Iain Banks - Walking on Glass

Even having only got that far, she had still missed out a lot; there were still books she had to find, or go back and read, once she had read through to the last era books were still printed in (or the castle's records stopped; she didn't know what had happened; did some cataclysm overwhelm the world, did they move on to some other form of communication, or did the castle only contain works up to a certain period in the world's history?).

"Come on, Ajayi," Quiss said with a sigh. "I finished ages ago. What's keeping you?"

Ajayi looked up at the old, mottle-haired man, with his smooth cheeks and broad, lined face. She arched one eyebrow, but said nothing. She would have liked to have thought that her companion was making a joke, but she was afraid that he was serious.

"Yeah, get a move on," the red crow said. "My cigar's getting put ,out by this fucking snow."

Ajayi looked up then, and realised it was snowing. Somehow she had been aware that Quiss kept blowing the board in front of her clear every now and again, but she had been so involved with trying to find a niche, or two, for the remaining tiles on her side of the board that it hadn't got through to her properly that what he was blowing off it was snow.

"Oh," she said, suddenly aware of it. She looked around, seemingly confused for a second. She pulled the collars of her furs up closer around her neck, though if anything it had become slightly milder since the snow started to fall, not colder. She frowned at the board, then looked up at Quiss again. "Should we go back to the games room, do you think?"

"Oh gods no," the red crow said in an exasperated voice, "let's get this over with. Shit." It pulled the cigar from its mouth, glared at its wet, black end, then tossed it away with a flick of its skinny black leg. "No point in asking either of you bastards for a light," it muttered, then shook its head fiercely, stretched its wings half-out, and fanned its tail. It shook itself free of the snow gathering on its back. A couple of small red feathers floated down to the soft ground, like strange flakes of blood in the white fall.

Ajayi went back to staring at the board.

Quiss had given up all hope of carrying out some sort of coup-de-chateau . The seneschal was in an impregnable position, he discovered, because he was beyond time. Five hundred days ago some of the scullions Quiss had befriended were working in the kitchens when a temporary stove collapsed, sending a huge vat of boiling stew crashing down on the seneschal, who was walking by it at the time. Half a dozen scullions saw what happened next; one second the seneschal was there, walking, the next he was disappearing under the gigantic metal cauldron as it fell and cracked and split, flooding an entire section of the kitchens with molten stew. Two of Quiss's little attendants were only metres away, and had to jump for their lives into the sink with the dishes they were cleaning to escape the tidal wave of steaming, bubbling broth.

A moment later, the seneschal was walking past on the other side of that sink unit, telling the section under-cook to find out who had been responsible for the building of the temporary stove, get them to construct another, and then burn them alive in it. He went on to his office as though nothing had happened. No body was ever discovered when the remains of the shattered stove and cauldron were cleared up. One - still stunned - scullion said the seneschal had simply materialised, right in front of it.

Quiss wasn't a fool. There was no way you could go against power like that.

He had also given up the idea of trying somehow to short-circuit the process which occurred when they finished a game and gave an answer to the riddle they had been set. The red crow had told him what happened - the last creature in the castle Quiss would have expected to be so forthcoming, but it had obviously decided that by telling him it would discourage him still more and thus send him a little further along the road to self-destruction.

Quiss couldn't recall the whole story now, but it went on for a long time and involved the waiter whispering the answer in a room full of bees which then built some sort of nest which something called the message crow ate and then started flying.

After that there were some more funny beasts, most of which seemed to end up eating each other, then a place on the surface of wherever-they-were with thousands of tiny lakes which thousands of animals marched on to and spontaneously combusted, melting the ice of the lakes in a certain sequence which some sort of organic communication satellite with a message laser recognised... after that it got even more complicated.

It was, in other words, foolproof. Impersonating or somehow coercing the waiter who did the whispering was pointless too; as a final check whoever or whatever arrived to take them away from the castle would ask the rooks and crows what they had seen, to make sure there had been no tricks employed.

The whole thing, of course, happened in some sort of time warp, which was why, despite the labyrinthine complexity of the answering process, they always found out the response to their answer within a matter of minutes. Quiss found it all very depressing.

Well, they were about to finish this game. Perhaps, he told himself, they would get it right this time. They had only about one good answer left to the riddle, which was worrying in one way but encouraging in another. Maybe this one had to be the right one, maybe they would finally say the right thing and get away from here.

Quiss tried to think of the things he used to try not to think about; the things he had missed so much at first that it had really hurt to think about them. He could think of them quite easily now, quite painlessly. The good things in life, the many pleasures of the flesh and mind, the joy of battle, plot and drunken reminiscing.

It all seemed so far away now. It felt as if it had all happened to somebody else, some young son or grandson, some other person entirely. Could it be that he was starting to think like an old man? Just because he looked like one was no real reason, but perhaps there was a sort of back-pressure, a feedback cycle of effect and cause which made his thoughts gradually fit the husk they filled. He didn't know. Maybe it was just all that had happened here in the Castle Doors, all the disappointments, all the missed chances (those brown woman-arms, that bright promise of a contrail, that sun, that sun in this overcast place!), all the chaos and the order, the seemingly purposeless, apparently directed insanity of the castle. Maybe it just got to you after a while.

Yes, he thought, the castle. Perhaps it makes us as we are, as we are to be. Perhaps it moulds us, like those numbers ever circling to destruction, reincarnation. Indeed: disintegration and break-up, an epilogue at birth... why not? He would even be sorry to leave, in some ways. The small minions he used as contacts in the kitchens were hardly the crack troops he was used to, or even battle-honed mercenaries, but they had their own nervous, inefficient attraction; they amused him. He would miss them.

He laughed at the thought of the barber, he recalled meeting the master mason, and the superintendent of mines; both surly, proud, impressive men he would like the time to know better. Even the seneschal himself was interesting once he could be persuaded to talk, ever disregarding his ability to evade catastrophe.

But a lifetime, or more than a lifetime, here?

Unbidden, the thought suddenly filled him with deep, awful despair. Yes, he would miss this place, in some strange, twisted way, if they were able to leave at last, but that was only natural; as a prison it was very mild indeed, and anywhere not unendingly unpleasant could inspire nostalgia given enough time, sufficient scope for the processes of memory to select the good and neglect the bad. That was not the point, that was simply not the point.