The Liar's key

THIRTY-ONE

Kara lay senseless in the dark alleyway. Senseless or dead. Snorri told me as often as not the head-struck die, or their wits are scrambled to the end of their days. Worse, like Alain DeVeer on the morning that started this long nightmare so many months ago, they might just turn around and try to kill you.

“She’s not dead,” Hennan said.

“How can you tell?” I stared hard, raising the lantern, looking for some small signs of breath being drawn.

“She hasn’t got up and tried to bite your face off.”

“Ah. True.” I looked left then right down the alley. “Let’s get out of here.”

I led off and Hennan followed. Any small pang of guilt I felt at leaving Kara unconscious in the gutter washed away with the thought that if there were dead things stalking us in the dark then we were leading them away from her. The blood, continuing to run from my nose, dripped from my chin and left a pattering trail behind us. I could taste it running into the back of my throat, hot and coppery. I swallowed without thinking. Blood triggers the spell-the only thought I had time for before I pitched forward into my own darkness.

• • •

The night swallows me and I rush through it, blind and reckless, the wind tugging at my clothes. For some endless time there’s nothing, no sound, no light, no ground beneath my feet though I’m running fast as I can, faster than is safe. A pin-prick of brightness pierces me, so thin and sharp I wonder that it doesn’t hurt. I race toward it-there’s no other direction here-and it grows, becoming larger and brighter and brighter and more large until it fills my vision and there’s no rush, no running, no motion, just me at the window, leaning across the sill, looking out, out onto a sunlit city far below.

“Vermillion looks so small from here.”

The voice comes from beside me, a boy’s voice, though cracking with the rumours of the man to come. I turn, and flinch away. The child is deformed. A boy of maybe fourteen, his arms twisted into unnatural positions, straining and tight against his body, wrists bent at painful angles, hands clawed. His skull bulges out above his forehead as if overburdened with brain. . just like-

“What, Garyus?” A girl’s voice on my right.

“The city looks so small from up here, like I could hold it in the palm of my hand,” he says.

“It looks that way to me when I’m down there in the middle of it.”

I turn and it’s the Red Queen, just a girl, no more than eleven. Jaw set, staring out into the sun-bright distance.

Garyus seems unconcerned. “The world though, sister. . now that looks big wherever you stand.”

“I could conquer it,” says Alica, still staring out across the palace walls into the streets of Vermillion. “I could lead my armies from one end to the other.”

“When you’re older,” says Garyus with the superiority of a big brother, “you’ll understand how the world works. You don’t conquer it with the sword. Armies are the last thing you use, when the result is no longer at issue. Money is the lifeblood of Empire-”

“The empire is broken. It was broken before we were born. And merchants grub after gold-wars are won by soldiers. You’re just obsessed with money because Father gave you those hundred crowns and you bred them into more. You only care because-”

“Because I was born broken, yes.” Garyus’s smile seems genuine. “Broken like the empire. Even so, I’m correct. Money is the lifeblood of Empire, and of each part of it, and of any kingdom, or nation where there exists sufficient industry to arm and equip a military of consequence. Money is the blood of nations and a person who understands that, who controls that, controls the future. Let the blood out of any country and it will collapse soon enough.”

Both of them turn and look back into the room. I turn too, blinded for a moment by the change from the brightness of the day.

“I’m right. Tell her I’m right, — .” Garyus speaks a name but it slides past me as if it is deliberately evading my ears.

It’s Alica who replies though. “He’s not right. Wars decide, and when I’m queen I’ll lead my armies to Vyene and remake the empire.” Her scowl reminds me of the expression she will wear when she gazes out across Czar Keljon’s forces from the walls of Ameroth, less than ten years from this day.

I can see who Grandmother and Great-uncle Garyus are addressing now. A pale girl, painfully slim, hair lank and colourless, of similar age to Garyus. She’s not looking at them-she’s looking at me. Her eyes are startling, one green, one blue, both unreal shades that seem to have been taken from some alien place.

“Don’t be so sure you’ll be queen, little sister,” Garyus says, his tone light but hurt behind his smile. “When Father sees what I’ve made of his investment in me he’ll-”

“He just gave you the money to give you something to do up here,” Alica says, her scowl half-frown now as though the hard truth doesn’t taste as good on her tongue as she thought it might.

“Father knows that a king needs to rule his economy as much as his people. .” Garyus trails off and looks toward his twin. “I could be king. .”

The Silent Sister gives him an unreadable look, those strange eyes fixing him for the longest time. At last she gives a slight shake of her head and looks away. Garyus’s face stiffens in disappointment. He’s almost handsome beneath the deformity of his brow.

“I will be king.” He returns his stare to the city beyond the window. “You don’t see everything!”

The three of them stand in silence in the dimness of that tower room where only the shape of the window, sun-blazed upon the floor, seems alive. Something nags at me, somewhere I should be, something I should be doing.

“Wake up.”

I look around to see which of them said it, but they’re all three bound in their own thoughts.

“Wake up.”

I remember the dark street, the dead things creeping, the witch lying in the road.

“Wake. UP!”

I tried to wake, willing my eyes wide, trying with every ounce of my determination to spit the blood from my mouth and shake off the chains of Grandmother’s memories.

“Wake.” I opened my eyes and looked up at Hennan. “Up.” We both closed our mouths on the word. Panic had me on my feet in moments, reeling from one side of the alley to the other, reaching for the wall of a house to support me. Half of me still felt as though it were in that tower room. “How long?”

“Ages!” Hennan looked up at me, face dirty and etched with worry. He’d rescued the lantern from my tumble, though it looked pretty battered.

I glanced up at the sky-still velvet and dusted with stars. “Couldn’t have been more than an hour?” Kara’s spell could have had me on my back for a week. Had she planned it that way? Perhaps I was growing less susceptible. “Two hours?”

Hennan shrugged.

“Come on.” And I snatched the lantern before leading off. The voices of Garyus and the Red Queen followed me, sounding somewhere deep behind my imagination.

I hurried along, taking turnings at random, unhooding the lantern only when some or other obstacle presented itself-the damaged hood leaked enough illumination the rest of the time to stop me running into walls. I kept my eyes on the patch of light before me-whenever I glanced at the dark I saw the lines of Garyus’s room written across it. He seemed less damaged back then but surely he knew no king so crooked as he ever sat upon a throne. Still, children hope in ways adults find hard to imagine. They carry their dreams before them, fragile, in both arms, waiting for the world to trip them.

I ran, trailing other people’s lives and dreams, and each time I slowed they caught up, surging around me to fill the night so that I had to wade through the images, through scents, memories of a touch, struggling all the while not to be dragged down beneath them and cast into one of those endless sleeps that had plagued my journey south.

In time the visions lessened and we came to broader streets where the occasional person still came and went despite the hour. The morning couldn’t be very far away and I felt I could ward off the memories that my blood had sparked, at least until I had to sleep-what dreams might come then I couldn’t say. Sageous would have to fight Kara’s magic if he wanted a place on stage. I pulled Hennan to the side of the road and sat with my back against the wall, slumped.

“We’ll wait for dawn.” I didn’t say what we’d do at dawn. Run away probably, but at least it sounded like a plan.

• • •

I could have taken Hennan’s twenty doubles off him. The fact that it was my gold in the first place only made it an easier thing to justify. I could have taken the boy’s money, left Kara senseless in the alley, bought a horse and ridden for the hills. I should have done that. I should have taken him by the ankles and shaken my florins out of him. Instead dawn found me staring across the width of Patrician Street at the high bronze doors of the Frauds’ Tower, and the silvered steel bulk of the clockwork soldier standing guard before it.

Morning made its slow advance down the street. I’m sure a tutor once told me that day breaks at a thousand miles an hour, but it always seems to creep when I’m watching. The high points on the soldier’s armour caught the first light and seemed to burn with it.

“There. I told you. Nothing we can do.” I took Hennan’s shoulder and pulled him back into the shadows of the side street. He shot me a sour look. He still hadn’t forgiven me for taking him by the ankles and trying to shake my florins out of him. I’d failed on two counts. Firstly, he’d proved heavier than I’d imagined and I got very little shaking done, and most of that with his head on the ground. Secondly, he’d had the foresight to hide all the gold. He’d probably stashed it when I fell into the vision-sleep. I explained to him how terribly mistrustful this was and how it wasn’t only an insult to my royal person but by extension to the whole of Red March. The little bastard just clamped his mouth shut and ignored all reason. Some people might say I only had myself to blame, what with teaching him to cheat at cards, advising him to always take the money, and sharing with him my policy on disposable friends. It’s not the kind of education that builds trust in the tutor. Of course I’d say to those people, “shut the hell up,” and also that it was Snorri’s fault for filling the boy’s head with nonsense about never abandoning a comrade and for making that ridiculous last stand with Hennan’s grandfather back in Osheim. In any event the boy’d hidden the money and I was hardly going to twist his arm until he told me where he’d put it. Well. . I did twist his arm, but not far enough to get him to tell me where my gold was. Hennan had turned out to be tougher than I’d expected and whilst I might twist his arm, I didn’t want to break it. Or at least not unless I was sure it’d get me my answer. And of that I wasn’t sure.

In the end we’d come to a compromise. I agreed to take him to Frauds’ Tower and show him just how impossible what he was asking would be. In exchange he would, when convinced, recover the money and we’d buy a horse then ride it to death getting to Vermillion in the hope of getting the Red Queen’s aid in freeing Snorri and Tuttugu.

“Maybe there’s a back way,” Hennan hissed at me.

“If there is, you know what it will have?” I whispered my reply. I wasn’t sure why we were whispering but it fitted the mood. “Guards. That’s what prisons are about. Guards and doors.”

“Let’s go and see,” he said. We had already watched for hours as the guards came and went, made their rounds carrying their lanterns, swords at their hips. It would look no better in the light of day or from a different angle.

I kept hold of his shoulder. “Look, Hennan. I want to help. I really do.” I really didn’t. “I want Snorri and Tuttugu out of there. But even if we had fifty men-at-arms I doubt we could do it. I don’t even have a sword.”

I felt the boy slump beneath my grip. Perhaps finally accepting in the light what I’d told him over and over in the dark. I felt sorry for him. And for me. And for Snorri and Tuttugu under the question in some torchlit room, but, in all truth, there really was nothing to be done. Snorri had sealed his own fate when he decided to keep the key and set off on this insane quest. The fact was that the day Sven Broke-Oar told Snorri his family were gone Snorri had stopped caring whether he lived or died. And the thing about people who don’t care if they live or die. . the thing is. . they die.

“We can’t stay long,” I said. “If we don’t keep moving the witch will find us.”

“Don’t call her that.” Hennan scowled.

I touched fingers to my swollen nose. “Damnable witch, I say.” I was sure she’d broken it.

“She just wants to take the key somewhere safe,” he said. “She’s no worse than you. At least she was ready to help Snorri while she could. .”

“No worse than me? She’s a witch and she wants to give the key to an even worse witch!” I started to think the only reason he’d brained her was he knew he could buy me.

“My grandda used to tell stories about Skilfar. She never sounded too bad. Helped as many people as she didn’t.” Hennan shrugged. “Who do you want to give the key to?”

“The Queen of Red March! You’re not going to insult my grandmother I hope?”

The boy shot me a dark glance. “And the key will be safe from witches in your grandmother’s hands will it?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. Kara had obviously been telling the boy tales about the Silent Sister. I glanced over my shoulder. The shadows still lay thick enough to hide a multitude of sins-any manner of witch or dead man could be creeping up on us as we wasted time watching the prison.

Still, the fact that all the dry bones in the city hadn’t converged on us during the night seemed to indicate that the Dead King couldn’t track the key with any great accuracy. Perhaps he only knew its location when it came near a corpse. In most cities there would be enough fresh corpses in the gutters come morning to pose a problem if they started dragging themselves out. Umbertide has remarkably little violent crime though-I guess its citizens are all too busy with the more lucrative kind. I hoped that, barring someone dropping dead at our feet, we would be safe enough if we kept our eyes open, especially during the day. Kara, however, had found us pretty quickly after our escape. She’d placed one charm on the key to hide it-it seemed likely that she’d placed another on it to find it. Her magics couldn’t be that potent though or she would have found a way to get to Hennan in the debtors’ prison. . unless of course her hiding charm hid the key from even her. . my head began to spin with the possibilities and I found myself imagining the curve of her lips instead and feeling a deep sense of injustice and betrayal. None of the tales I’d told myself about Kara and me had ended like this. .

I rubbed my sore eyes and sat back on my haunches. A yawn overwhelmed me. I felt more tired and in need of sleep than I had at any point in my life. All I really wanted to do was lie down and close my eyes. .

“We have to do something!” Hennan tugged at my shirtsleeve with new resolve. “Snorri would never leave you in there!”

“I wouldn’t be in there!” I bristled at the suggestion. “I’m no fraud-” I broke off, realizing that in the eyes of Umbertide’s officialdom that was exactly what I was. Very likely only my family name had saved me the horrors of the Tower, or perhaps the paperwork just hadn’t had time to go through. Considering Umbertide’s addiction to bureaucracy, and the glacial pace with which they progressed things, the latter guess was possibly the true answer.

I looked up with a shudder at the granite walls of the Frauds’ Tower. High above us the first rays of the sun were warming terracotta tiles on the conical roof. Snorri had held out against his jailers’ questions for days now, how many I couldn’t say, four? Five? And for what? Eventually they’d break him and, for all he knew, take the key. His pain was as pointless as his quest. Did he really think someone would save him? Who the hell was going to do that? Who did he even know? Certainly not anyone he could possibly expect to storm the jail and get him out. .

“We could climb the. .” Hennan trailed off, silencing himself-I didn’t even have to tell him that we couldn’t.

“God damn it, the big idiot can’t think that. . I? That’s just not reasonable! I don’t even-”

“Shhhh!” Hennan turned and pushed me back.

Two men passed our side street, deep in conversation. We crouched, hidden behind a flight of steps, me fighting a sudden urge to sneeze.

“. . the other one. The regulations though! Do this, do that, get this signed. . ah Jesus! Ten forms, two courts, and five days just to set a hot iron to flesh!” A solid man, thick-necked, silhouetted against the brightening Patrician Street. Something familiar about him.

“Everything in its time, specialist, and in its turn. It is not as if the duress applied so far has been. . gentle. The law requires that beating, the stick, and the flail are used before irons. A case must be made for each, along with the correct. .” The second man’s voice trailed off as they carried on down the street. A horse clattered by in the opposite direction, black-clad rider astride its back. Soon the streets would be full of errands as banking hours arrived.

I raised myself above the steps and looked down at Hennan. “There was something. .” The second man had seemed familiar too, though I only saw him in silhouette, a smaller man, a modern to judge by the stupidity of his hat. Something about his gait, very precise, very measured. And the voice of the first. . he’d had an accent. “Come on!”

I dragged Hennan to the corner and, crouching, peered after the pair. They’d crossed over to present themselves to the clockwork soldier at the Tower door and stood with their backs to us. The soldier dwarfed them both, taking the scroll offered by the taller of the two in a surprisingly delicate pincered grip. The modern turned a fraction so I caught his profile. Like all his kind, he had the white face of a man who avoided the sun with fanaticism, but this particular shade of fish-belly white went past even the pallor of a Norseman in winter. “Marco!”

“Who’s-” I clamped a hand over Hennan’s mouth and pulled him back.

“Marco,” I said. “A banker. One of the least human humans I’ve ever met, and I’ve known some monsters.” Also the last person I wanted to see since I owed his bank more than I owed Maeres Allus. But what was he doing here? Had it been the House Gold who put a sixty-four thousand florin debt on a beggar boy and set him to starve in debtors’ prison? Was it House Gold that had turned the wheels and cogs of Umbertide justice to licence hot irons to loosen Snorri’s tongue?

I risked another glance around the corner. Marco had already set off up the street. The soldier held the door of the Frauds’ Tower ajar for the specialist and as the man slipped through the gap I caught a glimpse of him. Just a glimpse, a snatch of dark tunic, grey trews, dusty boots, and his hair-I saw that too-close-cropped to the skull, iron grey, with just a band of it yet untouched by age, running front to back, a crest so black as to almost be blue.

“Ow!” Hennan tore free of my grip where my fingers dug into his arm. “What was that for?”

“Edris Dean,” I said. “Edris fucking Dean.” And I stood and walked out into the new day.