Red Queen's War: The Liar's Key Part 31

That sinking feeling became something more savage as if some great hand were trying to pull me through the cell floor. I thought he'd been in the cell the whole time I'd been in Umbertide. "But you're so thin . . ."

"I've been living off rubbish and sleeping in the streets for . . . weeks. Snorri didn't come by road. Not at first. They took a boat down the river-"

"The Seleen?" The cunning b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. They hadn't trusted me to keep quiet about the key and knew the Red Queen would come after them. They'd done what northmen do. Taken to sea.

"Yes, they got a merchant to take them down the coast on his ship. Only they had problems and it took them a long time. They put in at some port on the Florentine coast and walked to Umbertide. I saw them coming through the Echo Gates. I used to sleep by there, up on a roof."

"So you met up with them and . . ."

"Soldiers took us a few hours later."

"Soldiers?"

"Well, men in uniform anyway, with swords."

"And what had you done?"

"Nothing. Kara got us a room and we'd gone to a tavern and Snorri got me something to eat. They were talking about how they would find Kelem once they reached his mines-Kara said they weren't far off. And then the soldiers came. Snorri knocked some down and we barricaded ourselves into the room. And that's when Kara convinced Snorri to let her hide the key. Snorri said . . ." Hennan frowned again, as if trying to remember the exact words. "'Hide it with the boy. He needs something to give them.'"

"s.h.i.t." Not good. Not good at all.

"What? What's wrong?" Hennan said, as if there weren't already enough wrong for me to curse every time I opened my mouth.

"If they want the key they'll be coming here soon enough."

Hennan was all questions then, but for once I couldn't think of any plausible lies and the truth was too ugly to share. When I thought that House Gold had held Snorri for weeks without coming to the debtors' prison to question their other captives things had seemed less urgent. If they'll wait three weeks then chances are they'll wait another one, and another. My own questions spiralled in my skull, chased by inconvenient answers. Why would they capture Snorri if not for the key? What could be more dangerous in a city where locked vaults lay everywhere than a key that opened everything? Why would Snorri give the key to a child? Because when they came to question the boy Snorri needed to know Hennan had something to give them rather than be tortured for information he didn't have. And the biggest question was how long-how long would the northmen hold out once the bankers stopped asking nicely and got out the hot irons? If it were me I'd be babbling out every secret I ever knew before they'd even got past harsh language. They'd had them three days. If they were asking questions the hard way then n.o.body could hold out much longer than that, not even Snorri.

Common sense said the bank was after the key and they'd be coming to my cell once they'd broken Snorri. Or, and the thought only increased my panic, once they'd broken Tuttugu, which would take far less time. Without the key I wasn't ever getting out of this cell, except as a bag of bones destined for the back door. We needed to get out as soon as possible-now in fact. But until we had a key's shadow we didn't have a key, and without a key we could do nothing but hurry up and wait.

A whole day pa.s.sed before Racso's return-a day and a sleepless night in which each hour crawled and I sweated through every minute. I couldn't imagine how either northman could be holding out so long under interrogation and each distant clunk of metal on metal had me sure that someone had come for Hennan. But in the end it was our jailer that came, with a new debtor in tow, fresh meat for the cells. Or rather a long-term debtor whose funds had finally run so low that she'd been judged ready for the final stop in her repayment plan. The gate should have been unlocked nearly a day earlier when a bag of bones named Artos Mantona died quietly in the middle of the floor, being too weak to keep his corner place. We shouted through the bars but if Racso heard he showed no inclination to remove the corpse, probably thinking a replacement would be along sooner or later and he'd kill two birds with one stone.

By the looks of some of the gaunt faces in the light of my flickering candle Artos might not be the only inmate waiting to be dragged away for the pigs by the time Racso deigned to unlock. One of the "heavies" I paid in apples to keep the starving ma.s.ses off my back, a man bearing the unlikely name of Artemis Canoni, had taken a turn for the worse despite the improvement my arrival had wrought in his diet. I'd never seen a man go downhill so fast. He seemed to curl up about some hidden pain, growing smaller by the hour. Another fellow nursed a wet cough, not wet in the normal spluttery way, but in the ragged sound of his lungs and the bubbling corruption to be heard inside his straining chest. I kept away from him.

"Get back, you defaulting maggots!" Racso's bellow always made me flinch, each utterance of it scoring the hate I had for him a little deeper. The debtors moved back from the bars as Racso's baton rattled across them, the actual maggots stayed where they were, chewing on the ruins of Artos Mantona's eyeb.a.l.l.s with tiny mouths. "Back!"

Hennan and I stayed where we were, sitting around our candle, the latest in a line of them, now burned down to its last few inches. We'd positioned ourselves as close to the bars as we thought would be tolerated.

Behind Racso stood a middle-aged woman in grey rags, regarding us with horror. She looked gaunt rather than starved, and once among the other inmates she would seem almost healthy.

"Move that debtor beside the gate." Racso nodded at Artos's remains. "You there, stay close and roll him through." He counted through his keys and approached the gate with the chunk of iron best suited to opening it. He held his lantern in the other hand, sending a confusion of shadows swinging this way and that, the pattern of the bars playing back and forth across the floor. I opened my hand to reveal the small rune in my palm, colder than it should be, heavier too.

"Come on, dammit." A desperate mutter as I chased shadows, trying to catch them in my hand. There wasn't any blasted shadow that looked like a key, just random blurs and the sweeping shadow of the bars.

"What you got there, yer worship?" Racso helped the woman in with a kindly shove between the shoulder blades. "Something to trade?" The old wreck he'd detailed to move Artos struggled to roll him through the gap. The rotten stink that went up made him retch over the body as he rolled it. "Something good?"

I stood up, holding my palm out toward him. The movement came too fast and, ever suspicious, he slammed the gate, turning the key in the lock. A few seconds earlier and Artos's dead legs would have kept the gate from closing, but the old man had pushed them through just in time. What I would have done then I'm not sure. Certainly pitting my skull against Racso's baton did not appeal. He looked to have the sullen strength possessed by many fat men with slab-like arms. Not a showy, muscular strength, just the killing kind.

"Easy, emperor! Nothing sudden. Nothing sudden!" He squinted at my hand as he withdrew the key. "Don't look like much."

"Take a closer look!" I stepped forward and he stepped back, lantern waving, key jutting at me as if to ward off attack. I'd tried too hard though, unnerved him, let the need show.

"You want to settle yourself, emperor, take it easy. Don't let this place get to you. A little fasting will calm you down." He turned away, evidently not taking food orders today.

I punched the bars in frustration. It didn't help. Another night would see me falling asleep and spilling all my new secrets to Sageous.

"Wait!" Hennan's high voice. "A silver crown. Crown argent of Red March!" He nudged me in the ribs, hard. Racso swivelled with considerable grace, pirouetting on a heel.

"Silver? I don't think so. I'd've smelled out a silver." He tapped his nose.

Hennan nudged me again and with great reluctance I drew one of the three silvers from the depths of my pocket, not the promised crown argent but a silver florin from the Central Bank's own mint. A hungry gasp went up on all sides.

"Shut it!" Racso banged the bars, scowling at the inmates before returning his gaze to the florin. "Silver is it?" A peculiar greed stole over his face as if the coin were a pudding he were about to devour. "And what is it you'd be wanting, yer lordship? Meat? A good joint on the bone? Beef? A jug o' gravy with it?"

"Just hold your lantern like so." Hennan mimed the action. "And the door key, like so." He held the one hand before the other. "And let the shadow fall onto Jalan's palm."

Racso frowned, his hands moving to obey even as he considered his objections. "Witchcraft is it? Some heathen thing of yours, boy?" He unclasped the key hoop on his belt and worked the largest of them free.

"He says it will bring us luck." I shrugged, joining in. "d.a.m.ned if I'm not tired enough of this place to want a bit of that. The key symbolizes freedom."

"You following the north G.o.ds now, yer lordship?" Racso picked absently at his nose with the hand holding the key. "Don't hardly seem Christian."

"Just taking a gamble, Racso, just a gamble. I've been praying hard to Jesu and the Father since I got here and it hasn't done a bit of good. Me the son of a cardinal and all! Thought I'd spread my bets."

And just like that Racso held out the door-key, his lantern behind it, close enough and still enough for the shadow to fall on the floor. As Hennan surmised, everything's for sale at the right price, and you won't find many shadows that will earn you a silver florin.

I reached out with the rune at the middle of my palm and caught the shadow from the air, closing my hand about it. In one moment fingers closed about empty s.p.a.ce and in the next they held Loki's key, as cold, heavy, and solid as a lie.

In the same instant I tossed the florin between the bars and a hundred pairs of eyes followed its ringing progress. Racso scampered after it, dropping the door-key on the floor, beyond arm's reach though that didn't stop half a dozen of my cellmates stretching for it.

He tracked the coin down and stamped on it to halt its progress. "Now that weren't right, debtor." He called the ones closest to dying debtor, as if it excused everything happening to them. "Ain't right to send a man running after a coin like he's a street beggar. Not even for a silver." He straightened, bit the coin, and crossed back toward us, the florin in his meaty fist. He barked a laugh at the arms withdrawing between the bars. "Take more'n a key to get out of Central Prison. I could open all eight of these gates and wouldn't none of you maggots get halfway out. You'd need all these here." He patted the ring at his hip, making the keys hooked upon it jangle. "And a sword-son to get past the guard. There's close on a dozen standing between you lot and freedom." He frowned over the arithmetic. "Six or seven anyway."

Racso looked down at the coin in his palm, his face almost lit with the glow of it. "Easy money." He laughed and slapped his belly, shadows swinging. "I'll be back for the debtor." He toed Artos's corpse. "Got me some spending to do." And off he walked, whistling his song of cool breezes and open fields.

I sat in my island of light, the candle flame guttering around its wick, Loki's key in my hand, and in the thickness of the shadow on all sides desperate men muttered about silver coins.

TWENTY-NINE.

We waited for Racso to come back. We didn't need his key but I needed light for my plan and before the light I'd needed darkness. We had to wait. I didn't want to wait. I didn't want the boredom or the misery or the sense of uncertainty, but most of all I didn't want to fall asleep and find Sageous waiting there for me.

It proved a long and miserable test of endurance, there in the unbroken night of the cells. I moaned and sighed about it, until I remembered Hennan had endured the place alone before I arrived, much of his time starving and parched. I kept quiet after that even though I thought it had probably been easier on him, raised as he was to the hardships of peasant life.

Artemis Canoni stopped answering my calls to have the inmates and their prying hands kept from my person, and took to moaning in a corner-whatever had been eating at his insides seeming now to have gained the upper hand. My other bodyguard, Antonio Gretchi, a former cobbler to Umbertide's moneyed cla.s.ses, proved unequal to the task on his own, and so I indentured a new servant for the price of a wizened apple and set him to his duties-which meant stamping on any hand that he encountered creeping in my direction in the dark.

For hour stacked upon empty hour we sat on the hard ground, too hot, too thirsty, and listening, always listening for the rustle of any approach. My head kept nodding, imagination creeping in to paint pictures on the darkness, tempting me into dream. I jerked my head up with a curse, more desperate each time. Occasionally someone would start to speak, sometimes a muttered conversation with a confidant, sometimes a long slow litany uttered into the dark. In the anonymity of blindness people confessed their sins, spoke their desires, made their peace with the Almighty, or, in some cases, bored the a.r.s.e off everyone with endless dreary recollections from profoundly dull lives. I wondered how long I would have to sit there before the company became acquainted with every detail of events at the Aral Pa.s.s and I progressed to a comprehensive reconstruction of all Vermillion's bordellos. Quite possibly another day would get me there.

The low mutter of conversation rose and fell in cycles, petering out to long silences then building again, sparked by a memory that built into a recounted moment and split into half a dozen threads running through our number. The thing had a natural rhythm to it, and when that rhythm broke it jarred me out of my reverie. The muttering of four or five people had stopped at once. Even the wet death rattle of Mr. Cough paused.

"What is it?" I asked. It clearly needed someone of royal blood to voice the important questions.

Silence, save for a sc.r.a.ping noise, something heavy being pulled across flagstones.

"I said-" The sc.r.a.ping noise came again and I realized with a start that whatever was making the sound was beyond the bars.

I held my breath. Silence. Fear kept that breath trapped in my lungs, only to burst out in a shriek when Mr. Cough suddenly started choking on his own held breath, hacking so hard I felt sure his lungs must be filling with blood. When he finally trailed off a couple of people started to mutter again, the tension broken. With a dull thud something fell against the bars-and everyone swallowed their words, the breath trapped in their chests once more. Inmates shuffled back further into the cell starting to curse and cry out in fear.

"What the h.e.l.l?"

"How can-"

"There's no one out there . . ."

And then someone said it. "Artos?" The corpse that had been left sprawled just beyond the gate.

"Maybe he wasn't dead."

"He was dead. I checked him. He was my friend."

"Maggots were eating his eyes."

"Of course he was dea-" A second dull thud of meat against bars cut the conversation off.

"Oh s.h.i.t."

"Sweet Jesu!"

"Artos? Is that you?"

The darkness seethed with possibilities-none of them good.

"It is Artos, isn't it?" Hennan's voice, closer to me than I'd imagined. I flinched.

"Yes."

"And he is dead, isn't he?" A small hand seeking mine.

"Yes." In my left hand I held the key, removed from its hiding place, the witch's spell undone . . . Loki's key ready for use once more, and once more free to draw the attention of any foul thing that might be seeking it.

The thud of meat on iron came again. I imagined what I couldn't see. Artos, staggering back from the impact on dead legs, face still crawling, ready to lunge forward once more, answering the call of what I held in my hand.

"Don't worry." I used my bluff hero-of-the-pa.s.s voice, loud enough for everyone but aiming the message at just one pair of ears. "Don't worry. He's out there, and we're in here. If he couldn't manage to get through those bars in all the months they held him trapped on this side, he's not going to manage to get back through them before Racso's next visit, now is he?"

I'd barely got the words out before Mr. Cough drew in another gurgling breath as if he were drowning in whatever filth was filling his lungs. On cue, after that chilling breath rattled into Mr. Cough, my former bodyguard Artemis Canoni loosed a soft cry of agony from his corner of the cell. Neither Hennan nor I said it, but from the sudden tension in his hand I think we came to the understanding in the same moment. Artos might be trapped out there-but if Mr. Cough or Artemis Canoni were to meet their maker within the next ten hours or so before Racso came back . . . the Dead King would have a new corpse to play with, and this time we'd be trapped in the cell with whatever he chose to stand back up again. Suddenly my concern for my fellow inmates reached new heights.

"Give that man with the cough some room, dammit! Don't crowd him. Someone give him some water-there's a copper in it for the man that does. And Artemis-where's my faithful Artemis got to? Water for him too. And here's a crust to dip into it."

It took a bit of organizing but I did my best for them. Not that I had much faith in the curative powers of stale water and staler bread. Our friend outside kept b.u.mping against the bars, and our friends inside kept muttering about why he might be doing it, but in the end with nothing to see and nothing to be done about it, we settled back into an uneasy quiet.

The truth about sheer terror is that even for a world-cla.s.s coward like me it's unsustainable. When the dreaded thing doesn't happen hour after hour it becomes something that whilst still terrible allows a little room around the edges through which other thoughts may slip. Thoughts came. Thoughts that seeded suspicions into the blindness of the cell. Suspicions, watered by darkness, growing, slowly but relentlessly. The Red Queen's war lay at the midst of my troubles. Her elder sister had sent me to the distant north to find the key I now held. And what was I doing in Umbertide? The Silent Sister's twin had sent me here. It had seemed a mercy at the time, an escape from the dangers at home . . . but was it? Red March mortgaged to the banks of Florence, a power struggle between House Gold and others against Kelem, the Broken Empire's unofficial master of coin, the Dead King sticking his bony fingers into the pie . . . the last staging post for Snorri before heading into the hills bearing Loki's key to seek the door-mage out . . . and young Prince Jalan thrust into the middle of it all by a man I'd come to understand more fully in Umbertide than I ever had in the palace-a man the traders here considered Red March's unofficial master of coin. I thought of Garyus slumped in his bed, looking two steps from death as he sent me on my way with the only kind words I heard on my return. I thought of him lying there and tried to square that image with the new ones being built behind my eyes. With a start I realized I was holding Loki's key tight to my chest. I lowered my hand, wondering if its lies were bleeding into me even now.

I sat pondering, clutching Loki's key, shifting position every few minutes to keep from getting sore against the flagstones, until every part of me was sore and it didn't matter any more. I would rather have set the key in a pocket but I couldn't risk losing it, and so I held it tight, that slick and treacherous surface seeming to slide beneath my fingers like melting ice.

To start with I'd gripped the thing as if it might bite me, remembering how at my first touch memories had pulsed through me, images from the day Edris Dean killed my mother. But the key didn't bite any more than old Artos found a way through the cell's bars. I sat with it cool in my fist for an hour or more, listening to the sounds of the dungeon. At one point I heard a knocking, as if someone were rapping on a door close by-though I knew we had only bars and gates, no door. The knocking grew louder, more insistent, though no one around me mentioned it, and the darkness around my ears seemed crowded with whispers just beyond the edge of hearing. It lasted a minute, another, and then no more.

The fear subsided into unease, disquiet fermented into boredom, and only the long battle against sleep remained as the blind hours pa.s.sed. That was when the key struck. It felt as if the key were hauled sideways. I could let it go or be dragged along with it. Darkness melted into vision though I fought with all my strength to stay where I was, and struggled to see only what lay about me. My efforts blew away in a cold wind. I stood once more on the margins of the Wheel of Osheim. The archway, that empty arch through which we'd escaped from Edris and the Harda.s.sa Vikings stood once more before me, a lone work of the wrong-mages in the bizarre wilderness through which Kara had guided us. Of the volva, of Snorri and Tuttugu, there was no sign. No sign of me either, just my disembodied point of view, watching, unblinking, waiting for the lie, waiting for the key's deception. And nothing came. I held a dim awareness of my body, somewhere else, in another place and time, the key a cold and heavy bar locked tight in my grip.

"It's an odd sort of vision that shows me nothing . . ." The words sounded only in my head. In Osheim the wind spoke and everything else lay silent. I stared at the arch, and at the strangely sculpted encrustations of black and gla.s.sy rock that punctuated the surrounding terrain. I looked up at the mauve wound of the sky. "What?"

Light reflecting from one of the nearer outcroppings drew my eye. Obsidian they called this stuff. I knew it not from the lecturing of some tutor but because there had been a fad back in Vermillion for jewellery made from the material. For several months one autumn everyone who was anyone was wearing it, and after Lisa DeVeer had dropped enough heavy hints on me from the considerable height of her balcony, I borrowed sufficient money to buy her a necklace fashioned from polished beads and discs of obsidian. She wore it once if I recall . . . The key burned cold in my hand and suddenly I knew what it had been made from and from whence it came.

"Ah h.e.l.l." No story that begins "near the Wheel of Osheim" ends well. I looked down and saw that I'd arrived in body as well as spirit. In my hand, where the key should be was nothing but Hennan's iron rune tablet. A moment later it was the shadow of a key. Then the key. "Kara hid you in a shadow . . ." My eyes roamed up the sides of the arch, gaze sliding uncomfortably over the symbols set there in stone. "She's dark-sworn?" I remembered the ease with which she cast Aslaug from her boat. She hadn't opposed the spirit with light or fire, just ordered her gone . . . and Loki's daughter had fled.

I looked at the arch and remembered how Kara had prepared it with spells before getting Snorri to use the key. The arch had opened onto the dark and Aslaug had emerged, then Baraqel had broken through, setting light at war with darkness within the span of the portal, forming some kind of recreation of the powers at the heart of the Silent Sister's spell. Only then had the volva urged us through, leading the way. And from that moment to this I hadn't heard another word from Aslaug nor had Snorri mentioned Baraqel. Their voices suddenly silent and their influence fading to nothing in the s.p.a.ce of a week. It hadn't seemed that odd until now. Everything about magic is strange and untrustworthy in any case . . . but . . . Kara had led us to that arch, she had worked enchantment upon it, and then as well as transporting us from danger it had stripped away our patrons, the strength given to us by my great-aunt. Granted, they were strange spirits we bore and not to be trusted, and granted my great-aunt was as mad a witch as might be found in the Broken Empire, but even so they had been a form of power, our only protection from the worst of what our enemies might bring to bear upon us . . . and Kara had taken them from us.

I walked through the arch and found myself on the other side, back on that same blasted heath. When Kara had activated it the arch had taken us to the darkness beneath Halradra . . . but I'd come from darkness this time and required light. For the longest moment I stood staring back at the archway, remembering the darkness of my cell and the darkness of the caves beneath the volcano. Light. That was why we were waiting. We needed light. And, as if a key had turned, pieces of memory aligned and I had my answer.

I closed my eyes, opened them again, and found it dark, just as it had always been. Near silence-the low muttering of two people across the width of the cell, the rattle of a dying man's breath, the sc.r.a.ping shuffle of a dead man beyond the bars. I patted my pockets and cursed myself for a fool.

I worked blind, breaking free double florins from the linen strips into which they'd been sewn, unwrapping the used lengths of cloth and stacking the coins between my knees. I took exquisite care not to let them c.h.i.n.k.

"What're you doing?" Hennan close by.

"Nothing." I d.a.m.ned his keen ears.

"You're doing something."

"Just be ready."

The boy had the sense not to ask what for, where many grown men would not.

With even greater care I balanced a tin plate upside down atop the stacks of coins.

"I'm going to make a light," I said loud enough for everyone. "You should shield your eyes."

Loki's key opened a lot of things, memories not the least of them. I reached down into the depths of my back pocket, down among the fluff, the old handkerchief that needed cleaning, sc.r.a.ps of parchment, a locket with Lisa DeVeer's likeness inside, and found the small hard lump I'd been searching for, wrapped in cloth. I slid a finger past the covering to touch the cold metal. Immediately a glow broke through the handkerchief, through the questing fingers, and shone through the fabric of my trews. Had there been a wit among our number he might have commented that for once the sun did indeed appear to be shining out of my a.r.s.e. I pulled Garyus's orichalc.u.m cone out, hidden in my fist and yet still bright enough to light the room in the rosy hues of my blood, the illumination pulsing and erratic as a heartbeat. Gasps of awe and shock went up on all sides. Even muted by my hand the light was enough to make everyone there, me included, shield our eyes.

The awe turned to horror within moments. On all sides my fellow debtors were screaming and shuffling back from the bars. Being closest to the source, the light blinded me for longer than most so that I had to unscrew my eyes against the glare and blink helplessly to try to see what had caused the panic. When I finally focused on the thing beyond the bars a shriek nearly escaped me too and only my greatest resolve kept me from bundling back to bury myself in the crowd.

Artos had sc.r.a.ped off most of the maggoty flesh and the eyes that regarded us from that raw and glistening face were oozing sockets, night-dark with shadow. Even so a hunger seemed to stare from the darkness of those eye-pits, a hunger that felt horrifically familiar. Dead hands gripped the bars and a jaw full of broken teeth ground out still more fragments whilst gargling incoherent threats at us.

"In a moment I'm going to unlock the gate," I said.