The Game

I turned back to the invisible door, and breathed, “It’s clear. Could you do something to the lock so—”

“It’s done,” Holmes whispered back. The last thing we needed, should this mad mission actually succeed, would be hunting for another trick switch with an abducted maharaja on our hands.

The two men slipped into the toy room beside me, and I pushed the door shut, more or less. As I turned into the room, two hands came to rest on my shoulders, Holmes’ familiar long fingers gripping my left, O’Hara’s on my right. Now was the time to make good on my foolish assertion to Kimball O’Hara that I could find my way through a black room I had visited only once.

I bent my head and allowed my mind’s eye to summon a view of the room as it had been. The door; the high shelves of mechanical dolls and animals to its left; the scattered arrangement of glass-enclosed mechanisms across the floor—not in a haphazard pattern, not once one knew that there was a doorway hidden behind them. The Englishman-eating tiger was over there, the erotic toys back there. Which meant that we need only circle the piggies’ tea party and dodge the pair of fortune- telling gipsies, and we would be at the room’s entrance.

I led the way forward—slowly and with my hands stretched out to be sure, since I was not all that supremely confident. But we reached the door without noise or mishap, and I felt a surge of pride as I laid my hand upon the doorknob.

The corridor stretched out in both directions, lit by oil lamps every thirty feet or so. The nearest one was smoking and guttering, a black stain on the ceiling showing that it had not been properly trimmed. We closed the door quietly and turned south, away from the durbar hall and the billiards room, where late guests and their attendant servants might still be up.

The southernmost quarter of the New Fort, hidden from view behind a thick stand of timber bamboo, had not yet known the hand of the maharaja’s renovators. Behind the greenery, the plaster was chipped, the paint long peeled away, the stone floor of the arcade worn and gritty underfoot. But not uninhabited—these were the servants’ quarters, with faint cooking odours wafting in from the open corridors. We slipped from one darkness to the next, freezing into imitations of the stone pillars around us when two tired-looking chuprassis scurried from the Fort’s central courtyard and slipped between two columns into the south wing.

I stood pressed up against the greasy stones and looked through the bamboo at the guest centre above the durbar hall and dining rooms. It had to be nearly one o’clock, but all the lights were still burning, the band played, the sounds of merriment spilled over the lotus pond and trimmed bushes. I thought the merriment sounded more than a little forced, but perhaps that was imagination. Certainly the sound was drunken. What state could the maharaja be in? Thwarted at every turn, his captives escaped, first Mary and then Martin tweaking their Russellian noses at his compulsory hospitality. No wonder the servants looked edgy.

For the first time, it occurred to me that the man might be too overwrought to enter his rooms at all. Our loose plan called for abducting the maharaja as soon as we found him alone, and either taking him away immediately or, if it was too near dawn, finding an abandoned corner of this vast place and keeping him drugged until night fell.

It was, frankly, a terrible plan. It was no plan at all. But it was marginally preferable to watching a regiment march across the borders and force a madman into open battle, and the three of us were all old hands at making do with whatever opportunities that presented themselves.

And in the event we did not succeed, the servants at the dak bungalow had been given a letter for the commander at the encampment. It would be taken to him if we did not return by dawn Wednesday, some thirty hours hence.

The two chuprassis came back out of the crumbling corridor, carrying what appeared to be a canvas stretcher. The object seemed weighty with implications, and my eyes followed it all the way across the gardens and up the steps into the hall. Holmes had to tug my sleeve to get me moving again.

The maharaja’s private quarters lay adjacent to the main gates at New Fort’s easternmost limits. The so- called “gun-room” with its fur walls was to the north of the gates, and according to Nesbit, the prince’s bedroom and private suites were immediately to the south of the gates, reached by a corridor that linked both halves of the wing on the top level. We planned to reach his quarters from the rear, by means of a little-used servants’ stairway at New Fort’s most southeastern corner, which Nesbit had seen but never tried to enter. He thought it might be passable.

It was, but only just. I think, looking back, it was probably the thought of that stairway that kept Nesbit from fighting harder about being tied to the bed. His wounded leg would never have got him up it.

But it did mean that, once we had shinnied up the abandoned stones and pulled ourselves over the gaps, we were in a place no one would have expected to find us. I had gone first, as the lightest and most agile, and now I folded the rope the others had used to traverse the final gap while we discussed what came next.

“It sounds to me as if the maharaja is having a pretty determined party,” I said, in little more than a murmur.

“Which merely means that the Fort will sleep late in the morning,” Holmes replied, his voice deliberately soothing. “Are you ready, O’Hara?”

“Oah yes,” he said. “May the Compassionate One be watching over us all.”

We stole north along the corridor towards the lighted section, there to reconnoitre. On the other side of a bend in the corridor, restoration had taken place: The carving around the doors gleamed; intricate carpets lay on the polished marble; brightly coloured frescoes graced the fresh plaster walls. There were even electrical lights in this section, as if a line had been drawn between the twentieth century and the seventeenth. O’Hara walked down the hall-way, opened a door, and disappeared from sight. We settled ourselves for a long wait.

This portion of the evening’s sortie had caused us the most vigorous argument. The maharaja was rarely alone for more than a few minutes while he was awake. Therefore, our best opportunity for laying hands on the man, short of a pitched battle with his guards, was to take him asleep, or at least alone in his rooms. And if he was not alone, at least the numbers would be few, and presumably any woman he took to his bed would not be armed.

But we couldn’t all three hide in a wardrobe or under his bed. And in the end, O’Hara’s talents, and the fact that he was smaller than either of us, gave him the job. He had the morphia, he could move as silently as a ghost, and heaven knew he had as much patience as might be required. So Holmes and I watched him go, and adjusted the revolvers in our belts, before settling ourselves to wait beyond the reach of the lights. As we waited, my hand kept creeping to my near-naked scalp, exploring the loss, and the freedom.

It is always at least mildly astonishing when plans actually work out, and I was indeed mildly astonished when, an hour later, the maharaja actually appeared, accompanied by two stoney-faced guards and a giggling German girl. The guards took up positions on either side of the door; after a few minutes, however, they looked at each other, and in unspoken accord retreated to the head of the main stairway, standing with their backs to the lit corridor.

I tried not to grin at the picture of O’Hara, silently reciting his rosary and trying to close his ears to the noisy events that had forced the guards’ retreat. It seemed forever before the shrieks of the girl’s laughter faded, and longer before the thuds and sense of movement died away, but in truth, less than an hour after we had come up the derelict stairway, the door nearest us eased open and the girl slipped out. Five minutes later it opened again, and Kimball O’Hara looked out at us.

We were on our feet in an instant. Holmes held up two fingers to warn him of the guards, then put one finger to his lips before gesturing that he should come. O’Hara stepped back inside for a few seconds, then reappeared with a weight slung across his shoulders, pausing to glance down the corridor at the two distant backs. He emerged fully, pulled the door shut, and in a few silent steps was with us.

The maharaja, wrapped in a dark red dressing-gown, stank of alcohol, but his sleep was that of drugs as well. He stayed limp as we slung him down the pit of the stairs; he remained lifeless across O’Hara’s shoulders through the shadows of the ground-floor arcade. The festivities on the other side of the gardens seemed to have died rapidly away once the maharaja was gone; half the lights had been extinguished, and the only voices I could hear were the querulous calls of the over-worked servants. Still, we kept to the deepest shadows, and made the western wing without raising an alarm.

We shifted our unconscious burden from O’Hara’s back to that of Holmes, and I led the way through mostly unlit passages to that off which the toy room opened. Nearly half the oil lamps had burnt out, including the one nearest the blue door itself. In near darkness, I reached for the doorknob, when the smoothly working mechanism