Eventually, though, the attraction of the castle's tortuous internal geography palled on her, and now she restricted herself to only very occasional sallies, mostly conducted - as near as possible - on the same level, just to stretch her legs. The very inexhaustibility of the castle's ever-changing topography depressed her after a while, whereas at first it had seemed encouraging that one could never know the place perfectly, that it would never be boring, that it was always constantly changing; falling down, being rebuilt, altered and redesigned. Stuck all the time in a human frame which would not change, imprisoned in this one age, this cage of cells, the analogue of organic change and growth and decay which the castle exhibited seemed somehow unfair; an unpleasant reminder of something she might never have again.
Now she filled up her spare time with reading. She took books from the interior walls of the castle and read them. They were in many different languages, most of them tongues from the nameless planet which was the castle's Subject and from where all the books seemed to originate. These languages she could not understand.
Some of the books, however, appeared to have been produced on this single globe as translations into other - alien - languages, some of which Ajayi could to varying degrees understand. She often wondered, as she read, if perhaps the name of the Subject world was some sort of clue; it had been carefully removed from any and every book in the castle which mentioned it, the word cut out from each page it had been written on.
Ajayi read the books she could. She took them from the littered floor of the games room, or from deteriorating walls and columns, only glancing at most of them, dropping or replacing those whose languages she couldn't understand, scanning the remainder and keeping to read later those which sounded interesting. Only about one in twenty or thirty was both comprehensible and intriguing. Quiss wasn't happy with her new pastime, and accused her of wasting not only her own time, but his as well. Ajayi had told him she needed something to keep her sane. Quiss still grumbled, but he was hardly blameless himself. He still went for his long walks through the castle, and sometimes didn't come back for several days. She had tried asking him what he did, but the reaction was always either blank or hostile.
So she was reading, and gradually, with the use of some picture books she had discovered in one not-too-distant gallery, she was trying to teach herself one of the languages she kept encountering in the books which appeared to be written in one of the Subject world's own tongues. It was difficult - almost as though by design - but she was persevering, and after all, she had plenty of time.
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.