Chinese was a difficult language, even more difficult than the one she had started studying, the one called English, but they were both worth all the effort. They were even worth the effort of having to drag Quiss along the same educative road. She had helped and cajoled and prompted and shouted and insulted until he could get by in the language they had to play the game in, and even once he had just about grasped the basics she still had to keep helping him along; she'd been able to work out roughly what tiles he still had on his side as the game had entered its final, most difficult, stage, and had deliberately left him easy openings so that his imperfect grasp of the language would not prevent him getting rid of the last of his tiles. The result was that now she was stuck, unable to see where she could put the last two pictograms she had left. If she couldn't place them somewhere, make one or two or more new meanings, they would have to start again. The next game wouldn't take as long as this one, which had lasted thirty days so far, but she was worried that Quiss would get impatient. He had already grumbled several times that she hadn't taught him the language properly.

But the language had been a marvellous, magical gift for her. To enable them to play the game properly, they of course had to understand Chinese, a language from the castle's Subject place, the still un-named planet all the books appeared to originate from. The seneschal had therefore provided them with a dictionary which gave Chinese pictograms and their equivalent in one of the languages common to both sides in the Therapeutic Wars, an ancient, long-deciphered battle-code so elegant its utility as a language had ensured its survival after its secrecy had evaporated.

With that key Ajayi could unlock any of the languages original to the un-named globe. It had taken her only a few days to find a Chinese-English dictionary, and after that she could read the books she found far more easily. She learned Chinese, for the game, and English, for her own reading, alongside each other, becoming relatively fluent in the Indo-European system long before the more tricky Oriental tongue.

It had been as if the whole, massive crumbling ruin of the castle suddenly became transparent; now there were so many more books she could find and take and read and enjoy; a whole culture and entire civilisation was spread out before her, for her to study as she wished. She was already learning French, German, Russian and Latin. Soon Greek, and from the Latin, Italian shouldn't be too big a step (her English was already helping her with the ancient Roman language). The castle was no longer the prison it had seemed before; it was a library, a museum of literature, of literacy, of language. The only thing which still worried her was that she could not find any way to translate the markings on the slates. Those cryptic, buried symbols still meant nothing. She had scoured wall after wall of books but never found a single mention of the strange, simple markings somehow etched inside the grained rock.

But that was a small worry in comparison to the immense satisfaction she felt with her discovery of the key to the castle's original tongues. She had started methodically to read all the classics of the un-named planet's past, having discovered long before a book which acted as a guide to the literature of that world. Apart from the occasional foray further forward in time - to whet her appetite - she was being quite strict with herself in keeping to a chronological exploration of the books she had discovered and stored in her rooms. She was now, at the end of this first and - she hoped - last game of Chinese Scrabble, just starting the age of the Elizabethan dramatists in England, and was already starting to get excited about reading Shakespeare, desperately hoping he hadn't been over-praised in the later critical works she had already encountered.

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.