The Liar''s Key

  “Hmmm.” A rumble deep in the Red Queen’s throat. “Out.” She waved at the people behind me.

  Lord, lady, merchant, or baron, they knew well enough not to protest or delay but shuffled out, meek beneath her stare.

  The doors closed behind them, the clang like a funeral bell.

  “You have good eyes, boy.” She stared into the palm of her hand, resting it on the throne’s arm.

  I had spent a lifetime dreading the throne room, keen on every occasion I attended the place to be gone from it as soon as possible and with as little fuss as could be managed. But now, though every nerve clamoured for a chance to run, I had come of my own volition and provoked the Red Queen to private audience. I’d pointed out the Silent Sister and spoken her secret. Sweat poured off me, trickling down across my ribs, but I remembered how Mother had stood up to the old woman, and how she died an hour or two later, not through Grandmother’s wrath, but through her failure.

  “Yes. I have good eyes.” I looked at her but she kept her gaze upon her palm as if reading something there among the lines. “Good enough to have watched you in the castle of Ameroth, with Ullamere.”

  The queen raised her eyebrows as if taken aback by my boldness, then snorted. “That story is sung in taverns across the land. They even sing it in Slov!”

  “I saw you in the chamber beneath the keep,” I said. “Among the best of your troops.”

  She shrugged. “The keep is all that stands. Any fool could tell you the survivors gathered there.”

  “I saw the machine and heard it speak. I saw the time-star burning blue.”

  She closed her hand into a fist. “And who showed you these things? Skilfar perhaps? Mirrored in ice?”

  “I showed them to me. They are written in my blood.” I turned to glance back at the old witch by the door. She hadn’t moved but her smile had left her. “And I saw my sister die. She had all the magic you were hunting for in me . . . but the Lady Blue stole that chance from you. Edris Dean stole it. Why haven’t you killed him for that? He works for the Dead King now . . . why don’t you reach out and . . .” I made a twisting motion with my hands. “Why doesn’t she?” I pointed to the Silent Sister, only to find her gone.

  “Edris Dean still works for the Blue Lady,” the queen said. “As do many others.”

  “But the Dead King—”

  “The Dead King is like a forest fire—the Lady Blue encourages the flames this way or that for her own purposes. The Hundred think this war is being fought for Empire but those of us who stand behind it know there are greater things at stake.”

  I tried to consider larger stakes than the whole of Empire. And failed. I wasn’t even interested in the empire, broken or unbroken. All I wanted was for the world to roll on its merry way just as it had been doing for my entire life, and to provide me with a careless middle age and comfortable dotage which I could continue to misspend just as I’d been misspending my youth. I didn’t even want to be king of Red March despite my moaning. Just give me fifty thousand in gold, a mansion of my own, and some racehorses and I wouldn’t bother anyone. I would graduate from a rich lecherous young man to a stinking-rich lecherous old man, with a pretty and accommodating young wife and perhaps a handful of blond sons to occupy some pretty and accommodating young nursemaids. And when age claimed me I’d climb into the bottle just like dear Papa. I had only one stain on the glowing imaginary horizon of my future . . .

  “I want Edris Dean dead.”

  “The man is hard to find.” The queen’s face showed a hint of the murder she wore at Ameroth. “My sister cannot see him and his service to the Blue Lady has taken him far beyond our borders. Patience is the key. In the end your enemies always come to you.”

  I thought then of Snorri. The key was the key—Edris would come for that. And Snorri would kill him.

  “Your sister—my great aunt . . .” It made me uncomfortable to state our relationship so plainly but I’d discovered on my journeys that knowledge—a thing I’d always avoided as a tedious obstacle to having fun—could prove handy in the business of staying alive. Since I had so little of it I decided to lay out what I had in the hopes Grandmother might fill in the gaps. If there’s one thing I know about people, from fool to sage, it’s that they have a hard time not showing that they know more than you do—and of course by doing so they close that gap a little. “My great aunt tried to kill me. In fact she killed hundreds of people . . . and she’s done it before!” Suddenly out of nowhere I saw Ameral Contaph, his round face, his eyes narrow with suspicion. Just one of many palace functionaries and a pain in my royal arse, but a man who I spoke to that day and who died in the fire. I saw him against a background of violet flames, lit by their glow. “Wait—Ameral Contaph . . . he wasn’t . . .”

  “Ullamere’s grandson.” The Red Queen inclined her head. “One of eight. The apple that fell furthest from the tree.” She fixed her gaze upon me, eyes grave. I wondered if she knew quite how far I’d fallen from her tree . . . if we were talking apples then Jalan Kendeth had dropped from the Red Queen’s boughs, rolled down a hill, into a stream, and been carried out to sea to beach on the shores of a whole other country.

  “And the mass murder?” I got back to my point, glancing around for the Silent Sister once more, to find with a start that she now stood behind the throne, her seeing eye hard as a stone. I remembered how she looked that night in her rags, painting her curse on the walls of the opera house.

  “This is a war that started before I was born, boy.” Grandmother’s voice came low and threatening. “It isn’t about who wears what crown. It’s not for the survival of a city, a country, a way of life, or an ideal. Troy burned for a pretty face. This is about more than that.”

  “Name it then! All this grand talk is very well, but what I saw were people burning.” The words escaped me, unstoppable as a sneeze. I had no idea why I was goading the woman. All I really wanted was to be out of there, back to my old pursuits, working the Jalan charm on the ladies of Vermillion. And yet here I was criticizing the second most powerful woman in the world as if I were her tutor. I quickly started to apologize. “I—”

  “Good to see you’ve grown, Jalan. Garyus said the north would make or break you.” I swear I saw her lips twitch with the faintest suggestion of approval. “If we fail in this. If the change that the Builders set in motion is not arrested, or more likely reversed, if magic runs wild and the worlds crack open, each bleeding into the next . . . then everything is at stake. The rocks themselves will burn. There will be no countries, no people, no life. That’s what the long war is about. That is what is at stake.”

  I drew a breath at that. “Even so . . .” I started, mind whirling. War is a game, games take two players, the other side have their own goals. “The Lady Blue and all those working for her . . . they’re not looking to destroy the world. Or if they are then there’s something in it for them. Everyone’s got an angle.”

  The Red Queen looked over her shoulder at that, eye to eye with her elder sister. “Not completely stupid then.”

  The Silent Sister smiled, her teeth narrow, yellow, each set apart from the next. She extended her hand, reaching past the queen’s shoulder, and I flinched, remembering her touch. Fingers uncurled and somehow in her palm lay a poppy, so red that for an instant I thought it a wound.

  “Smoking the poppy is an addiction that steps around people’s sense, a hunger that reduces proud men and clever women to crawling in the mire in search of more.” The Red Queen took the flower from her sister’s hand and in her fingers it became smoke, a crimson mist, lifting and fading. “Magic is a worse drug, its hooks sink deeper. And it is magic that fractures the world, magic that will drag us to our end. The world is broken—each enchantment tears the cracks a little wider.”

  “The Lady Blue wants to doom everyone because she can’t bear to give up her spells?” Even as I asked it my tone changed from disbelief to
credulity. The old whores on Mud Lane would sell more than their bodies for the coin to buy another hit of the resin Maeres squeezed from his poppies. They’d sell more than their souls if they had more to barter.

  “In part,” Grandmother agreed. “I doubt she could give up her power. But more than that, she believes there is a place for a self-selected few, beyond the conjunction of the spheres. The Lady Blue thinks that those steeped deeply enough in their magic will survive the end and find new forms in a new existence, just as some among the Builders survived their Day of a Thousand Suns. Perhaps she sees herself as the first god to be born into what will come. Her followers she views as an elite, chosen to found a very different world.”

  “And you . . . don’t believe?” With a start I realized I’d been addressing her without formality all this time and added in a belated, “Your majesty.”

  “What I think would follow such an ending is of no matter,” she said. “I have a duty to my people. I will not allow this to happen.”

  And in the end, whatever Alica Kendeth said about the stakes, here was a queen defending her lands, her cities, and those subject to her rule. “And the burnings? The whole damn opera house?” I saw her eyes narrow and added, “Your majesty.”

  “The world may be wearing thin but still there are very few places where the unborn may return. The opportunities are seldom, and short-lived, hard to predict. A certain spot in a certain hour. If it is missed there may not be another window through which they may pass for months, and it might lie a thousand miles away. To bring an unborn through the veil at any other juncture requires an enormous expenditure of resource.

  “The size of this city’s population and the magics that are worked here make Vermillion a spawning ground for the unborn. My sister can give no warning, only detect and destroy the things as they emerge. The people around these events are food for the new unborn—it would use their flesh to repair itself, to build larger and more terrifying forms, and to feed its power. The only way to ensure the unborn’s destruction is to burn out the nest before it realizes that it is under attack.”

  “But I saw it—at the opera house I saw the unborn. It escaped and pursued us north. That thing wasn’t like the others. At the circus an unborn came for us, miscarried from womb to grave and bursting from the ground in the dead of night. And in the Black Fort Snorri’s son, and then the captain of them . . .”

  The Red Queen pursed her lips. I might almost think her impressed that I’d seen four separate unborn and yet stood before her with my insides on the inside.

  “The creature you saw first was not newly returned but there to seed the event, one of two. Each unborn starts with a child killed in the womb. The longer that child stays in the deadlands the harder it is to birth into the living world, but the more it will be able to meet whatever potential lay in its blood. This was to be a very special unborn, perhaps the greatest of all of their kind. The two worst of the Dead King’s servants were there to ease this one into the world: the Unborn Prince and Captain. The passage is made less difficult by the death of a close relative. It is likely the relative they needed was among the audience. It was a rare chance to test my sister’s magics against the key figures in the ranks of those armed against us and to block the arrival of a powerful new servant for the Dead King.”

  I swallowed, remembering again the eyes that had regarded me through the slit of a porcelain mask. Then, realizing that my role in the failure of the curse was a bad place to let the conversation rest, I carried on. “And the Unborn Prince escaped and tracked us north to stop—”

  “The Unborn Prince went south,” Grandmother said. “The Unborn Captain to the north. They informed the Dead King of events, no doubt, and sent agents against you, but the prince went south, to Florence, where he works against us even now.”

  “Ah.”

  “When you broke her spell my sister glimpsed a possibility. The crack you put into her working allowed the two elder unborn to escape but she saw a way for the main investment of her power to be carried between two unusual men, and that the tides of chance would bear you to our foe in the north.”

  “Tides of chance?” That wasn’t mere chance. I’ve bet on some long odds at the gambling table when drunk but I’ve never thrown the dice at quite so slim an opportunity.

  “She may have moved some of the pieces into place. Hers is an art rather than a science, and even if she were not silent I doubt she could explain more than half of what she does. Her motives are unlikely to fit within words.”

  “But once she interfered, once she acted on what she knew would happen to me . . . she could see no more.” I paraphrased Kara. “She reached into a clear pool to change the future and left it muddy.”

  Grandmother cocked her head to the side at that, as if seeking a new angle to view me from. I’d seen her offer the same look in the still-smoking ruins of Ameroth Castle fifty years before.

  “We felt the curse released. We felt the unborn ended. Out in the wilds they are weaker, away from people on which to feed . . . So tell me, did Snorri ver Snagason find what he sought after he’d laid his enemies low?”

  I paused. Always a bad idea if you plan to lie. Did she know what the Dead King was hunting beneath the Bitter Ice? Did she know that we found it? The important thing was not to get myself into trouble . . . and trouble could come from being caught in a lie, but also from earning myself some kind of further task. “His family were all killed,” I said. True though perhaps not what she wanted to know. Snorri wasn’t seeking the key in any event—neither of us were.

  The Silent Sister held out her hand again, closed about something. I held my breath and refused to meet her eyes. Slowly her fingers unfolded, revealing a long black key, Loki’s key.

  “Ah, yes, he found that.” I didn’t feel safe enough to lie. A damned unpleasant feeling. They say that the truth will set you free, but I find it normally hems me into a corner. “Snorri has the key.” This time however an immediate sense of relief flooded me. I’d told them. It wasn’t my problem any more. Grandmother had armies, assassins, agents, cunning and fearless men and women who would sort things out.

  “And?” the Red Queen prompted, her face tight. The Sister’s copy of Loki’s key faded to a stain across the whiteness of her palm.

  “He’s taking it to a mage named Kelem, in his mines. Has some crazy idea to unlock a door the old man can show him . . . and . . . uh . . . get his family back.”

  “What?” A boom of disbelief that had me scuttling backward so quickly I stepped on my cloak and went crashing down on my arse. As the reverberations echoed through the throne room I swear I heard a hiss issue from Silent Sister’s dark mouth. “Where . . .”

  Grandmother rose from her throne, looking more terrible than Skilfar ever had. She seemed to be struggling with the question, struggling to draw in air and frame her outrage. “Where is Snorri ver Snagason now?”

  “Uh . . .” I shuffled further back, not feeling it safe to get back on my feet. “H-he should be about twenty miles down the road to Florence. I left him outside Vermillion yesterday noon.”

  Grandmother clasped her hand to her face, reaching for the arm of her throne with the other. “The key was on my doorstep? Why—”

  She broke off her question and I didn’t feel it a good moment to volunteer that nobody had ever mentioned that she wanted the damn key.

  “Marth.” The Red Queen lowered her hand and looked to the grey-haired woman to the right of her throne. “Organize a hundred riders. Send them out to bring the Norseman back here. He shouldn’t be hard to miss, about six foot eight, black hair and beard, pale-skinned. Is that right, boy?”

  I’d been demoted to “boy” again. I picked myself up and dusted down my cloak. “Yes. He’s travelling with a fat ginger Viking and a blond völva from the Utter North.”

  “Even better. Spread the net wide. Don’t lose him.”

  TWE
NTY-ONE

  Grandmother dismissed me from her throne room with no more ceremony than she had afforded the courtiers. A short walk, three sets of doors closing at my heels, and I stood once more in the blazing sun of a hot Red March afternoon. No duties, no calls on my time, no responsibilities—“Hennan!” I remembered the boy and with surprise found that it gave me a sense of purpose I welcomed.

  • • •

  “Ballessa!” Back in the slightly cooler confines of Roma Hall I set to finding Hennan, and that meant finding Ballessa first. The doughty mistress of my father’s household knew where each pin lay. “Ballessa!” I’d been striding through the ground floor rooms shouting for a while now and, tired, I flomped down in one of the leather armchairs in Father’s study. Innumerable worthy tomes on theology crowded the shelves. The books held no interest for me, excepting that I knew Father had hollowed out the twelve-volume works of St. Proctor-Mahler to hide whisky, two long salt-glazed earthenware jugs of it, stoppered tight. Also the legends on the top row may read “The path to Heaven” and “Saving the fallen, one soul at a time” and the like, but the etchings within were perhaps the most pornographic to be found in the city.

  “Jayne!” I saw the housemaid trying to sneak past unobserved.

  “Yes, Prince Jalan?” She straightened up and faced me.

  “Ballessa—bring her here would you? I need to find out about the boy.”

  “You mean, Hennan, sir?”

  “That’s the one. Little fellow. Dirty. Where is he?”

  “He ran off, sir. Ballessa put him to work in the kitchen garden and an hour later he was gone.”

  “Gone?” I stood up out of the chair. “Gone where?”

  Jayne raised her shoulders, almost insolent. “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Dammit all! Tell Fat Ned I want the boy found. He can’t have got far!” Though in truth he could have got quite far. The palace was hard to get into. Getting out was much less difficult, providing you weren’t carrying an armful of valuables.