The Wheel of Osheim

THIRTY-TWO

Kara led us through the bulk of the sleeping leviathan, the engine that had broken free the Wheel that once steered the ship of the universe on its straight path through the unending night. The engine that even now nudged the Wheel further and further from true, threatening at any moment to steer us over some precipice into a fall that could shatter worlds.

The pulsing light throbbed throughout the structure, the siren penetrating all corners, making speech almost impossible.

“We have to hurry!” I shouted the words at Kara’s back in order to be heard. “We don’t have much time.” Since we broke the mirror I had been hearing various parts of the great engines come to life, or rather feeling it through the soles of my boots. Beneath the siren the labouring mechanisms groaned and whined, an unhealthy edge to the sound.

Kara turned away from the door in front of her and narrowed her eyes at me over Hennan’s head. “Perhaps the person with the key that opens everything should go first?”

I could hand the key over, but that would feel like handing over my choices. Instead I squeezed past and held key to door until the hidden locks surrendered and the metal slab slid out of my way.

We passed half a dozen facets of the mirror, positioned as if they might be windows into the interior of the Builders’ creations, but each showing the Lady Blue’s sanctum. Twice more I saw the room shudder and on the second time larger pieces fell from the ceiling, along with several mirror frames, and innumerable glittering shards as the broken mirrors had their teeth shaken from them.

“Up?” I looked up the narrow shaft, pulsing red.

“Up.” Kara nodded.

“Will Snorri make it? He’s quite fat.”

Snorri growled, the light gleaming on muscles slick with sweat as the temperature rose around us.

I drew a deep breath, and regretted it. “Smells like the rest of the Builders came in here to die.”

The tight confines of the shaft muted the siren, but as I clambered into the small chamber at the top it returned with full force. I stumbled to the mirror facet set into the wall and slapped the key onto one of the dead screens below it. “Make it stop!”

That last “stop” burst out into a silent room. Kara looked up at me as she climbed out of the hole.

“Well done.” Rubbing her ears, she stepped back to let Hennan out.

“Thank the gods for that.” Snorri squeezed out of the shaft, flexing his shoulders.

“We’re close now. The central chamber is next but one. Through there.” Kara pointed to a peculiar opening, tall, narrow, leading into what looked to be a small cupboard.

The sound of a door crashing open spun us all around. The Blue Lady stood in the doorway of the room beyond the mirror, arms spread as if about to cast some terrifying spell, grey hair in disarray, a cloak of midnight blue swirling around her. Her age shocked me. I knew her to have more than a hundred summers under her belt, but I’d not seen her like this, like something that might be piled in the corpse cart at the back of a debtors’ prison: bones wearing old skin that wrinkled up around each joint. Worse than her age was the way she moved, possessed of unnatural vitality, avid, eyes full of fever. She sprang at the surface between us, covering the distance in a moment. Her face filled the mirror, shrieking curses at us in a language I was glad I didn’t understand.

I took a step back as two gnarled hands covered the mirror facet and the whole thing grew dark. “What’s she doing?” Mora Shival might look a shadow of herself-not a shadow, more as if she had been scraped too thinly across the day-but she still scared the hell out of me. “What’s she doing?”

“I don’t know,” Kara said. “We should keep going though.”

“Where?” I asked.

Kara pointed to the slot she had indicated before.

“But it’s just a cupboard or something . . .”

“The map says it’s through there.” She glanced down at the paper in her hand, frowning.

“Fine.” I pushed past Snorri and stuck my head through the slot. “There’s room for one person to stand in here, and no other way out.”

“Maybe it goes up,” Snorri said.

I didn’t like the sound of that.

“Get in there and try it.” At least he refrained from pushing me in this time.

“That should do it.” An unfamiliar voice behind me.

Turning, I saw the hands draw back from the mirror facet, revealing the Lady Blue’s haggard face and bright eyes once again. “That should do it,” she repeated, her voice like a rasp, no trace of the culture and humour I remembered from the Red Queen’s memories.

“Do what?” I wanted to ask but my tongue stuck as my mouth went dry. I could see some of the thinnest hairline fractures closing up.

“The mirror’s healing itself.” Kara stepped back. “Go! Hurry!”

Keen to be away now, I slid into the space past the slot, folding my arms across my chest. I stood in a vertical tube a little taller than myself. A silver panel with no markings was set into the curving wall before me. Lacking any other ideas, I pressed the key to it. “Open.” The structure shuddered. “Open!” The panel turned black. “Open, damn you!” Something began to move with the sound of tortured steel, an awful scraping noise that put my teeth on edge.

“Jal!”

I turned my head just in time to see Snorri vanish as the inner cylinder rotated, with me inside, sealing away the opening slot. I kept the key pressed to the panel and prayed hard to any god that would have me. The light stuttered and died. I’ve known weeks pass more quickly than the thirty seconds that followed. Eventually a bright vertical line appeared, broadening with agonizing sloth into a gap wide enough for me to press myself through as the slot in the inner cylinder rotated into alignment with the slot affording access into the next room.

“Decontamination cycle complete.” A lifeless voice spoke in the cylinder as I stepped out.

The first thing to hit me was the stink, as if something had crawled in here to die. Fortunately that was also the only thing to hit me. The chamber was larger than I had expected, with irregular walls giving on to narrow convoluted passages trailing off beyond the reach of the pulsing red light. A time-star floated at head-height in the centre of the chamber, burning blue above a black disc set in the silver-steel floor. I kept myself from looking at it, sensing the thing could hook a person, leaving them to spend the rest of their life staring at it.

A facet of the fractal mirror had been set in one of the few flat sections of wall. The spiderweb of fractures continued its slow healing process and for a moment the Lady Blue turned her attentions to her sanctuary’s door. On the walls around her a dozen or more unbroken mirrors now hung in spots where the original occupant of the space had been shaken down. All of them the same: a plain mirror in a cheap pine frame . . . The same mirror I had seen hanging in a score of places in Tuttugu’s cell as he lay dead.

In the section of wall directly opposite me was a valve like the one I had just come through, next to a large black rectangular panel. I pressed the key to the outer casing of the valve that had admitted me. “Keep turning.” The thing ground on with agonizing slowness, fighting every inch of the way.

In the mirror the Lady Blue’s door shuddered beneath a great blow. Then another. On the third hit it shattered as if it had been made of glass, wickedly sharp chunks flying in all directions. The Silent Sister stood revealed in the doorway, stooped in her greying rags as always, the hint of that enigmatic smile gilding the thinness of her lips, one eye dark and penetrating, the blind eye glowing as if her head were full of light. Behind her, taller, broader, armoured in crimson half-plate, the Red Queen, smoke rising from the mantle about her shoulders as if she might at any moment burst into flames.

“Alica.” The Lady Blue tilted her head to acknowledge her visitors. “And your sister. I never did quite catch her name.”

Behind me Kara slipped out of the valve which kept on turning, rotating its opening back toward Snorri and Hennan. “Don’t look at the star,” I hissed, pushing her face away from it with one hand. “Perhaps you’ll introduce us?” the Lady Blue said.

My grandmother made no reply. The Silent Sister stepped into the room, and as she did so, reflections of the Lady Blue leapt from the new mirrors on the walls, each racing toward the original, running into her, somehow becoming one with her. Each joining painted Mora Shival more firmly into the world, adding definition to her, making the blue of her robe deeper, more intense, more vibrant, making her flesh more solid over her bones.

“No.” The Silent Sister spoke only that word and every mirror exploded into fragments, glittering clouds blooming before each frame. Even the cracks across the fractal mirror spread for a moment rather than healing. I couldn’t tell you what she sounded like-I only know that the word was spoken.

“That was foolish.” The Lady Blue wiped her mouth where a flying shard had cut her. “To spend your power so.”

“You’re not running away this time.” My grandmother stepped around her sister. She held a long, thin sword with runes along its length.

“You can’t stop this, Alica.” The Lady Blue stepped back toward the fractal mirror. “This world is broken. Death is broken, along with the darkness and the light. There’s a better life waiting for those of us with the strength of mind to take it. The herd is lost either way, but the shepherds can survive.” She faced the old women before her but I knew her words were for me.

“The people can be saved.” Grandmother raised her blade, the tip pointed at her enemy’s heart. “And I will fight to save them, however slight the hope of success.”

Mora Shival shook her head. “You speak about the people, girl, but it’s always been about keeping power in your own two hands. It’s fear that keeps you fighting. Fear of what you might be without history, without throne and crown to fill your peasants’ throats with cheers. You were born to power. You stepped up to it over the broken bodies and broken minds of your siblings. Somewhere behind those fierce eyes the dream of being Red Empress still burns, doesn’t it, Alica? You’ve been planning a route to the all-throne for so many years you can’t let it go even when you try. You broke Czar Keljon’s power in the east, neutralized Scorron, put the fear of God into the Port Kingdoms at your back . . . and here you are, advancing through Slov on a pretext, bound for Vyene. You’re piling corpses up faster than the Dead King-so don’t talk to me of ‘the people’.”

Snorri joined Hennan behind me and gestured voicelessly to the valve opposite us.

“The last chamber,” Kara hissed. “You can end all this.”

I hurried, hunched and fearful, across the chamber, skirting the blue star burning at its heart. The valve proved identical to the first. I pressed the key to it, causing the same trembling as whatever held it in place struggled to deny me, then came the same slow and grinding revolution of the inner cylinder. Over the grating I heard a last snatch of the confrontation back in Mora Shival’s tower in Blujen.

“How is that dear boy you broke getting rid of me back in Vermillion? Shouldn’t he be the third Gholloth? If anyone has a right to be emperor it’s him. The last emperor, twisted and drooling in the all-throne as he watches the world die around him.”

I wanted to shout that Garyus would make a good emperor-better than any of them-but the entrance narrowed to an inch and then vanished, sealing off sound and plunging me once more into darkness.

The whole structure shuddered, a deep-voiced groan resonating through the metal superstructure. Throughout the vast machine, in engines that the best minds among the Builders had conceived and wrought, one element battled the next, running wild now that the mirror which was both one and many lay cracked through.

I turned with the cylinder and eventually the slot reappeared in front of me, first a dark-grey sliver, then a finger-width only a shade lighter than the midnight all around me, a hand-width, wider . . . I stepped through.

A single light panel in the ceiling struggled into life, replacing the near-impenetrable gloom with a flickering red half-light, chasing the shadows toward the corners only to fall back and let them regroup. Four thick, square pillars occupied the middle of the room, each face covered with screens, all dark.

I saw immediately that the small amount of light I had first seen in the room came through the window beside the valve. I’d thought it a black panel but it was really a thick glass window that had been giving me a view of a dark room, and now showed Snorri and the others waiting at the far side of the valve.

To my left a dirty grey cloth hung over something on the wall. I twitched the thing off and found I held a cloak, tattered and stained by hard use. It had been covering the room’s mirror facet. The Lady Blue stood close to the mirror now, her back toward it, both hands raised. The lamps in her sanctum threw her shadow across me, the rest of their light spilling into the chamber. Grandmother and her sister stood before the Lady, their faces tight with concentration. I had seen that expression before, back in Grandmother’s memories when they both struggled against their reflections as children. Silver, glimpsed between the Lady Blue’s fingers, confirmed that in each hand she held a small looking-glass, angled toward her enemies.

The strain upon their faces held me. It kept the breath locked in my chest. It kept me silent. That’s when I heard the footstep behind me.

“Oh God. It’s Cutter John.” Fear’s cold hand knotted its fingers in my innards.

“Whoever that bogey-man is, he’s your creation. He can only hurt you in ways you can imagine. I, on the other hand, am going to hurt you in worse ways. Ways you can’t imagine.”

I turned on legs almost too weak to hold me up. Edris Dean stood there, devilish in the pulsing red glow, the dark crest of his hair night-black between widows’ peaks. The pale scar, horizontal below his right eye, seemed to underscore his words. A darker scar, thick and ridged, ran along the side of his neck where Kara had nearly taken his head from his shoulders.

Motion at the corner of my eye drew my gaze to the window for a moment. Dead men were emerging from the twisting corridors that ran into the depths of the machine in the chamber behind me. I could see Snorri’s mouth open in a roar, Kara shouting, or screaming, but no hint of the sound reached me.

“The Blue Lady sent me through the mirror ahead of her . . . with some friends . . . to secure the Wheel and make sure nobody tried anything foolish, like turning it off.” Edris smiled. He held a curved sword of black iron, its point resting lazily on the floor between us. It reminded me of the blades the Ha’tari carried in the depths of the Sahar.

I glanced at the window once more. There were a lot of dead men. All in leather armour trimmed with blue. They moved with worrying quickness, faces full of fury and dark with old blood. Snorri’s axe carved a path through two of them, splattering the window.

“They’re the Lady Blue’s men,” I said. “You killed them.”

Edris inclined his head. “Dead men are better at obeying orders.”

In the mirror the Lady Blue thrust her hands toward the Silent Sister and the Red Queen. “You were foolish to bleed your army here for so many weeks, Alica.” She hissed the words as if forcing them past gritted teeth. Grandmother fell to her knees with a cry, hands before her, wrestling with the invisible. The Sister went to her knees slowly, by degrees, first to one, then to both, as if a great weight were upon her, increasing from one moment to the next. “You spent so many lives and so much of your strength . . . and for what? To die at my feet.” The Lady Blue shook her head. “You were not the only one the years made stronger.”

“You should have defended the mirror,” I told Edris, and set my hand to the hilt of my sword-the blade I’d taken from Edris back in Frauds’ Tower in Umbertide. “Now your mistress is locked away.”

“I thought you might make it here,” he said. “You and the Northman.” He nodded to the blood-spattered window. Not much could be seen through it save the outlines of men, all in violent motion. “And the bitch.” He rubbed absently at his neck and the black scar above the collarbone. “Thought you might break it for me, so I did. You see, I never did much care for the Lady, and she never did quite trust me, what with my refusal to show in any future the wise can read. I’m for her plan, and all. It’s just I’d rather see myself at the head of the table when the new gods meet in the world that comes after this one. Edris, Lord of Creation. It has a nice ring to it, so it does.” He raised his wicked sword, its point a hand-span from my belly. “If you could pass over that key now, and I’ll do the honours.” He nodded beyond the pillars. The light from the mirror revealed the back wall, projecting its own cracks across the many screens set there, cracks that were still healing, perhaps halfway now to a full repair. In the middle of the back wall was the silver plate the professor described, the legend “Manual Over-ride” above it. A dark line in the middle that must be the key slot.

I looked down at the sharp point level with my navel then glanced back at Grandmother and the Silent Sister, on their knees, straining to stand but being pressed inexorably down, blood starting to leak from the corners of their eyes. I thought of Hennan in Frauds’ Tower with Edris Dean’s blade against his neck. I’d given the boy Loki’s key to give to the necromancer and he’d thrown it back at me. Refusing to let me purchase his freedom. My eyes returned to the sword point before me. At the last it always comes down to the sharp end. Edris had threatened me with horrors I couldn’t imagine. I couldn’t properly imagine seeing that black iron slide into my gut.

A sharp cry of agony rang out behind me. An old woman’s hurt. Something dark and bloody hit the window beside me, sliding away without a sound. It had been a slight figure . . . perhaps Hennan . . .

I threw the key and, the Lord have mercy on my impious soul, I prayed to Loki, even though I knew him to be nothing more than an imprint of an old professor, stamped onto the stuff of the world and shaped by legend. I prayed and followed the key’s rotation through the air with a single word, “Off!,” chosen for no better reason than that I wanted the opposite of whatever Edris Dean wanted. We would all still be bound for Hell in a handcart if the engine shut down: the Wheel would continue to roll, albeit more slowly, driven by man’s inability not to use power for personal gain. But more than anything I wanted Edris Dean to go to Hell first.

You can’t of course throw a key at a small keyhole ten yards away and expect it to hit, let alone stick in and turn. But Loki is the god of tricks.

There’s one benefit of doing very stupid things. They surprise people. Throwing the key across the room surprised Edris Dean just enough for me to clear my steel and sweep his belated thrust away from my belly whilst leaping backwards. A hot wet feeling across my hip let me know I hadn’t escaped unscathed, but at least Edris’s sword wasn’t sticking through me.

Edris thrust again and I turned his blade. Behind him all the panels in the far wall lit, torrents of numbers rolling down across them as if a river of digits were pouring over a cliff. The key, now bedded in the lock, started to smoke gently, as if the obsidian was giving off darkness as a vapour. All the previous grindings, groanings and shuddering seemed as nothing compared to the tortured sounds now reaching through the metal floor. Somewhere, deep in the heart of the Builders’ engines of calculation a cryptological war of codes and cyphers was being fought, as the key sought both to over-master the security that guarded the Wheel’s prime function, and to solve the problems that had defeated Professor O’Kee for so many years, allowing the engines to wind down in such a way that they didn’t pitch us over the fall we were seeking to avoid.

Edris swung at my head. I parried, the clash of steel almost lost in the cacophony around us. At the end of things, with so many ways to die surrounding me, I found fear to be less important to me than the fact that the man who butchered my mother stood before me. I parried again and lunged, cutting through his tunic and leaving a bright scratch across the mail underneath.

“If you kill me you won’t have time to force the key the other way!” I shouted. “And if you try to do it before you kill me I’ll cut your head off.”

Edris made a wild swing and leapt back. He wiped his mouth, bloody from a bitten tongue, and regarded me, breathing heavily.

Through the mirror facet on the wall between us I glimpsed Grandmother and the Silent Sister, both on all fours, their arms buckling under invisible weight, the Lady Blue stepping toward them in triumph.

“You came to save the world, Alica,” she hissed. “But you neglected to bring anyone to save you.”

The Sister managed to raise her head, her dark eye a hole into midnight, her blind eye a hole onto the noon-day sun. Snorri’s goddess, Hel, had such eyes. The old woman managed to raise a hand, fingers clawed, and for a moment the Lady’s advance halted, but only for moments. The Sister’s head dropped once more, face lost behind grey straggles.

Edris watched, as fascinated as me by the spectacle. The hands that had played us across their board our whole lives now met for a final reckoning.

“They didn’t bring me. I came.” A figure at the Lady Blue’s doorway, covered in masonry dust, ghost-grey. At first it didn’t look human: too bulky, too many limbs at odd angles.

A step forward and the new figure collapsed, now making a kind of sense. One man carrying another. The man on his knees, short, stocky, dark beneath the dust, the face of a clerk rather than a hero, despite his uniform and the sword at his hip. Captain Renprow, adjutant to the marshal in Vermillion, my right hand in organizing the defence.

“No!” If the mirror had truly been a window I might have thrown myself through it. The smaller figure, sent sprawling, rolling among the mirror shards, was twisted as cruelly as any victim upon Cutter John’s table. An old man, deformed, barely able to turn himself, and yet, in that moment as he raised his misshapen head, more noble than any man I’ve seen upon a throne.

“Madam.” Garyus’s voice came rough from his throat. The journey from Red March could not have been easy on him-the journey from the base of the tower still less so. “You underestimate how much a son of Kendeth is prepared to sacrifice for his sister.”

One twisted hand reached out and old fingers with over-large knuckles wrapped around the Silent Sister’s ankle. I saw the pain of even that small action in his face-the cold had always troubled Garyus’s joints, and in Slov the winter has teeth.

The Silent Sister flexed her shoulders then straightened her arms, head still lowered. The sound of shattering filled the air. She got to her knees, drawing in a rattling breath.

“Down!” The Lady Blue brought both hands together as if crushing something between them.

The Silent Sister stood, a slow, deliberate motion, accompanied at each stage by the sound of glass breaking until there was nothing left to break. In the Lady Blue’s hands the last two looking-glasses shattered. The Lady spread her fingers with a gasp and shards of mirror tinkled down amid dripping blood, her palms sliced by the fragments.

Alica Kendeth, the Red Queen, surged to her feet with a roar of fury, sword swinging.

With a cry the Lady Blue broke away from the contest, turning on a heel, somehow fast enough that the point of Grandmother’s sword only ploughed a furrow through her shoulder, and threw herself toward her last mirror. toward Osheim, and me. For a split second her image filled the facet. She hit the remaining fractures and they cut her like wires through cheese. And she was gone-nothing remaining on the mirror save a crimson wash, the room beyond seen dimly through it. Blood trickled down across the image of the Red Queen, her sword extended, the point against the mirror that her enemy had leapt through. I had little doubt that a visit to the fractal mirror far below us would reveal a wet heap of cleanly sliced body parts-the last remains of a woman who would have sacrificed one world to be a god in another.

Edris’s blade flickered my way. I almost didn’t turn it from my chest. My inattention earned me a shallow cut across my upper arm. The panels on the far wall burned red now and I thought I saw a figure moving beyond them, as if each were a window through the wall to some space beyond. The sound had died somewhat, reduced to deep metallic groans and the slow noise of a ratchet as one tooth after the next is drawn through it.

Edris feinted at me, our blades scraping edges. “I don’t have time to kill you,” he said. “Fortunately I brought someone with me who does.” He backed away and the unborn unfolded itself spider-like from the darkened ceiling where it had hidden in the shadows behind the pillars. It descended into the space Edris opened between us, a horror built from fresh meat rearranged about the bones of the men the Lady Blue had sent with Edris. A torso on thick legs, lowered by five raw and skinny limbs emerging from its open chest, each reaching two yards or longer, jointed in a dozen places, and ending in a sharp bone spike.

Edris turned his back and walked to the far wall and the key. “With that sword you stole from me maybe you’ll even send her back to Hell. But she’ll still be bound to the lichkin. Either way, it will buy me the time I need and I’ll deal with you myself afterwards if I have to.” He set his hand to the key and gasped as its lies wrapped him. “Though there isn’t going to be an after.” His wrist turned, forcing the key the other way, and the great engines howled a new note. “This is the way the world ends. No bangs, no whimpers, just the turning of a wheel.”

In the end there are few things more likely to squeeze stupidity and courage from a man in equal meas-ures-if indeed they are not both the same thing. Family will do it, and so will the sight of someone you hate with a passion about to seize their moment of triumph.

“Never underestimate what a son of Kendeth will sacrifice for his sister.” The words came from my lips without any hint of fear.

It wasn’t a berserk that took me. I think the rage that enveloped me the day I cut Maeres Allus’s throat had never truly let go, never bundled itself back into the tiny and forgotten space where I had once kept it, but mixed with my blood as with any other man, sometimes quiet, sometimes loud. The anger that raised my hand was all mine, owned and paid for. I threw Edris’s sword hilt over tip, turning through the air just as the key had. And just as Loki’s key struck home, Edris’s unholy blade did so too, taking him between the shoulder-blades.

The unborn reared between us, its arms closing around me like the fingers of a hand. Somehow Snorri had seen the essence of his son within the unborn that attacked us inside the Black Fort’s vault. I hadn’t understood it then-how he saw his own inside that corrupt travesty of corpse flesh and wept to end it. I couldn’t see it now, but I knew my mother would have seen her daughter, and that was enough. It wasn’t my knife I plunged into the open heart of the unborn but the cardinal’s seal from that road far away, running along the Attar-Zagre border. And it wasn’t my faith that tore them apart, the child that never saw the world from the monster that was forged in Hell. It was the faith of the million and more, huddled in their churches, hiding from uneasy dreams in their beds, cowed by signs and portents, clinging to their god as the end of days drew near. That faith, that will, that belief, given power by the Wheel itself, split child from horror, and left the dead flesh shredded on the ground.

I hadn’t felt the spikes pierce me. I didn’t feel the pain until I rolled and, finding myself on the floor, tried to rise. The blood flooded from puncture wounds in my shoulders and side, running hot down my back. I slumped to one side and lay there, watching. Edris faced me now, his face contorted with fury, the point of his own sword emerging from just beneath his ribs.

I didn’t care about Edris any more. I looked around and saw them both, the lichkin and my nameless sister. She stood, a pale spirit, grown into the woman I had glimpsed when I cut her from the Hel-tree. She held both Mother and the Red Queen in her, beautiful, strong, undaunted. The lichkin, nerve-white and naked, hiding in the blind spot of my eyes, reached to clothe itself in my sister’s ghost. She took its finger in hers and wound its whole body swiftly into a ball, larger than a head, then compressed the ball until it grew smaller, smaller, the size of a fist, an eyeball, a pea . . . gone.

Her image rippled like a reflection on water, changing, fading, shrinking, a younger woman, a child . . .

“Don’t go.” I tried to raise a hand to her.

Edris loomed behind her, blood drenching the grey shirt across his abdomen. “Don’t go,” he echoed me. “I’m sure I can find you another master.” His fingers worked to spell runes into the air, weaving a new web of necromancy to snare her once again.

My sister, a little child now, offered her tormentor a scowl I knew from the Red Queen’s face on the walls of Ameroth. She stamped her foot, punching down with both fists, and in an instant Edris was flung down, groaning alongside me in the fetid mess of the unborn remains. The groan became a snarl and he got to his knees, facing the faint traces that were all that was left of my sister, blocking them from my view. My sword, still jutted from between his shoulders, the hilt offered to me, swaying just out of reach.

I didn’t have the strength to move. But I had the desire, and I moved anyway. With one last burst of energy, I yanked the sword free and took his head with a wild swing, more by luck than judgment.

Edris knelt for a moment longer, blood spraying, then keeled over.

Of my sister, there was no sign.

It took me an age to reach the rear wall, crawling, inching through the filth whilst all around me the engines of the Builders screamed for the end of the world. Somehow my hand closed around the end of the key and I turned it to the middle, neutral, position.

And there, at the end of all things, I hesitated. Let Loki’s key finish its work and I would be guaranteed safe passage into the new world that the Lady Blue had so desired. A god. The status I had always sought, all that and far more, delivered into my lap. No longer the superfluous princeling eking out a life at the margins of my grandmother’s court. Turn the key back to the left, and the great engines would shut down, the magic would leave this place, and with nothing to drive it forward, the Wheel that the Builders set turning, changing the balance between desire and the solid stuff of the world, would slow and eventually stop. Perhaps it might even turn back and return us to the lives men had known all those long years since some fool scattered us across the face of the Earth.

Listen to the wise, though, and you would know they saw a doom postponed, not ended. The Silent Sister saw that same Wheel turn under the pressure of man’s greed for power and crack everything apart, pitching us minor mortals into fire and destruction. I could save myself now and end countless nations . . . or consign myself and all those people to the fire in a few short years. Beneath my hand the key smoked and all around me the engine whined and roared. The key still battled the lock, fighting for control, and the engine, without the fractal mirror to moderate its energies, ran wild.

The many screens to either side of me continued to show their portions of a larger scene, as if they perforated the wall, revealing what was happening in the mind of the machine beyond.

“I need-”

“Men don’t know what they need.” A figure turned, cutting across the first and unseen speaker. “They barely know what they want.” He looked like a short man, though there was nothing to measure him against and the screens showed him larger than life. Neither young nor old, his dark hair standing as if in shock. He wore a coat of many colours. But as he turned it became a golden jacket sewn all over with innumerable pockets. In the next moment, the blacks of a Florentine modern, replete with three-tiered hat. Whatever he wore, he looked familiar. “Me? I’m just a jester in the hall where the world was made. I caper, I joke, I cut a jig. I’m of little importance.”

“Professor . . .” I saw the old man’s face there, traces of him behind Loki’s confidence and cunning.

The god continued to address his unseen target. “Imagine though . . . if it were me that pulled the strings and made the gods dance. What if at the core, if you dug deep enough, uncovered every truth . . . what if at the heart of it all . . . there was a lie, like a worm at the centre of the apple, coiled like Oroborus, just as the secret of men hides coiled at the centre of each piece of you, no matter how fine you slice?”

I clutched the key tight and the black ice of it slid beneath my grasp. The screens went dark.

“Wouldn’t that be a fine joke now?” Loki stood beside me. “W-what do you want?” I tried to move away without releasing the key.

“Me?” Loki shrugged. “I’m finished when you break my key, and it will break when its job is done. Turn it left, turn it right. Make up your mind, Jalan.”

“I . . . I don’t know.” Sweat ran down me, my hand pale from loss of blood, trembling. “Was the Lady Blue telling the truth when she-”

“Truth?” Loki threw up his hands, fingers fluttering. “Lies are our foundation-we each start with a lie and build a life upon it. Lies are more durable than the truth, more mutable, able to change to meet requirements.”

“I need the truth. You set me on this path with the truth when you showed me my mother die. The key didn’t drop me in the desert at random . . . it was all part of a plan. Meeting Jorg Ancrath, finding the steel to kill Maeres Allus. You were building me for this task, just as you built the key and sent it out in the world to gather strength.”

“Perhaps.” Loki shrugged. “The facts are a liar’s best friends. So many truths are uncovered in the search for a plausible lie. Why not work with them?” He turned to gesture at the chamber, a hall of wonders, strewn with death. “What a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive. The Great Scott wrote that, back when the moon wore a younger face.” A sigh. As the darkness smoked about the key in my grasp Loki seemed to diminish, growing older, the light within him fading. “This was my first work and it is, I will admit, tangled. Where’s the coward that would not dare to fight for such a land? Another of the Great Scott’s lines-and here you are, my coward. Do you dare?”

“ButshouldI-”

“I don’t care!” Loki boomed across me, haggard now, and ill. “Only know that you don’t need the truth. The truth didn’t set you free. It was a lie. You didn’t see your mother die. You weren’t in the room. You weren’t even in Roma Hall that day.”

“What?”

“I lied to you.”

“What . . .”

“Hate, courage, fear . . . all lies. Don’t look for reasons. Do what you feel. Not what you feel to be right-just what you feel.”

“I have the scar . . .” My free hand moved toward my chest where Edris’s sword had caught me that day.

“You did that climbing a fence.”

“You lying bast-”

“Yes, I know. Now hurry up could you? I’m falling apart here.”

I looked back past the false god, a thing made real by the dreams of men, and saw, standing at the blood-smeared window to the other room, the hulking figure of my friend, only his eyes clearly visible where a hand had wiped the glass clean.

I turned the key.