The Liar''s Key

  At last the spider brought us by a long flight of steps and a short corridor into a natural cavern where rock occasionally showed through the salt-clad walls and everything had a rounded, lumpen look to it. Another turn revealed a bleached wooden bridge crossing a fast-running rill that carved down through the salt, hot and steaming as it ran. Beyond the bridge lay a chamber of wonder.

  “Holy Hel!” Kara invoked the heathen goddess that rules the Norse in their afterlife should death not take them to Valhalla. A cold bitch by all accounts, split nose to crotch by a line dividing a left side of pure jet from a right side of alabaster.

  “Fuck me.” I feel Christendom provides the more apt responses in such situations. The cavern ran before us in a wide and writhing tunnel, as if some great wyrm had burrowed here, and on every side the salts lay in vast crystals, forests of them, some a yard long, hexagonal in cross-section and so thick I might not get my hands to meet around them. Others were ten yards long and thicker than I stood tall, each face flatter than anything man can make, the angles sharp and perfect.

  I knew this place. I had seen it in the visions Kara’s magic gave me. I had seen it in a mirror in my grandmother’s memories. The Lady Blue fled to these caverns after she murdered the elder Gholloth, first of my line. That bound them, Kelem and the Blue Lady. But which had been the hand behind the move I didn’t know—only that both had played the game and played it against my family. However I turned it this placed Kelem’s hand on Edris Dean’s shoulder on the day he came to Vermillion.

  The spider moved between, beneath, and over the crystals without interrupting its pace, flowing around each obstacle in a whirring interplay of legs. We moved more slowly, struggling to extract any use from each lungful of scalding, over-moist air, and sweating water faster than a man could piss it away. A lethargy wrapped me, like a hot wet blanket, and I found myself paused halfway across a massive crystal shard that Snorri had just struggled over. The crystal plane beneath me returned the light of Kara’s lantern, tinting it deepest indigo. The whole shard seemed to glow with some inner fire, burning at its core impossibly far beneath me. It felt for a moment that I sat upon the surface of a calm sea, fathoms deep, with only the thinnest sheet of some brittle substance to hold me up, to keep me from sinking down to where that fire burned . . . Exhaustion bowed me, a great weight, dragging my head down toward the crystal’s surface. Loki’s key slipped from my wet shirt, dangling on its thong, the blackest I had ever seen it, its tip just a finger’s breadth above the surface that supported me . . .

  “Jal!” Kara barked the word from behind me, her voice seeming to scratch like fingernails on a slate, filling me with irritation. “Jal!”

  I turned my head to her, reluctant, and met her stare.

  “Don’t,” she said. “The world is broken here.” She frowned, sweat running down her brow, plastering her blond hair to her forehead. Her eyes seemed defocused . . . witchy I’ll call it for lack of a better word. She tasted the air. “This is a place of doors.”

  “Well . . . so they say.” I waved a hand around us. “I haven’t seen one damn door since we left the surface.”

  She glanced at the crystal beneath me. “There’s a portal here. An almost-door . . . to let that key touch it would be a mistake. I don’t know where or when it might take you.”

  “When?”

  But she didn’t answer, just looped her hands so Hennan could scramble over the shard. The boy had wrapped rags about his hands. A good move. Mine were cut from sharp edges and already stinging with the salts.

  The spider led us away from the crystal gallery, past a steaming pool of cobalt blue water, and into a hall equal to any we had yet seen but hewn from the bedrock. Along each side stood massive salt crystals, vast octagonal columns retrieved from some deep place by an artistry unknown to men, or at least to any since the Builders. Each would barely fit along the passage that brought us here and would take a hundred elephants to haul.

  What salt had formed the columns I couldn’t say but each held a limpid light that sprang from no source I could see and illuminated the clear depths of them where webs and veils of ghostly white fault lines suggested shapes, hints of horrors and of angels, held forever within the heart of the crystal.

  “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 assassin’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 clusters 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 assassins 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 pa
st, 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 assassins, 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 völva.”

  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. Nobody 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, völva. They call me ‘master of the ways.’ Did you not wonder if I might not notice you passing 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 twang of amusement.

  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 god, 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. “God of tricks they—”

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

  The vision passed 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 spawn 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 damn 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.”

  Alwa
ys 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 hoard.”

  “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.”