Walking on Glass

THEOBALD'S ROAD

He walked through the white corridors, past the noticeboards with their offers of small rooms and old cars, past the coffee bar where people sat at tables, past a hole in the white floor where an old chair stood sentry over an opened conduit in which a torch shone and a man crawled, and as he left he looked at his watch:

TU 28

pm

3:33

He stood on the steps for a second, smiling at the figures on the face of the watch. Three three three. A good omen. Today was a day things would come together, a day events would coalesce.

It was bright outside, even after the painted lightness of the marble-flaked corridor. The air was warm, slightly humid but not sultry. The walk would be a pleasure today. That was good too, because he didn't want to arrive at her place hot and flustered; not today, not with her at the end of the walk, not with that subtle but unequivocal promise there, waiting, ready.

Graham Park stepped out on to the broad grey pavement outside the School and during a break in the traffic jogged across Theobald's Road to its north side. He relaxed to a walk on the pavement outside the White Hart pub, his large black portfolio held easily at his side by its single handle. Drawings of her.

He looked up at the sky, above the blocks and squat towers of the medium-rise office blocks, and smiled at its blue, city-grimed segmentings.

Everything seemed fresher, brighter, more real today, as though all his quite normal, perfectly standard surroundings had until this point been actors fumbling behind some thin stage curtain, struggling to get out, but now stood, triumphant expression frozen on face, hands spread, going Ta-Raah!" on the boards at last. He found this young-love rapture almost embarrassing in its intensity; it was something he was delighted to have, determined to hide, and wary of examining. It was enough to know it was there, and the very commonness of it was reassuring in a way. Let others have felt this way, let them feel it now; it would never be exactly like this, never be identical. Revel in it, he thought, why not?

A worn and grubby old man stood with his back against the wall of another tall grey-and-brickred building. He wore a heavy grey-green coat, even in that heat, and one of his shoes was open at the toe, baring skin inside. He held two huge boxes of mushrooms. It was the sort of sight - the poor, the strange - which usually alarmed Graham.

So many strange people in London. So many of the poor and the decrepit, the still spinning shrapnel, walking wounded of society. Usually they oppressed and threatened him, these people with little threat to offer, and much to fear. But not today; today the old man, hot in his thick coat, blinking from his grey face, clammy hands round his two two-pound boxes of mushrooms was merely interesting, just a possible subject for a drawing. He passed the Post Office, where a young black man, tall and well dressed, stood talking quietly to himself. Again no fear. He realised that maybe he really was after all, just a little, the country hick he had tried so hard to avoid being. He had been so determined to be ungullible, city-wise that perhaps he had gone too far in the other direction, and so read a threat in everything the big city had to offer. Only now, with the promise of the strength she might give him, could he afford the luxury of thinking so closely about himself (you had to have armour in the city, you had to know where you stood).

He had opted for the cynical, guarded approach, and now he could see that for all the safety it had brought him - here he was, in his second year, still solvent, heart intact, unmugged and even succeeding in his studies, despite all his mother's fears - every defence had its price, and he had paid in a separating distance, incomprehension. Perhaps the young black man was not mad; people did talk to themselves. Perhaps the old man with the torn shoe was not some desperate down-and-out with fists full of stolen mushrooms; maybe he was just an ordinary person whose shoes had split that lunchtime, while shopping. He looked at the traffic roaring by, and over it through railings at the leafy greenness of Gray's Inn, edging into view on his right. He would remember this day, this walk. Even if she did not... even if all his dreams, his hopes did not... ah, but they would. He could feel it.

"Put that fantasy down. Park, you don't know where it's been."

He turned quickly to the voice and there was Slater, bounding down the steps of Holborn Library, wearing a pair of one-and-a-half-legged jeans, with a shiny black shoe on one foot and a knee-length boot on the other; the jeans were cut to suit, so that one leg ended normally, in a stitched hem over the shoe, while the other leg came to a frayed stop just above the top of the boot. Above, Slater sported a well-worn hacking jacket over a black shirt and a black bow tie which appeared to have lots of small, dull red stones set in it. On his head sat a tartan cap, predominantly red. Graham looked at his friend and laughed. Slater responded with a look of pretended chilliness. "I see nothing to cause such hilarity."

"You look like -" Graham shook his head and waved one hand at Slater's jeans and footwear, and spared a glance for his cap.

"What I look like," Slater said, coming forward and taking Graham by the elbow to continue walking, "is somebody who has discovered an old pair of RAF pilot's boots at a market stall in Camden."

"And taken a knife to them," Graham said, looking down at Slater's legs and shrugging his arm free of the light grip which held it.

Slater smiled, put his hands in the pockets of his mutilated jeans. "There you show your ignorance, young man. If you had looked carefully, or if you knew enough, you would appreciate that these are, in fact, specially designed pilot's boots which, with the aid of a couple of zips, convert into what was doubtless, in the forties, a pretty neat-looking pair of shoes. The whole point is that if the intrepid aviator got shot down while blasting Gerry out of the skies above enemy territory, he could simply unzip his boot-legs and have a pair of civilian-looking shoes on his feet, and thus pass for a native and so escape those dreadful SS men in their tight little black uniforms. I have merely adapted -"

"You look silly," Graham interrupted.

"Why you straight old straight," Slater said. They were walking slowly now; Slater never liked to rush. Graham was only a little impatient, and he knew better than to try to hurry Slater up. He had left in plenty of time, there was no hurry. More time to savour. "I just don't know why you turn me on at all," Slater said, then peered closely at the other young man's face and said pointedly, "Are you listening to me, Park?"

Graham shook his head, grinning slightly, but said, "Yes, I'm listening. You don't have to camp it up with me."

"Oh my God, pardon me," Slater said melodramatically, one hand fanned over his upper chest, "I'm offending the poor hetero boy. Under twenty-one as well; oh say it ain't so!"

"You're a fraud, Richard," Graham said, turning to look at his friend. "I sometimes think you aren't even gay at all. Anyway," he went on, attempting to increase their pace a little, "what have you been up to? I haven't seen you around for a couple of days."

"Ah, the change-of-subject," Slater laughed, staring ahead. He grimaced and scratched his short, curly black hair where it stuck out from under his tartan cap. His thin, pale face contorted as he said, "Well, I shan't go into the seamy details... the more basic facets of life, but on a cleaner if more frustrating theme, I have been trying to seduce that lovely Dickson boy over the last week. You know: the one with the shoulders,"

"What," Graham said contemptuously, annoyed, "that tall bloke with the bleached hair in first year? He's thick,"

"Hmm, well," Slater said, bobbing his head in an arc - a gesture somewhere between a nod and a shake - "thick set, certainly, and not awfully bright, but God those shoulders. That waist, those hips! I don't care about his head; from the neck down he's a genius,"

"Idiot," said Graham.

"Trouble is," Slater mused, "he either doesn't realise what I'm up to, or he doesn't care. And he has this awful friend, called Claude... I keep telling him how earthy I think he is, but he hasn't got it yet. Now he really is thick. I asked him what he thought of Magritte the other day, and he thought I was talking about some girl in first year. And I can't get him away from Roger. I shall die if he's gay. I mean if he got there first. I'm sure Roger isn't really stupid, it's just his friend who's infectious,"

"Ha ha," Graham said. He always felt slightly uncomfortable when Slater talked about being gay, though his friend was rarely specific, and Graham was hardly ever directly involved - he had, for example, only ever met one of Slater's (supposedly many) lovers, at least as far as he knew.

"Do you know," Slater said, suddenly brightening, as they crossed John Street, "I've had this really good idea."

Graham gritted his teeth: "Well, what is it this time? Another new religion, or just a way of making lots of money? Or both?"

"This is a literary idea."

"If it's The Sands of Love, I've already heard it."

That was a great plot. No, it isn't romantic fiction this time." They stopped at the corner of Gray's Inn Road, waiting for the lights to change. A couple of punks on the far side, also waiting to cross, were pointing at the oblivious Slater and laughing. Graham looked up at the skies and sighed.

"Imagine, if you will," Slater said dramatically, sweeping his arms out wide, "a -"

"Keep it short," Graham told him.

Slater looked hurt. "It's a sort of Byzantine future, a degenerate technocratic empire with -"

"Oh, not science fiction again."

"Well, no, it's not really, smart-ass," Slater said. "It's a... fable. I could make it a fairy-tale instead, if I wanted to. Anyway. It's the capital of the empire; a courtier starts a liaison with one of the princesses; the demands she and the Emperor make on his time get to be too much, so he secretly has an android made to impersonate him at the endless court rituals and boring receptions; nobody notices. Later he has the android's brain upgraded so it can cope with hunting expeditions and personal meetings, even Cabinet discussions with the Emperor present, all so that he can spend more time dallying with the princess. But he gets killed in some over-energetic love-play. The android continues to fulfil all its courtly duties and even becomes a trusted confidant of the Emperor, and the princess discovers it actually makes a better lover than the original. The android can fit in all its commitments because it never has to sleep. But it develops a conscience, and has to tell the Emperor the truth. The Emperor smiles, opens up an inspection panel in his chest and says, 'Well, by a funny coincidence...' End of story. Pretty good, eh? What do you think?"

Graham took a deep breath, thought, then said. "These pilots: so they could disguise their boots. What about their uniforms?" He frowned seriously.

Slater stopped, a look of horror and confusion on his face. "What?" he said, aghast.

Suddenly Graham realised - with a small, disquieting feeling in his stomach - that they were standing right outside a place which always made him feel apprehensive.

It was only a small picture-framing shop which sold prints and posters and more-tasteful-than-average lampshades, but it was the name which held unpleasant associations for Graham: Stocks. That name chilled him.

Stock was his rival, the great threat, the cloud hanging over him and Sara. Stock the biker, the macho black-leathered never-properly-seen image of Nemesis. (He had looked up the name in the London telephone directory; there were one-and-a-half columns of them; enough for quite a few coincidences, even in a city of six-and-a-half million people.)

Slater was saying, "- to do with it?"

"It just occurred to me," Graham said defensively. He wished now he hadn't decided to tease Slater.

"You haven't listened to a word I've said," Slater gasped. Graham nodded to indicate they should keep on walking.

"Of course I have," he said. They passed Terry's fruitstall next, with its smell of fresh strawberries, then a chemist's. They were at the junction of Clerkenwell Road and Rosebery Avenue. By the side of Gray's Inn Buildings, which led on up the Avenue, some tall green wooden hoardings jutted out over part of the street and pavement, shielding some roadworks. Graham and Slater walked down the narrow alley formed by the seedy, decaying stonework and the painted wood; Graham saw the grimy glass of cracked windows; fading political posters flapped in a slight breeze.

"But don't you think it's a laugh?" Slater said, trying to edge round Graham to peer into his face. Graham avoided his friend's eyes. He wondered if Slater intended to walk the whole way with him, or whether he was only going as far as the Air Gallery, now only just across the street, where he sometimes went in the afternoons. Graham didn't mind Slater knowing about Sara - he had introduced them to each other, after all - but he wanted to keep this day private. Besides, he got embarrassed at the stares people gave Slater, even if Slater himself didn't seem to notice. The least he could do, Graham thought, was take off that ridiculous tartan cap.

"It's... all right," he conceded as they came out from between the decaying buildings and the green hoardings, "but..." he smiled and looked at Slater, "don't give up your day job."

"And don't you quote my own lines back at me, you young pup!"

"Okay," Graham said, looking at Slater again. "Stick to ceramics."

"You make me sound like a glaze."

"That's your expression."

"Oh-ho," Slater said, "well, touche, or toushe, anyway." He stopped by the pedestrian crossing which led over Rosebery Avenue to the square, red-brick building of the Air Gallery. Graham turned to face him. "But don't you like the latest scenario?"

"Well," Graham said slowly, deciding he had better say something nice, "it's good, but perhaps it needs a little work."

"Huh," Slater said, stepping back and rolling his eyes. He came forward again, eyes narrowed, pushing his face close to Graham's so that the younger man shrank back just a little." 'A little work', eh? Well, bang goes your commission from the National Portrait Gallery when I'm famous."

"Are you going over there?" Graham indicated the far side of the road.

Slater slouched a little and nodded, looking over the road to the gallery.

"I suppose so. You're trying to get rid of me, aren't you?"

"No I'm not."

"Yes you are. You've been hurrying me all the way."

"No, I wasn't," Graham protested. "It's just that you walk slowly."

"I was talking to you."

"Well, I can walk and listen at the same time."

"Oh, wow, the Gerry Ford of the Art School. Anyway, not to worry; I bet I know where you're off to, hmm?"

"Oh?" Graham said, trying to look innocent.

"Yes, I can tell," Slater said. "Stop trying to look so damn nonchalant." A smile appeared on his face like oil surfacing on still water. "You've got the hots for our Sara, haven't you?"

"Oh, intensely," Graham said, trying to over-play it; but he could see Slater wasn't taken in. But it wasn't like that; it wasn't that crude, or even if it was it shouldn't be talked of in such a way; not now, not yet.

They aren't worth it, kid," Slater said, shaking his head sadly and wisely. "She'll let you down. Later if not now. They always do."

Graham felt happier with this direct assault; this was just gay misogyny, not even genuine at that, but another of Slater's roles. He laughed and shook his head.

Slater shrugged and said, "Well, when it does go wrong, at least you know you can come running to me." He patted his right shoulder with his other hand. "I have very good shoulders for crying on."

"Not," Graham laughed, "while you're wearing that cap, chum." Slater narrowed his eyes and straightened the tartan cap on his head. "Well," Graham went on hurriedly, "I really have to go now," and took a couple of steps backwards.

"All right, then," Slater sighed wistfully. "Do all the things I wouldn't dream of doing, but don't forget what your Uncle Richard told you." He grinned, blew Graham a kiss, waved one hand, then stepped on to the crossing during a lull in the traffic. Graham waved back, then walked away. "Graham!" Slater called suddenly from the other side of the road. He turned to look, sighing.

Slater stood outside the gallery, in front of one of its large windows. He put one hand in his jacket pocket, and as he did so his bow tie lit up; the small red stones were really lights. They flicked on and off. Slater started laughing as Graham shook his head and walked away up Rosebery Avenue. "A quick flash!" Slater bellowed in the distance.

Graham laughed to himself, then had to break his stride as a long-haired biker in dirty denims bumped a large Moto Guzzi across the pavement in front of him and into the courtyard entrance of the buildings called Rosebery Square. Graham looked darkly at the man pushing the bike, then shook his head, telling himself not to be so stupid. The man looked nothing like Stock, the bike was quite different from the big black BMW Stock rode, and anyway omens were nonsense. Stock's time was over; he could tell that from what Sara had said over the phone that morning.

He breathed deeply and put his shoulders back, shifted the large black portfolio from one hand to the other. What a blue sky! What a great day! He thrilled to everything around him, no matter what; the brightness of the June day, the smell of cheap cooking and exhaust fumes; birds singing, people talking. Nothing would, nothing could go wrong today; he ought to find a betting shop and put some money on a horse, he felt so lucky, so good, so in tune.

MR SMITH

Sacked!

Lips tight, fists clenched, eyes narrow, breath held, back straight, stomach in, chest out, shoulders back, Steven Grout stamped away from the depot he had just been fired from, away from their stupid job and those awful people. He came to a car parked by the kerb, stopped, took a deep breath, then walked on. Never mind the name of the road, he thought; they would only change it. He watched the cars and buses and vans and trucks pass by him, and calculated how far he had to go to get to the next parked car which would shield him from them.

The pavement had been much repaired, and it was difficult to synchronise his steps so that the middle of each foot fell exactly on the cracks between the paving stones, but with some concentration and a few judicious half-steps he managed it; then he came to a long blue-grey line of asphalt where a pipe had obviously been repaired, and walked along that instead, free from the worry of the paving stones between the cracks.

He still felt hot and sticky from the attack by the Microwave Gun. He thought back, again, to the confrontation in Mr Smith's office.

Of course, he had known they would use the Microwave Gun on him; they always did when he was up in front of somebody, whenever he was at a disadvantage anyway and needed all the help he could get, whenever he was going for an interview for a job, or being asked things by the Social Security people or even clerks in the Post Office. That was when they used it on him.

Sometimes they used it on him when he was waiting to be served by a barman, or even when he was just standing waiting to cross a busy street, but mostly it was when he was talking to somebody official.

He had recognised the symptoms as he was standing in Mr Smith's office.

His palms were sweating, his forehead was wet and itching, he felt shivery, his voice was shaky and his heart was beating fast; they were cooking, him with the Microwave Gun, bathing him in its evil radiations, heating him up so that he broke out in a lathering sweat and looked like a nervous kid.

Bastards! He'd never found the Gun, of course; they were very clever, very clever and cunning indeed. He had given up dashing through to adjoining rooms, running to look downstairs or above, craning his head out of windows to look for hovering helicopters, but he knew they were there somewhere all right, he knew what they were up to.

So he had to stand there, in the office of the Roadworking Operatives Supervisor in the Islington Council Seven Sisters Road Highways Department Depot, sweating like a pig and wondering why they didn't just get on with it and sack him as he listened to Mr Smith and his eyes hurt and he could smell his own body-odour again.

"... were all hoping that this would not be a continuing situation, Steve," Mr Smith said, droning nasally from behind the chip-board desk in his low-ceilinged office on the depot's first floor, "and that you would be able to consolidate your position here by forming a positive working relationship with the remainder of the road gang, who, in all fairness, I'm sure you'd be the first to agree, have done their very best to, well..."

Mr Smith, a man of about forty with large soft bags under his eyes, leant over his paper-strewn desk and looked down at the No-Nonsense pen he was fiddling with. Steven watched the pen, mesmerised for a second.

"I really do think... ah... Steve - oh, and please don't hesitate to interject if you feel you have anything you wish to articulate; this isn't a star chamber here. I want you to play a full and meaningful part in this discussion if you feel that thereby we can ah, resolve..."

What was that? He wasn't sure he'd heard that right. Something about a Star Chamber? What was that? What did it mean? It didn't sound like it fitted in with this period, this setting, this age or whatever you wanted to call it. Could Mr Smith be another Warrior, or even further up the hierarchy of Tormentors than he'd thought?

God! Those bastards and that Gun! He could feel sweat start to gather in the lines of his forehead and in his eyebrows. Soon it would roll down his nose, and then what? They might think he was crying! It was unbearable! Why didn't they just throw him out? He knew it was what they wanted to do, what they had planned to do, so why didn't they just do it then?

"... resolve this apparent impasse in some viable way conducive with the efficient operation of the department. I don't think I'm running a particularly tight ship here, Steve; we like to think that people will appreciate..."

Steven stood smartly to attention in the middle of the office, his hard hat held tightly under his right arm, close to his side. Out of the corner of his eye he could just see Dan Ashton, the road-gang foreman and union representative. Ashton was leaning, thick bronzed arms folded, against the edge of the doorway. He was about fifty, but the fittest as well as the oldest man in the gang; he stood there grinning unpleasantly, his cap pushed back on his head, a damp, unlit roll-up hanging from his mouth. Grout could detect its soggy odour even over the smell of Mr Smith's Aramis.

Ashton had never liked him either. None of them did, even the one or two who didn't continually make fun of him and tease him and play jokes on him.

"... over backwards to accommodate you, but it really does look, I'm afraid, as though this incident with the canal and the cat has to be just about the last straw... ah... Steve. I understand from Mr Ashton here -" Smith nodded at the older man, who pursed his lips and nodded back, "- that Mr ah..." Mr Smith looked at some of the papers on his desk for a moment,'... ah yes. Mr Partridge had to go to hospital for a tetanus injection and stitches after you struck him with a shovel. Now, we don't think he's going to press charges, but you must realise that if he did you would in fact be facing a charge of assault, and coming as this does on top of your other verbal and written warnings - all within, I'm afraid to say, Steve," Mr Smith sat back in his seat with a sigh and flicked through a few more of the papers on his desk, shaking his head at them, "a very short interval of time considering the length of your employment with us, and all regarding previous lapses in

Partridge! He wished he'd knocked his head right off. Calling him those names! Bastard, was he? Mad, was he? Simple, eh? That fat Cockney with his stupid tattoos and his jocular manner and his dirty jokes; he should have dumped him in the canal!

The sweat was gathering in his brows, getting ready to slide down his nose and make a dewdrop at the end which would either stay there wobbling about very obviously and making him want to sneeze, or force him to draw attention to it by wiping it away. To wipe his brow would be a sign of weakness, too, though; he wouldn't do it! Let them see his proud contempt! They wouldn't break him, oh no! He wouldn't give them the satisfaction.

"... appreciated what you have said about not really meaning to offend anybody, I just can't square this version of accounts with that of your workmates, Steve, who insist, I'm afraid, that you seemed quite serious about back-filling the canal with the tarmac allocated for laying on Colebrook... ah... Colebrook Row, in fact. As for Mrs Morgan's cat, all we can do is -"

They were talking about cats, to him! One of the mightiest warlords in the history of existence, and they were talking about bloody cats! Oh, how the mighty were fallen, right enough!

The sweat left his right eyebrow. It didn't roll down his nose; it went straight into his eye instead. A terrible, furious, impotent anger filled him, making him want to strike out, to shout and scream. He couldn't do that, though; he had to keep cool, despite the Microwave Gun, and only answer back, if even that. Discipline; that was important.

"... but I take it you have nothing else to say?" Mr Smith said, and stopped talking. Grout sucked in his breath; was he supposed to say something? Why didn't people make things clear? What was the point, though? Might as well get the whole thing over with as fast as possible.

"I was only kidding!" he heard himself say.

It had just leaped out! But it was true; it was only a sign of their stupidity - or their fear? - that they were taking him so seriously. Of course he hadn't been going to fill the bloody canal in! It would have taken him all day even if they'd had enough tarmac in the back of the pickup! It was all just a sort of angry joke because the rest of the gang, and Ashton in particular, wouldn't agree with him about the best way to fill holes in. But they would see; those holes they'd patched in Upper Street at the start of the morning shift would soon show who was right!

Of course, he knew speaking out would do no good, but he couldn't help it sometimes. He had to tell people when they were doing things the wrong way.

It was more than he could bear to see the stupidity around him and just suffer it in silence. That would drive him to madness, to the place they most wanted him, the place in which it would be even more difficult to find the Key; an institution, a hospital where they filled you up with all sons of disgusting drugs and deliberately kept you as stupid as the rest. That was part of their game, of course; leave him to search for the way to escape, but alone. If he started trying to find any others like him, other Warriors, they would have an excuse for locking him away. It was fiendishly clever.

"... really excuse your actions Steve. Let's be fair, now; I don't expect it makes much difference to Mrs Morgan, or her cat," Mr Smith said, and a small smile played over his lips as he glanced at Dan Ashton, who grunted and looked down at his feet while Smith continued, "whether you were joking or in deadly seriousness."

The other eyebrow discharged its sweat, rolling it down into Grout's other eye. He blinked furiously, almost blinded, eyes red and stinging. Intolerable!

"... typing your final written warning now, but really, Steve, without wishing to sound patronising in any way or form, I really do think you're going to have to mend your ways very considerably indeed if you're to -"

"Right!" Steven shouted hoarsely, shaking his head, sniffing hard and blinking all at the same time. "My contempt for all... all of you is just it! I resign! I won't give you the satisfaction! I quit; I resign; I throw in the towel! There, I've said it before you did! Don't tell me I couldn't; I'm stronger than you know!" He could feel his lips trembling; he fought to control them. Mr Smith sighed and leaned forward over his desk.

"Now, Steve -" he began tiredly.

"Don't you 'Now Steve' me!" Grout shouted, standing there and quivering. "It's 'Mr Grout' to you. I'm resigning; give me my papers! I demand my papers; where are my papers?" He stepped forward towards Mr Smith's desk. Smith sat back, surprised. Grout saw him exchange looks with Dan Ashton, and thought he could see the older man nod, or give some sort of sign or signal to Mr Smith. Certainly the foreman was no longer leaning against the door-jamb; he was standing properly now, arms unfolded. Maybe he thought Steven was going to offer some violence to Mr Smith; well, let them fear! He'd show them! He wasn't frightened of any of them.

"I really do think you're being a little rash in this - " Mr Smith began, but Steven interrupted,

"I believe I asked for my papers, please! I shan't leave without my papers. And my money! Where are they? I know my rights!"

"Steve, I think you're allowing your understandable - " Mr Smith began, pushing his chair back from his desk slightly. The sunlight glinted on his discreet SDP lapel-badge.

"Enough!" Steven shouted. He took another step forward, and with his right hand made as though to hit Mr Smith's desk. His hard hat, held in the crook of his right arm, fell out from between his arm and his side and hit the floor, rolling briefly. Steven stooped quickly and retrieved it, banging his head sharply on the front edge of Mr Smith's desk as he straightened. He rubbed his head rapidly, feeling his face turning red. Damn that Gun!

Mr Smith was on his feet now. Dan Ashton had come forward, and was leaning over from the side of Smith's desk, whispering something into his boss's ear. Grout glared at them both as he rubbed his smarting head. Oh, it was easy to see what they were both up to!

"Well," Mr Smith began, a pained expression on his face as he turned to look at Grout again, "if that's the way you really feel. Steve..."

Dan Ashton had smiled thinly.

So he'd won in the end. He hadn't given them the satisfaction of firing him there and then; he'd shown them the contempt he felt for them... let them suffer!

A strange fierce joy had filled him after that, and he hadn't really heard anything Ashton or Smith had said to him. They'd given him some papers, and somebody had gone to the cashier for his money (it made a nice fat bulge in his hip pocket; he patted it now and again as he walked, just to make sure it was still there) and eventually he'd signed some papers. He hadn't wanted to sign anything, but they had said they wouldn't give him any money unless he did, so he'd pretended to read the papers carefully, and then signed them.

Ashton had tried to see him out after that, and even wanted to shake hands with him, but Steven had spat at his feet and made a rude sign at him.

"You bad little fucker," Ashton had said, which was typical of him. Steven had told him he was a foul-mouthed ignoramus, and stuffed his various papers and forms quickly into his trouser pockets and walked off. "Here!" Ashton had shouted after him as he strode down Seven Sisters Road, head held high, "Your P45. You dropped it!" At least that was what Steven thought he had shouted; it might have been a different number, but it was something like that. He had glanced back, to see Ashton standing at the depot gates, waving a piece of paper at him. Grout turned away, straightened his back and brought his head up, ignoring Ashton pointedly as he walked proudly away.

Ashton had started after him; Steven heard his trotting steps behind him; so he ran, ignoring the older man's shouts until eventually he outdistanced him. Ashton had shouted one last thing at him, but Steven had been too far away, breathing deeply, an expression of triumph on his face. He'd got away from them. It was a small escape, a little rehearsal, but it was something.

So now he walked, still angry with them, but glad to be away, glad to have salvaged something from yet another of their attempts to grind him down, make him feel small, drive him into despair.

They wouldn't succeed that easily! They had surrounded him with horror and stupidity, with all the paraphernalia of this so-called-human excess, and they expected it to bring him down, to reduce him still further from the once proud state he had fallen from, but they would not succeed. They were trying to wear him down, but they would fail; he would find the Key, he would find the Way Out and escape from this... joke, this awful solitary confinement for Heroes; lie would leave them all behind and take his rightful place in the greater reality again.

He had Fallen, but he would Rise.

There was a war somewhere. He didn't know where. Not a place you could necessarily get to by travelling anywhere from here, late Twentieth Century London, Earth, but somewhere, sometime. It was the ultimate war, the final confrontation between Good and Evil, and he had played a major part in the war. But something had gone wrong, he had been betrayed, lost a battle with the forces of chaos and been ejected from the real battleground to languish here, in this cesspit they called "life'.

It was part punishment, part test. He could fail entirely, of course, and be demoted still further, with no hope of escape. That was what they wanted, the ones who controlled the whole seedy show; the Tormentors.

They seemed to want him to try and call their bluff, to stand up and say: "Right, I know what it's all about, you can drop the pretence. Come out wherever you are and let's get it over with', but he knew better than that. He had learned that lesson as a child, when the others had laughed at him, and they sent him to see the school shrink. He wasn't going to try that again.

He wondered how many people in all the mental hospitals in the country - or the world, come to that - were really fallen Warriors who had either cracked up from the strain of trying to live in this hell-hole, or simply made the wrong choice and thought that the test was just seeing through the whole thing and then having the courage to stand out and make that challenge.

Well, he wasn't going to end up like one of those poor bastards. He would see it through, he would find the Way Out. And he might not even stop at simply escaping; he might just smash up the whole foul contraption of their testing and imprisonment apparatus - this "life" - while he was about it.

He was starting to feel faint. He had about another ten paces to go to the next parked car, within the wheelbase of which he would be safe from the laser-axles of the passing traffic.

All the traffic, every single vehicle which passed him was equipped with lasers in its axles; they could register a hit on his legs unless he was above them, or shielded by a wall, or between the wheels of a parked car, or holding his breath. Of course, he knew that the lasers didn't hurt; you couldn't see them and they did no harm by themselves, but he knew that they were another of the ways that they - the Tormentors - took points off him. He knew all this from dreams, and from having worked it out. As a child he had done the same thing, as a game; something to make life more interesting, give it some purpose... then he had begun to have dreams about it, to come to realise that it was real, that he had had an insight when he started to play the game. He had to do it now; it felt horrible and uncomfortable when he tried to stop, even just to see what it was like walking down a street breathing "normally'. It was like the feeling he used to get when he played another game from his childhood; that of closing his eyes and walking for a certain number of steps along, say, a wide path in a park. No matter how certain he might be immediately before he closed his eyes that there was plenty of space in front of him, no matter how positive he was as he walked with eyes closed that he wasn't veering off to one side and there was tarmac under his feet rather than grass, he still found it very hard, almost impossible, to walk more than about twenty paces with his eyes closed. He would be certain, positive, that he was about to walk into a tree, or a post or sign he hadn't noticed; even that somebody had been watching from behind a tree and was about to leap out and punch him hard on the nose.

Better to keep your eyes open; better to trust your instincts and take deep breaths between the parked cars. You couldn't be too careful.

He got to the car and stopped opposite it, breathing deeply. He took off his hard hat and wiped his brow, after checking for scaffolding. The safety helmet was another of his discoveries, his good ideas. He knew how vulnerable people's heads were, and how important his own was. He knew they would just love to arrange a little "accident" with some spanner or brick falling from a building, or, more plausibly still, from some scaffolding. So he had worn that hard hat, since even before he left the home. No matter what the job was, or what else he might be doing, he wore the hat when he was outside. They had laughed at him in the road gang; who did he think he was? they said. Poncy engineers wore hard hats everywhere, not your labourers. Or was he frightened of pigeons then? Going a bit thin on top as well as inside, eh? Ha ha. Let them laugh. They wouldn't get the hat off him. He had two spare hats in his room just in case he ever lost his usual one, or somebody stole it. People had done that before now, too.

He started walking again, treading carefully on the cracks between the paving stones. A careful, steady stride was very important, anyway. Good for the breathing and the heart rate.

People stared at him sometimes, jumping from one paving stone border to another, then taking some mincing little half-steps over others, his face going strange colours as he ran out of stored air in his lungs, sweating under a hard hat with no construction sites anywhere in evidence, but he didn't care. They'd be sorry, one day.

As he walked, he wondered what he would do today with his new-found freedom. He had lots of money; perhaps he would get drunk... the pubs would be open soon. He supposed he ought to go and sign on; let the unemployment people know he was out of a job again. He wished he could remember what you were supposed to do when you wanted to register as unemployed, but he always forgot. Obviously the whole unemployment, Social Security system had been set up to confuse, anger and demoralise him. He kept meaning to take notes, write down all the separate moves you were meant to make, forms fill out, offices visit, people see, but he always forgot. Anyway, he always told himself that this would be the last time; this time he would find some really good job in which he would get on really well and his talents would be appreciated and people would like him and he would surprise all his Tormentors, so there would be no reason to go through the whole fraught and sapping business of signing on again. He wondered vaguely about going back to Mrs Short's boarding house and getting a pen and paper.

He would go back to his room. He always felt better there, and he still felt like a good wash; he needed to get rid of all this sweat and clamminess, wash all the dust and the lead off his face and hands. He could do that back at Mrs Short's. He would gain strength from being back with his books, his bed and his little bits and pieces. He could have a look at the Evidence, again; that would be good. He could start re-reading a book.

He had a lot of books. Most of them were Science Fiction or Fantasy. He had long ago realised that if he was going to find any clues to the whereabouts of the Way Out, the location or identity of the Key, there was a good chance he might get some ideas from that type of writing. He knew this from the way he felt attracted to it.

It was a contemptuous sop of a clue, something they thought they could afford, but it might be useful. Obviously they thought that by letting this sort of thing out they would have an excuse for putting him away if he ever attempted to call their bluff. "Ha!" they would be able to say, "Crazy; read too much SF. Bonkers; let us put him away and keep him under sedation and have done with him." That was the way their minds worked.

That realisation was supposed to put him off, but he was too clever for them. He bought all the most fantastic "unrealistic" fiction he could find and afford; by the rules they must have hidden a clue away in it somewhere. One day he would open up a book - some new sword-and-sorcery trilogy, probably - and something he would read there would trigger what he knew was locked away in his own brain somewhere. It might be the name of a character (there was one already he was sure sounded familiar; it was one of his bits of Evidence), it might be the description of a place or a sequence of events... all he needed was that Key.

Escapism, they called it. Oh, they were clever all right!

His room was full of books; thick, dog-eared, broken-spined gaudy-covered paperbacks. They lay on the floor, stacked on their sides because he didn't have any proper shelves. The floor of his room was like a maze, with tower-blocks of books, whole walls of them set out on the thin carpet and holed linoleum so that only small corridors for him to walk in remained between them. He could go from bed to window and table, to cupboard and door and fire and wash-handbasin, but only by certain routes. Making the bed was difficult. Pulling the drawers in the cupboard out properly needed great care. Coming back to the place drunk, especially when he couldn't find the light switch, was horrendous; he would wake to a sight like Manhattan after a severe earthquake. In paperback.

But it was worth it. He needed both those avenues of escape; drink because it felt like escape, a way out of their fetid reality for a while... and the books because they soothed, they offered hope. He might lose himself in the books sometimes, but he might find the Key there, too.

A car he was heading for to draw his next breath suddenly drove off. Steven cursed inwardly and had to step up on to a low wall above the height of the laser-axles to empty and fill his lungs again. He got down from the wall and walked on.

He'd show them all, one day. All the people who had taunted him and hurt him and confused him and denied him. Even the ones whose names he had forgotten. When he found the Key he'd get them. People like Mr Smith, Dan Ashton and Partridge. He'd find that Way Out, but he wouldn't leave until he'd found them again and sorted them out. They'd pay all right.

Couldn't even take a joke. Throw a shovelful of tarmac into the canal and they went to pieces. It hadn't been his fault he'd tripped over the cat. He knew he shouldn't have hit the animal, but he'd been angry. Then Partridge had tried to wrestle with him, claiming later that he was only trying to "restrain" him. Partridge had got all angry and upset soon too, because as he was struggling with Steven a magazine fell out of his trousers on to the towpath of the canal and the other men had picked it up and it had been a spanking magazine so all the other men who weren't laughing and shouting already started teasing Partridge; Partridge started trying to wrestle Steven to the ground but Steven had got free and clouted the other man with the shovel, which was still bloody from hacking the cat to bits, and after that, with the magazine coming apart as the other men grabbed at it and Partridge rolling about dazed on the towpath in the cat's blood and almost falling into the canal, Dan Ashton had said soberly that enough was enough and they'd better go and see Mr Smith the supervisor because they just couldn't go on like this. They weren't getting the work done.

It was all horribly sordid, but the more he thought about it, the more he became certain that, far from being a disaster, leaving the Highways Department was in fact a real step forward. It hadn't been much of a job after all; he had thought at first from the sound of it that it might mean travel, but it didn't.

He would definitely go to the pub later, he decided. It was a day to celebrate. For two reasons, he reminded himself. Not that it meant very much, because when you thought about it it wasn't something really to celebrate, but today, June 28th, was his birthday.

He stopped, opposite a car, of course, and looked at his reflection in a shop window. He was tall and thin. He had longish, lank dark hair he didn't wash often enough. It stuck out from under his red hard hat in scrappy curls. His trousers were slightly too short, and showed off his purple nylon socks and his tar-stained desert boots. His Paisley pattern shirt didn't go too well with the greying Marks & Spencer pullover he wore instead of a jacket, and he knew his fingernails were dirty. But it was a good disguise, he told himself. Great Warriors didn't want to attract too much attention to themselves when they were trying to think their way out of their penalty period in the ultimate war.

A young woman who was dressing the female dummies in the lingerie department window Steven was looking at frowned at him and gave him a suspicious, disapproving look which he noticed her just in time to see. He saw the half-dressed models then, and quickly walked away, only just taking a deep breath in time as he walked out from the cover of the parked car.

"Many happy returns," he said to himself, then suddenly gulped as he put his hand to his mouth and looked around. What was he saying!

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.