LITMIR.BIZ

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coming, lady!”

      “I know, Mischief. Believe me: I know. But there’s no light—”

      “There should be a cup and ball up there. Isn’t there a cup and ball?”

      “What?”

      “The oldest game, Candy. Light is the oldest game —”

      Candy glanced back inside. Yes, there was a cup, of sorts, sitting on top of the inverted pyramid.

      “Yes! There’s a cup!” she yelled back down to the brothers.

      “Put the ball in it!” Mischief replied.

      “What ball? There isn’t any ball.”

      “There should be a ball.”

      “Well there isn’t one!”

      “So look!” yelled John Serpent.

      Candy didn’t waste time telling Serpent to be more polite. She had only seconds to spare before Shape made an entrance into the round room, she knew. So she stopped talking and did as Mischief suggested, stepping over the hole she’d made in the platform and returning to look for the ball.

      She listened as she scoured the room. To judge by the sound of his feet, Shape was close to the top of the stairs. Then—just as she was certain he was about to open the door—she heard the welcome sound of splintering timber, and her pursuer loosed a shout of alarm. His weight had apparently been too much for the staircase. She heard a series of crashes as broken portions of the steps fell away into the stairwell. A moment of silence followed, when she dared hope that perhaps Shape had fallen down the stairwell along with the broken stairs and was lying at the bottom of the flight. But instead of the distant moans she’d hoped to hear, there came an outburst of words in a language she had never heard before. She didn’t need a translator to recognize them as curses.

      She crossed to the door and glanced down, just to see what had happened. A large portion of the staircase —five or six stairs—had indeed collapsed under Mendelson Shape’s weight. But he had somehow managed to avoid the full fall by jumping back down the stairs before they had collapsed beneath him. This left a sizeable gap for him to get across before he could continue his ascent. She was disappointed that he wasn’t dead or comatose at the bottom, but this was better than nothing.

      Looking up at her, he made horns of his forefinger and smallest finger, which he jabbed threateningly in Candy’s direction. No doubt had he possessed the power to strike her dead on the spot, dead she would have been. But all he could do was curse and point, so she left him to it and went back to search for the missing ball.

      As she did so, she heard Mischief yelling up at her from outside. Obviously he’d heard the din.

      “I’m coming in, Lady Candy!”

      She went to the outer door and called down to him.

      “No! Stay where you are. You can’t get up here anyway. The stairs have collapsed!”

      She saw him looking through the holes in the tower wall to confirm what she’d told him. He was aghast.

      “How will you get down?” he said, apparently more concerned with her safety now than with the oldest game in the world.

      “I’ll find a way when the time comes,” Candy said. “First I’m going to find this stupid ball.”

      “We’re coming in!” he said again.

      “Wait!” she told him. “You just stay there. Please.”

      Without waiting for an answer, she went down on her haunches and started a systematic search of the floor, looking for the missing part of this bizarre puzzle. It was not immediately visible, but there were several places where the boards had rotted completely, leaving holes in the floor. She went to each one, pulling up the worm-eaten boards to get a better look at what lay beneath. They came away easily, in showers of splinters, dust and dried beetle corpses.

      The first hole revealed nothing. The second, the same. But the third was the charm. There it was: rolled away under the boards. A small turquoise-and-silver ball. She had to tear away a little more of the rotted boards before she could fish it out between her fingers. When she finally succeeded, she discovered that it was surprisingly heavy for its size. It wasn’t wood or plastic; it was metal. And elegantly engraved on its blue-green surface was a design she knew! There it was, etched into the metal: the doodle she’d drawn so obsessively in her workbook.

      She didn’t have any time to wonder at this. Behind her she heard a series of fierce grunts from the stairwell, followed by another crash. She knew in an instant what was going on. In his ambition to get to her, Shape had dared to try and jump the gap in the stairs.

      She glanced up at the door, which stood open a few inches. Through it she could see Shape. He had succeeded in leaping over the gap, and he was coming up the remaining stairs two at a time, his razor claws making a horrid squeal on the timbers that lined the stairwell.

      Candy looked at the small, simple cup that sat on the pyramid. Mischief’s words echoed in her head.

       Light’s the oldest game in the world—

      Shape was at the door, staring with one pinprick pupil through the crack at Candy, his jaws wide, dripping foam like the maw of a mad dog. He started to sing his lullaby, again, but more softly now, more liltingly.

      “Forget the future,

       Forget the past,

       Life is over:

      Breathe your last.”

      As he sang he pushed the door, slowly, as though this was some game.

      Candy didn’t have time to cross to the pyramid and put the ball in the cup. If she wasted those three or four seconds then Shape would be through the door and tearing out her throat, no doubt of it.

      She had no choice: she had to play the game.

      She took a deep breath and threw the ball. It wasn’t a good throw. The ball hit the edge of the cup instead of landing in it, and for several seconds it circled the rim, threatening to topple out.

      “Please,” she willed it quietly, staring at the ball like a gambler watching a roulette wheel, knowing she had this throw and only this throw; there would be no second chance.

      And still the ball rolled around the rim of the cup, undecided where to fall.

      “Go on,” she murmured, trying to ignore the creak of the door behind her.

      The ball made one last, lazy circle of the rim, and then rocked back and forth for a moment and toppled into the cup, rattling around for a few seconds, before finally settling.

      Shape let out a sound that was as far from human as any throat that was fashioned like his could make: a profound din that rose from a hiss to the noise of a creature tormented to the edge of madness. As he loosed this unearthly sound, he pushed open the door, threw Candy aside and reached for the ball so as to snatch it out of the cup.

      But the tower was having none of that. Some process beyond Candy’s comprehension had begun with that simple throw of hers. An invisible force was in the air, and it pitched Shape back, its power sufficient to carry him out through the door.

      Outside, Candy heard Mischief and his brothers whooping like a pack of ecstatic dogs. Though they couldn’t possibly see what she’d done, they knew she’d succeeded. Nor was it hard for Candy to understand how they knew. There was a wave of pure energy emanating from the pyramid. She felt the fine hairs at the base of her skull starting to prickle, and behind her eyes the design of the ball burned blue and green and gold.

      She retreated a step, then another, her eyes fixed on the ball, cup, and pyramid.

      And

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