Red Queen's War: The Liar's Key Part 39

"Listen." Kara held up her hand and even the spider paused, frozen in mid-step.

"I can't-"

"They're singing." Hennan gazed around him.

Singing was too grand a word for it. Each crystal emitted a pure tone, just on the edge of hearing. As I drew near to one then the next I could discern a subtle change in the pitch, as if each were like one of those tuning forks the musicians use to set their strings.

"These are doors." I set a hand to the surface of the one before me and the key on my chest rang with the same note, making my skin tingle with the vibration.

I counted thirteen of them, all translucent save for the one dead centre of the left row. That one stood black as lies.

Snorri came to stand beside me. He seemed diminished in this place where the scale made ants of us all. He held his axe before him, the manacle cuts on his wrists burning red and angry. His whole body curled around the a.s.sa.s.sin's wound and a crystal excrescence clad one side of him from hip to armpit, sharp with spiky outgrowths. "Which is mine? The black one?"

"They are none of them yours, northman." The voice rang behind us, a grating atonal thing that reminded me of the clockwork soldiers.

Turning, we saw first a throne of salt, carved in pillars and roundels, grand as any king's. The oak boards, upon which it sat, rested on the backs of several more of the silver-steel spiders, the meshing forest of their legs moving quick as bards' fingers across lute strings to propel both platform and throne smoothly on.

Hunched in the salt chair like a stain against the whiteness of it, a wizened figure, a corpse I took it for at first, grey and naked, sunken, emaciated, the skin pierced in many places by sharp white crystals of salt, growing in cl.u.s.ters like frost on frozen twigs.

"These are my halls." The head on that corpse-like body raised itself to view us, the glimmer of what might be an eye far back in the darkness of its sockets. Around a neck of bone and skin a device of silver-steel, bedded in the grey flesh and facing a perforated grille toward us. Similar contraptions sat in the necks of clockwork soldiers, generated their voices for them.

"Kelem-"

"You were not wise to come here, witch." The mechanical voice cut across Kara. "Of Skilfar's brood are you? Her judgment is usually better than this." As Kelem spoke more spiders came into view, smaller ones, flowing over the back of his throne, some with bodies the size of hands, others no larger than a coin. They moved about the mage in a complex tide, shifting his body, changing the position of his arms, so that like a marionette he became animated in some dreadful approximation of life.

When you invest in self-deception as heavily as I do there come points at which a swift audit of the truth is forced upon you and I can attest that the sudden realization of what a fool you have been is as cruel as any knife thrust. In my mind's eye we had sneaked into the mines and found the door Snorri sought while Kelem dreamed. Even with the spider leading us to Kelem I thought we might find what we needed before we reached him. Now it seemed that Snorri must trade away my last hope of salvation just to visit a place any knife could dispatch him to. And if Kelem chose not to bargain but simply to turn us into four columns of salt . . . then all our hope lay in Kara's spear.

"You sent a.s.sa.s.sins after me." Snorri spoke past teeth gritted against agony. I could almost see the slow march of the salt growing across his flesh.

"If you believe that then it was foolish to come here, Snorri ver Snagason."

"In Eridruin's Cave you tormented me with a demon in the shape of my daughter." Snorri lifted his axe.

"Not me, Norseman. Maybe some ghost of my past, feeling my will that you should come here to my home. But the past is a different country, I'm no longer responsible for what happens there. Age absolves a man's crimes."

Kara interjected, perhaps worried Snorri might attack and steal her chance with the spear. "But you sent no more a.s.sa.s.sins, no more shades. Did you think to bargain instead?"

"It is true-I do like to bargain." Some rusty sound that may have been a laugh escaped the voice grille. "And it would seem you need something from me, Snagason. I could help you with this problem you have . . ." A larger spider moved Kelem's hand along his side, a gesture mirroring the line of the wound eating Snorri up.

"I seek a door. Nothing beyond that." And Snorri straightened, his mouth set in a tight line of pain, the crystals cladding his side cracking, plates of salt falling clear.

Kelem scanned each of us, his sunken eyes lingering on me, then on Hennan, the legs of the spider that first raised his head now visible among the pale straggles of his hair. "I don't believe you have the key, Snagason. Though it is a mystery why a man would give up such a treasure if he did not have to." His gaze settled on Kara, lingering on the black and silver spear in her hand then moving to her face. "Give me Loki's gift, little volva."

Kara moved fast. Faster than when I punched her and she knocked me flat. Two short steps and she released Gungnir with a crack of her arm. The spear hammered into Kelem's chest, pinning him to his throne, a throw Snorri would have been proud of.

None of us moved. n.o.body spoke. A spider tilted Kelem's head to look down at the spear. Another raised his arm to rest his forearm across the haft. "You took the wrong door, volva. They call me 'master of the ways.' Did you not wonder if I might not notice you pa.s.sing through such portals as stand close to the Wheel of Osheim? I gave you this." A salt-crusted finger tapped Gungnir's dark wood. "I gave it to you to make you brave-"

"Sageous helped you." I clamped my mouth shut on the words, not meaning to draw attention to myself.

Kelem looked my way, head tilted in acknowledgment. "My skills detected you. I guided the dream-witch to sew this into your visions. He was well paid. A hireling, no more than that. You've no idea how hard it was to lead your slow and plodding minds to this plan, to guide you to the tools, to place them in your hands . . ." He returned his gaze to Kara. "And now that you have attacked me Loki will not mind if I simply kill you and take the key from your body. Even so, out of respect for your grandmother, I give you this last opportunity to hand it to me of your own free will."

"I don't have it." Kara let her arms hang at her side, as limp as her hair, defeated.

A noise like nails on slate rasped from Kelem's voice grille, perhaps as close to fury as he could come, this desiccated imitation of a man. His head turned sharply back to Snorri. "How . . . how is it that the one with the greatest power does not also bear the greatest weapon? You gave Odin's own spear to a witch when she didn't even own the key. Are you mad?"

"It isn't Odin's spear," Snorri said. "And when I face what lies beyond death's door I will be carrying my own axe, the axe my fathers bore, not somebody else's spear."

"Say your piece, Snagason. You've come far enough to say it." Kelem's mechanical voice held a tw.a.n.g of amus.e.m.e.nt.

Snorri looked my way, eyes dark, no sign of blue in the curious glow of the crystals. "You should speak with Prince Jalan Kendeth, heir to the throne of Red March. My friend. The key is his."

Kelem made a noise of disgust and jerked a dismissive arm at us. "The key you bear leaves a mark in the world. The longer it is still the deeper that mark. The more it is used the deeper that mark. Once you started your journey I had no good idea where to seek it. But now you stand before me . . . I see it is true. The princeling has the prize." His eyes, glittering deep in their dry sockets, settled on me. "I will buy the key from you. Shall we . . . haggle?"

Kelem had wanted the key-bearer to attack him. He'd dropped the spear into our laps to make us bold enough to do it. If his plan had worked he could have killed us and avoided Loki's curse just as Snorri had avoided it when the Unborn Captain had attacked him. Now his plan had failed the mage needed to have me give him the key willingly, or else steal or trick it from me. I doubted he was any good at picking pockets, but he did have deep ones of his own . . . I wondered quite how deep he would dig to own it.

"I'm sure we can reach a deal." I clutched the key tight, not intending to lose it to some thieving mechanical arachnid. As I squeezed it I saw a flash of another place, a room of many doors, just wooden ones, with Kelem standing before me, younger even than the shade we saw of him at Eridruin's Cave. "What's your offer?"

Kelem didn't speak as spider legs rotated his salt-crusted skull to stare directly at me. Even while he turned to face me though I glimpsed that small square room again and heard a younger Kelem speak, "Are you a G.o.d, Loki?" His eyes on me, hard as stones.

"Wh-" I started to speak but the vision came again, cutting me off.

"Your death lies behind one of these other doors, Kelem." It seems I'm speaking the words in that room, so many centuries ago that Kelem looks no older than Snorri.

That younger Kelem had sneered. "G.o.d of tricks they-"

"Don't worry." My voice, but it's not me. "You'll never manage to open that one."

The vision pa.s.sed and I became aware that Kelem, ancient and wizened in his throne, was addressing me.

"The Red Queen's child?"

"Her grandson, sir. My father is cardinal-"

"Skilfar's sp.a.w.n and Alica's, waiting on my judgment, deep in the salt earth with old Kelem. How strange the world does turn, and so swiftly. It seems only yesterday that Skilfar was young and fair, the flower of the north. And Alica Kendeth, surely she's a child still? Must everyone grow old each time I blink?"

The spear fell from him, several spiders had been working to free it. The weapon slid to the ground.

I raised the key, cold, hard, slick, and yet somehow seeming to writhe worm-like in my grip. "Do you have an offer?" A vision of crystals growing from the rock flashed before my eyes. A mirror, white crystals, the Lady Blue fleeing, the blood of my line on her hands. It would have to be a d.a.m.n good offer.

"Long before they called me door-master I was master of coin. The golden key will open almost as many doors as the black one. Hearts too."

Those hollow eye-pits studied me a moment. "Every man has his price, boy. Yours is easy enough to guess. I'll pay for calling you 'boy,' but not much. I am rich, boy, did you know that? Rich enough to make a beggar of Croesus, to make Midas's wealth look modest. Money, boy, is the blood of empires." Spiders raised his dry hands, tugging on tendons, manipulating bones, a silver web of them across his sunken flesh. "Money flows through these hands. Name your price."

"I . . ." Indecision paralysed me and greed took my voice. What if I asked for too little? But asking some ridiculous sum might enrage him.

"Knowing your own price is quite a thing, Jalan Kendeth. Know thyself, that's what the philosopher said. A wisdom that has lived through the Thousand Suns. Easy to say, hard to do. Knowing your own price is most of knowing yourself, and who can expect such a thing from the young? Ten thousand in crown gold."

"T-Ten . . ." I tried to imagine it there, glittering before me, the weight of it spilling through my hands. More than I'd lost, more than was stolen from me, more than I owed. Enough to pay off the grasping hands of Umbertide, and clear my debt to Maeres Allus, with a thousand and more left over.

"Ten thousand would be an insult to a man of your breeding, Prince Jalan." The mechanical voice dragged me from my vision. "Sixty-four thousand. Not a clipped copper more or less. We have a deal."

Always take the money. Sixty-four thousand. A ridiculous sum, a preposterous sum. I could buy back Garyus's ships, set myself up for a life of debauched pleasure among Vermillion's elite, seduce the DeVeer sisters from their husbands . . . I could buy Grandmother a squad of sword-sons or a warship or something equally violent to take her mind from the loss of a key she never owned . . .

"The money will be waiting for you in credit at the House Gold. I will ensure all charges against you are dropped and when you've cleared your debts you may leave the city," Kelem said.

"It's not here?" That disappointed me. I wanted the mound of gold I had imagined.

"I'm not a dragon, Prince Jalan. I do not sleep upon my h.o.a.rd."

"Sixty-four thousand-in crown gold-and you undo what you've done to Snorri." I hesitated then sighed. "And he gets to open death's door before you take the key." I glanced over at the Norseman, standing, hunched, with his hand on Hennan's shoulder, a father's touch. "Though I pray he finds the sense not to use it."

"No." Just that through the silver grille on Kelem's withered neck, then silence.

I drew in a deep sigh and wiped the sweat from my brow. "Sixty-three thousand, fix Snorri, and he gets to open the door." There's an exquisite pain involved in the loss of a thousand in gold. Not one I'll ever get used to.

"No."

"Oh, come on." I knuckled my brow. "You're killing me here. Sixty-two, the cure, and the door."

"No."

I wondered how far I could push him. Kelem clearly feared Loki's curse more than he feared losing sixty-four thousand in gold. But perhaps less than he feared opening the door into death.

I held up a hand and stepped to Kara's side, leaning in close to whisper in her ear. d.a.m.n but I wanted her, even there, even then, even sweat-slick and with the suspicion in her eyes. "Kara . . . how dangerous is this curse?"

She stepped back, her fingers on my chest. "Why didn't Skilfar take the key from Snorri?"

"Um . . ." I battled to remember. "The world is better shaped by freedom. Even if it means giving foolish men their head-that's what you said?" I looked from her to Snorri. "She let him keep it because . . . she's wise. Or something."

Kara raised her eyebrows. "Doesn't sound very likely, does it?"

"Skilfar was scared too?"

"It's Loki's key. G.o.d of trickery. Nothing as straight forward as strength is going to decide its ownership. Or it would have been Thor's key an age ago!"

"It has to be given," Snorri said. "Olaaf Rikeson took it by strength and Loki's curse froze his army, ten thousand strong."

"So . . . when you gave me the key back in the olive groves . . ."

"I trusted a friend, yes."

"h.e.l.l." Snorri had placed his future in my hands. That was far more trust than I could hold on to. It was like telling a dog to guard a steak. It was stupid. "You don't know me at all, Snorri." Somehow, even with sixty-four thousand in crown gold glittering in my immediate future I felt low. A fever perhaps, or poisoning from the sour salts of the lower mine.

Maybe it was the way Snorri didn't even argue his case but just stood there like the huge over-loyal idiot he was, having the gall to expect the same foolishness from me.

"Thirty-two thousand, the cure, and the idiot gets his door open."

"No."

"Oh for Christ's sake! How much to open that d.a.m.ned door?"

"That door shouldn't ever be opened. Even if you took no gold, only offered me the key to show you death's door, I would hesitate. There's a reason the ghosts of my youth are scattered across h.e.l.l. It wasn't just chance that one stepped out to oppose you when you approached Eridruin's door. Opening that door is dangerous. Pa.s.sing through still more so." Kelem's jaw moved as the voice issued from his neck. In his mouth something glittered, silver across the black thing that had been his tongue.

"Why? Why would a dead thing like you care?" I didn't even want that door open-why I was arguing rather than wondering how to carry my gold back to Red March I didn't know.

"I'm not dead." Kelem tilted his head. "Merely . . . well preserved."

I stood, the key tight in my hand, watched by the witch, the warrior, the boy, and the old bones in the chair. Something in the quality of the light from the crystals changed, as subtle as a slight shift in the wind, but I felt it.

"What would you do with this key, Master Kelem?" I asked him, starting to pace from one column to the next.

"I have a palace of doors. It's only natural that I should want one key that could unlock any of them." Kelem's throne rotated to allow him to track me. "Without a key the opening and closing of such doors is a complex and tedious business, dangerous even, and one that can exhaust an old man like me. These thirteen before me. These are difficult, but over the years I've managed all but three. The doors to darkness and light still defy me. Those on the far side hear me trying though, oh yes." A scratching sound that might be laughter. "They fear me, hate me, and hold the doors tight against my efforts. The dark knows that if I control the door, I own them. The light knows it too.

"Long ago I was told that one of these doors would never open for me, that my doom lay beyond it. Loki himself told me this, the father of lies. And I believed him because he is always honest. He takes pride in it-knowing that a partial truth cuts deeper than a lie." Kelem waved a desiccated hand in my direction. "The key will unlock the doors, and the last one-that will be the one I will leave closed. That one I will lock again, and lock so well that it will never open, not in the lives of men."

It's unnerving when the person you're bargaining with lets you know how valuable what you have is to them. In the market we pretend not to care, we insult the thing we desire, denigrate it. Kelem's honesty told me two things. That I could trust his offer, and that I would be a fool to refuse it because one way or another he would own the key.

"That black one." I pointed to it. "It's death's door? The gate to h.e.l.l?"

"No, that is one of the three that defy me still. The gate to h.e.l.l is opened easily enough, the Day of a Thousand Suns left it hanging off its hinges-it's the first of the thirteen that I learned."

I stared at the black crystal. "It's the night gate then." Even as I said them the words felt wrong.

"Do you think so, Prince Jalan? Has your connection to the dark grown so weak?"

"No." I shook my head. "It's not that one . . ." I pa.s.sed another pillar, trailing my fingers across it.

"That door is Osheim, Prince Jalan. The door is the Wheel, the Wheel is a door. It's the door I need to own."

"The Lady Blue would open them all," I said. "She thinks the time for doors is pa.s.sing and soon all worlds will bleed one into the other. She wants to open the ways and marshal the destruction to ensure her place in whatever h.e.l.l results."

"I've been misinformed about educational standards in Red March," Kelem said, two spiders the size of silver eyeb.a.l.l.s tugging at the dry corners of his mouth to make a smile. "You've been well taught, Prince Jalan. But the Lady Blue really only wants to turn the Wheel. She could do that by opening the black door, but the black door is opening by itself. It has been for centuries. Ever so slowly, but speeding up. Each door that is opened, each thing that pa.s.ses through from one world to another . . . it weakens the walls between those places, and as the walls start to crack, the door of Osheim opens, the Wheel turns. With Loki's key the Lady Blue could end the world today by opening that door before us. Without it she must rely on the Dead King opening death's door wide enough to fracture the walls around it . . . and, by doing so, turn the Wheel and herald the end of all things."

"And where do you stand, Master Kelem?" The conversation had grown too big for me. I just wanted to escape with my money and enough years to spend it in.

"I'm a financier, a man of trade, Prince Jalan. Everything has its price. I buy, I sell. There's no harm in this surely? Buying what can be bought, selling it to those with the need and the means to pay. The rich must have what they crave-surely you agree with that?

"On this point my position should be clear enough. I'm refusing to open one door, just briefly, to save myself tens of thousands in gold. That hardly paints me as a man who would be overly keen to set them all open wide, now does it? I might want to own the darkness and the light and the creatures therein, but ending creation? What good would my wealth do me then? True, the Lady Blue and I have interests in common, but I am not her ally in this ambition."

You were her ally in another ambition, equally b.l.o.o.d.y, and long ago. The words twitched behind my lips. He had been part of the plot that killed the first Gholloth. Maybe the second had died by his command also. Had he directed the Lady Blue, or she him? Either way both of them had stained their hands with the blood of Kendeths. Snorri's family too counted among their crimes, his whole clan, the Undoreth, gone, just one man remaining now that Tuttugu had died beneath Edris Dean's blade. And Edris was the Lady Blue's creature, my mother's death her plan, my unborn sister just something broken in the process. I saw again the vision of the lady vanishing into the mirror, the Red Queen kneeling there among the shards, her grandfather slain, the linens of his bed crimson. Perhaps it was Alica Kendeth's legendary anger that infected my blood, perhaps my own, a pale flame to be sure, but feed any such spark enough fuel and it will blaze.

I heard the knocking again, that knocking I'd been hearing every once in a while since the debtors' prison. It sounded louder here, reverberating among the columns. None of the others looked up.

"Do you-" I broke off, the knocking came from my left. I turned and walked back toward Kelem and the others. Kelem, master of doors. Kelem, sender of a.s.sa.s.sins.

Knock. Knock. Knock. Steady, rhythmic, louder by the moment. I'd heard it every day of late. Was it sunset a mile above us . . . had I heard this sound every sunset since I took the key? Had Snorri heard it when he held the key, sounding each dawn since the wrong-mages' door had closed Aslaug and Baraqel off from us? Knock. Knock. Knocking had woken me from my dreaming that spring morning back in Trond. Knock. Some doors are better left unopened.