The Gray House

Birds. Birds made me pause a little. All right. Black is just a color. Unpleasant faces, but I probably could make my own face look like that if needed. Vulture . . . the House monster. I looked at him through my newly opened eyes and tried to strip away the chaff. Mourning . . . rings . . . black polish on long manicured nails . . . long hair and eye shadow. Throw all of that out, forget even the fact that he made his bed in a coffin, erase every trace of his nasty habits—what would you have left? A gaunt, hook-nosed fellow. An unpleasant person, to be sure, but not a monster by any stretch.

This is where I switched off temporarily, because the unpleasant person suddenly turned around and stared at me. Must have felt himself being exposed. He looked at me with those sleepy yellow eyes of his and I lost the ability to function, skewered by that stare.

Assured that I had been neutralized and was ready to be served, Vulture smiled, showcasing the unnaturally long crooked teeth. It felt like someone forcefully dragging a blade over glass.

It took me a couple of minutes to get my composure back, and even then something kept nagging at me. Like when you watch an old black-and-white movie and this creep in a ton of makeup is constantly polishing his fingernails and looking around unblinkingly, and it suddenly freaks you out and the next moment makes you ashamed for falling for his cheap tricks.

All right. That meant only that he was a very good actor. He inhabited the character. If anyone was supposed to be a Game master, it was a House Leader. It must have been they who actually invented it.

To test my theory, I decided to expose Red.

Rat Leader proved to be not particularly amenable to exposure. If you took away the green shades occupying the whole upper half of his face and the bloodred buzz cut, supposedly his natural color, what were you left with? Nothing at all. A tailor’s dummy made up as a Rat would have done just as well.

That fairly took away my thunder. To cheer myself up again, I turned to Pompey.

He sort of looked a bit like Sphinx. I guess it was his height. And the bald head. Except Sphinx’s was real. And Pompey left a small lick on top. Jet black and greased to a shine. He was also fatter. That is, fleshier.

I stripped away the leather biker jacket, like the ones so beloved by Logs, and shook off the face powder. Then picked the poor bat off the collar, bearing in mind that its name was Suzy and that its days were numbered. What was left looked . . . ordinary. A handsome guy, but nothing special.

I couldn’t understand before why a guy like Pompey would pretend he was a walking corpse. Now I knew it was all in accordance with the rules of the Game. Leaders needed to be pale and ominous. Pompey was naturally swarthy, so he must have gone through a lot of face powder to maintain the standard. The image of Pompey with the puff in his hand, putting the last touches of deathly paleness on his face, made me swoon and giggle.

The script accounted for everything. Every detail. Which way the part in Pheasants’ hair went. How black was the underwear of a true Bird. What books were allowed for Hounds. Maybe Rats would have liked to skip the hair coloring once in a while, but they forced themselves, for those were the rules of the Game. It was even quite likely that Birds secretly loathed anything that grew, pots or no pots.

The final insight was a very simple one. I was leading up to it through all the preceding ones, deliberately, slowly, leaving it for last, so that in the end I could place it on top flamboyantly and be done with the whole thing.

The overthrow of Blind by Pompey—or rather, the widely advertised intention thereof—must have been a part of the Game as well. To always run the same tired script wasn’t much fun. From time to time the play needed some variety. The war declared by Pompey provided just such variety. Hound Leader scares the Logs, practices throwing knives, generally behaves “in a not entirely satisfactory manner,” to quote Jackal. The audience shivers, Log spies run between different camps with the latest dispatches. People have something to discuss. Everyone’s engaged and no one’s afraid. Except Lary, but Lary is a simpleton taking everything at face value.

I looked around the canteen again. It was all so obvious! And so stupid!

I wanted to laugh out loud and scream that I was onto all of them now. All of their bats, throwing knives, coups, face powders, and scorpions in oil.

It must have somehow manifested itself on my face, because Tabaqui suddenly threw down his fork and demanded to know why the hell was I looking so smug and stupid.

“This,” I said and stuck out my tongue at him. Just the tip. I immediately remembered how Jackal could not stand being mocked, but it was already too late.

He went livid faster than if someone had dumped boiling water on him. Coughed the half-chewed piece of food out on his plate and asked Noble to hold him as fast as he could.