Red Queen's War: The Liar's Key Part 34

I risked another glance around the corner. Marco had already set off up the street. The soldier held the door of the Frauds' Tower ajar for the specialist and as the man slipped through the gap I caught a glimpse of him. Just a glimpse, a s.n.a.t.c.h of dark tunic, grey trews, dusty boots, and his hair-I saw that too-close-cropped to the skull, iron grey, with just a band of it yet untouched by age, running front to back, a crest so black as to almost be blue.

"Ow!" Hennan tore free of my grip where my fingers dug into his arm. "What was that for?"

"Edris Dean," I said. "Edris f.u.c.king Dean." And I stood and walked out into the new day.

THIRTY-TWO.

I'm cursed with berserker blood. Perhaps it's the Red Queen's taint, her penchant for violence breaking out of me in rare but concentrated bursts. It's happened twice to my knowledge and I don't remember anything but fragments of the time that followed, just loose images of blood and dying, my blade cutting a red path through other men's flesh. That, and the screaming. Mostly mine. I can't remember the emotion of it, not anger, not hate, just those images as if seeing pieces of another man's nightmare.

Walking out into Patrician Street in the first light of what must be my last day I still had my fear but it seemed as though I'd put it in a small box somewhere at the back of my mind. I heard its shrieks of terror, its demands, its attempts at reasoning with me . . . but, like the boy's shouts at my back, it was just noise. Perhaps the lack of sleep had me dreaming on my feet. Nothing felt quite real. I didn't know what I would do except that Edris Dean would be dead at the end of it. As I approached the clockwork soldier I lifted a hand before me steady and sure, no sign of a tremor in it.

The thing took a step toward me, looking down to study my features, copper eyes burning. At each move it made a thousand gears hummed, a million teeth meshed, from the minute, through small to large, to cog-jaws big enough to eat me. "Yes?" A proper clockwork voice this time, a metallic rasping that somehow made sense.

The boy stood at my side now. I could see him reflected in the silver-steel of the soldier's armour, warped and distorted, but still Hennan. He'd tried to drag me back, tried to stop my advance, and found he couldn't. Strange, when this was what he'd been demanding all along. We're like that. Give us everything we ask for and suddenly it's too much.

The soldier's breastplate gleamed, bearing few scratches despite its age, but in one place, low in the side, a puncture wound spoiled the perfection, a dark, angular hole, driven through the thickness of the silver-steel, a gauge no man could support and a metal no smith could work. "You can be hurt then . . ." I turned and took the boy by the shoulder. "Go to the door, Hennan." I angled him and thrust him toward it.

"State the nature of your request." The soldier flexed its fingers, articulated in many places and each as long as my forearm. It put me in mind of the unborn monster built from the graves in Taproot's campsite. It had taken an elephant to put that down, and the soldier looked like an elephant might just bounce off it.

"I just came to see what the boy is doing," I said. "It looks as if he's breaking in."

The soldier pivoted about its spine, the upper half of it rotating toward the door behind it. A clockwork soldier doesn't worry about presenting its back to a potential enemy. All that slamming a battle-axe between its shoulders would do is ruin a good axe and remove any doubt concerning whether you were an enemy or not.

I had one hand in my pocket. It closed now about the key. Loki's key. The thing felt cold against my fingers, slick, as if it would slip from them at the first chance for treachery. I pulled it clear and a dark pulse of joy rang up my arm.

High above me, between silver shoulder plates, a circular depression edged with intricate teeth glittered in the light. Up close I could see not just one ring of teeth but a second set further back and narrower, then a third and fourth, and more, forming a cone-shaped indentation maybe two inches across. The key held the shape of the one whose shadow Racso set upon it, a crude and heavy thing, a notched rectangular plate on a thick shaft some six inches long.

Olaaf Rikeson had held this key before Snorri had. It had been taken from his frozen corpse, and before he died Rikeson had raised an army with it. An army that thought it could march on the gates of Jotenheim and face down the giants that even the G.o.ds feared. Olaaf had opened more than doors with this key-he had opened hearts, he had opened minds.

Reaching as high as I could, I lunged forward and slammed the key into the soldier's winding lock. The obsidian flowed beneath my grip, colder than ice, searing my skin, but I kept hold and in the moment it met the lock the key became a thick black rod ending in a cone pitted with an infinity of notches.

There's a rule for doing and undoing, a rule older than empires, even a word to go with it, clockwise, and the opposite, anti-clockwise. One direction to wind up, the opposite to wind down. In the heat of the moment, in the cold terror of the moment, I just guessed. I set every part of my strength behind the task. For three pulses of my heart, each seeming to boom out slower than the most solemn funeral beat, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d thing wouldn't move. Time congealed all about me. The soldier halted its own rotation with a shuddering clunk and began to turn back toward me, starting to drag the key from my hand. One arm reached for me, articulating against the elbow joint in a way that gave the lie to any pretence of humanity. Long metal fingers stretched wide to encircle my waist, each ending in talons razored to slice flesh from bone.

Maybe the additional fear lent me strength, or Loki had had his joke by that point, but without warning the lock surrendered and the key turned. It gave with a sharp jerk accompanied by a sound like something expensive breaking. A resonating metallic tw.a.n.g followed, and a multi-tonal whirring as a thousand wheels, flywheels, cogs and escapements spun free. The soldier ground to a halt just as the key wrenched from my grip and that metal face turned my way. The whole thing slumped, the strange light dying from those copper eyes, and within the span of a single second the entirety of that great steel behemoth stood inert before me, no hint of sound, and without rumour of motion.

The fingers of the soldier's hand nearly met around my chest, the point of the claw on the longest finger having sliced a three-inch tear into my shirt, a small crimson stain just beginning to spread through the fabric at the far end.

"s.h.i.t!" I took hold of the finger and tried to pry it back. Hennan rushed to help, glancing nervously at the soldier as he tugged. Despite the mechanism's apparently relaxed slump there wasn't any give in the thing, I might as well be caged in iron bars.

"Slip through," Hennan said.

"What?" The most emaciated corpse behind the debtors' prison couldn't slip through the gap between the fingers.

Hennan raised his arms above his head by way of answer and wriggled down onto his haunches.

"Ah." Undignified, but what the h.e.l.l? I followed his example and a moment later was crawling out from beneath the soldier's hand with no additional injuries save for the brocaded epaulette torn from my shoulder.

"You stopped it!" Hennan stood gazing up at the soldier, showing a degree of awe now that he was close up that had proved lacking when we'd watched from the corner and he'd urged me to storm the place with nothing but my bare fists to defeat the guards.

"If I can't do better than that we're in trouble." Some large part of my mind had set itself screaming at me to run. But Edris Dean's face floated over that noise, not as he'd been on Beerentoppen this spring, but as he'd looked when Mother slipped b.l.o.o.d.y from his sword. The scarlet stain from the soldier's claw spread like a memory of the wound Edris's blade gave me that day. It grew slowly, blossoming from the site of the old injury that had nearly taken my life. For a moment the sight hypnotized me.

"Jal!" Hennan, urgent, tugging at my sleeve.

"Prince Jalan," I said. "Unhand me." I shook him off, recovered the key, and walked around to face the soldier head on. The street lay empty left and right. A messenger clattered through the cross-roads fifty yards further on, intent on his business. I reached up and took hold of the soldier's shoulder, stepping onto its knee and hauling myself up.

"Jal-Prince-we should . . ." Hennan gestured at the door.

"It's locked and there are men with swords on the other side," I said, staring at the soldier's gleaming metal skull.

On the smooth forehead where my face distorted in hideous reflection a small metal disc lay raised a hair above the surrounding. I banged the side of it with the base of the key and slid it aside to reveal a small circular hole no wider than the pupil of an eye. I pressed the cone-shaped point of the key to the hole and willed Loki's piece of trickery into action. It took a moment's concentration before the obsidian started to flow again, liquid night reforming beneath my fingers, cold with possibility, draining into the narrowness of the hole until all I held was the end of a thin black rod.

"You're mine." I whispered it, remembering Yusuf waiting with me in the House Gold, the blackness of his smile as he told me how the Mechanists' machine coded a rod to each new owner and that rod, inserted into the specified clockwork soldier's head, would transfer its loyalty to the person who had purchased it. I felt the rod change, felt it lock, and then, with a twist, I drew it slowly out, six obsidian inches of it. "Mine!" Louder now.

"But . . ." Hennan, frowning as I jumped down beside him. "You broke it . . ."

"I unwound it," I said. "There's a difference. And it was pretty much unwound in any case." I moved back around to the winding port. The key changed to fit the indentation as I reached toward it. "Let's . . ." I started to turn the key in the opposite direction to my first attempt. "See . . ." I put some muscle into it. "What . . ." Throughout the soldier's torso cogs began to whisper and whirr. "We . . ." I kept turning. "Can . . . Do."

I'm no scholar or artificer but I seem to recall that the physic of things is much like that of life. You don't get anything for nothing, and if you want a lot out you've got to put a lot in. I wanted a lot out of my newest possession and I didn't want to put a lot in. By rights I should have stood there winding for an hour just to get the thing to take a single step forward, but the key I held had its own rules. The key had been crafted to unlock, to remove obstacles, to allow the user to get where they wanted to. I wanted to get to a fully wound soldier. Its failure to work was the obstacle before me. I remembered how when I'd held the orichalc.u.m I could, with enough focus and will, direct the wild pulsing of its illumination into a single brilliant beam and steer it forward until my concentration failed and it fell apart. I summoned that same focus and tried to will whatever potential I had in me into a single beam driven through the black rod in my hand and into the metal ma.s.s of the soldier.

With each turn of the key the noise from within the soldier grew, wheels rotating, springs groaning, cogs buzzing in a fury of motion, creaks and tw.a.n.gs as things deep within grew tighter, tighter, and tighter still. I thought of Edris Dean and turned the key though it resisted me and threatened to tear the very skin from my palm rather than rotate another degree. The soldier groaned, its armour flexed as deep inside the reservoirs of its power clenched into potent cores that might drive it on for another seven centuries. The great head above me turned on a neck of silver-steel collars, gears meshing, cricks giving with high pitched retorts. And the eyes that found me blazed even in the light of the new day.

"Jalan Kendeth," it said in a voice sharp with angles and tw.a.n.ging like lute strings wound too tight.

"Prince Jalan," I corrected it. "See this child." I pointed and waited for the head to swivel and fix upon Hennan. "Hennan Vale. We're going into this jail to extract two prisoners. You are to precede us and protect us from anyone trying to stop us."

The soldier's head rotated back toward me, a smooth and sudden motion, far more rapid than its movements prior to rewinding. "This will contravene numerous laws applying in the city of Umbertide."

"Duly noted. Let's go." And I waved it toward the formidable door that gave access into the Frauds' Tower.

The soldier strode smartly to the door and rapped four times. I heard rattling, someone mutter, and the door began to open. The soldier jerked it wide and the guardsman behind came sprawling out into the street, dragged by the door handle. He landed face first a short distance before me. I kicked him in the head as he got to all fours.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h!" I'd been about to apologize for kicking the man while he was down but it hurt me more than him. I hobbled around his senseless form muttering more explicit curses under my breath, pausing only to slide his short sword from its scabbard.

The clockwork soldier had vanished inside by the time I reached the entrance. I managed to grab Hennan's shoulder and haul him back. "Fools rush in. And granted this whole exercise is deeply stupid, but let's not make it worse." I pushed him behind me and peered into the foyer. The soldier stood there with a guardsman in one metal hand and a clerk, plucked from behind the counter, in the other. Maybe they were gripped too tightly to holler for help or they were too scared of being ground to pulp, but either way they both held quiet.

"Well, done . . . erm . . . do you have a name?" I looked up at the soldier.

"Guardian."

"Well done, Guardian. Best not to kill anyone you don't have to. We can put these two in a cell if they behave themselves." I should be terrified. I should be four blocks away and still sprinting, but when I tried to reach for my fear all I found was Edris's face as it had been fifteen years ago, and Mother sliding off his sword for the thousandth time, with that same look of surprise. "You, clerk." I pointed unnecessarily at the balding man, his pot belly bulging through the gaps between Guardian's many-knuckled fingers, his face purpling. "What cell are the northmen in and how do we get there?"

The man gasped something, his eyes bulging, shot through with burst veins.

"Put him down so he can answer my question, Guardian."

The soldier opened his hand and the man fell with all the grace of a grain sack.

I came a few steps closer. Close enough to smell that the man had soiled himself. "Tell me again. And make sure you get it right or Guardian here will come back and pull your arms off."

"Cells ten and thirteen, level four." The clerk heaved in a wheezing breath. "Please don't hurt-" The soldier swept him in its grip again.

"Keep going then!" I shooed the soldier on. "Wait, stop!" It jerked to a halt, teetering mid-step. "Go back and get the guard from the street." Even if he didn't wake up in a hurry he would attract attention left lying in the road.

Guardian dutifully clunked outside and returned with the unconscious guard over one shoulder. I closed and bolted the door once the soldier was through.

"Stairs!" I waved the mechanism on and it moved past me, through the foyer, great feet clanking on stone until it reached the central spiral of steps. A large gate of crossed iron bars, a boss set with a rose symbol at each junction, sealed the stairs. Various doors led off into rooms or corridors around the stairwell and a thorough man, or at least a cautious man like me, should really have secured the ground floor first to ensure a clear escape and no attackers sneaking up from behind. On the other hand, Edris Dean had almost certainly gone straight up to Snorri's cell with his torture warrant. I set Loki's key into the gate's lock and turned it. "Level four! That's what the man said!"

On level one a jailer startled from his doze, nearly falling off his chair. He managed a brief and startled shout before Guardian clubbed him with the clerk. The familiar human stink told me they kept prisoners here and unlocking doors off the stairwell revealed the jailer's sleeping quarters, a storeroom, broom closet, and a corridor leading to a pa.s.sage that paralleled the Tower's perimeter, running in a circle between two concentric rings of cells. Heavy doors, each set with a small barred window, lined the pa.s.sage walls. Guardian deposited the door guard, ground floor guard, jailer, and clerk into the first of these, surprising the ragged and elderly man inside with this unexpected company.

Returning to the stairs behind Guardian, I could hear cries of alarm from the levels above us. Evidently the jailer's strangled squeak and subsequent flattening with a blunt instrument hadn't gone unnoticed.

"Up! Up!" I clapped my hands. "And you, stay close." I motioned Hennan to my side and held my short sword ready. The fear had started nipping at my heels now. Guardian led on. The jailer on the second level had kept his station, standing with bra.s.s-banded club in hand and flanked by two guardsmen, steel drawn. Guardian advanced on them, arms wide, as they stared in disbelief. The jailer dropped his club, one guardsman managed a half-hearted thrust that glanced off the soldier's armour, and all three were swept up into a metal embrace.

"We'll lock them up." I hurried past to unlock the door to the corridor and then the first door off the corridor. Guardian followed to toss its captives into what proved this time to be an empty cell. "Quickly!" I didn't know how much time we had, but I knew for sure it was running out fast.

Guardian set off up the stairs with me right behind. Almost before the soldier had taken its first step a prison guard hurtled down the spiral hollering the kind of battle cry that sounds mostly like terror, his short sword raised on high. The man had no time to register what he was up against before being backhanded into the wall. Guardian caught the guard's limp form in both hands on the rebound.

"d.a.m.n." The crimson smear along the stonework told an unpleasant story. "Careful! You don't need to hurt them!" I'm not perhaps the most generous of souls but generally there's no murder in me. It's not conscience so much as being squeamish, and also afraid of the repercussions. For Edris Dean though I would make an exception and call it justice.

Guardian took three more strides carrying the guardsman, clearing five steps a time and leaving them spattered with blood. Without warning the guardsman's head snapped back up revealing a gleam of fractured white skull in the scarlet mess where the left side of his head should be. His eyes found me and the appet.i.te in them made my legs too weak for stair climbing. Hennan crashed into my back.

"He's dead!" Fear reduced my voice to a squeak. The guardsman started to struggle in Guardian's grip. "Quick! Make an end of him!" I found my shout.

Guardian carried out his instruction with gruesome efficiency, ramming the corpse's head into the wall with a steel palm and pressing until nothing remained but a splat of b.l.o.o.d.y porridge and bone shards dribbling down the wall. I vomited acidic yellow drool onto the step in front of me.

"Keep hold of the body and keep moving." I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand then looked for somewhere to wipe the back of my hand. I moved on past my own mess and the one on the wall, clutching at my nose which being sick had made throb like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d for some reason, and trying to shield my eyes so I didn't have to see the corpse still twitching in Guardian's grip.

"At least they're easier to deal with when you've got help." Hennan, close behind me, sounding less scared than I felt.

"One dead man isn't the problem," I said, still sounding nasal. "They know where we are now." If the Dead King had looked at us through those eyes he could be steering every dead body in the city our way. I wondered just what might be waiting for us outside when we came back down the stairs. Up until this point the worst my imagination had shown me was rank upon rank of city guard.

We stepped from the stairwell through the arch onto the third floor, keeping close to Guardian. It looked identical to the floor below, absent the jailer and guards. I could see down the short corridor into the pa.s.sage that circled the Tower-something seemed off, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

"We've got to check for guards," I said. "Can't have them escaping to raise the alarm." Or creeping up behind us.

Guardian took three heavy steps into the room. Another heavy footstep and something huge loomed from the side where the column of the stairs had hidden it. It came out swinging-swinging a large iron door, which immediately resolved what had looked wrong about the place: the corridor to the cells should have been hidden behind a locked door.

The impact of the blow knocked Guardian off his feet and sent him slamming into the wall, reducing the jailer's desk to splinters on his way. For a moment Hennan and I stood horrified, gazing up into the gleaming red-copper eyes of a clockwork soldier both broader and taller than Guardian. The thing held the dented iron door over its head in a pincered grip, ready to squash us like flies. And, unlike flies, we were neither of us quick enough off the mark when the soldier began to swing the door down toward us. Cogs whirred as great bra.s.s and steel muscles contracted and the iron door came speeding down, on course to reduce us both to stains.

Guardian leapt to intervene, as if driven by a single huge and coiled spring he shot in beneath the blow, narrowly missing taking my head off, and drove into the newcomer's chest. Both went tumbling across the stone floor, their progress arrested by a crunching impact with the opposite wall. They rose, locked in combat, each gripping the other's hands and straining to break some vital part.

"We should help Guardian." Hennan said it with conviction but made no move to do anything.

"We should get to Snorri and Tuttugu while we still can," I said, although "we should run away while we still can" very nearly came out instead. I grabbed the boy and pushed him back onto the stairs. Behind us the two metal combatants thrashed around with no concern for bystanders. A wild kick from Guardian knocked a chunk of stone nearly as big as my head from the corner where the cell pa.s.sage led off and sent it ricocheting off the walls. I couldn't tell who was winning but although the tower-soldier was the larger of the two, Guardian had been fully wound for the first time in centuries and the extra strength that bought him soon began to make itself told. Metal strained against metal, joints creaked, reinforcing bars groaned under the pressure, and gears ratcheted up through their cycles.

"Jal!" Hennan tugging at me.

A rivet from the tower-soldier's armour shot free and hit the arch above my head, pulverizing a small piece of the stonework. Taking my cue, I ducked back and hurried past the boy, off up the stairs.

The fourth floor had a different smell to it, a stench of blood and vomit. You couldn't miss it, not even with a broken nose. On the jailer's station downstairs a truncheon and lantern had hung; on this level manacles, ropes and gags depended from various pegs in addition to the usual tools of the trade. This floor had more to it than just wasting away people's lives in small stone boxes. Here they hurt people. Every piece of me wanted to run-it felt as though I were voluntarily putting myself into Cutter John's care. A sharp metallic retort echoed up the stairwell as some vital part of one of the soldiers surrendered to the pressures mounting against it.

"We should check the cells." Hennan, stepping forward. "Find Snorri and Tutt." He'd never seen the horrors I'd seen, never been tied to a table and visited by Maeres Allus. Also he wasn't a coward. The short sword trembled in my grip, feeling too heavy, and awkward. Every piece of me wanted to flee, but somehow the sum of them stepped forward on uncertain legs, pushing Hennan behind me. A small voice behind my eyes cut through the baying panic-without Snorri at my side I wouldn't get far out of the city, perhaps not even past the reach of the Tower's shadow. When I reasoned it as a more forward-looking version of running for the hills my legs seemed better prepared to play their role.

I went to the jailer's station and took the lantern from its hook. The jailers had left in a hurry, perhaps gathering together on the top floor to make a stand. If so I hoped they stayed there. If they found their courage and came down in a group I'd be sunk. I made a quick check for any sign of jailers or guardsmen then unlocked the door to the cell corridor. The stink lay thicker here, sharp with something new and unpleasant . . . a burnt smell.

Hennan tried to rush on ahead. I held him back. "No." And advanced, short sword out before me, lantern in the other hand, sending the blade's shadow dancing across the walls.

"Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen." Hennan read the numbers from above the doors. I didn't know if he could read but his grandfather had at least taught him the Roman number runes.

"Watch the corridor for me," I told him. I didn't know what waited beyond the door but it probably wasn't something he needed to see.

"It's dark!" Hennan waved an arm at the gloom.

"So watch for a light!" I turned from him, held my lantern up, out of my line of sight, and placed the key into the lock. It fitted perfectly as always, almost eager to turn. With the door unlocked I returned the key to my pocket and drew the short sword I'd stolen. Edris could be waiting on the other side. The door creaked as I pushed it and the stink hit me immediately, a sewer stench, laced with vomit and decay, together with smoke and an awful aroma of burned meat.

Tuttugu looked smaller in death than he had in life. The weight that he'd carried across frozen tundra and wild oceans despite meagre rations seemed to have dropped from him in less than a week in the Tower. They'd torn away his beard leaving just sc.r.a.ps of it here and there amid raw flesh. He lay upon the table they had tortured him on, still bound hand and foot, the marks of the iron on his arm, belly, thighs. The brazier still smoked, three irons with cloth-wrapped handles jutting from its small basket of coals. They'd been ready, waiting for the authorization, and set to work immediately.

I stood, looking around stupidly, not knowing what to do. The chamber was otherwise empty, a water jug on its side on the floor, broken, a bucket in the corner. And, seeming at odds with its surroundings, a mirror in a wooden frame hung from a chain-hook above the table, a cheap thing and tarnished, but out of place.

Blood from Tuttugu's cut throat pooled about his head. It had soaked into the red curls of his hair and dripped between the planks to the flagstones beneath. He must have been alive when we entered the Tower . . .

"Hennan!" I spun around.

Edris already had the boy, his sword at his neck, the other hand knotted in his hair. They stood opposite the doorway, against the corridor wall.

"You hid in one of the other cells . . ." I should have been terrified for myself, or angry for Tuttugu, or worried for the child, but somehow none of those emotions would come, as if the part of me that dealt with such things had had enough and gone home for the night.

"So I did." Edris nodded.

I hadn't seen a friend dead before. I'd seen dead men aplenty, and some of them I'd liked well enough. Arne Deadeye and the quins I'd liked. But Tuttugu, lowborn and foreign as he was, had become a friend. I could admit that now he was gone.

"Let the boy go." I lifted my short sword. The steel Edris held to Hennan's neck was rune-marked and stained with necromancy, its blade considerably longer than mine, but whether that would still prove an advantage in the confines of the corridor I couldn't say. "Let him go."

"I will," Edris nodded, that crooked smile of his on narrow lips, "to be sure. Only first give me this key everyone's talking about, hey?"

I watched his face, shadows twitching across it. The half-light caught his age, seamed with old scars, grey, but toughened by the years rather than diminished. I set the lantern down, keeping back out of his reach, and fished for the key in my pocket. In the moment my fingers made contact a younger face pulsed across Edris's, the one he'd worn when he killed my mother, killed my sister inside her, and driven the same blade he held now into my chest. Just for a beat of my heart. Only his eyes remaining unchanged.

I drew the key out, a piece of blackness like the shape of a key, cut through the world into night. The Norse called it Loki's key, in Christendom they'd name it the Devil's key, neither t.i.tle offered anything but tricks, lies, and d.a.m.nation. The Liar's key.

Edris's smile broadened to show teeth. "Give it to the boy. When we're safely past whatever's making that racket downstairs I'll take it from him and let him go."