The Liar''s Key

  “It’s not a volcano. His castle was built on it. Some kind of ancient weapon blew the mountain apart. Huge areas of forest to the north have been incinerated and miles beyond that trees are dying. While you were sleeping we spent two days walking through dead trees. Gorgoth said it’s Jorg Ancrath’s work.”

  “Christ.” I remembered when Queen Sareth set me up to challenge the little bastard to a duel. Only he wasn’t so little after all, a six-foot stone-cold murderer, fourteen going on forty. “How long until we reach Rhone?”

  “Less than a week. The town of Deedorf’s just ten miles off. We’re making good progress.”

  “Mmm.” In truth I wasn’t that interested in where we were, what really concerned me was how far we had to go to reach civilization. One wet forest was very much like the next, be it haunted by Thurtan peasants hunting truffles, Gelleth charcoal men, Rhone loggers, or the charmingly rustic Red March foresters. They could all go hang as far as I was concerned. “This curse you put on me—”

  “This enchantment you begged me to work,” interrupted Kara. “Yes. What about it?”

  “I was close. Very close. Just before those trolls tried to kill me . . .” I lowered my voice and became serious. “I dreamed of things I didn’t remember, but now I do. And I got close to the day she died. The summer when I turned eight. I might even have been dreaming of the actual day.” I took Kara’s hand, she flinched but let me hold her. “How do I get back to it? I need to finish this.” I can’t deny that the thought that I might sleep my way across the whole of Gelleth had occurred. Even better, I might then slumber another two weeks as Snorri and Tuttugu dragged me south through Rhone, and not wake until the Norsemen delivered me to the gates of Vermillion. With luck I might pass the entire excursion off as a nightmare and never think of it again. But those hopes aside—the desire to know the truth about my mother’s death drove me, the need to lay to rest the lies Loki’s key had infected me with. The thing had set a curse upon me and I would know no peace until the itch had been scratched—the boil lanced.

  Kara bit her lip, vertical furrows appearing between her eyebrows. It made her look much younger. “Blood is the trigger.”

  I lifted a hand to ward her off. “You don’t have to hit me again!”

  “Bite your tongue.”

  “What?”

  “Bite your tongue.”

  I tried but it’s not easy to deliberately hurt yourself. “I canth geth any bluth,” I told her, tongue trapped painfully between my teeth.

  “Bite it!” Kara shook her head, despairing of me. Without warning she reached up and knocked my chin.

  “Jesu that hurt!” I had a hand to my mouth, fingers reaching in to check my tongue was still attached. They came away scarlet and I could do nothing but stare at them, the colour filling my vision and my mind.

  • • •

  For a moment I don’t know where I am or why my mouth aches. I crashed into the eastern spire feet first and everything went grey. My mouth hurts and when I take my hand from it crimson drips from my fingers. I must have bitten my tongue in the impact—an ungentle arrival but a kinder greeting than I would have got from the ground had I gone over the edge of the roof.

  The need to get away from the blind-eye woman proves more pressing than the need to moan and groan, so I wipe my hands off and get to my feet. Sweaty, tired, and too hot I begin the climb to Garyus’s window. In later years I often took the stairs, particularly if the weather proved inclement. But even in the months before I left the city with Snorri, when I found time between rising in the afternoon and setting out into Vermillion with my band of reprobates in search of sin, I’d scale the spire once in a while. Old habits are hard to break and in any event I like to keep my hand in. When a lady invites you from her bedroom window it’s good to know how to climb.

  Arms trembling with fatigue, tunic sweat-soaked and torn, I haul myself through the window to Garyus’s landing. Sometimes an attendant waits there but today it lies deserted, the door to his chamber standing ajar. My ungainly collapse through the window has not gone without notice. I hear Garyus’s cough and then,

  “A young prince or an incompetent assassin? Best show yourself in either way.” Words from a thick tongue, hard to understand at first but I’ve learned the knack.

  I step in through the narrow gap, nose wrinkling at the faint stink. There’s always an air of bedpans here though the breeze thins it. Over the years I came to understand it as more honest than the perfumes of court. Lies smell sweet—the truth often stinks.

  Garyus is propped up in his bed, lit by sunlight through a small high window, a jug and goblet on the table beside him. He turns his misshapen head toward me. It looks as if it were pumped too full of brains, his skull a tuberous root vegetable, swelling above his brow, thin hair seeking purchase on shiny slopes.

  “Why Prince Jalan!” He fakes surprise. Garyus has never once objected to me climbing his tower, though juggling scorpions would be a safer pastime. I think perhaps a man who has never walked, never held control over his own ups and downs, doesn’t understand the danger of the fall in the same visceral way that grips any watcher seeing another hanging by fingertips.

  “I’m running away,” Jally announces.

  Garyus raises a brow at that. “I’m afraid you’ve come to a dead end, my prince.”

  “The Red Queen is after me,” Jally says, glancing back at the doorway. He half expects to see the dead white face of blind-eye woman peering through the gap.

  “Hmmm.” Garyus struggles a little further up his pillows, arms too thin and too twisted to make the job easy. “A subject shouldn’t run from his queen, Jalan.” He regards me for a moment, eyes wide and watery, each iris a deep and calming brown. He fixes me with a shrewd look, as if he’s seen past the child to the man lurking inside. “And perhaps you do too much running away? Hey now?”

  “She made Mother bring me to the other tower. The one where the witch lives. Said she was going to let her touch me again.” Jally shudders and I flinch inside him—we both remember the Sister’s hand settling upon ours. Paper and bones.

  A frown, upon the deformity of Garyus’s forehead, quick then gone. The smile returns to his lips. “I’m honoured that you should seek sanctuary with me, my prince, but I’m just an old man, bound to his bed in the Poor Palace. I’ve no say in the doings of the queen or of witches in towers . . .”

  Jally opens his mouth and finds no suitable words. Somehow, deep down, his opinion and expectations of the man before him are totally at odds with the facts clearly on display. In the years that follow this, although I call on Garyus most months, that faith in him erodes into pity, until by the time I reach twenty I consider my visits a kindness, some secret duty that a last shred of decency binds me to. By the end it was the act of visiting that made me feel better about myself. At the start it was Garyus himself. Somewhere along the way I stopped listening to what he said and started listening to my pride. Even so, it was only ever in his presence, as now, that I saw myself unfiltered by self-deception. As I grew older the effect wore off more quickly, so that at the end any epiphany would have faded to vague discomfort before I’d made it back across the plaza to the Roma Hall. Even so, perhaps it was those moments of clarity, more than anything, that kept drawing me there.

  “You should go back, Prince Jalan. The queen may be a scary old lady but she won’t allow harm to come to her grandson, will she now? And the Silent Sister . . . well, neither of us please the eye, so don’t judge our hearts by our hide. She sees too much and perhaps it twists her way of understanding what you and I see, but there’s a purpose to her, and—”

  “Is she good?” Jally asks. I’ve felt the question building behind his lips. He knows she isn’t and wants to hear if Garyus will lie.

  “Well, don’t children ask the most complicated questions?” Lips wetted with a thick tongue. “She’s better than the alternative.
Does that make sense? The word ‘good’ is like the word ‘big.’ Is a rock big? Who knows. Is this particular rock big? Ask the ant, ask the whale, both have different answers, both are right.”

  “Is Grandmother good?” A whisper. Jally is too young for these answers. He listens to the tone of Garyus’s voice, watches his eyes.

  “Your grandmother is fighting a war, Jalan. She’s been fighting it all her life.”

  “Who against?” Jally’s noticed no war. He watches the soldiers drill and march, parade on high days and holy days. He knows Scorron is the enemy but we don’t fight them any more . . .

  “A thousand years ago the Builders put a slope under us all, Jalan.” A woman’s voice behind me, old but strong. “The world’s sliding toward a fall. Some of us have been enjoying the ride too much to worry about that drop, or they think there will be something for them at the bottom of it. Others want to undo the deed that set us sliding in the first place. That’s the war.”

  For a moment I think of that hot roof slipping beneath me, the desperate scrabbling at the tiles as the edge rushed toward me, the relief when I managed to steer into the east spire. Had she seen all that? I don’t want to ask if she plans for us all to fall.

  I make a slow turn. The Red Queen fills the doorway, her gown a deep crimson, bone spars rising above her shoulders to spread a fan of the material behind her. A necklace of jet sets stark black shapes across her chest, diamonds and rectangles. She looks old, but tough, like a rock that has weathered countless storms. There’s no kindness in her eyes. I can see Mother behind her, winded by the stairs, tiny in comparison, and Nanna Willow with her.

  “Come, Jalan.” My grandmother beckons me, turning to leave. She doesn’t offer her hand.

  “Use a lighter touch,” Garyus says. He coughs, thick with phlegm, tries to rise, then flails an arm at a shelf on the wall opposite. “The copper box.”

  Grandmother steps into the room. “It’s a crude measure at best.”

  I stand gaping, amazed that the Red Queen would let an old cripple in the Poor Palace address her so.

  “It says enough to tell you if the boy needs closer inspection.” Garyus waves at the shelf again.

  Grandmother gives a curt nod and Nanna Willow hurries to the box. It’s small, only just big enough to fit my fist in, no lock or latch, embossed with thorn patterns.

  “Only what’s inside,” Garyus directs.

  Nanna Willow opens it—schnick—it makes a satisfying sound as the lid comes free. She stands without motion for a moment, her back to us, and when she turns her eyes are bright, almost as if she were on the edge of tears, perhaps struck by some old memory at once both bitter and sweet. In her hands the box is open and a glow escapes, visible as her body casts it into shadow.

  “The blinds, if you wouldn’t mind.” Garyus looks toward my mother who seems more surprised than the queen at being set tasks by this stranger, but after a moment’s hesitation she goes to use the long stick beside the shelf to draw the cloth across the high window. The room is plunged into a half-light. Nanna Willow tips the contents of the box into her hand, closes the lid, and replaces it on the shelf. In her palm is some piece of shaped silver, a solid cone with little runes incised around it. The whole thing glows like a coal from the fire but with a whiter light, and the runes burn.

  “If you could let your son hold the orichalcum, Princess Nia,” Garyus asks. In the shifting glow of the metal cone his face becomes something monstrous, but no worse than the gargoyles that supported me in my climb.

  Mother takes the orichalcum from Nanna Willow’s hand and immediately the glow becomes brighter, more white, though shifting as if waves were rippling through it. She holds it at arm’s length as if it might explode and brings it to me, passing Garyus in his bed. The glow becomes momentarily stronger still as she nears him. Grandmother steps back when Mother approaches us.

  “Here, Jally. It won’t hurt you.” Mother holds the cone out to me, her thumb on the base, the point against her forefinger. I’m not convinced. The way she keeps it from her body suggests it might bite.

  I take it despite my misgivings, and as I do the thing ignites, too bright to look at. I turn my head away, almost dropping the cone, and in my effort not to look I stab myself with the sharp end behind the knuckle. Keeping my gaze averted I now see the cone’s illumination as light and shadow on the walls. When Nanna Willow held it the glow was a steady thing but now it’s as if I hold a hooded lantern spinning on a cord, sweeping a beam of brilliance across the walls, throwing first the queen’s face into sharp relief, then Mother’s, leaving Grandmother in darkness.

  “Set it on the table, Jalan,” Garyus says. “On this plate.” And so I do.

  The light dies from it immediately, leaving only a faint glow, and the runes still burning bright as if carved through onto some hot place where the sun dazzles on desert sands.

  “Unstable.” Grandmother steps closer, bending in to see. Despite their interest both she and Garyus are careful not to touch the orichalcum. “Conflicted.”

  Unbidden, Nanna Willow comes to turn the plate, rotating the orichalcum so the queen can see all the runes, seven in total.

  “Brave. Cowardly. Generous. Selfish. It’s almost as if he were two people . . .” Grandmother shakes her head, turning to look at me as if I were some unsatisfactory meal set before her.

  “His character is not the issue,” Garyus tells her. “Jalan lacks the stability needed for training, and yes he’s strong, but to fill the role my sister saw for Nia’s child would require an extraordinary talent, something that might be pitted against the likes of Corion, or Sageous, Kelem or Skilfar. The Blue Lady is simply misled. Perhaps she has lost too many reflections and her mind has broken.”

  Mother comes and sets her hand to my hair, a brief touch as she takes the cone and returns it to the box on the shelf.

  “Perhaps you’re right.” A low rumble from the Red Queen that sounds more like a threat than an admission. “Take the boy, Nia. Keep close guard on him though.”

  And as easily as that we’re dismissed.

  “What’s an assassin?” Jally asks before reaching the stairs.

  • • •

  For a moment I glimpsed branches, lattice-worked across a bright sky, sliding past. A sense of bodies moving around me, a face leaning in, indistinct.

  • • •

  “Bite your tongue.”

  I look up from the crimson carpet. “Sorry, Mama.”

  “Queen Alica is your sovereign and you must never speak ill of her, Jally.” Mother kneels to be on a level with me.

  “She’s mean,” I say. Or rather, I said it fifteen years ago and now I remember the moment, the feeling of the word, my mother still above me though kneeling, disapproval painted on her face, trying not to smile.

  “Sometimes a queen has to be . . . hard, Jally. Ruling a land is difficult. The gods know I have a trouble enough getting three young boys through each day.” The gods. Sometimes Mother forgets herself. Father says there is only one God, but then that’s his job. Grandmother must have staked a lot by the bloodlines to match her cardinal to a heathen, converted from her many gods, glorious in their variety of form and virtue, to our singular invisible deity. How much did that dispensation from Roma cost the treasury I wonder? Father may have a cathedral and a fat book full of God’s own wisdom, but Jally likes Mother’s stories better, told in a soft voice by his bedside. She places a kiss on my forehead and stands again.

  We’re back in the Roma Hall, in one of the galleries on the first floor. The north gallery, by the slant of the sun through its tall windows. These have glass, dozens of small panes of Attar glass leaded together, each with a faint green hue. When I was very young I called it the Green Sky Room.

  “What’s wrong with your hand, Mama?” She’s standing with her right hand in her own shadow and it looks wrong . . . a touch to
o bright. She looks down and quickly folds her arms, a guilty motion. Jally stares up at her and I watch. She’s the same woman that I see in my locket. Not much more than thirty and seeming younger, long dark hair, dark eyes, beautiful. The picture I have is by a very skilled artist but somehow it doesn’t capture her. It’s only when these memories flow through me that I remember how far she travelled to be my mother, how alone she must have felt in a strange land. Grandmother may have picked Mother for her blood but whatever heritage she carried in her veins it made little impact on my appearance or that of my brothers. She may have darkened the gold of our hair but to look at us there’s nothing of the Indus to see. The blond comes from Gabron, Grandmother’s third husband, or from her father or grandfather, Gholloths one and two, passed down to our father—though he hides it beneath a cardinal’s hat often as not, along with his bald spot—and on down to us. “Your hand looks . . . different.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it, Jally. Let’s get you back to Nanna Odette.”

  Where her fingers can be glimpsed behind the other arm I can see the glow, more pronounced now.

  “Stealing is bad,” Jally says. I suppose it’s true—though I wouldn’t let it stop me—but I can’t see the relevance.

  “It’s borrowing.” Mother brings her hand out and opens it. The orichalcum is glowing in her palm, brighter than it was in Garyus’s room, the light more steady. “But you’re right, Jally, it was wrong not to ask.” She leans forward. “Can you give it back to him and not say where you got it? He won’t be cross with you.” She looks worried and that makes Jally afraid. He nods slowly, reaching out to take it.

  “I won’t say, Mama.” He says it in a solemn tone, confusion filling him. He’s sad but he doesn’t know why. I could tell him that he’s seen for the first time his mother do wrong, his mother be afraid and without certainty. It’s a hurt every child must suffer as they grow.