The Liar''s Key

  “Hold the spear steady, so the shadow falls between you.” She raised the orichalcum. “Keep it close to the ground . . . Turn your heads away and don’t move.”

  And without warning the metal in her grasp ignited into a white incandescence turning the whole world blind. The last thing I saw was the spear’s shadow on the floor between us, a black line amid the brilliance all around. I gripped the spear for all I was worth and found it crumbling away beneath my fingers as if the light had burned out its vitality leaving only ash.

  “Christ, woman!” I pressed the heels of my palms to my eyes. “I can’t see.”

  “Shush. Wait. You’ll see again soon enough.”

  My sight returned slowly, blurs at the edge first, light and shade, then colour. I could see the fire, and the glow in Kara’s hand. The blurs resolved into edges and I saw that of the fist-sized ball of orichalcum she’d been holding only a fraction remained, a shining bead no bigger than an eyeball, as if the rest had burned away.

  “Now, that’s a spear worthy of a god!” Snorri straightened up having taken from the place where the shadow fell a new spear, seemingly taller than the old, the design similar but with something fierce added to the mix so that the runes about it seemed to shout their message, the wood between them darker than sin, the silver-steel burning with its own light.

  We sat awhile, watching Snorri hold the spear. It grew darker. I fell asleep.

  • • •

  The week Gorgoth said it would take the duke’s men to arrive turned out to be four days. Four days turned out to be three days too long—and I spent the first day sleeping.

  Our beds were heaps of bracken, heather, and the occasional spiky sprig of gorse, all looking to have been yanked up, roots and all, still with the earth fresh upon them. Dinner predictably was goat, presented raw, and still eyeing us with that faintly surprised expression it wore when the troll ripped its head off. Breakfast was goat too. Also lunch.

  I woke before daybreak on the second day and lay unmoving as the predawn began to reach in, blunt-fingered and finding only edges. Time passed and I saw, or thought I saw, amid the greyness, a deeper shadow, sliding toward the lump I took to be Snorri. The gloom seemed to knot about . . . something, concealing it, but leaving enough of a hint to draw my eye. Perhaps if I weren’t dark-sworn I’d have seen nothing. The something, or the nothing, gathered itself as it drew close to Snorri and rose above him, and still I lay, paralysed, not with fear but with the moment, held by it in the way that a waking dream can sometimes trap a man.

  Dawn broke, no rays of sun reaching into our cave, only a different quality to the light.

  “Knocking.” Snorri sat up, muttering. “I hear knocking.”

  And just like that the strangeness left me and I could see nothing more sinister than Snorri, rubbing the sleep from his face, and Kara leaning over him.

  “I don’t hear anything.” She shrugged, perhaps a flicker of irritation on her brow. “I need to check those wounds. Today I’ll make a poultice.”

  • • •

  The morning of that second day Kara trekked down the ashy shoulder of the mountain to a level where plants dared to grow and returned hours later carrying a linen pouch stuffed with various herbs, barks, flowers, and what looked suspiciously like mud. With these she proceeded to treat the wounds our Vikings had sustained, the slice above Snorri’s hip proving the most serious. All I could plead was skinned knees of the sort little boys endure. I probably sustained the injury falling to my knees to plead for mercy or praying to an uncaring God, but to be honest I had no recollection of it. Either way I got no sympathy from Kara who fussed around Snorri’s over-muscled side instead.

  Aslaug didn’t return to me that second night either. The first night I’d fallen asleep before sunset and lain so dead to the world it would have taken a full-blown necromancer to have roused me. The second sunset though, when Aslaug didn’t appear, I wondered if Loki’s daughter were still angry about me diving through the wrong-mages’ arch. Since the alternatives had all appeared to end in gruesome death it seemed unreasonable of her to object, but she had been set against it at the time. Temper or no temper it struck me as odd. Aslaug had been so eager to return that first day ashore after being denied my ear for so long by the magics set around Kara’s boat. I chalked it up to “women” and told myself she’d come round in the end. They always do.

  In the gloom and boredom of our cave I replayed those memories of my grandmother at Ameroth Castle more than once. In truth, when my mind turned toward the events of the siege’s last day I couldn’t stop the carnage playing out behind my eyes. I wondered once more how I could have managed to avoid the story for so long. But then again I have been accused in the past of being a little self-centred and my only interest in the family’s glorious history was to know where they’d buried the loot. Come to think of it, there was a song about the Red Queen of Ameroth but I’d never paid any real attention to the words . . .

  I thought of Grandmother with her long-laid plans, her strange and creeping sister who ran her spell through me and Snorri, and of Skilfar, ice cold and old beyond the lives of men.

  “Kara?”

  “Yes?”

  I tried to find the right words for my question and, failing, settled for using the wrong ones. “Why did you decide to become a witch? You know they all end up weird, yes? Living in caves and talking gibberish while they gut toads . . . scaring honest folk. When did you decide, yes, toad-gutting, that’s the life for me!”

  “What would you have done if you hadn’t been born a prince?” She looked up at me, eyes catching the light.

  “Well . . . I was . . . destined to be—”

  “Forget divine right or whatever excuse your people use—what if you weren’t?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. Maybe run a tavern, or raise horses. Something to do with horses.” It seemed a silly question. I was a prince. If I wasn’t then I wouldn’t be me.

  “You wouldn’t pick up your sword and carve yourself a throne then? Regardless of your birth?”

  “Well, yes of course. That. Obviously. Like I said, I was destined to be a prince.” I’d rather be destined to be a king though. But she had me right—I wouldn’t cut myself out a kingdom, I’d work with horses. Hopefully riding the beasts rather than shovelling their dung. But better wielding a shovel than a sword.

  “I was born to peasant stock, thralls to the Thorgil, the Ice Vikings. I could tell you that I had a hunger to know things, to understand what lies behind what we see, to unlock the secrets that hold one thing to the next. A lot of the young völva apprentices will tell you that kind of thing, and a lot of them mean it. Curiosity. It’s killed more cats than dogs have. But the real reason? For me at least—I’ll tell you honestly, because you should never lie on a mountain. Power, Prince Jalan of Red March. I want to take my own share of what you had given to you with your mother’s milk. There are bad times coming. For all of us. Times when it would be better to be a völva, even if it means being a scary witch in a cave. Better that than a peasant working to scrape a life from the ground, head down, as ignorant of what’s coming as a spring kid is of the farmer’s knife.”

  “Ah.” I hadn’t an answer for that. Every royal understands the value of ambitious men, and the danger inherent in them. The courts of the Broken Empire are packed with such. I had half-imagined that different forces drove those who toyed with the fabric of the world and dreamed of strange and frightening futures . . . but perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to find ambition, the simple greed for power, at the bottom of that too.

  • • •

  By day three I got so bored that I let Snorri talk me into trekking up to the crater a thousand feet above us. He brought the spear, using it as a staff to lean on, and limped along favouring his good hip, setting a pace that I could match for once. The boy came with us, scampering ahead over the rocks.

/>   “A good kid.” Snorri jerked his head toward Hennan, waiting for us up the trail.

  “Don’t let the trolls hear you call him a kid. They’ll gobble him up in two bites without even wanting to know who’s trip-trapping over the bridge.” I looked at the boy, hunched and windblown. I supposed he was a good kid. I’d never really had occasion to think of children as good or otherwise, just small and in the way, and remarking loudly about where I was touching their big sister.

  We came up through gullies, deep-scored in the black rock. Up between the serrated teeth of the crater rim, and gazed down at a wide and unexpected lake.

  “Where’s the fire?” I asked. The lack of smoke rising overhead during our climb had already made me suspicious. I’d missed out on looking down into Beerentoppen’s crater when Edris Dean force-marched me up the damn thing, and frankly I’d been grateful not to have to climb the last hundred yards to the rim. I remembered though that smoke had escaped Beerentoppen, to be scraped away by the wind, trailing south like a bald man’s last wisps of hair. Labouring up Halradra I expected to be rewarded with some fire and brimstone at the very least.

  “Long gone.” Snorri found a seat out of the wind. “This old man has slept for centuries, perhaps a thousand years or more.”

  “The water’s not deep.” Hennan from further down the inner slope—the first thing he’d had to say all day. Odd when I considered that the defining characteristic of children for me had been how seldom they shut up. He was right though, it looked to be little more than an inch or two of water spread across a huge ice sheet.

  “There’s a hole out near the middle.” Snorri pointed.

  The reflected light had disguised it but once seen it was hard to know how I’d missed it. A carriage and four horses could have fallen through it.

  I remembered Gorgoth’s words. Two fire-sworn disagreed. “Perhaps that’s how the trolls ended the fire-sworns’ argument.” A bucket of cold water to separate two fighting dogs—an entire lakeful to end a battle that cracked the world deeply enough to let us spill out into it from wherever the wrong-mages’ arch had sent us.

  The boy started to throw stones out into the water, as boys do. I half wanted to join him, and would have if it had involved less effort. There’s a simple joy in casting a rock into still waters and watching the ripples spread. It’s the thrill of destruction combined with the surety that all will be well again—everything as it was. A stone had fallen into my comfortable existence at court, so large that the waves washed me to the ends of the earth, but perhaps on my return I would find it as before, unchanged and waiting to receive me. Much of what men do in later life is just throwing stones, albeit bigger stones into different ponds.

  Snorri sat silent, the blue of his eyes a shade lighter with the reflection of the sky in the lake. He watched the waters, watched the boy, arms folded. The wind reached around the rock he’d set his back to and threw his hair across his face, hiding his expression. I’d seen him step away from Hennan, more than once, leaving his care and safety to Kara or to Tuttugu. But he watched him, every time he thought himself unobserved, he watched him. Perhaps a family man like Snorri couldn’t help but be concerned for an orphan child. Perhaps he thought his care a betrayal of his own lost children. I’d never really seen how family works—not out in the world, without nannies and nurses paid to do the job in place of parents, so I couldn’t say. If I was right it seemed damned inconvenient though and an expensive vulnerability. All those years spent training, all that skill at arms, just to let a little boy get under your guard and weigh you down with his wants.

  A few moments later I picked up a loose stone and lobbed it over Hannan’s head, out across the lake. The question was never if I would throw a stone, just when.

  • • •

  We stayed up on the crater rim until the sun began to fall and the wind grew chill. I had to call the boy back from whatever silly games were occupying him at the lakeshore. He’d found a twig somewhere and set it to sail where new melt water had gathered on the ice.

  He came running up between us, Snorri staring into the distance across the valleys choked with forest, and me huddled in the blanket that was serving me as a cloak.

  “We’re going down already?” He looked disappointed. “I want to stay.”

  “We don’t always get what we want,” I said, remembering as the words left my mouth that he didn’t need advice on hardship from me. He’d watched the man who raised him die within moments of our acquaintance. “Here.” I held out a silver crown between two fingers to take his mind off it. “You can have this coin, or you can have the most valuable piece of advice I own, something a wise man once told me and I’ve never shared.”

  Snorri looked around at that, taking in the two of us with a raised eyebrow.

  “Well?” I asked.

  Hennan furrowed his brow, staring at the coin, then at me, then at the coin. “I’ll . . .” He reached out, then pulled his hand back. “I’ll . . . the advice.” He blurted it out as if the words pained him.

  I nodded sagely. “Always take the money.”

  Hennan looked at me uncomprehending as I stood, pocketing the coin and pulling my blanket tight. Snorri snorted.

  “Wait . . . what?” Hennan’s confusion giving way to anger.

  Snorri led the way and I followed.

  “Always take the money, kid. Bankable advice, that.”

  • • •

  By the time Gorgoth finally reported that the Danes had been spotted entering the forest we were all eager to be on the road again.

  We left on a dreary late afternoon with a north wind raking rain across the slopes. The plan was to travel by night on our long journey but the earliest part of the route, down from the Heimrift, lay through lands so sparsely populated that the Danes said that there was no need for concealment. My bet was that our escort just didn’t want their first meeting with a horde of trolls to be in the dark.

  Still wearing what we’d escaped the wreck of the Errensa in we wound our way down the black flanks of Halradra toward the pine forests in the valleys below. Snorri kept us at the rear of the column and we counted one hundred and forty of the beasts as they left the caves, hissing at the light. An eerie thing to follow a hundred and more trolls, creatures few men have ever glimpsed even in ones or twos, and fewer men have lived to speak of. We five made more noise than they did, with barely a sound passing between the lot of them. And yet the exodus proved orderly and swift. Kara maintained the creatures must speak together in some manner beyond our hearing, without the need for words. I offered that sheep will form an orderly queue to leave their pen and they’re just dumb animals. A troll at the rear turned his head at that and fixed those wholly black eyes of his upon me. I shut up then.

  Once within the shelter of the trees Gorgoth called a halt and the trolls spread themselves about, breaking noisy paths through the dense thickets of old dry branches.

  “We will wait here, as agreed,” Gorgoth said.

  How he knew where to wait I couldn’t say. It looked like a random piece of forest to me, indistinguishable from any other, but I was content to wait now that we were out of the worst of the wind and rain. I sat against a tree, my wet shirt sticking unpleasantly to me. If it weren’t for the presence of a hundred trolls I would have been fretting about pine-men and other horrors that might lurk in the shadows. Snorri and I hadn’t had good experiences with the region’s forests on our journey north. Even so I leaned back and relaxed, not caring how bad the troll stink got. A price well worth paying for peace of mind.

  “. . . man in charge . . .” Tuttugu chatting with Gorgoth a short distance from me. The two of them seemed to get on well despite one being a vast devil wrapped in a red hide, and the other a fat ginger Norseman not reaching up much past his elbow. “. . . duke’s nephew . . .”

  A ripple of unease ran through me, as if a stone had dropped into the
recently calmed pool of my peace.

  “The duke’s nephew what?” I called out.

  “The duke’s nephew is leading our escort, Jal, they should be here soon,” Tuttugu called back.

  “Hmmm.” It seemed fair enough. Only fitting that a Prince of Red March should have a noble in charge of escorting him safely home. Albeit a minor noble. Duke’s nephew . . . somewhere a bell was ringing.

  I shrugged off my unease and sat watching Kara watching Hennan while the rain dripped on me through the dense needles above. After a while I spotted the troll-stone that must be the reason for the place having been chosen as our rendezvous. An ancient and weathered chunk of rock, moss-covered and bedded in the ground at a slight angle. I could tell it was a troll-stone by the way it bore not the slightest resemblance to the trolls to either side of it.

  • • •

  “Horses! They’re coming.” Snorri stood, spear in hand, his axe now secured across his back with an arrangement of goat-hide thongs he’d fashioned during our stay in the cave.

  Seconds later I could hear them too, branches snapping as they forced a passage through the trees. A short while later the first of them came into view.

  “Hail, Gorgoth.” The man sounded uneasy. I could see three of them in total, all mounted, pressed close together by more than just the trees. All around us black shapes moved in the shadows. The horses seemed even more nervous than their riders, the scent of troll making them roll their eyes.

  They came closer, all of them in wolf-skin cloaks, round shields on their arms, helms not dissimilar to the Red Vikings’, close-fitting, bound with riveted bands of bronze, eye guards and nose-piece reaching below the rim and elaborately worked.

  “Good to meet again.” Gorgoth lifted one of his huge hands in welcome. “How many are you?”

  “Twenty riders. My men are down on the forest road. Are you ready to go?”

  “We are.” Gorgoth inclined his head.

  The riders tugged on their reins but, as they turned, their leader caught sight of Snorri, pushing from the trees.