The Liar's key

TEN

Perhaps Kara had a magic about her that permeated her boat, or maybe I had found my sea legs at long last-either way, the voyage south from the Beerentoppen proved less horrendous than the many days with Snorri in the Sea-Troll. Kara had named her boat Errensa, after the valkyrie that swim beneath the waves to gather the war dead for Ragnarok. She knew the winds and kept her sails full, driving us south faster than a man can run.

“She’s a fine-looking woman,” I told Snorri when he came to join me, huddled in the prow. The boat wasn’t large but the wind gave us privacy, overwriting our conversation and snatching the words away.

“That she is. She’s got a strength about her. Didn’t think she’d be your type, Jal. And haven’t you been mooning over this Lisa of yours ever since we left Trond?”

“Well, yes, I mean Lisa’s a lovely girl. . I’m sure I’ll climb her balcony once or twice when I get back but. .” But a man has to think about the here and now, and right there and right then, Kara had all my attention.

• • •

Life aboard a small sailboat is not to be recommended, however attractive the company, and even when you don’t have to spend most of each day emptying yourself over the side. The food proved cold, monotonous, and in short supply. The nights continued to try to reinstate winter. My fever continued to keep me weak and shivering. And any hopes I had of exercising my charms on Kara died early on. For one thing it’s hard to play the enigmatic prince of romance when the object of your affections gets to watch you shit into the sea twice a day. For another, the very first time my hand wandered her way Kara took a long knife from out beneath the many pleats of her skirt and explained with unnecessary volume how she would use it to pin that hand to my groin should it wander again. Snorri and Tuttugu just watched me and rolled their eyes as if it were my fault! I cursed the lot of them for miserable peasants and retreated to nibble on our diminishing store of dry oatcakes-revolting things.

At sunset Aslaug came, rising through the boards of the hull as if the inky depths had kept her safe while day scoured the world. Tuttugu glanced my way, shuddered and busied himself with a net that needed repairs. Snorri stared hard at the spot from which Aslaug rose, his gaze unreadable. Did he miss her company? He hadn’t the look of a man who saw her clearly though, his eyes sliding past her as she moved toward me. I hope her words slid past his ears just as well.

“Jalan Kendeth. Still huddled among northmen? Yours is the palace of Red March, not some creaking tub.”

“You have a faster means of getting there?” I asked, my mood still soured.

Aslaug made no reply but turned slowly as if hunting a scent, until she faced the stern where Kara stood beside the tiller. The völva saw Aslaug in the moment the avatar’s gaze fell upon her. I could tell it in an instant. Kara made no attempt to conceal that recognition, or her anger. Without taking her gaze from the spirit she tied off the tiller and stepped forward. She compensated for the swell, advancing as if the boat were set in rock.

“Out!” Loud enough to startle Snorri and Tuttugu, and to have me jump half out of my seat. “Out, night-spawn. Out, lie-born. Out, daughter of Loki! Out, child of Arrakni!” Kara’s eyes blazed with the sunset. She advanced, one hand held before her, clutching something that looked rather like a human bone.

“Well she’s a pretty thing!” Aslaug said. “Snorri will take her from you. You know that don’t you, Jalan?”

“Out!” Kara roared. “This boat is mine!” She struck the bone to the mast and all about the hull runes lit, burning with a wintery light. In that instant Aslaug seemed to collapse, flowing into some smaller shape, the size of a large dog, so wreathed in darkness it was hard to see any detail. . other than it had too many legs. In a quick thrashing of long dry limbs Aslaug scurried over the side and was gone without a splash. I shuddered and looked up at Kara who returned my gaze, her lips set in a thin line. I opted to say nothing. The völva held like that, still with the bone to the mast, for another minute, then another, and then, with the sun gone behind the world, she relaxed.

“She is not welcome here,” Kara said, and returned to steering the boat.

“She and Baraqel are all Snorri and I have in our corner. They’re ancient spirits, angel and. . well. . There are people after us, things, after us that work magic as easily as breathing. We need them. The Red Queen’s sister gave us-”

“The Red Queen moves you on her board like all her other pawns. What she gives you is as much a collar as a weapon.” Kara took up the tiller again. Adjusted course. “Don’t be fooled about these creatures’ nature. Baraqel is no more a valkyrie or angel than you or me. He and Aslaug were human once. Some among the Builders copied themselves into their machines-others, when the Wheel first turned, escaped their flesh into new forms.”

“Aslaug never told me-”

“She’s the daughter of lies, Jalan!” Kara shrugged. “Besides, she probably doesn’t remember. Their spirits have been shaped by expectation for so long. When the Day of a Thousand Suns came their will released them and they were free. Gods in an empty world. . then we came back. New men, roaming the earth as the poisons faded. New will. And slowly, without us knowing it, or them, our stories bound about the spirits and our will made them into something suited to our expectations.”

“Uh.” I leaned back, trying to make sense of the völva’s words. After a while my head started to hurt. So I stopped, and watched the waves instead.

• • •

We sailed on. Snorri and Kara seemed to find excitement in each newly revealed stretch of dreary Norse coastline. Even the sea itself could fascinate them. The swell is doing that, the wind is turning, the rocks are this, the current is westerly. Pah. I’d heard more interesting discussions between herdmen cataloguing the ailments of sheep. Or I probably would have if I’d listened.

A consequence of boredom is that a man is forced to look either to the future or the past, or sideways into his imagination. I tend to find my imagination too worrisome to contemplate, and I had already exhausted the possible scenarios for my homecoming. So, sulking in the Errensa’s prow I spent long hours considering the circumstances of my abduction from Red March and forced march across half of Empire to the Black Fort. Time and again my thoughts returned to great uncle Garyus and his silent sister-born a conjoined monstrosity, the rightful king and queen of Red March. Their father, Gholloth, had set the chirurgeons to splitting them, but neither could ever be set upon the throne when age claimed him. He passed them over for Alica, the younger sister. My grandmother. A less obvious monster. But which of them ruled? Which of them had truly set Snorri and myself upon our path north? Which of them had gambled my life and soul against the Dead King? The blood-men with their sharp knives and blunt opinions had cut Garyus from his sister, but the twins had not split even. Garyus a broken teller of stories, his nameless sister a silent voyeur of years yet to come. And Grandmother, the Red Queen, the beating heart of the Marches for a generation, the iron queen with no give in her, her armies feared across the south, her name reviled.

In the empty hours memories plagued me as they are wont to do with nothing to drown out their whispering. Garyus had given me Mother’s locket, and over years I’d so wrapped it in lies that I couldn’t see its value when sat in my palm. Perhaps I’d been equally blind to its purpose. Dr. Taproot, the man who had known obscure facts about the Scraa slopes and Nfflr ridges of the Uuliskind, had told me a thing about my mother and I had laughed at his mistake. Had I wrapped her life in as many lies as her locket? Did I look at her death with the same blindness that had hidden the locket’s nature from me?

It’s not like me to brood on the past. I’m not comfortable with uncomfortable truths. I prefer to round off the edges and corners until I have something worth keeping. But a boat and the wide sea give a man little else to do.

“Show me the key,” I said.

Snorri sat beside me trailing a line and hook into the sea. He’d caught nothing in all the hours he’d been at it.

“It’s safe.” He placed a hand on his chest.

“I don’t think that thing can be described as safe.” I sat up to face him. “Show it to me.”

With reluctance Snorri tied his line to the oarlock and drew the key from his shirt. It didn’t look like part of the world. It looked as if it had no place there in the daylight. As the key turned on its thong it seemed to change, flickering from one possibility to the next. I supposed a key that could open any lock had to entertain many shapes. I reached for it, but Snorri pushed my hand aside.

“Best not.”

“You’re worried I’ll drop it in the sea?” I asked.

“You might.”

“I won’t.” Hand held out.

Snorri raised a brow. A simple but eloquent expression. I had been known to lie before.

“We came as close to dying for this thing as men can come, Snorri. Both of us. I have a right.”

“It wasn’t for the key.” Voice low, eyes seeing past me now. “We didn’t go for the key.”

“But it’s all we got,” I said, angry that he should deny me.

“It’s not a thing you want to touch, Jal. There’s no joy in it. As a friend I say don’t do this.”

“As a prince of Red March I say give me the fucking key.”

Snorri lifted the thong from about his neck and with a sigh dangled the key into my palm, still retaining the tie.

I closed my hand about it. For the briefest moment I considered ripping it free and arcing it out across the water. In the end I lacked either the courage or the cruelty to do it. I’m not sure which.

“Thank you.” The thing seemed to shift in my grasp and I squeezed it to force one form upon it.

There isn’t much I remember about my mother. Her hair-long, dark, smelling of softness. I recall how safe her arms felt. I remember the comfort in her praise, though I could summon none of the words to mind. The sickness that took her I recollected as the story I told about it when people asked. A story without drama or tragedy, just the everyday futility of existence. A beautiful princess laid low by common disease, wasted away without romance by a flux. Isolated by her contagion-her last words spoken to me through a screen. The betrayal a child feels when a parent abandons them returned to me now-still sharp.

“Oh.” And without transition the key was no longer a key. I held my mother’s hand, or she held mine, a seven-year-old boy’s hand encompassed in hers. I caught her scent, something fragrant as honeysuckle.

Snorri nodded, his eyes sympathetic. “Oh.”

Without warning the boat, the sea, Snorri, all of it vanished, just for the beat of a heart. A blinding light took its place, dazzling, dying away as I blinked to reveal a familiar chamber with star-shaped roundels studding the ceiling. A drawing room in the Roma Hall where my brothers and I would play on winter nights. Mother stood there, half bent toward me, a smile on her face-the face in my locket, but smiling, eyes bright. All replaced a moment later with the boat, the sky, the waves. “What?” I dropped the key as though it had bitten me. It swung from Snorri’s hand on the thong. “What!”

“I’m sorry.” Snorri tucked the key away. “I warned you.”

“No.” I shook my head. Too young she was for the assassin’s blade. Taproot’s words, as if he spoke them in my ear. “No.” I stood up, staggered by the swell. I closed my eyes and saw it again. Mother bending toward me, smiling. The man’s face looming over her shoulder. No smile there. Half-familiar but not a friend. Features shadowed, offered only in rumour, hair so black as to be almost the blue beneath a magpie’s wing, with grey spreading up from the temples.

The world returned. Two steps brought me to the mast and I clung for support, the sail flapping inches from my nose.

“Jal!” Snorri called, motioning for me to come back and sit before the sweep of the boom took me into the water.

“There was a blade, Snorri.” Each blink revealed it, light splintering from the edge of a sword held low and casual, the fist at his side clenched about its hilt. “He had a sword!” I saw it again, some secret hidden in the dazzle of its steel, putting an ache in my chest and a pain behind my eyes.

• • •

“I want the truth.” I stared at Kara. Aslaug hadn’t arrived with the setting sun. To me, that was proof enough of the völva’s power. “You can help me,” I told her.

Kara sighed and bound the tiller. The wind had fallen to a breeze. The sails would soon be furled. She sat beside me on the bench and looked up to study my face. “Truth is rarely what people want, Prince Jalan.”

“I need to know.”

“Knowledge and truth are different things,” Kara said. She brushed stray hair from her mouth. “I want to know, myself. I want to know many things. I braved the voyage to Beerentoppen, sought out Skilfar, all in search of knowing. But knowledge is a dangerous thing. You touched the key-against Snorri’s strongest advice-and it brought you no peace. Now I advise you to wait. We’re aimed at your homeland. Ask your questions there, the traditional way. The answers are likely not secrets, just facts you’ve avoided or misplaced whilst growing up.”

“I can’t wait.” The boat had become a prison, the sea an endless wall. I sat trapped there, with neither space nor answers. Too young she was for the assassin’s blade. I remembered, on the journey north, wiping the soup from my locket and at Snorri’s insistence really seeing it for the first time in years. The scales had fallen from my eyes and I had discovered a treasure. Now I feared what I might see if I looked again at my past-but not looking had ceased to be an option. The key had unlocked the door to memories long buried. Now I had to throw that door wide. “Help me to remember.”

“I have little skill, Prince Jalan.” Kara looked down at her hands, folded in her lap, nails bitten short, fingers callused by ropework. “Find another way. . Perhaps the key-”

“It’s Loki’s key,” I snapped, filling the words with more harshness than intended. “It’s black with lies. I need to know if what I saw, what I remember, are true memories, or the trickery of some pagan spirit.”

Evening thickened, spreading across the face of the sea, the glow of the swallowed sun faded among the clouded western skies. A fat raindrop struck my hand, another grazed my cheek. Snorri watched us from the prow, huddled in his cloak. Tuttugu sat closer, whittling some piece of driftwood he’d snagged from the water.

“All I know of memory is in the blood,” Kara said. “A man’s blood can tell the secrets of his line. The story of his life lies there, the story of his father too, and his father’s father. But-”

“Let’s do that then. I like a good story, and if it’s about me-all the better!”

“But,” she kept to her thread with the tone that always means the speaker is heading toward “no.” “I am a novice. It takes a lifetime to learn the blood-tongue. Skilfar might show you a day of your choosing, or hunt out some secret held too deep for speaking. My art is less. . precise.”

“Try?” I used that vulnerable look that makes women melt.

Kara pressed her lips together in a thin line and studied my face. Her eyes, very blue, moved as if I were a book she could read. I saw her pupils dilate. Somehow she was falling for my puppy dog routine. I felt slightly disappointed. I had wanted her to be more. . magic. Stronger. I’ve found over the years that women want to save me. No matter how bad I am. No matter how bad they see me being-perhaps I’ve cast aside their friends when I’ve had my fun, or cheated with a handful of court wives, a new one each day-if I but show them some small hope that I might be redeemed, many, even some of the cleverest of them, the most moral, the most wise, step into my trap. It seems that the prospect of taming a dangerous reprobate who is unlikely to truly care for them is sweeter honey to some than, say, a strong and moral man like Snorri. Don’t ask me why. It makes no sense to me-I just thank God for making the world this way.

There in the boat though, wanting the truth, wanting for perhaps the first time in my life to know myself, I would rather have been sat beside a woman who could see right through me.

“Please,” I said, widening my eyes. “I know this will help me to be a better man.”

And like that she fell for it. “If you’re sure, Jalan.” She started to rummage in the covered space beneath the bench.

“I am.” I wasn’t sure of much except that the experience was damned unlikely to make me a better man. I was sure though that it was what I wanted, and getting what I want has always been my main priority. Aslaug says it shows strength of character. I forget what Baraqel called it.

“Here!” She pulled out a long case of polished bone from the locker and sat up. A single rune had been burned into the front of the box. It looked familiar.

“Thorns.” Kara set a finger to the rune in answer to the query in my raised eyebrow. “The first thing we’ll be needing is some blood. And for that-a thorn.” She clicked the case open to reveal the longest needle I’d ever seen.

“Ah,” I said, making to get up. “Perhaps we could do this later.” But Snorri and Tuttugu had crowded around now, both snorting as though I were play-acting for their amusement.

The weight of their expectation pressed me back into my seat. “Ha. As if I were scared of a little needle.” I managed a dry laugh. “Have at me, madam witch.”

“I have to say the incantations first.” She offered a small smile and all of a sudden despite the foot-long needle that sat between us, and the fact she’d promised to meet my next advance with a knife to the balls, I found myself wanting her. She hadn’t Astrid’s voluptuousness or Edda’s slender form, or the prettiness of either. . maybe it was just being forbidden that sparked my lust, but more than that it was the strength in her. Old witches aside, like Skilfar and my grandmother, I’d never met a woman more capable. Like Snorri she had something about her that made it impossible to believe she would ever let you down, ever be afraid, ever run.

Kara lit a lantern. Speaking in the old tongue of the north, she dipped the needle into the sea, then ran it through the flame. She spoke my name in the mix. More than once. It sounded well upon her lips.

“When the needle is blooded you must taste it. Then whatever is to be revealed will come.”

“I’ve tasted my blood before. It didn’t tell me much.” I must have swallowed a gallon of the stuff when Astrid punched me. Once my nose starts bleeding it never wants to stop.

“This will be different.” Again that smile. “Hold out your hand.”

So I did. I wasn’t sure how deep the needle would prick but I steeled myself. Squealing like a little girl probably wouldn’t help me in my new quest to bed her.

Kara took my hand, fingers probing, as if to find the ideal spot. I sat still, content to have her hold my hand, feeling a heat build between us.

“Now. .” She circled the needle over my palm as if searching.

“Ow! Dear God! Sweet Jesu! The bitch stabbed me!” I yanked my hand away, transfixed by the needle that Kara had driven entirely through it in one smooth motion. “Jesu!” Six inches of crimson-beaded steel protruded from the back of my hand.

“Quick! Taste it. The longer you delay the further back the memories!” Kara grabbed my wrist and tried to steer the hand toward my mouth.

“You fucking stabbed me!” I couldn’t quite believe it. Blackness crowded my vision and I felt faint with shock. Curiously there wasn’t much pain.

“Help me with him.” Kara glanced at Snorri and used both hands on my wrist. The bloody needle lurched toward my face. Damned if I was letting her do it though. She’d stab the thing through my mouth given half a chance! I pushed back. “Stop fighting me, Jalan. There’s not much time.”

Snorri lent his strength to the task and a moment later the needle wiped the complaint off my tongue. Kara pulled the steel free then. That’s when it started to hurt-as the needle grated across the small bones in my palm.

“Concentrate now, Jalan! This bit is important.” She clamped my face between her treacherous stabby hands. She probably said some other stuff after that, but by then I’d fainted clean away.

• • •

I’m flying. Or I’m the sky. These things are equal. The day is ending and far below me the land folds, falls, and rises. The mountains still catch the sun, forests sweep out in shadow, rivers run, or dawdle, each according to their nature, but all bound for the sea. The ocean lies distant, crinkled with the dying light.

• • •

Lower.

• • •

The country below runs from plains, green with growing, toward arid hills, stone crested. Trails of smoke lace the air like threads, twisted by the wind. Fields lie blackened where the fire has consumed them. A wood, acres wide, stands ablaze.

• • •

Lower.

• • •

A castle sprawls across a high ridge, commanding views into two valleys that run toward the garden lands. A huge castle, its outer wall thick as a house, taller than trees, punctuated by seven round towers. Enclosed within this perimeter, a small town in stone and Builder-brick, then a second wall, yards thick and higher than the first, and within that, barracks, armouries, a well-house, and a keep tower. The keep I recognize-or think I do. It reminds me of the Ameroth Tower that stands on the edge of the Scorpions, a range of hills straddling the region where Red March, Slov, and Florence meet. I visited the tower once. I must have been ten. Father had sent Martus to be squired to Lord Marsden who keeps his household there. Darin and I tagged along as part of our education. The tower had been the tallest building I’d ever seen. It still is. A work of the Builders. An ugly rectangular structure, fashioned from poured stone, without windows or ornament. I recall that it had been surrounded by rubble and the village lay a mile off, the locals too fearful of ghosts to dwell any closer. Darin and I had ridden the surrounding hills, being still young enough to explore and play. I remember that the rocks thereabouts sported peculiar scorch marks. Geometric patterns fractured into them in ways I couldn’t explain.

• • •

Lower.

• • •

An army stands camped about the castle, arrayed for siege. An army so numerous that the tents of the different units colour the ground like crops in great fields. The horses for their cavalry are corralled in herds thousands strong. Forests have been felled to build the machinery that waits at the foremost edge of the host. Rocks are piled beside each in pyramids ten, twenty, thirty feet high. The throwing arms of trebuchet, catapults and mangols are drawn back, loaded, ready to unleash.

• • •

Lower.

• • •

The stink and the cacophony of the horde are intolerable. Such a press of humanity and animals in such close confines. On the higher ground pavilions stand, decked with crests of arms. The great houses of Slov are there. The high and the mighty have come with their knights and levies. Among the forests of standards are the arms of nobles from Zagre, Sudriech, even Mayar. There cannot be less than thirty thousand men here. Perhaps fifty thousand.

• • •

I’m falling. Falling. Toward the outer wall. Unseen I descend among the troops that crowd the top of the east-most wall tower. There are a hundred archers here, smooth iron skullcaps fluted across the neck, chain-mail coifs, leather jerkins set with iron plates, skirts of overlapping leather strips, iron-studded. I have seen such armour on stands along the long gallery of Roma Hall. As a child I used to hide behind one suit in particular, by the west stair, and leap out to shock the maids.

A scorpion bolt-lobber stands at the front of the tower, aimed out between the crenulations at the distant foe. The operating crew are holding back a respectful distance whilst gathered immediately behind the engine a small group of nobility debate some issue.

In a moment I stand amongst them. Next to me is a huge warrior in battered platemail, heavy-duty stuff fashioned in the old style from black iron. He glances my way but he sees through me.

“We can hold for relief. If it takes two months we can hold,” he says, eyes fierce and dark, set in a brutal face, a black beard bristling over his lantern jaw, threaded by a pale scar.

“Damn that!” The speaker whirls from her contemplation of the enemy. She stands four fingers over six foot, her build athletic, strong, young with it. . maybe eighteen. Her armour is gilded, and worked in enamels across it are the burning spears of the Red March. No vanity this though, the steel is full gauge and without ornament. A soldier’s armour. “If we let them bide here the Czar’s path west lies open. The Steppes will be at Vermillion’s gates before the harvest.”

I watch her face, broad and angular, pale for a woman of the March-beneath a shock of dark red hair, angry hazel eyes, full lips. I know this face.

“Contaph.” She advances on the knight beside me. Even a woman of her stature has to look up at the man. “Can we attack? Sally forth? They won’t be expecting an attack.”

An intake of breath at this from the men around her, knight captains and lords by their armour. I can understand this. There are not enough troops within the castle to challenge the host outside. I know this without looking. The castle could not hold so many.

“They won’t be expecting an attack, princess,” says Contaph. “But they are ready for one, even so. Kerwcjz is no fool.”

“A deputation!” This from a man at the wall, with a spyglass to his eye.

The princess leads the nobles to the battlements, archers parting to make space. “Tell me,” she says.

“Ten riders under a white flag. An emissary. And a prisoner. A woman. A girl-”

The princess snatches the spyglass and sets it to her own eye. “Gwen!”

“Kerwcjz has your sister?” Contaph’s fist tightens on the pommel of his sword, the iron plates of his gauntlet grating one against the next. “This means Omera has fallen.”

“Give me your bow,” the princess demands of the nearest archer.

“Alica!” A strained whisper from the man beside her, smaller but similar in his colouring.

“Princess,” she says. The bow is in her hands, her eyes on his-dangerous. “Call me by my name again, cousin, and I will drop you from this wall.”

She pulls an arrow from the archer’s quiver. “It’s a good bow?”

“Y-yes. . princess.” The archer stutters it out. “Pulls a hair to the left if you over-draw. But that’s not a worry-it’s too much bow for a wo-”

Princess Alica strings the arrow and draws it to her ear, pointing up at the great keep tower back beyond the second wall. “Yes?”

“A hair to the left, your majesty.” The man backs away. “Two fingers on a fifty-yard target.”

“They’ve drawn up.” The cousin at the wall.

The princess lets the bow relax and comes to watch. Nine of the men have spread into a line on their horses. The emissary and the captive ride forward five more yards. The girl is in silks, side-saddle, she looks no more than thirteen, maybe fourteen. The man is fat, his armour adjusted for it, his neck thick and reddened by the Red March sun. He wears a blue plumed helm and a long turquoise cloak.

“Hail, the castle!” His voice reaches them, thinned by the distance.

Princess Alica’s face is stone. She strings the arrow to her bow once more and draws it.

“The flag. .” Contaph stares at her, a frown throwing his brow into deep furrows. Out among the enemy contingent the white flag flutters.

She looks once, out across the wall. “A mistake,” she says. “It helps me adjust for the wind.” She arches her spine, drawing the bowstring back further across her breastplate. . and the arrow is gone, just the hiss of it left behind amid our silence.

The princess drops the bow and steps away from the wall. Behind her a high-pitched cry rings out. A pause. The sound of galloping.

“Princess Gwen-” The cousin runs out of words.

“Shot her sister. .” The whisper ripples along the wall.

Alica whirls back around to face them all. “No negotiation. No surrender. No terms.”

Another sharp turn and she’s striding toward the stairs at the tower’s centre. Contaph jogs, clanking to catch her, the others strung out behind. I’m at her shoulder. So close I can hear the tightness of her breath.

She doesn’t turn her head as Contaph draws level at the head of the stair. “Kerwcjz would have had her staked over a fire for us all to watch by morning. He’d have set her singing my troops a song of pain and kept her at it as long as his torturers’ skills allowed.” The cousin and three others arrive behind us. Alica keeps her shoulders to them. Back at the wall the first rock explodes against the battlements. All along the enemy line engines of war release their pent up forces with throaty twangs.

“We win this, or we die. There is no third way.”

And in that moment I knew my grandmother.

And rock rained down upon us.