Red Queen's War: The Liar's Key Part 30

"Does it matter?" Racso asked.

"Well . . . no. Sixty-four thousand? That's not even a number."

"It is-"

"n.o.body has sixty-four thousand!" I doubted even Grandmother could lay her claw on sixty-four thousand in crown gold without selling something holy or spilling some blood. "Who lent him that kind of money?"

"It's a code, see." More scratching and Racso bent his balding head as if the admission shamed a man who was paid to watch people starve. "Means the bank has them here for its own reasons. An abuse of the system is what it is. Puts honest men in a questionable position regarding the law is what it does." He shook his head and spat dolefully.

I took us back to the more immediate questions. "A penny for the candle then. And food, for me and the boy, bread, b.u.t.ter, apples?"

"A hex." Again the grin, pleased to be on more familiar ground. "Better hope you can eat fast though." An eye to the bodies behind me, a shiver of antic.i.p.ation running through them.

"How much to get out of here, a private cell back up the corridor?"

"Ah." A slow shake of the head, almost regretful. "That'd take silver that would, yer lordship. Don't think I've ever seen the colour of it down in the dark cells. You got silver on you? Have you, yer lordship?" He seemed to think it unlikely.

"Just the food for now," I said. "And the candle." I fished in my pocket and brought out a hex and a penny.

Racso took my money on a flat wooden paddle hooked upon his belt. A device that meant he never had to come within grabbing range of the bars. "Done and dealt." He stowed the coins away, nodded to me, and handed me the cold end of my candle. Transaction complete, Racso wiped his hands across the sides of his trousers and sauntered away whistling some spring tune that remembered flowers and joy.

When Racso returned he carried a reed basket containing three crusty loaves, a wedge of blue cheese, and half a dozen apples of a good size, bursting with the summer. He also brought with him a barrel on wheels from which he doled out ladles of water to those who could pay. Water exchanged hands for the clippings of a copper, for a left shoe, for one of the tin mugs into which he was pouring-that man took his ration in his cupped hands-and for promises of company from several of the younger women. I had to pay over a penny for two cups and their contents, my earlier order not having made mention of water.

"Give me two apples first," I said. And Racso rolled them over to the bars.

I tossed them to the two largest and least dead of our inmates, Artemis and Antonio, men I'd selected and negotiated with before. They cleared a s.p.a.ce and kept the others back while I took the remaining food.

"Behave yourselves and there'll be crusts to share out. Give me any s.h.i.t and jaws will get broken." It's easy enough to be the hard man when you're fit, fed, and hale and the foe are skin and bones.

Backs to the wall, bread between us, cups on the floor and the candle burning at our feet, Hennan and I began to eat. The boy dipped his bread in the water to ease it past his sore gums. I still couldn't pin an age on him and he'd never had a clear idea of it himself. Today I settled on twelve. He looked older starved. All of them did. Ancients with young men's fears. Old women with children like tiny old men. A mother with b.r.e.a.s.t.s as withered as any crone, the baby in her arms black with dirt and unmoving. I choked down what food I could and threw the rest at them, cursing the lot for beggars and thieves. Fear stole my appet.i.te.

Hennan recovered faster than I thought possible, wrinkling his face at the cheese as he wolfed it down.

"Steady-you'll be sick." I say "recovered" . . . he remained a skeleton dressed in skin, but the light returned to his eyes, the words to his tongue.

"Why did you come?" he asked.

I'd been asking myself the same thing. "I'm an idiot."

"How come they locked you in? You've got money."

"I owe more than I've got." That had been the story of my adult life. A short enough tale but one that had never got me locked up in h.e.l.l before. "In debtors' prisons you own what you carry in. They call it bankruptcy."

"How are we getting out?" He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and reached for his water. Across the cell fights were breaking out over the loaf I'd thrown.

"I don't know." Honesty always pains me. Telling it to a child who considers you a hero puts any number of barbs on those words, making them harder than you'd expect to spit out. "You shouldn't have run." Recriminations are useless but it takes a better man than me not to kick someone close when they're down. "You were in the palace of Vermillion for G.o.d's sake! And now . . ."

"I wanted to be with the others . . ." He kept his eyes on the apple in his hand, red with his blood where he'd bitten it.

"Yes, but you didn't find them did you?" Snorri and the others were back in Vermillion enjoying my grandmother's hospitality-the second time for Snorri. There was no way they could have beaten the Red March riders to the border and I'd seen the riders returning, so they must have been captured.

"I did find them." So quiet I almost missed it.

"What? Where? I've been here weeks and not a whisper of them."

"Kara's here. In this prison."

"She is not!" I couldn't believe that. How could this place hold a volva? I imagined her watching from the bars of the cell opposite, one more grey face among the rest, and found I didn't want to pursue the thought. "Where?"

"She's serving at the front." Hennan put the bread down, a hand clutching the distended ache of his belly. "She doesn't know I'm here."

"But you know she's here?" I raised a sceptical brow.

"News travels front to back, not the other way. They say Lady Connagio has a heathen maid with white hair and white skin who can do charms that cure warts. Came in the same time as me."

"G.o.d's sake!" A thousand questions fought to exit my mouth at once, but the biggest one won. "Where's the key?"

Hennan shuffled closer and spoke lower, the bread wars were coming to an end with the victors pitting wobbly teeth against the crusts and the losers licking wounds.

"Can't talk about it. That's what we're in for."

TWENTY-EIGHT.

True to his word Hennan wouldn't tell me about the key. Every question I hissed at him about it met with silence. I exhausted myself quizzing him but the child kept his lips clamped tight and in the end I fell into a doze, unsure whether the sun was still shining outside or not.

I dreamed of a book, surely for the first time ever. I've long maintained that nothing of interest ever took place between the covers of a book, excepting the cardinal's whisky and p.o.r.nography of course, but here I was turning page after page in my dream. Even in my dream I didn't want to read the thing, but some compulsion kept me going as if hunting for a particular page. I tried focusing on the writing but the letters carried no meaning, sliding this way and that like spiders who've forgotten how to master so many legs.

One more page, one more page, one more and then I saw it, a word like any other, buried amid its fellows but anchoring my eyes. Sageous. And as I said it the dream-witch's face rose from the page, carrying the text with it so that the words lay across his skin, sinking in like tattoos. And his name-well that disappeared into the black slit of his mouth, now opening wider and wider to speak my own.

"Prince Jalan."

"You!" I leapt to my feet, letting the book tumble to the floor. I stood in the room where I first met him, a guest bedroom in the Tall Castle, Crath City, Ancrath. "What the h.e.l.l?"

"You're dreaming, Prince Jalan."

"I . . . I knew that." I brushed myself down and glanced around. It didn't look like a dream. "Why are you here? Looking for Baraqel to skewer you again?" I didn't like the man one bit and wanted him out of my head quickly.

"I don't think either of your friends will trouble us tonight, Prince Jalan, light nor dark." He touched a word on his left arm then another on his right as he spoke of light and darkness. "And I am here to see if anything can be salvaged. You were supposed to free the boy and then be led to the Nors.e.m.e.n. With so much gold at your disposal it shouldn't have been beyond you to free them too. You could have hired an army with what you carried. Instead I find you locked with the child in a debtors' cell."

"I was . . . supposed to?" I stared at the heathen trying to make sense of his gibberish. "The dreams?" I put a hand to my face. "You sent the dreams. I thought I was going mad!" All those nights haunted by Hennan's fate. I knew that wasn't like me. "You b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" I took a step toward him, then finding my legs would no longer listen to me, I stopped.

"It seems I over-estimated you, Prince Jalan." Sageous shooed me back and my traitor legs obeyed. "A man who walks himself into a prison is unlikely to be able to walk himself out. I fear my employer will have to accept both your failure and his resulting losses."

"Employer?"

"Kelem wishes you to free your companions from the custody of House Gold so that they may continue their journey and bring Loki's key to him. I do not believe this will be possible however."

"But Kelem owns the banking clans . . ." Though now I said it I did recall talk of strife between them.

"The House Gold has its own ambitions and has grown close to other interests in recent years."

"The Dead King!" It made sense now. Or at least it was moving in that direction. "The clockwork soldiers and the corpse flesh . . ."

"Even so." Sageous nodded.

"So the bank captured Snorri hoping to find Loki's key? And when they get it they'll give it to the Dead King." That didn't sound good.

"Perhaps, perhaps not. They have, as I said, their own ambitions. However, the key has yet to be found. Your Nors.e.m.e.n must know where it lies and so Kelem wished you to free them."

"He could have asked!"

Sageous smiled as if we both knew the answer I would have given. He'd pointed me at Hennan, a gentle push that would normally be misconstrued as the nagging of a guilty conscience. It seemed important to Kelem that Snorri not feel pushed toward their encounter for fear of changing his mind. I took some small comfort in the fact that neither the dream-witch nor the door-mage seemed to understand either of us. Conscience would never compel me into harm's way, and nothing would ever turn Snorri from his path, certainly not the fact that Kelem so badly wanted him to pursue it.

Sageous's smile hung for a moment then fell away as if it had never been. "And to the purpose of my visit." Sageous advanced on me, intimidating though he was the smaller man by more than a head. "Where is Loki's key?" His eyes became drowning pools and terror washed over me. I fell into darkness screaming only the truth. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know!

I woke sweat-soaked, screaming the words, Hennan shaking me and shouting for me to wake up.

After the dream-witch's visit I resolved never to sleep again.

It took a day's insistence and the privacy of another food riot to get Hennan to talk about the key. Once the food got into his system and he found a little energy the boy wanted to talk about everything under the sun, about Kara, about how Snorri got taken down, about what happened to Tuttugu. I wouldn't listen. I had one question-where is the key? In the end the need to talk about something, even if it was the one thing he'd promised not to talk about, was what broke Hennan's resolve.

"Kara hid it," he said.

"Snorri wouldn't trust her with the key."

"He watched her do it."

"Did they bury it somewhere?" I don't know what I'd been antic.i.p.ating, but the idea of the key in a box under four foot of soil, or jammed in some remote crevice on a cliff face, didn't offer much hope. A thing like that wouldn't stay hidden. The unborn felt its pull and it seemed as though the necromancers could track it too. If the only thing the Central Bank wanted wasn't still there once I'd bargained our release for its exchange then we'd all leave the prison the same way and n.o.body would be happy but the pigs. And if I did find out where it was, Sageous would pick the fact from my mind the very next time I fell asleep. Kelem getting the key might be the lesser of two evils compared to the Dead King getting his claws on it, but it still seemed a pretty evil evil to me. The only hope would be to find out where it was and use that information to my advantage before I next fell asleep.

"Tell me they gave it to someone for safekeeping-someone we can trust." I couldn't think of anyone I could trust, but maybe Snorri had more friends and was less troubled by that particular problem.

"Snorri didn't give it away," Hennan said.

"Well where is it then?" I hissed, fending off an old man who'd stumbled past our guards after being elbowed in the face over the ownership of an apple core.

The boy scratched his head as if this were a difficult question.

"Hennan!" I tried to keep the exasperation from my voice.

He withdrew his hand and opened it. A small iron tablet lay in his palm, no bigger than the nail of my little finger, set with a single rune. Kara wore the same things in her hair, or had until she sewed the Harda.s.sa's ruin with them close to the Wheel of Osheim. Hennan must have had it hidden in the matted filth of his own hair.

"How will this help?" I didn't say it wouldn't-I'd seen marvels spring from such runes.

Hennan frowned, trying to remember the exact words. "Let the shadow of a key fall upon it and it will unlock the truth and reveal the lie."

"It will . . . what?" He'd forgotten the spell. All we had was garbled nonsense. The death of a small hope hurts more than an age of despair. That constant fear swelled again from the pit of my stomach and tears stung my eyes.

"It is the key." Hennan kept his gaze on the rune. "But we can't see it or use it until the charm's taken off."

It sounded like madness. "With a shadow?"

"Yes."

"Of a key?"

"Yes."

"Christ." I lay back, shoulders to the roughness of the wall. "You think any of this lot have a key?" I leant to the side and grabbed the ankle of the old man who'd collapsed to the floor. "You! You got a key?" I started laughing, too loud, the kind of laughter that hurts your chest and isn't but a hair from sobbing.

There's one thing to be said for sitting in a cell with absolutely nothing to do but keep what's yours and nurse your hunger-it gives you time. Time to think, time to plan. Obviously to give the lie to this nonsense Kara had spun Hennan, or possibly prove it true, we needed someone with a key. The only someone likely to come down into the bowels of the prison was our friend Racso. So all we needed to do was to get the shadow of Racso's key to fall across it, and we'd have our opportunity when he next unlocked the cell.

Racso wouldn't be back until he felt like selling the debtors food and water, probably another twelve hours or so. I sat back against the wall and invited Hennan to tell me just how Snorri had managed to get them all locked up.

"And how the h.e.l.l did you find them?"

And Hennan told me. The food supplies he had taken from the Roma Hall kitchens ran out after two days. Hungry and tired, he had managed to get a ride with an old couple visiting relatives in Hemero. The pair of ancients appeared to be taking all their worldly possessions with them in their cart but found room for the boy atop the heap. Hennan's part of the bargain was to fetch and carry water, gather kindling, take the horses to pasture, and carry out miscellaneous ch.o.r.es. To me it sounded as if the old folks had taken pity on a strangely pale beggar boy. In any event the arrangement got him safely to within ten miles of the Florentine border.

Back roads took Hennan across the invisible line between the two kingdoms at a point without any guards to turn him away. He arrived sunburned and hungry in Umbertide, exhausting the last of the provisions that his ageing benefactors had sent him off with. Getting into the city had been an adventure of sewers and climbing, Umbertide having enough street children of its own without the soldiers at its gates letting any more in.

It wasn't until Hennan had nearly finished the tale of his getting into Umbertide that I realized what the real problem was. The understanding struck as a cold contraction of the stomach and a sudden reluctance to ask the questions that needed answers.

I forced the words out. "How long ago did you get taken?"

Hennan frowned in the candle light. "I don't know. Everything feels like forever down here and there's no days."

"Guess."

"A couple of days before you came?"