‘I don’t think so,’ the boy said dismissively. ‘Father says it won’t last.’
‘What won’t last?’
‘The Golden Hour, of course. He says it’s temporary. He says we’ll eventually get bored with it and have another war, or find a way to go faster than light. Either way, it won’t matter any more.’
I felt I was ahead of him there. ‘We won’t leave. The story-cube says there’d be no point. There’s nothing beyond the solar system that we don’t already know about, so what would be the sense in going there? We already have planets and moons to live on, and enough Lesser Worlds for everyone.’ I strived to sound earnest, even though I was reciting an argument that had been spoon-fed to me, rather than one I had worked out for myself. ‘Interstellar travel would be pointless, even if we could do it. And we can’t.’
‘It’s been done,’ the boy pointed out. ‘People have already gone to Epsilon Indi, and come back.’
‘That was just a stunt - it wasn’t sustainable. And the people who did that went mad when they came back home. They couldn’t adapt to the changes that had happened since they left.’
‘Then they didn’t go fast enough. But we can. Sooner or later we’ll even go faster than light. Father says it’s just a matter of time, with all the research that’s going on.’
‘I rather doubt that.’
‘Read something else in the story-cube, have you, Abigail?’
‘You can’t go faster than light - it’s just not possible.’
‘Because you say so?’
I answered huffily, ‘Because the story-cube says so, and the story-cube’s always right.’
‘Like it was right about the black hole under the house? You did look that up in the end, didn’t you?’
‘It’s nothing to be frightened of.’
‘Glug, glug, glug.’
The problem was, although I was as certain as I could be that I was right, I could offer nothing to bolster my arguments. I had read in the story-cube that the speed of light was a universal limit; that in a thousand years of experimentation - despite any number of false dawns - no one had ever managed to circumvent it. This had made me feel hemmed in and claustrophobic - it was like being told I must never run or skip down the long, dreary corridors of the house, but must walk instead, with my neck straight and my hands held behind my back. I felt affronted, as if the speed of light was a personal assault on my liberty. Why should I not go as fast as I pleased? Why should I not skip and run? But I could no more explain why the speed limit existed than I could explain why two and two did not make five. It was simply the way things were, one of those rules - like the edict not to visit certain parts of the house - that were not to be questioned.
But I sensed this was not an argument that would wash with the boy.
‘I’ll tell you why things can’t go faster than light,’ he said, taking an impish delight in knowing more about the subject than I did. ‘Causality, that’s why.’
It was not a word I knew. I filed it away for later enquiry.
‘Then you believe it as well,’ I said, hoping I would not be pressed.
‘Father doesn’t think so. He says causality’s just a temporary stumbling block. It’s the reason faster-than-light travel is difficult, not the reason it’s impossible. One day we’ll find a way around it - and then we’ll leave everyone else behind. They can keep their Golden Hour - it isn’t going to be enough for the rest of us.’
Even though he was not being nice, even though he was teasing me, he was still my only true friend, the only one I really liked playing games with. The cloned companions the household sometimes sent me were too docile, too compliant, ever to compare with a real boy. When I won against them, I always knew it was because they had capitulated. It was never like that with my friend from the other side of the Golden Hour - when I beat him, it was because I was better.
Typically, he would become friendlier to me, less argumentative, the closer we got to the playroom. That was because his mind was shifting onto the matter of Palatial. Without my consent, we could not enter it. He would tell me I looked pretty, that he liked the black ribbons in my hair.
Palatial lived in a room of its own, inside the larger bounds of the playroom. It had been delivered and installed by green-overalled technicians. Now and then one of them would arrive to check on it again, usually bringing a box full of glistening, maze-like panels which he slid in and out of slots in the side of Palatial’s casing. By then I knew that I was not the only girl in the world with this gift, but that it was one of a number of prototypes. I had been told that there were still teething problems with the game, which was why - despite it having been given to me a year earlier - Palatial had still not been authorised for mass-production.
It was nearly as large as the room it filled. On the outside it was a green cube, covered in mouldings depicting castles and palaces, knights and princesses, ponies and dragons and sea-serpents. In one side was a doorway, leading through the thick-walled cube into its interior, where there was another room. The first time I had gone through that door, I had felt dizzy, and for a hallucinatory moment my thoughts had chased each other in epicycles of déjà vu. It was not as bad the second time, and by the third time I felt nothing as I passed through the aperture. Later I learned that the thick walls were dense with brain-scanning machinery, combing through my skull with invisible fingers. The boy experienced it the first time as well - I watched with a sadistic delight as the strangeness hit him - but he was also affected less and less with each subsequent visit. That was because Palatial kept a map of our minds in its memory, and refined its scanning patterns accordingly.
The room was empty, but it was also crammed with wonders and miracles. Appearing in the middle of the green-walled space - woven there by direct manipulation of our minds - was a palace. It was perched on the top of an impossibly steep mountain, with a treacherous path winding its way up the mountain’s sides, crossing gorges on bridges, spiralling through tunnels, leaning out from the cliff on outrageous ledges, before finally entering the palace by means of a glittering draw-bridge. The palace climbed almost into the clouds, pale pink and pale blue like the icing on a birthday cake, sprouting turrets and towers, spires and keeps. It was the fabulous vertical counterpart to my own house, and from the instant I had seen it, I longed to know what was inside.
Palatial made that possible. In fact, there was no escaping it. There were figures moving around behind the windows, on the ledges and turrets. Each was exquisitely real-looking, while glowing with a luminous, stained-glass intensity, as if they were coloured drawings in a book with the light of day shining through the pages. I had seen animated figures in the story-cube, but Palatial made even the best of those appear muddy and flat and dead. The little people in the palace were alive; they moved as if they had lives to be getting on with.
On my first visit I had noticed the princess, sitting on her own on the highest ledge, wearing a dress of blue fabric peppered with yellow stars, combing her long golden hair. Later - as I found her today - she was working with needle and thread on something in her lap. Even though she was no larger than a fingernail, and so far away from me that if she had been a picture in a book I would not have been able to read her expression, every detail on her face was clear to me. There was something very sad in her demeanour, some inexpressible longing, and yet I could not understand how anyone could live in a palace like that and not be radiantly happy. Palatial must have sensed this, must have sensed my interest in her, for all of a sudden I found that I had become the princess. I was sitting on the balcony, wearing her dress, working with needle and thread, looking out across a fairy-tale landscape. It was not simply that my perceptions had been remapped to correspond to that tiny, seated figure. I was actually inside her head, thinking her thoughts. In an instant, like the moment before waking when we confabulate an entire dream, I had access to all the memories of her life, back to when she was born in one of the highest, brightest rooms of the palace, on
an early spring day when geese were crossing the sky from the north. I understood the history of her kingdom, the society into which she had been born, the difficult path she was about to tread upon ascension to the throne. I understood that her father, the king, had been killed during a battle with the neighbouring province. Although I had not noticed it until that moment, I spied on the horizon a dark counterpart to this palace, many leagues distant, wreathed in the shifting emanations of abnormal magic.
I had become the princess, slipped into her world, but I was still Abigail Gentian, looking in from outside. I carried her memories, but my own were still present and correct. Shifting between the two, choosing to be the princess or Abigail, was a matter of adjusting mental focus. Palatial must have been helping me, because it soon became as easy as blinking.
There was a knock on the door: gloved fist on heavy oak. I had been sewing the corner of an embroidered picture, my treasured sewing kit spread open on my lap. I put down the work and looked around. One of the palace guards entered, snapped his spurred heels against the stone floor and saluted. ‘Begging your pardon, milady, but a communication has arrived. The chamberlain said I should bring it you directly.’
‘Very good, Lanius,’ I said. ‘Give it to me. I shall read it on the balcony; it is yet daylight.’
I had felt a compulsion to reply, as if I had been forced onstage in the middle of a drama and did not wish to let the audience down. Yet it was difficult to tell whether the words that came out of my mouth had been decided by me, or shaped by Palatial. I had known the man’s name without hesitating; I even had the vague sense that we had shared an adventure in the past, though not one that we cared to speak of now.
I took the handwritten note, broke the wax seal and opened it wide. It was from my stepbrother, Count Mordax, in the Black Castle. My hands trembled as I read the devastating news. A raiding party of Mordax’s had taken my lady-in-waiting prisoner; he was holding her even now in the Dungeon of Screams. In return for her release, he desired that I should reveal the identity of my uncle, the imperial wizard Calidris, who, having renounced sorcery, was now living as an ordinary man, a simple farrier, in one of the outlying hamlets of the Kingdom.
‘He wishes to use Calidris’s magic for his own foul ends,’ I declared. ‘The very same magic that, even though wielded by a man of good heart, nearly tore our Kingdom in two. I shall not give up my uncle’s identity. Or do you think I must, for the sake of my lady-in-waiting?’
As I spoke, I closed the sewing kit. I had used all but one of the needles in my embroidering. Only the smallest one, the blood-bound one, remained in its pocket.
‘I beg your lady’s indulgence, but the master-at-arms has requested permission to ride out tonight, into the very heart of the count’s territory. There is a detachment of Prince Araneus’s men said to be camped in a clearing of the Forest of Shadows. With the help of those men, there is every chance of conquering the Black Castle.’
‘Prince Araneus’s men will want nothing of our squabble with Mordax. The prince has troubles of his own.’
‘He remembers the good deed we did him in the Battle of the Seven Marches. If the prince has forgotten, his men will not have.’
‘This has the stench of a trap, Lanius. Or am I the only one who thinks so?’
‘It is right to be cautious. But if we are to act, it must be swiftly. The master-at-arms said he must reach the Forest of Shadows by sundown, or else his men will fall afoul of the Enchantress at the Serpent Gate.’
‘I suppose I must speak to Cirlus.’
‘He is with his men, preparing their armour. Shall I summon him, milady?’
‘No, I shall not interrupt his preparations unnecessarily. You will escort me to the armouring room, Lanius. Have Daubenton summoned. On the way, we shall speak more of Count Mordax. No one is better equipped to understand my stepbrother’s mind than you, I fear.’
Although I had become the princess, although I felt fully immersed in her life, I still remembered who I really was. It was like being in a lucid dream, with the consolation that I could wake up whenever I wanted to. Because of this, although there was excitement and jeopardy, there was no actual anxiety. I knew that it was just a game, and that nothing that happened in that green cube could really hurt me.
The little boy had taken an immediate liking to it. By the time I revealed Palatial to him, I had become very comfortable in the princess’s slippers. I could have slipped into the personality of any of the palace’s protagonists, but I felt a loyalty to my flaxen-haired sister.
‘I’m her,’ I said, pointing to the figurines. ‘You can be anyone else, but not the princess.’
‘Why would I want to be the princess anyway?’
‘I’m just saying.’
‘Can you change to someone else, once you’ve become one of them?’
I nodded. ‘You just need to concentrate on it hard, willing yourself into the other person’s head. But they have to be in the same room. If you’re in a dungeon, you can’t just become one of the guards outside and make them open the door.’ I had hopped from head to head, testing Palatial’s rules, until returning to the mind of the princess. ‘And you can’t keep changing all the time - you have to stick with each person until the game decides you’ve had enough.’
‘What is that other castle, in the distance?’
‘The Black Castle, where Count Mordax lives. He’s my stepbrother, in Palatial.’
‘I want to be him.’
‘You can’t. You can only be someone in the Palace of Clouds.’
‘How do you know?’
‘You have to see someone to be them. Count Mordax is always too far away.’
Despite several attempts, the master-at-arms’s men had never succeeded in reaching the Black Castle. On that first night, the men camped in the Forest of Shadows had turned out to be soldiers from Count Mordax, dressed in the uniforms of Prince Araneus’s army. They had ambushed our men and slain many of them. Master-at-Arms Cirlus had retreated, his attacking force in ruins. Though he had made two more attempts to storm the castle and liberate my lady-in-waiting, he had twice been repelled, with great losses to men and horses. Meanwhile, the agents of Count Mordax were scouring the hamlets and villages for the hidden sorcerer, Calidris. Soon Calidris would have to use magic just to conceal himself.
‘There must be a way for me to become Count Mordax,’ the boy said.
‘He’s the baddie,’ I said, puzzled. ‘Why would you want to become him?’
‘He’s the baddie to you. But I bet he doesn’t think of himself that way.’
‘He kidnapped my lady-in-waiting. He won’t let her go until he finds out where Calidris is.’
He asked me what I had done to free the lady-in-waiting. I told him about Calidris and the futile attempts to take the Black Castle.
‘Then you need to try something different. If I became Mordax, I could set her free, couldn’t I?’
I tried to tell him how Palatial would twist his mind once he was in it, to make him think and feel like Mordax, but it was difficult to explain. In any case, he waved aside my point with feigned indifference.
‘I still want to be him.’
‘You can’t - he won’t come near the Palace of Clouds, and he won’t let any of us near the Black Castle.’
‘What about a messenger?’
‘He’ll kill you.’
‘I shall ride as a spy and claim to have knowledge of the sorcerer. He won’t kill me then, at least not until he’s spoken to me. Then I can become him.’
‘He might not see you in person.’
‘Then I’ll become his interrogator, and work my way to him gradually.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said doubtfully. So far, Palatial had been mine, and no one else’s. When I played with it, the only other mind shaping the flow of events had been the dim but cunning intellect of the machine itself, working its way through endless schemata. If the little boy entered the game and took on the persona of Count Morda
x, the landscape of my imagination would have changed. There would be another human mind affecting the outcome. It was one thing to be beaten by a machine, but I was not sure how I would take being beaten by another child.
But I did so want him to share my secret world.
‘We can go into it now,’ I said, ‘but everything takes a long time in Palatial. There won’t be time for you to ride out to the Black Castle before you have to leave.’
‘I can still look around,’ the little boy said. ‘I can still make plans, can’t I?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Make all the plans you like. But it won’t make a blind bit of difference in the end.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m still going to win.’
CHAPTER TEN
Campion was doing a bad job of masking his fear. It was in the tightness of the muscles around his mouth, in the set of his jaw, leaking through his eyes and pores.