The Liar's key

THIRTY-THREE

A crowd had started to gather by the time we left through the Tower doors. The whole top half of the Frauds’ Tower belched smoke through its windows. Before we left I set Guardian to checking the building for Edris Dean and explained how many pieces he was to tear the corpse into. “Oh, and let everybody out,” I added. The idea of leaving anyone to fry didn’t sit well with me, but mainly I wanted as many fraudsters let loose on Umbertide as possible. That way the authorities might have too much on their plate to put great efforts in recapturing me.

No one challenged us, surrounded as we were by other inmates all pouring into the street and vanishing down alleys into the maze of Umbertide. If Edris Dean had escaped the building he must have had more important things to do than raise the alarm because there were no more than two city guardsmen in the road and both of those were trying to look inconspicuous in case anyone suggested they stem the tide of escaping prisoners. I sincerely hoped Edris had crawled away to die but at the very least it seemed likely that even a necromancer would require some time and resources to repair the kind of wounds he had sustained.

• • •

With the morning sun climbing above the rooftops we hurried along narrow streets following Hennan who had learned the ways in and out of the city that honest folk didn’t use or know of. The easiest way to leave Umbertide proved to be by climbing over the walls rather than scrambling through the sewer pipes that got Hennan into the city. It would have been a tight and malodorous squeeze for Kara-Snorri and I would not have fitted. Besides, the walls of any city not at war are poorly watched, and with the column of smoke from the Frauds’ Tower to draw the eye of any guard who might actually have been watching, it proved easy enough to find a stretch of wall we might escape over.

The only real problems were in buying a rope and grapple. It’s damn hard to come up with a good reason for wanting a grapple in the first place and even harder to find a blacksmith who doesn’t tell you to pay now and come back in three days to collect it.

• • •

“Throw it higher,” Kara urged as the iron hook narrowly missed my head on its second descent.

I paused and favoured her with a narrow-eyed stare, remembering I’d not forgiven her for breaking my nose. “Throw it higher? That’s the wisdom of the völvas speaking is it? All those years of arcane study. .”

I threw it higher on the third attempt and snagged the wall. Climbing a thin and unknotted rope turned out to be a lot harder than I had imagined and I spent the best part of five minutes jumping, lunging, and straining, without getting more than a yard off the ground. Finally I got the hang of it, at least partially. Driven mostly by embarrassment I managed to shin up the rope to the top of the wall as two toothless elders and a growing crowd of local urchins watched on. Kara and the boy followed with no discernible effort, Kara with the spear, Gungnir, strapped to her back. Snorri brought up the rear, his wound making his climb an awkward one, though only once, when he slipped, did he snarl out in pain. I found getting down the other side proved both easier and faster. Also it hurt more at the bottom.

Once gathered outside at the base of the walls we hurried away across the dusty and hard-baked earth toward the margins of the nearest olive grove and lost ourselves among the trees.

“Well?” Kara spoke first. We’d followed the gradient down through the dappled shade to come in sight of the Umber, the river without which the city behind us would be nothing more than badlands flecked with mesquite bushes and picked over by scrawny goats.

“Well what?” I asked, swatting at the flies, already too hot and too sweaty.

“Do you know the way?”

“Hennan knows the backpaths. I came by the Roma Road.” Before long much of the Umbertide guard would be fanning out around the northern stretch of the Roma Road. It wouldn’t matter to Snorri. He was heading south, to the sour lands where Kelem made his home in a salty gash in the earth known as the Crptipa Mine.

“Do you know the way to the mine?”

“To Kelem’s mine? Why the hell would I? I’m in Umbertide because my uncle sent me to attend to some banking affairs not to find some wizened magus and. . and beg him to let me do something incredibly stupid.” I actually did know the way, at least roughly, but given I’d no interest in going there I kept the fact to myself.

“Snorri?” Hennan looked up from his own misery at the Norseman in his. Seeing such a sombre look on so young a face reminded me that Tuttugu lay dead-a fact I’d been trying to push to the back of my mind into the place where things get forgotten.

“I know the way.” Snorri looked up, eyes red, jaw set, scary as hell. “I’ll have the key now-you can stay or go.”

I studied the broad palm he held out toward me, and pursed my lips. “I didn’t break Hennan out of one prison and storm another single-handed just to give you a key that we earned, all three of us, me, you, and Tuttugu. I came in to save your lives. And given that I could have just walked off with the key instead some might say I’ve got a pretty good claim to owning it now. So the least you can do is ask rather than demand, and perhaps show a little fucking gratitude.” I regretted the profanity the moment it left my mouth. Partly because a prince of the realm doesn’t want to be seen lowering himself to gutter talk with commoners but mainly because of the sunlight burning on the edge of the axe fixed across his back in a leather harness I’d recently paid for.

A dangerous silence stretched between us, slowly tightening every muscle I had in anticipation of being imminently hit. Snorri reached out and I flinched so violently that I nearly struck his hand away. He took hold of my shoulder, deep blue eyes finding mine, and sighed.

“I’m sorry, Jal. I don’t know how you got to us but it took guts, and skill. I thank you for it. Tuttugu will be telling the tale over the tables at Valhalla. The north won’t forget it. You are a true friend, and I was wrong to speak to you like that.”

We stood there a minute, him with his head bowed, looming above me, hand heavy on my shoulder, me puffing up with pride. Some men can just lift you with a few words. Snorri was one of them, and although I knew how it worked, and had seen it before, it still worked.

I put the key into the open palm of his other hand and his fist closed about it. The sense of loss was immediate, even though I knew the thing to be ten kinds of poison.

“I have to do this,” he said, sounding for all the world as if he actually did.

I tried to fathom that one. He had to take the key to the man who had sent assassins to kill him for it? He had to take the key to the man who wanted it badly enough to reach out more than a thousand miles for it? He had to enter the lair of a deadly mage and face ridiculous odds. . and the “prize” was to open a door into death and start another suicidal quest that couldn’t possibly give him what he wanted?

“You really don’t.”

“I do. And there’s no man I’d rather have with me than you, Jalan, Prince of Red March. But this is my journey and I won’t ask anyone to share the danger. I took you north against my enemies-I’m not going to lead you into Hel.”

Dammit if I didn’t find my mouth opening to contradict him. I managed to strangle off a defiant declaration that I’d stand by him against all the hordes of the underworld.

“Look. Kelem wants you there. He’s been pulling you south with that wound in your side. He blocked you from the door in Eridruin’s Cave and would have shut any others you went to. You know he’s reeling you in. Christ, you’re only out of that tower because of the dreams!”

“What dreams?” Kara stepped closer, eyebrows raised.

My shoulders slumped. “Kelem hired a dream-witch, Sageous, we met him in Ancrath, Snorri and I. He plagued me with nightmares about Hennan until I found him. Hennan led me to Snorri. There, I didn’t come after anyone out of heroism. I came because I couldn’t sleep. Weeks of not sleeping will have a man ready to try anything for peace.”

“Weeks?” Kara smiled and turned away.

“Weeks!”

“But we were only captured five days ago,” she said.

I stared at her retreating back, trying to re-evaluate myself. Perhaps I did have a conscience after all. .

Snorri took his hand from me and stepped back. “We both know the key is a curse, Jal. There’s no happiness in it, only trickery. You’ll save yourself more sorrow than you can imagine if you give it up.”

He held Loki’s key out to me, compassion in his eyes. “But you’re right-you earned it. I had no right to demand it from you.” Kara turned and stared with such intensity that I thought at any moment she might leap forward and snatch the thing from him.

Part of me suspected Snorri had it right-I should refuse it. Even so, if I had a future in Vermillion it probably started with me placing Loki’s key into my grandmother’s care. And more than that I just plain didn’t want to give it up.

I took the key from him. “I’m not going through the door if we find it, but I’ll come with you and carry this burden until the last. And if you stand before that door and ask me to unlock it. . I will.” I made it a bold and manly speech, meeting him eye to eye. “It’s what a friend would do.” Also keeping his company while heading in an unexpected direction would probably be my best chance at not being caught by Umbertide’s authorities and thrown back in jail. Kara shot me a suspicious glance as if she could read my mind, but if she could then after all those weeks lusting for her in that boat her opinion of me probably couldn’t be lowered. I gave her a winning smile, slapped Hennan on the back and led off, the key deep in my pocket once more.

“Where are you going?” Kara asked as I passed her. “I thought you said you didn’t know the way.”

She had me there so I veered toward the river and knelt to wash my hands. “Cleanliness is next to godliness, dear lady, and since I’m keeping the company of heathens I should at least aspire to washing the dirt off.”

• • •

We camped by the river that evening beside a slow meander where the Umber snaked across its floodplain. All of us took the opportunity to wash off the best part of a week’s worth of prison filth. I had to remind myself several times that Kara was a treacherous dark-sworn heathen witch because she looked damn good dry and dirty and a whole lot better clean and wet. I’d been far too long without a woman. Being so focused on gambling does that to you. It’s the only drawback. Well, that and the losing.

I say “camped” but “lying down in a vineyard” would be more accurate. Fortunately the sky was clear and the air kept warm with the memory of the day’s heat. Kara sat with Snorri, cleaning his injuries and applying a paste made from some herb or other found along the riverbank. The cuts he’d taken from the manacles were deep and ugly and like to sour if not treated. Even with a chirurgeon wounds are apt to turn bad in the heat and once ill humours are in the blood they’ll drag you to an early grave no matter who you are.

The main wound, the one Kelem’s assassin put on Snorri, Kara couldn’t treat. I could see it would give him no peace, and the way he kept looking to the south-east let me know where it drew him. How much of his thinking was his own now, I wondered. If Kara truly had sealed Baraqel away from Snorri so as to give her more chance of working her charms and stealing the key then she had done him a double wrong. While he was light-sworn his own magics had worked against the wound. With Snorri undefended the rock-sworn infection would only grow until either it killed him or claimed his will.

When Kara had finished with Snorri I tried to get her to see to my nose, after all she broke it, but she claimed it wasn’t broken and if anything I should be tending her eye.

“Jal gave you that?” Snorri looked up from the grapes he’d been trying, wincing at their sourness this early in the season.

“Long story.” I lay back quickly and stared up at the first stars, just piercing their way through the deep maroon of the sky. My shoulders burned where Edris Dean’s blood had soaked them and had started to blister and peel as if I’d been out in the sun too long. It hurt but I consoled myself with the thought it probably hurt the necromancer more. If I’d had to let another gallon flood over me to know he was dead and done it would have been a price worth paying.

I wondered if the Silent Sister had seen this when she looked into a future so bright it blinded her. Or perhaps she’d not looked past the destruction of the unborn seeking the key beneath the Bitter Ice. Had she moved to stop the Dead King gaining Loki’s key only to have her two agents of destruction, one her own flesh and blood, deliver the thing to Kelem? From what Grandmother told me Kelem was closely tied to the Lady Blue and hers was the hand that sought to steer the Dead King. We’d carried it a thousand miles and more from frozen wastes to the dry and burning hills of Florence, bringing it to the very door the Silent Sister never wanted to open. . In the end it seemed that Loki’s key had tricked even my great-aunt, reaching back through the years to fool her.

As the sun set I heard knocking. I looked around, but the others were settling down, Hennan already with his head buried in his arms. It came again, as if on all sides. I’d heard it before, in the debtors’ jail, for a minute or two. . The evening seemed full of whispers as the sky flushed crimson and the sun sank behind the mountains. The knocking came louder, then faded. I thought of Aslaug, of her dark appetites and the long-limbed beauty of her. It occurred to me, too late to act even if minded to, that I’d heard this knocking only since I held the key. Kara had somehow locked Aslaug away from me-did I now hold the means to open the way once more?

I noticed Kara watching me and decided to hang the key about my neck on a thong. Pockets are too easily picked and I didn’t trust her not to try. I’d scarcely finished tying the knots when exhaustion leapt on me from the shadows. I hadn’t slept in what seemed like days and felt as tired as I had ever been. I thought of Sageous, waiting to walk my dreams, and with a shudder I pulled the key from my shirt. I pressed it to my forehead. “Lock him out.” A whisper, but heartfelt. It seemed worth a try. I shoved the key back, yawning those huge yawns that stretch your jaw and fill your ears with the sound of sleep.

I lay down and let dreams wash around me while the stars came out in force and the hills throbbed with the song of crickets serenading the night. My grandmother’s war had swept us up, me, Snorri, Kara, the boy, Tuttugu, all of us-her sister had set us on the board and they played us. The Red Queen making her moves from the throne about which I orbited, slung north, slung south always seeking to return, and the Lady Blue watching from her mirrors, her own pieces upon the gaming table. Was Kelem hers too, I wondered, or another player?

All day, since near-choking on the blood that Kara’s punch brought flooding from my nose, the dream I’d escaped had continued to run its course, whispering at the edge of hearing, painting itself on the back of my eyelids if I blinked. Now I closed my eyes and listened hard. In my time I’d been both a player and been played. I knew which I liked best, and I knew that learning the rules is a vital first step if you intend to leave the board. One more yawn and the dream devoured me.

• • •

The banqueting hall of the great palace at Vermillion lies below me, though grander, more full, and more merry than I have ever seen it. I’m standing in the musicians’ gallery, a place I’ve crept to before to spy on feasts when I was too young to attend them-not that Grandmother is given to hosting such things, save for the great mid-winter banquet of Saturnalia, which she holds mainly to annoy the pope. Uncle Hertet on the other hand will honour any festival, pagan or otherwise, that gives an excuse to broach wine casks and summon his proxy court to the palace so they can all pretend the queen has died and play out their roles before age diminishes them further.

The hall below me however has more nobles shoulder to shoulder than Uncle Hertet ever attempted to dine, and on the walls garlands of holly and ivy festoon in profusion, berry red upon glossy emerald, chains of silver bells, and displays of swords and pole arms fanning out enough sharp iron to equip an army. I look left, then right. Alica stands to one side, a child of eleven or twelve, Garyus and his sister to the other, with me occupying the gap the twins have put between them and my grandmother. The girls stand, gripping the carved mahogany of the banister; Garyus sits, resting his ill-made legs.

The glittering crowd below hold my eye, the finery of a departed age, a fortune in silks and taffeta, each lord glittering with wealth displayed for every other. Hardly one among the hundreds would be alive when I woke, claimed by age, the children beside me old beyond my imagination. For the longest time I’d believed my grandmother had come into the world creased and seamed, carrying her wrinkles from the womb, the iron grey in her red tresses as ancient as the lichen on statues. To see her young unsettles me in ways I can’t explain. It tells me that one day it really will be my turn to be old.

The feast is almost over, though food still mounds the platters and servants scuttle hither and thither to refill and replenish. Here and there are empty seats, a lord stands, unsteady, bows toward the host, and walks toward the great doors with the overly careful gait of a man in his cups. Elsewhere guests are flagging, pushing back plates. Even the dogs at the margins of the hall have lost their enthusiasm for dropped bones, barely prepared to snarl their ownership.

At the head of the great table, presiding over fifty yards of polished oak near hidden beneath silver platters, goblets, candelabras, tureens, and ewers for wine and water, sits a man I know only from paintings. His portraits are rare enough to make me wonder if the Red Queen burned them. Gholloth, second of his name, a blond giant of a man, sits there-red-faced from the drink now, his tunic elaborately embroidered and blazoned with the red banner of the March, but wine-stained and straining at the seams. On canvas they paint him forever young and glorious as he looked on the beaches of Adora, or was imagined to look. They show him at the start of the invasion that was to tie the dukedom to the Red March throne. The War of Barges they called it because he took his forces on river barges across the sixteen miles of sea to reach Taelen Point. Now he looks to be fifty or more and wearing his years poorly, as old when he sired my grandmother as his own father had been when he sired him. Where the elder Gholloth might be I can’t say, dead perhaps, or a toothless ancient hunched upon his throne with a bowl of soup.

The twins aren’t watching their father though: the Silent Sister is staring at someone with unusual intensity, even for her, and Garyus follows her gaze, frowning. Alica and I join them. We’re watching a woman about halfway along the table. She doesn’t stand out to me, neither old nor young, not pretty, more motherly, modestly covered, her gown a lacklustre affair of black and cream, only her hair sparkles, raven-dark beneath a web of sapphires held on silver wire.

“Who is she?” Alica asks.

“Lady Shival, minor nobility from one of the Port Kingdoms, Lisboa I think.” Garyus frowns, raking his memory. “Has King Othello’s ear, an unofficial adviser of sorts.”

“Elias is watching her,” Alica says, and Garyus blinks, looking across the room to where a man stands by the wall in the shadows, away from the diners, ostensibly filling his pipe. There’s something familiar about the fellow. It’s in the swift and restless movement of his hands. He reaches up to light a taper from the wall lantern and his upturned face catches the glow.

“Taproot! By Christ!” They don’t hear me of course. I’m not here, just a dreamer floating in the memories my blood carries. It can’t be Taproot. This man is in his forties, and the Dr. Taproot I know can’t be past his fifties. Besides, how would my great-grandfather’s courtier be traipsing across the Broken Empire at the head of a circus? This must be an ancestor of his. But just observing him, seeing the quick and bird-like motion of his head as he scans the tables, always returning to our lady beneath her net of sapphires, I know it’s him. I know when he opens his mouth I’ll hear “watch me” and restless hands will conduct the conversation.

“Elias will-”

“This woman is beyond him. - says she’s here to kill. . someone.” Garyus cuts Alica off, waving her away with irritated jerks of his over-tight arm. Again their sister’s name escapes me, just a silence where it should sound.

“I didn’t hear her say anything,” Alica says, peering at her sister who is still fixated upon the woman below, her gaze unwavering. “Who is this woman to kill?”

“Grandfather,” says Garyus, half a whisper. “She seeks to change the destiny of our line.”

“Why?” It’s not the question I would ask, certainly not at eleven. I’d be asking where we should hide.

“- won’t say,” Garyus replies.

The Silent Sister breaks her staring at the woman below to glance my way. For an instant I’m sure she sees me-I’m transfixed by those mismatched eyes, the blue and the green. She returns to her study.

“She doesn’t know?” Alica asks.

“Be quiet, child,” Garyus says, though he’s just a boy himself. He looks serious now, old beyond his years, and sad, as if a great weight has been laid upon him. “I could have been king,” he says. “I could have been a good king.”

My grandmother frowns. She hasn’t it in her to lie to him, even this young when the whole world is half make-believe. “Why are we talking about that again?”

Garyus sighs and sits down. “- needs my strength. She needs to see, or this woman will kill us all before we can stop her.”

Alica’s frown deepens. “-’s done that before. . hasn’t she?”

Garyus’s nod is slight enough to be missed. “Even before we were birthed.”

“Don’t do it.” Alica is speaking to them both. “Tell Father. Set the guards on her. Have her thrown in-”

“- needs to see.” Garyus hung his head. “This woman is more than she seems. Much more. If we don’t know her before we act, we will fail.”

The Silent Sister leans over the balustrade now, staring at the woman with such intensity that it trembles in each line of her over-thin body, staring so hard that I almost expect to see the path between them light up with some recognition of the energies being spent. Garyus hunches in on himself, a slight gasp escaping his lips.

Unseen forces mount. My skin crawls with them, and I’m not even there. Down below the sapphires in the woman’s hair seem to return more than the light of lanterns, sparkling with some inner fire, a vivid dance of blue across the blackness of her hair. She sets down her goblet, and looks up, half a smile on wine-dark lips as she meets the Silent Sister’s gaze.

“Ah!” Garyus cries out in pain, limbs drawn tight to him. The Silent Sister opens her mouth as if to scream but, though the air seems to shake with it, there is no sound. I watch her face as she stands, her gaze still locked with the woman’s. For a second I could swear there is steam rising from the Silent Sister’s eyes. . and still she won’t break away. Her nails score the dark wood as some invisible pressure forces her back, and finally, like a branch snapping, she is flung back, reeling, arrested only by the wall behind her. She stands bent double, hands on thighs, pale hair about her face, drawing in shuddering breaths.

“What. .” Garyus’s voice is weak and croaky-more the voice I know. “What did you see?”

There is no answer. The silence stretches. I’m turning back to see what the woman is doing when suddenly the Silent Sister straightens up. Her hair parts and I see that one of her eyes is pearly blind, the other darkened beyond any memory of blue skies.

“Everything.” The Silent Sister speaks it as though it is the last word she will ever utter.

“We need to do something.” Alica, seeming a child for once, states the obvious. “Get me close enough and I’ll stick a knife in her.” The illusion evaporates.

“It won’t be easy.” Garyus doesn’t raise his head. “- saw enough before to poison her drink.”

“And?” Alica turns back to observe the feast.

“The man slumped on the table beside her? He’s dead. She swapped goblets.”

I don’t ask myself how the Silent Sister had known hours before which goblet to coat with venom, or where she’d obtained such a thing, silent and young as she is. She knew the same way the woman below knew to exchange with her neighbour. Both of them carry the same taint.

“Jesu.” Alica leans against the banister, eyes hard. The woman hasn’t moved: she picks a last sweetmeat from her plate as she talks to the man beside her-the one who’s not dead. She laughs at whatever he just said. “So if not poison, then what?”

Garyus sighs, an unutterably weary sound, and lifts his head as though it weighs a man’s weight. “The men I have around me-they’re mine. I replaced Father’s with hires of my own, expensive, but they’re mercenaries of the highest quality, and their loyalty runs as deep as my pockets. We’ll wait for her in the Sword Gallery and. . she won’t leave.”

Alica raises an eyebrow at this piece of information. A moment later she hastens to the door and raps against it. A man in palace livery enters, pushing a wheeled chair. He’s a solid fellow, watchful, a thin white seam of scar below his right eye as if underscoring it. I’d like to say I would have spotted him as more than a flunky, but I don’t know if that’s true.

The Silent Sister helps Garyus into the chair and he waves to be wheeled out. He’s weaker now, more twisted. It’s more than exhaustion-his sister has spent his health to buy what she needed. A second hard-man waits in the chamber beyond amid the instruments too large to be taken away with the musicians, a harp, drums, long tubular bells. He helps carry the chair down the stairs. Any aristocracy who are staying at the king’s pleasure will be housed in the guest wing, and to reach that from the royal banquet hall requires you walk the length of the Sword Gallery. If the woman is planning murder she must have been invited to stay the night, or else she is cutting things fine.

I wonder for a moment that neither of Garyus’s men are armed-but of course he’s unlikely to have permission to have his own hires wearing blades in the king’s house, relative or not, especially not as a displaced heir. The mercenaries may be paid well enough to risk concealed knives, but they’d have to be damn small to pass unnoticed. It seems unlikely that my great-grandfather or his sire are so lax as to not have regular inspections-certainly Grandmother has become very keen on them in later life. Still, the pair of them could strangle this woman with a cord swift enough.

We walk through the palace, Garyus trundled ahead, rattling in his chair, taking familiar passages that have changed remarkably little in sixty years. Just before we reach the gallery Alica pauses, then the others, then me. The Silent Sister has stopped some way behind us, beside a black oak door. She’s pointing.

“What does she say?” Alica asks her brother.

“I. .” He seems lost. “I can’t hear her any more.”

The message is clear enough without words, silent or otherwise. We go through and find ourselves in a tall but narrow chamber lined with cabinets, each fronted with thin sheets of Builder-glass, and each sporting a score or more of butterflies, speared through with pins to keep them in place. In dusty legions they haunt the room, the brilliance of their wings muted through neglect, a dozen lost summers impaled behind glass. I’ve not been in here before, or if I have the insects have been removed.

“Did we miss her?” Alica ventures, pulling a small but wicked knife from the pleated folds of her cream skirts.

The Silent Sister shakes her head.

“Gwen! Is she safe?” Garyus tries to straighten in his chair, remembering their little sister. The one who Alica will put an arrow through from the walls of Ameroth Keep six years from now.

The Silent Sister nods, though there is a sadness in it, as if she now shares my knowledge.

Garyus turns his head with effort to look at the man beside him. “Grant, there’s a woman that needs to be killed. She’ll be coming down the Sword Gallery shortly. She’s a threat to me and to my family. When the deed is done both of you will need to leave the palace and my service immediately. You’ll be taking three hundred in crown gold with you.”

Grant glances at the man behind Garyus. “Will she be alone?”

“There may be others with her, but no guards, nobody armed. The Lady Shival is the only one who should die. The one with sapphires in her hair.”

“Blue lady. Got it.” Grant puts a hand to his chin. His fingers are blunt and scarred. “Three hundred? And you’re sure, my lord? Killing in the palace is no small thing. Not an end to be pursued without certainty. Unless your sisters can hide you you’ll be found at the scene.”

Garyus tolerates the questioning-it’s well meaning after all, if insolent. “I’m certain, Grant. Johan, is it a fair price?”

“It is, my lord.” The other man, darker, older, inclines his head. His voice, soft and high, surprises me. “The money will reach us where?”

“Port Ismuth. My factor there, Carls. Within two weeks.”

We wait in silence then, amid the dead butterflies, dry wings unmoving within their cases. Five minutes pass, ten. . an hour?

The Silent Sister raises her hand. Grant and Johan go to the door, we follow them out, Alica pushing Garyus along.

Double doors lead into the Sword Gallery and here I see a difference between the present day and the gallery of sixty years before. Grandmother has hung the length of the hall with oil portraits of swordmasters practising their art. Her father had his art in iron rather than oils, with a hundred and more swords lining the walls, each pointing to the ceiling, each different. Grant breaks a fine example free from its restraints, a long sword with a blade of black Turkman iron, and hands it to Johan. He takes another for himself, a shorter but heavier sword in Teuton steel, and advances toward the double doors at the far end.

The doors open a second before the two mercenaries reach them. And there she stands, Lady Shival, behind her a maid in royal colours escorting her to her rooms. The lady seems entirely unsurprised to see two men advancing on her with blades drawn. Her smile, on a face just a few years shy of being matronly, is almost a mother’s, reproachful but indulgent.

“Look at yourselves!” she admonishes, and lifts her hand revealing a small silver mirror.

Johan’s advance is arrested as if he’d walked into something solid. He lifts his off hand, grappling with something I can’t see. The muscles in his neck stand out, corded with the strain. To the left Grant finds himself similarly caught, horror crowding his face as he struggles, his sword hand trapped, his off hand trying to close on something. Lady Shival walks between the pair, leaving the maid standing stunned in her wake.

“Should you children be up so late?” She leans forward slightly to address the trio.

Alica doesn’t waste any time on small talk or threats, just springs forward, knife concealed at her side.

“No.” The lady is faster, a tilt of her hand and her mirror is aimed at the child, stopping her as effectively as it stopped both mercenaries. “And that leaves Gholloth’s twins. .” She faces them: Garyus hunched in his chair, the Silent Sister beside him. She ignores the boy and meets his twin’s gaze. “We’ve met already, dear.” Again the motherly smile, though I see something harder behind it now. “Quite the stare you have there, young lady. But if you go looking in places we’re not supposed to look. . well, let’s just say the future is very bright.”

The Silent Sister makes no reply, just stares, one eye pearly blind, the other dark and unreadable.

“This whole thing.” Lady Shival waves her arm at the mercenaries, still struggling, grunting with effort, making quick readjustments of their feet. “It’s very inconvenient. I have to move quickly now, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t stop to talk.” She moves her mirror into the line that joins her eyes with the Silent Sister’s. “It’s a hole,” she says. And it is. In place of the silver and reflections there’s nothing but a dark and devouring hole, sucking in light and sound and air. I feel myself drawn forward, drawn in, the very essence of me bleeding from my skin and pulling away toward that awful void.

The Silent Sister holds her open hand toward the mirror, blocking it from her view, and closes her fingers with slow purpose. She’s a yard short of touching it but the bright noise of breaking glass rings out and blood runs from the fist she’s made. The hole shrinks, closes, and is gone.

“Remarkable,” the lady says. She takes a step forward. Her eyes are blue. I hadn’t seen it before. Deepest blue. A blue that bleeds into the whites and makes something inhuman of her. Another step forward and she holds out her hand toward the Silent Sister, clawed, palm forward. A blueness suffuses the light about her. “Impressive for one so young, but I don’t have time to be impressed, child.” Her lip trembles in a snarl. “Time to die.” And something that was coiled tight inside her is released so suddenly that the shock of it runs through the air, pulsing out, almost visible as a ripple.

The Silent Sister reels back as if struck. Only her grip on Garyus’s chair keeps her upright. She struggles back to her position as though walking into a high wind, her mouth set in a grim line of effort.

The Lady Blue raises her other hand and lets whatever venom is in her pour out onto the girl before her who falls to one knee with a noiseless gasp. The Lady Blue advances, my great-aunt bent and helpless before her.

“Get back!” My shout goes unheard and I stand, impotent, wanting to run but having no place to hide in these blood memories.

As the Lady Blue looms above her the Silent Sister reaches one hand up to clasp her brother’s arm just above the elbow. Garyus lolls his head toward her. “Do it.” Two words croaked out, thick with regret.

The Lady Blue stoops, clawed hands closing toward the Silent Sister’s head from either side to deliver the coup de grace, but something stops her, as if the air has thickened. Garyus groans and twists in his chair, his body spasming as his twin draws power from him. They were born joined together these two, and though sharp steel cut them apart there is a bond there that remains unbroken. It seems what makes the Silent Sister stronger makes Garyus weaker, more broken, and given how this boy appears to me, decades later as an old man, it seems that whatever she takes cannot be returned.

“Die.” The Lady Blue snarls it past gritted teeth but the Silent Sister, though bowed, continues to defy her as Garyus sacrifices his strength.

“It’s only a reflection.” Alica pants the words out behind Lady Shival. “It is not my equal.”

Whatever the child is wrestling with it appears to be getting weaker. The mercenaries are having a very different experience, each backed against the wall now, the edges of their swords being pushed inexorably toward their necks, though nobody’s there to wield the blades but them.

Somewhere in the distance there’s screaming. I glance away from the contest of wills to see the maid has fled. It can only be moments before palace guards converge on the battle.

The Silent Sister raises her head, slower than slow, her hair sweat-soaked, her neck trembling with effort, and on her face, as she meets the Lady Blue’s eyes, a grin that I know. Alica has her small knife raised now, her wrist white as if a hand were wrapping it, just as her free hand clasps empty air with a desperate intensity. With tiny steps, each the product of huge struggle, she is advancing on the Lady Blue’s back.

Deeper shouts ring out, closer now, an alarm bell starts to clang further back in the palace.

Cursing in a tongue I’ve not heard before, the Lady Blue breaks away, sprints along the Sword Gallery and vanishes between the two mercenaries, veering left past the double doors. As she passes them both Grant and Johan lose their battle and slide down the walls clutching their throats, blood drenching their chests.

I stand, overwhelmed by a deep sense of relief, although I was never in danger. Alica’s already running, but in the wrong direction: she’s chasing the lady. The Silent Sister is on all fours, her head down, exhausted. Garyus flops in his chair, as broken as I ever knew him, his last vestiges of health sacrificed to his twin’s power, drawn along whatever fissure still connects them. His eyes, almost hidden in the shadow of his monstrous brow, find me, or seem to. I meet his gaze a moment, and a sorrow I can’t explain closes a cold hand in my guts. I know I’m not the man ever to make the kind of gesture this boy has made. My siblings, my father, Red March itself, all of them could go hang before I’d take the blow meant for someone else.

I run, though whether to get clear of Garyus’s scrutiny or to follow Alica I don’t know.

The Lady Blue’s path through the palace is littered with guardsmen struggling against reflections that only they can see. It’s late at night and apart from the guards the palace is deserted. In truth the palace is largely deserted at any time of the day. Palaces are an exercise in show-too many rooms and too few people to enjoy them. A king can’t afford to let his relatives get too close and so the Inner Palace is nothing but luxurious chambers enjoyed by no one and unseen save by the cleaners who dust and the archivists who ensure that the dust is all they remove.

We pass more struggling guards. The dangerous men will be wherever the king is. Not in his throne room, not at this hour, but they won’t be walking the corridors, guarding vases and rugs, they’ll be close to the man who matters.

I catch up with Alica, though it takes some doing. I’ve run these corridors myself-well mostly corridors further away, the Red Queen isn’t that fond of her grandchildren, but on occasions as a child I’ve scampered down these halls. But, stranger or not, the Lady Blue is ahead of us both. She’ll need luck, however, and lots of it. This wasn’t her plan, this is desperation, or anger, or both, and it’s being made up on the spot.

As I run alongside Alica I try to remember what I’ve been told about my great-great-grandfather’s death. I draw a blank. I never gave a damn about any of the dead ones, unless it was to file away some impressive fact about my lineage that might give me an edge in pissing contests against visiting nobility. Surely I’d have remembered if he’d been brutally murdered in the palace by some crazed witch though? One of them died hunting. . pretty sure. And another of “a surfeit of ale.” I always found that one amusing.

Although Alica looks grim, and there’s murder afoot, I can’t help feeling the worst is over. After all I never knew either of the elder Gholloths, One and Two as the historians call them, and I’ve had my whole life to come to terms with the fact that they were both dead. And frankly five minutes would have been more than enough for that. We’ll find the Lady Blue has killed him, or we won’t, but either way she’s run off and I’m feeling far more relaxed than I was when confronted with her back in the Sword Gallery. Not that I was in any danger there either. . All in all I’m relaxing into these memories quite happily and-I glance back over my shoulder. I’m sure I heard a dog bark. I shrug and catch up with Alica as she turns a corner and starts up a flight of stairs. There it is again. The baying of a hound. Surely none of the mutts from the banquet hall have been allowed to run loose in the palace. Again, and closer. Intolerable! Mongrels from the hall prowling the corridors of power! A sudden tremor puts me off my stride. Earthquake? The whole place seems to be shaking.

“Slap him!” A woman’s voice.

“Get him up!” A boy’s.

I open my eyes, confused but still outraged about the dog, and a large hand smacks me across the cheek.

“What the!” I clutched my face.

“Hounds, Jal!” Snorri let go of me and I sunk to my knees. The ground dusty, the night dark, the stars many, and strewn in such profusion they made a milky band across the heavens.

“Dogs?” I heard them now, baying in the distance, but not distant enough.

“They’re tracking us down. After the key still.” Snorri helped me up again. “Sure you want to keep it?”

“Of course.” I pulled myself up to my full height and puffed out my chest. “I don’t scare that easily, old friend.” I slapped him on the shoulder with as much manly vigour as I could muster. “You’re forgetting who stormed Fraud Tower unarmed!”

Snorri grinned. “Come on, we’ll lead them higher up, see if we can’t find a climb they won’t manage.” He turned and led off.

I followed before the darkness had a chance to swallow him entirely, Kara and Hennan flanking me. Damned if I was going to give up the key now! I’d need something to give them if they caught me. And besides, even if I gave the key to Snorri and ran off in another direction the bastards would still hunt me down. These were bankers we were talking about, and I owed taxes. They’d hunt me to the ends of the earth!