs Short's face, "No, thank you, Mrs Short. Please don't dust my room. I prefer to do it myself."
"Well, if you're sure," Mrs Short smiled.
"Oh, completely," Grout assured her. He waited there, to see if she would close the door, but she didn't. He took a deep breath, said "Goodbye," and turned away. He walked quickly, towards Upper Street, and had done perhaps fifty metres before he heard Mrs Short, far in the distance, shout at him. He didn't turn round, but heard her distant scream of "Byeee!" with a sort of nauseous relief.
SPOTLESS DOMINOES
They sat on the balcony outside the games room of the Castle Doors. Inside was a blaze of light. The snow on the balcony had all melted and a warm, moist, salty breeze blew around them constantly, from the room over the balcony and out into the open air. Quiss and Ajayi sat with light tunics on, over the small wood-filigree table, shuffling plain white sticks of ivory over the cut surface.
It was now too hot in the games room. The boilers of the Castle of Bequest had been repaired only about thirty of their days ago, and according to the seneschal there was still a bit of "fine tuning" to be done.
From where she sat, Ajayi could see the quarries. Small black figures moved up the snow-covered paths and roads to the mines and quarries, and carts trundled to and fro; the ponderous, laden ones disappearing from her view behind an outcrop of - she peered, narrowing her eyes to try and see better - well, either rock or the castle; she couldn't tell.
The rest of the landscape was as near-flat and uniform as ever. A gust of warm air from the baking heat of the games room swirled round her, then unwound itself again. She shivered briefly. No doubt all this heat, and the salt, was playing even greater havoc with the castle's plumbing than usual, and before too long, once they did get things back to normal, and an acceptable level of light and heat, the whole system would break down again, probably for even longer. In the meantime they were playing a game called Spotless Dominoes, in which plain pieces of ivory had to be arranged in certain linear patterns.
Neither she nor Quiss had any idea when they were going to finish the game, or even how well they were doing at any stage, because although they knew that in the original version of the game there were spots on the ivory pieces, their pieces were blank. They had to lay them out in lines each time they played, hoping that the small table with the red glowing jewel at its centre on which they played would recognise that the spot-values it had -randomly, of course - assigned to the pieces before each game were such that the pattern Quiss and Ajayi produced was a logical one; one in which, if all the spots suddenly appeared on the surfaces of the dominoes, the pattern would make sense; a one would be matched with a one or a double one, a two with a two or a double two, and so on. It was the most frustrating game they had played yet, and they had been playing it for one hundred and ten days.
She deliberately did not think about how long they had been in the castle. It didn't matter. It was one instant of exile, that was all. She had no idea how much of it she would remember if... when she returned to her post in the Therapeutic Wars. It was a rare punishment and not one that people who had had to experience it were likely to talk very much about even if one did bump into them, so although she, like Quiss, had always known of the existence of the castle, what happened to those who successfully passed through it was not recorded.
No, it did not matter how long they were here, as long as they did not despair or go mad. They just had to keep playing the games and trying the many different answers, and eventually they would get out.
Ajayi looked over at her companion, without him seeing. Quiss was busy mixing the dominoes up, frowning deeply at them as though he could somehow bully the pieces of dead animal into forming a correct pattern. Quiss, Ajayi thought, seemed to be surviving all right. She still worried about him though, because his urgent, intimidatory style was not guaranteed to last for ever against the castle's so often impenetrably purposeless-seeming regime. She was afraid that what he had constructed for himself was something too much like armour, too much like what the castle itself represented. That armour might have to give in eventually, just as no fortress ever built could withstand any siege (they had discussed this ultimate vulnerability of the static, the hardened, before they gave their first answer to the riddle), whereas she had tried not to armour herself, she had tried to go with the castle's strange mood; adapt to it, accept it.
"Oh get on with it you two," the red crow said from its perch on the stump of a flag-pole about three metres above their heads, "I've had more fun watching snails fuck."
"Why don't you go and do just that?" Quiss growled at it, without looking, as he took seven of the face-down dominoes from the shuffled log-jam of them in the centre of the small table. He held all seven of his pieces easily in one huge hand, the little bone-chips lost in the hard flesh's folds and creases.
"Listen, greybeard," the red crow said, "it's my appointed duty to stay here and annoy you bastards, and that's just what I'm going to do until you have the sense - not to mention the common decency, considering you've grievously overstayed your welcome - to do away with yourselves." The red crow's voice twisted into an impersonation of Ajayi's least favourite teacher from her schooldays; "Ajayi, you old bag, pick up your pieces and play. We haven't got all day, you know." The red crow chuckled after this last sentence.
Ajayi said nothing. She selected seven of the dominoes, biting her lower lip as she did so. The bird's voice really did grate; it war ludicrous really, but the damn thing was an uncomfortably accurate mimic and commanded a repertoire of hateful voices from the past.
It was Ajayi's turn to start. She took one of the blank tiles and set it down in the middle of the table. She knew that there was something about the way she inspected her dominoes before placing them down which infuriated Quiss, who just picked out the first one that came to hand. Somehow, though, Ajayi needed this pretence; it was one of those little things which kept her going. She couldn't just pick up the dominoes, whack them down one after another, mix them up and do the whole thing again, even if that was the fastest way of getting through the games; that was too mechanical, too uncaring. It was important to her always to believe that this next game would be the right one, the one where everything fitted and all the junctions of all the pieces made sense, so giving them another chance to escape from here.