The Liar's key

THIRTY-FOUR

Snorri led us immediately to the river. A fact I discovered by losing my boot in unexpected and sucking mud.

“What is it with Norsemen and boats?” Now Snorri stepped to the side I could see the water, revealed where ripples returned the starlight.

“No boat.” Snorri strode down the long gentle bank.

I pulled my boot out of the mud. I appeared to have stepped into a small tributary stream. “I’m not swimming!”

“Could you lead the dogs away for us then?” Snorri called back over his shoulder. Ahead of him Kara and Hennan were already wading into the current. Damned if I knew where the boy learned to swim up in the Wheel of Osheim.

Cursing I followed, hopping as I tried to get my boot back on. The hounds sounded close one minute, distant the next. “Is it true that thing about water spoiling the scent?”

“Don’t know.” Snorri strode in, pausing a moment as the water reached his hips. “I’m just hoping they can’t get across, or won’t want to.”

I’ve never seen a dog that didn’t like to throw itself in a river. Perhaps Norse dogs are different. After all, for half the year doing that would just get them a bruised head.

“Damnation it’s cold!” I’ve yet to meet a warm river, no matter how fierce the day.

We set off swimming, or in my case, thrashing at the water and attempting to move forward rather than down. Edris’s long sword, now scabbarded at my hip, kept trying to drown me, pointing toward the riverbed and heaving in that direction as if it were made of lead rather than steel. Why I’d not bought a new blade in Umbertide I couldn’t say, save that this weapon, already stained with my family’s blood and my own, was my only link with the bastard who murdered them, and perhaps it might one day lead me to him again. In any event, swimming with a sword is to be even less recommended than regular swimming. Quite how Snorri stayed afloat with an axe across his back and a short sword at his hip I didn’t know. Kara too must be struggling under the weight of Gungnir. I’d held that spear and it felt far heavier than any spear should.

The Umber was a wide and placid river at that point in its course but even so the current took over soon enough and carried me ten yards closer to the sea for each yard I managed to struggle toward the opposite bank. Somewhere in the dark the others were making quicker and quieter progress. I’d seen them for a while by the whiteness of the broken water in the starlight, but before long I fought my battle alone, unable to see either bank and imagining the river to have swollen into some estuary so wide-mouthed that I might be swept to sea before finding land again.

When my hand struck something solid I panicked and swallowed an uncomfortably large amount of river whilst trying to inhale the rest. Fortunately the water around me proved to be little more than two feet deep and I splashed my way out to lie exhausted on the mud.

“Quick, get up!” Kara, tugging at my shirt.

“What?” I struggled to all fours. “How did you find me so fast?”

“We’ve been walking along the bank following the noise.” Hennan, somewhere in the dark.

“Probably covered half a mile.” Snorri, close at hand, hefting me to my feet. “Kara didn’t think you were going to make it.”

We walked on through the night, making what sense we could of the rising contours highlighted by the stars, avoiding the ink-dark valleys where possible. The warm air and exercise dried me off quick enough and fear kept me from feeling the lost sleep, my ears straining against the night sounds, always dreading the distant voice of the hounds.

I can’t say how many times I stumbled in the gloom-enough to twist my ankle into complaint. I fell several times, my hands raw with cuts and lost skin, coarse grit bedded in both palms.

I saw the others as dark shapes, no detail but enough to see Snorri hunched around the pain of his wound, hugging his side.

First light showed grey then pink above the Romero Hills in whose hollows the Crptipa Mine nestled. I heard the hounds again before the sun cleared the horizon. At first they seemed part of my imagination but Snorri stopped and looked back along our path. He straightened with a wince and put an arm around Hennan.

“We fought a Fenris wolf. A few Florentine dogs shouldn’t prove much challenge.” The shadow hid his face.

“Let’s move.” I strode on. Hunting dogs work together: half a dozen can bring down any opponent. And there would be men following. “It can’t be much further now.” I needed it not to be much further but what I need and what the world gives are often at odds.

“We should split up.” The baying sounded closer by the moment and, as always when things come to the sharp end, my thoughts turned to how I could win free. Hennan was slowing us down, no doubt about that. The fear wasn’t so deep in me that I was ready to leave the boy, but going our separate ways seemed a good alternative. He wouldn’t be slowing me down any more, and yet I wouldn’t be abandoning him-there was an equal or better chance the pursuit would follow me, and that, with the benefit of the doubt, could even be construed as saving him! “If we split up they can’t follow us all. .”

“What’s that?” Kara ignored me and instead pointed ahead.

The land had risen beneath us, becoming barren and drier as we climbed into the hills. With little more than a general direction to head in, and a blurred memory of some maps I’d perused in the House Gold archives, it had seemed that our chances of finding the particular hole in the ground we sought depended upon meeting some local to guide us. Unfortunately the Romero Hills appeared to be entirely devoid of locals, probably because the place was rather less hospitable than the surface of the moon.

“A trail.” Snorri lowered his hand from shielding his eyes, the grim line of his mouth twitching toward something less sombre, just for a moment.

“And there’s only one place to go out here!” I started forward with renewed energy, wetting cracked and dry lips and wishing I’d managed to drink a little more of the Umber while struggling through it.

Something about the acoustics of the valley made it seem as if the hounds were on our heels at each moment, though by the time the trail had taken us to the far side there were still no signs of pursuit on the slopes down which we’d come.

“Not much of a trail.” Snorri grunted and pushed Hennan up the incline. “Shouldn’t we have met some traffic?”

“Umbertide imports most of its salt up the Umber River, you would have followed its banks to the city after you docked at Port Tresto.”

Kara turned around at that. “I heard the Crptipa Mine is one of the largest-”

“It’s huge-it just doesn’t produce any salt worth a damn,” I said. “It’s got Kelem in residence. Apparently he doesn’t like company, and since the place preserves him, he’s not likely to be going any time soon.”

We carried on another few paces before Snorri commented again. “But these tracks would be washed away in a few years if they weren’t used.”

“There’s a small operation, working around the entrance chambers.” I lifted my head and pointed. “There, look!” The rise revealed a scattering of shacks, storage sheds, stables and several carts, all clustered around a black and yawning hole in the base of a rock-face where the valley became suddenly steep.

We picked up the pace and jogged up the dusty road, burdened by exhaustion. Falling behind, I turned and saw, emerging from the dry gullies on the far side of the valley, the foremost of the hounds, tiny in the distance but fearsome even so.

I’d moved from last to first by the time we stumbled gasping into the clearing ringed by the buildings before the mine entrance. I stood there, hands on knees, hauling in a dry breath, my shirt sticking to my ribs. I heard rather than saw Snorri unlimber his axe behind me. A moment later the ringing of an alarm went up, someone spinning a stick against the inside of one of those iron bars bent into a triangle that they use to call men to sup.

“E-easy.” I straightened up, reaching out to lay a hand on the thickness of Snorri’s arm. He didn’t look up to a battle in any case, dark lines beneath his eyes, sweat on his face, still bent around the agony of the salt-edged slash in his side. Miners from the night shift began to stumble out of one of the dormitory huts, rubbing the sleep from their eyes, yawns cracking their jaws. A couple more awake than the rest took hold of long-handled hammers from a stack beside the door.

Kara stepped forward. “We just need to visit Kelem. There’s no need for trouble.”

The miners stared at her as if she were some strange creature unearthed from the salt. The men might be paler than typical Florentines, labouring all day deep in the salt caves, but Kara’s skin was like snow, preserved from the sun by one of the witch’s unguents.

The foreman among them found his wits at last, just as I was about to chivvy him along. It could only be a matter of minutes before the hounds caught up and barks turned into bites. “Can’t do that ma’am. Kelem’s got his own ways. No one goes down less he sends his servant for them.” He watched us with eyes narrowed against the brightness, a shrewd look on his gaunt face, tight-fleshed as though the salt had sucked all but the last drops of moisture from him.

“We could pay.” Kara glanced my way, over-tired and leaning on her spear.

“Ain’t enough in your pocket, ma’am, no matter how deep it is.” He shook his grizzled head. “Kelem’s rules aren’t to be broken. Play by them and he’s fair. Break them and you’ll think the Inquisition kind.”

“And you’re going to stop us?” Snorri frowned. I knew it would be reluctance to hurt them that worried him, not their numbers.

The miners stiffened at the challenge in his tone, straightening up, awake now, some taking up crowbars, the last few emerging from the long hut to bring their strength up to fifteen. Their numbers worried me plenty, and Snorri looked done in.

“Wait! Wait. .” I raised a hand above my head and threw what princely authority I could into my voice. “By the rules you say?” I reached into my jacket and riffled through the papers still packed into the inner pockets, the deeds and titles of various acquisitions so minor I hadn’t had either time nor inclination to cash in when amassing the gold that Ta-Nam had taken from me. Of late they had served as nothing more than insulation from the night chill in the dungeons. I found the one I wanted and carefully unwadded it from the others. Thankfully it looked as though the ink hadn’t run too badly after my dip in the Umber. “Here!” I drew it forth with a flourish. “Notarized by House Gold.” I ran my finger along the scrolled title and wax seal. “I own thirteen twenty-fourth shares in Crptipa Mining Corporation. A grand name for this godforsaken collection of shacks and the trickle of salt you fellows manage to send to the city. So whilst. .” I searched the document. “Antonio Garraro. . is your paymaster and manages the running of this operation from his desk in the city, it’s actually me, Prince Jalan Kendeth, heir decimal to the throne of Red March and her protectorates, who owns the controlling interest in this hole in the ground.” I paused to let that sink in. “So, I’d like to take a tour of my holdings, and I can’t think that such an action would break any rules set by Kelem. Rules which, after all, allow my employees to do exactly that, seven days a week.”

The foreman came over, keeping a wary eye on the axe in Snorri’s hand. He glanced at the faded and water-blotched ink work on the parchment and reached out to tap a nail against the wax seal. He let his gaze fall to the dirty rags adhering to my body. “You don’t look like you own a mine, Prince. .”

“Prince Jalan Kendeth, heir to the Red Queen, and don’t try to pretend you’ve not heard of her.” I raised my voice to the near-shout that works best when commanding menials. “And I look like exactly the sort of man who would own a played-out, worthless hole like Crptipa, which hasn’t made a profit in six years.”

The foreman paused, teeth against his wizened lower lip. I watched him weighing up various odds behind his eyes, the sums evident in the furrowing of his brow.

“Right you are, yer majesty. I’ll take you down presently. The night shift will be up within the hour and then-”

“We’ll go now, no guide required.” I started walking toward the cavern mouth. The others joined me. The distant baying had started to grow rapidly louder.

“But. . but you’ll get lost!” the foreman called at my back.

“I doubt it! It’s my mine after all, a man should know the way around his own mine!” A guide would only try to keep us in the company-controlled areas and wouldn’t know how to navigate Kelem’s caverns any more than we did.

“You’re not even taking lanterns?”

“I. .” Swallowing your pride is always difficult, especially if it’s as indigestible as mine, but fear of the dark won over, and executing a sharp about turn I marched back to collect three glass-cowled lanterns from the hooks beneath the hut’s eaves. I stalked across to the others, my dignity demanding I take my time. A dog’s howl, the kind they give when sighting prey, chased away all traces of dignity and I sprinted toward the mine entrance, lanterns clattering together in my hands.

Rickety wooden ladders, lashed together with salt-crusted rope, vanished down the rocky gullet that opened in the cavern floor fifty yards back from the entrance. Directly above the shaft an ancient hole of similar diameter pierced the roof, a blue and dazzling circle. I shoved a lantern at Snorri, another at Kara. “No time to light them! Down!” And fear of the hounds had me leading the way, pulling Hennan along behind. Not even the ominous creaking of the ladder beneath my weight gave me pause. I climbed down in a fever and let the darkness rise to swallow me. Up above I caught the sound of snarls, of claws on stone, and Snorri’s roar, as fearsome as any beast’s. Something plummeted past me. A dog I hoped. I felt the wind of its passage. A touch closer and it would have plucked me from the rungs.

An age later, hands raw and unbearably parched from the salty rungs, I jolted down onto solid ground.

“Are you coming?” My words lost in the void overhead, its darkness pierced by a single patch of sky impossibly high above me.

“Yes.” Hennan, high above me.

“Yes.” Kara’s voice. Closer to hand. “Do you have the orichalcum?”

I backed from the ladder to give her space and fished for the metal cone. I stepped into foul smelling mud, slippery under foot, and almost lost my balance. The orichalcum eluded me and I became convinced I’d lost it in the river, until my fingers brushed against the metal sparking such a response I half blinded myself. The pulsing illumination revealed several facts: firstly, the curves of Kara’s behind as she descended the last few rungs, secondly, the splattered remains of a large dark-furred hound, and thirdly, that what I’d taken to be mud was actually the innards of the aforementioned dog, the beast having burst on impact. The fourth and least welcome fact proved to be that this wasn’t the end of our climb, rather a narrow ledge from which a new set of ladders descended, the whole thing being less than six square yards and mostly coated in mushed dog. My heels rested perhaps an inch from the dark and endless fall behind me, and the shock of realizing it set me slipping once again. Both feet shot out from under me and skittered over the edge. The orichalcum flew from my grip. My chest hit the stone with a rib-crunching thud, arms reached out, driven by their own instinct, fingers scrabbled for grip and for a trouser-wetting moment I hung, with the corner of the ledge under my armpits, body tight to the cliff, feet seeking any hold on offer.

“Got you!” Kara threw herself forward, hand encircling the wrist of my right arm in the heartbeats before the orichalcum glow died.

We hung like that for what seemed an age, me too winded to undermine any claim to heroism with cries for help or pleading with whatever gods might be watching. Eventually, as air started to seep in past bruised ribs, I heard the sound of flint on steel and a lantern flicker into life. Snorri and Hennan stood by the ladder, Kara lay stretched out through the dog’s wreckage, one foot hooked around the bottom rung, the only connection keeping us both from a fatal plunge.

It took a while for Snorri to haul me up-he seemed to lack his usual strength and groaned with the effort of raising me, his shirt stained dark on his injured side. Kara was still cleaning off the larger chunks of dog meat when I finally got up. I discovered I also had a few pieces of my own to pick off. Hennan recovered the orichalcum and I pocketed it. Kara and I had lost our lanterns over the edge and soon enough I might need my own source of light. Whatever the dog handlers were up to I could see no signs of them against the patch of brightness overhead. I wiped my mouth and found it bloody. I must have bitten my tongue when I slammed into the edge of the drop.

“Let’s go.” This time Snorri led off.

I followed after Kara, making my descent gingerly, boots still slippery and my chest one large ache from top to bottom.

The second leg of the climb proved longer than the first and the circle of sky seemed to grow as small and distant as the moon. A weight settled about me-an echo of the unimaginable tonnage of rock around us. I’d come from the frozen mountains of the north to bury myself beneath the baked hills of Florence, and whatever waited for us down there it seemed that our journey must be coming to its close. All those miles, all those months, and Loki’s key accompanying us every step, the sole reason for our long migration. I wondered if the trickster god watched us from the wilds of Asgard, laughing at the joke which only he truly understood.

The visions came at the worst possible moment, when my arms ached from too many fathoms of climbing, my hands ran slippery with sweat, and the darkness folded around me on every side. A vast thickness of rock stretched above my head, and an unknown fall beneath me. The taste of my own blood brought the memories rushing in. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. The remnants of Kara’s spell still plagued me, burning with whatever magic I held in my veins, amplifying her simple casting into something that threatened to unravel the whole history of my line into my dreaming. The suspicion that the völva had planned this outcome still lingered. Certainly plunging me into weeks of dream-sleep had given her far more opportunity to work on Snorri and to steal the key if he wouldn’t relinquish it.

The vision drew my thoughts from present suspicions to past ventures. We had been chasing the Lady Blue, Alica and myself, chasing her through the palace into the private quarters of the elder Gholloth, he whom legend had it was the true heir of the last emperor Adam the Third, albeit a bastard nephew. We never spoke that story too loud, indeed it hadn’t been told to me until my twenty-first birthday, little more than a year ago. There’s nothing more likely to unite the enemies of any kingdom than a legitimate claim on the Empire throne.

Memory painted my grandmother’s pursuit on the darkness as I descended, so vivid that it overwrote my sight and I sought the rungs utterly blind, all the while with corridors flashing through my mind, felled guards, broken doors, Alica Kendeth sprinting ahead of me, fearless and swift.

We wove past the carnage, speed our only goal, and still we came too late, past the wreckage of Gholloth the First’s elite bodyguard stationed at the doors of the old man’s bedchambers. The Lady Blue had felled three men in plate armour. God knows what magics she used and what it cost her. These would have been swift warriors, seasoned, loyal beyond question, deadly with sword and knife. They lay shattered as if each had been turned to glass and struck with a hammer, the sharp edges of their injuries softened by what leaked from them.

In the old man’s bedchamber, its wall hung with paintings of the sea, we found the king, the emperor if not for lies, treachery, and war. He lay at peace among his linens, clutching the red flower of his lifeblood to his chest. If you had lived somewhere where the emperors’ statues haunt every turn you would know at a glance that their blood ran from him. I saw it in the line of his jaw, the angle of his nose, the broadness of his shoulders, even slumped in death.

Alica’s cry held more rage than grief, but both were present. Then she saw it, and I followed her gaze. In the corner of the room a tall mirror stood. Silvered glass within an ebony frame. Such a thing would cost you a hundred in crown gold should you seek it in Vermillion today. But instead of reflecting the room it stood like a narrow window into some other place. A place where a figure ran, marked by the sapphires twinkling across her hair as she crossed a dreamland where crystal shards longer than lances and thicker than men jutted from the bedrock like the spines of a hedgehog.

My grandmother reached the mirror, and I swear she would have run headlong into it, but it shattered before her, a thousand glittering pieces of it filling the air, sliding down one across the other against the ebony board behind.

Alica Kendeth fell to her knees then, careless of the glass, and set her head to the ebony planks. She swore an oath. I saw it on her lips, but the words eluded me as I stepped down, foot questing for the next rung, and jolted to a halt against the mine floor.