Red Queen's War: The Liar's Key Part 36

Within ten minutes Tuttugu lay on his table surrounded by a sea of doors. Snorri took rags and straw, doused them with lamp oil, and set the flame. Snorri said the words as the fire took hold and smoke began to coil thick above us, louring beneath the ceiling in a dark blanket.

"Undoreth, we. Battle-born. Raise hammer, raise axe, at our war-shout G.o.ds tremble." He drew breath and carried on in the old tongue of the north, Kara joining him on the litany's refrain. The light of the fire flickered across them both. Snorri touched his fingers to the tattooed runes picked out across the thick muscles of his arm, set there in black and blue, still visible beneath the dirt. It seemed as if he were spelling out his farewell to Tuttugu, and perhaps to the Undoreth too, now that he stood the last of their clan.

Eventually with the smoke thick across the ceiling, low enough to touch Snorri's head, and with the flame blistering our cheeks, he finished.

"Good-bye, Tuttugu." And Snorri turned away.

I stood a moment longer and watched Tuttugu through the wavering haze of the flame, his clothes starting to burn now, skin withering before the heat. "Good-bye, Tuttugu." The smoke choked me so I couldn't speak the words unbroken, and got into my eyes making them water. I turned away and hurried after the others.

We found Guardian waiting, victorious but too damaged to accompany us into the city without drawing undue attention. But I decided to keep him close until we were ready to leave.

On the ground floor the inmates had done a thorough job of looting, but one heavy door resisted them. I hurried across to unlock it. We needed whatever a.s.sets we could gather.

"Come on!" Snorri heading for the main exit.

Kara grabbed my shoulder then stopped to stare. "What in-"

The room beyond held shelves floor to ceiling, deep and part.i.tioned, each laden with all manner of goods from paperwork to vases, silver plates to odd shoes. "Praise the Lord for Umbertide's bookkeepers!" I reached out for a gilt urn gleaming close by. Even as they tortured the fraudsters in the cells above, all their possessions lay ordered, catalogued, and untouched down below, waiting for the full process of the law to be completed.

Snorri strode past me, knocking my greedy hand aside. Kara behind him. The place, although cluttered, held very few weapons, both Norse made straight for them. Kara s.n.a.t.c.hed a spear from its place on the far wall, Gungnir, her own work.

"You don't still think that will scare Kelem, do you? It didn't even keep the city guard from taking you!"

Kara c.o.c.ked her head at me then looked over to Guardian in the doorway. She pushed by Snorri and slowly moved the spear until its point engaged with the solitary hole in the clockwork soldier's armour. A perfect fit. "They had two soldiers with them. The one that took Snorri came from behind us, through the wall, and wrapped its arms around him."

Snorri continued his inspection of Hel's blade. His father's axe had been hung among the other weapons. Satisfied he looked up with a grim smile, the first since I found him. "Now we're ready."

THIRTY-THREE.

A crowd had started to gather by the time we left through the Tower doors. The whole top half of the Frauds' Tower belched smoke through its windows. Before we left I set Guardian to checking the building for Edris Dean and explained how many pieces he was to tear the corpse into. "Oh, and let everybody out," I added. The idea of leaving anyone to fry didn't sit well with me, but mainly I wanted as many fraudsters let loose on Umbertide as possible. That way the authorities might have too much on their plate to put great efforts in recapturing me.

No one challenged us, surrounded as we were by other inmates all pouring into the street and vanis.h.i.+ng down alleys into the maze of Umbertide. If Edris Dean had escaped the building he must have had more important things to do than raise the alarm because there were no more than two city guardsmen in the road and both of those were trying to look inconspicuous in case anyone suggested they stem the tide of escaping prisoners. I sincerely hoped Edris had crawled away to die but at the very least it seemed likely that even a necromancer would require some time and resources to repair the kind of wounds he had sustained.

With the morning sun climbing above the rooftops we hurried along narrow streets following Hennan who had learned the ways in and out of the city that honest folk didn't use or know of. The easiest way to leave Umbertide proved to be by climbing over the walls rather than scrambling through the sewer pipes that got Hennan into the city. It would have been a tight and malodorous squeeze for Kara-Snorri and I would not have fitted. Besides, the walls of any city not at war are poorly watched, and with the column of smoke from the Frauds' Tower to draw the eye of any guard who might actually have been watching, it proved easy enough to find a stretch of wall we might escape over.

The only real problems were in buying a rope and grapple. It's d.a.m.n hard to come up with a good reason for wanting a grapple in the first place and even harder to find a blacksmith who doesn't tell you to pay now and come back in three days to collect it.

"Throw it higher," Kara urged as the iron hook narrowly missed my head on its second descent.

I paused and favoured her with a narrow-eyed stare, remembering I'd not forgiven her for breaking my nose. "Throw it higher? That's the wisdom of the volvas speaking is it? All those years of arcane study . . ."

I threw it higher on the third attempt and snagged the wall. Climbing a thin and unknotted rope turned out to be a lot harder than I had imagined and I spent the best part of five minutes jumping, lunging, and straining, without getting more than a yard off the ground. Finally I got the hang of it, at least partially. Driven mostly by embarra.s.sment I managed to s.h.i.+n up the rope to the top of the wall as two toothless elders and a growing crowd of local urchins watched on. Kara and the boy followed with no discernible effort, Kara with the spear, Gungnir, strapped to her back. Snorri brought up the rear, his wound making his climb an awkward one, though only once, when he slipped, did he snarl out in pain. I found getting down the other side proved both easier and faster. Also it hurt more at the bottom.

Once gathered outside at the base of the walls we hurried away across the dusty and hard-baked earth toward the margins of the nearest olive grove and lost ourselves among the trees.

"Well?" Kara spoke first. We'd followed the gradient down through the dappled shade to come in sight of the Umber, the river without which the city behind us would be nothing more than badlands flecked with mesquite bushes and picked over by scrawny goats.

"Well what?" I asked, swatting at the flies, already too hot and too sweaty.

"Do you know the way?"

"Hennan knows the backpaths. I came by the Roma Road." Before long much of the Umbertide guard would be fanning out around the northern stretch of the Roma Road. It wouldn't matter to Snorri. He was heading south, to the sour lands where Kelem made his home in a salty gash in the earth known as the Crptipa Mine.

"Do you know the way to the mine?"

"To Kelem's mine? Why the h.e.l.l would I? I'm in Umbertide because my uncle sent me to attend to some banking affairs not to find some wizened magus and . . . and beg him to let me do something incredibly stupid." I actually did know the way, at least roughly, but given I'd no interest in going there I kept the fact to myself.

"Snorri?" Hennan looked up from his own misery at the Norseman in his. Seeing such a sombre look on so young a face reminded me that Tuttugu lay dead-a fact I'd been trying to push to the back of my mind into the place where things get forgotten.

"I know the way." Snorri looked up, eyes red, jaw set, scary as h.e.l.l. "I'll have the key now-you can stay or go."

I studied the broad palm he held out toward me, and pursed my lips. "I didn't break Hennan out of one prison and storm another single-handed just to give you a key that we earned, all three of us, me, you, and Tuttugu. I came in to save your lives. And given that I could have just walked off with the key instead some might say I've got a pretty good claim to owning it now. So the least you can do is ask rather than demand, and perhaps show a little f.u.c.king grat.i.tude." I regretted the profanity the moment it left my mouth. Partly because a prince of the realm doesn't want to be seen lowering himself to gutter talk with commoners but mainly because of the sunlight burning on the edge of the axe fixed across his back in a leather harness I'd recently paid for.

A dangerous silence stretched between us, slowly tightening every muscle I had in antic.i.p.ation of being imminently hit. Snorri reached out and I flinched so violently that I nearly struck his hand away. He took hold of my shoulder, deep blue eyes finding mine, and sighed.

"I'm sorry, Jal. I don't know how you got to us but it took guts, and skill. I thank you for it. Tuttugu will be telling the tale over the tables at Valhalla. The north won't forget it. You are a true friend, and I was wrong to speak to you like that."

We stood there a minute, him with his head bowed, looming above me, hand heavy on my shoulder, me puffing up with pride. Some men can just lift you with a few words. Snorri was one of them, and although I knew how it worked, and had seen it before, it still worked.

I put the key into the open palm of his other hand and his fist closed about it. The sense of loss was immediate, even though I knew the thing to be ten kinds of poison.

"I have to do this," he said, sounding for all the world as if he actually did.

I tried to fathom that one. He had to take the key to the man who had sent a.s.sa.s.sins to kill him for it? He had to take the key to the man who wanted it badly enough to reach out more than a thousand miles for it? He had to enter the lair of a deadly mage and face ridiculous odds . . . and the "prize" was to open a door into death and start another suicidal quest that couldn't possibly give him what he wanted?

"You really don't."

"I do. And there's no man I'd rather have with me than you, Jalan, Prince of Red March. But this is my journey and I won't ask anyone to share the danger. I took you north against my enemies-I'm not going to lead you into Hel."

Dammit if I didn't find my mouth opening to contradict him. I managed to strangle off a defiant declaration that I'd stand by him against all the hordes of the underworld.

"Look. Kelem wants you there. He's been pulling you south with that wound in your side. He blocked you from the door in Eridruin's Cave and would have shut any others you went to. You know he's reeling you in. Christ, you're only out of that tower because of the dreams!"

"What dreams?" Kara stepped closer, eyebrows raised.

My shoulders slumped. "Kelem hired a dream-witch, Sageous, we met him in Ancrath, Snorri and I. He plagued me with nightmares about Hennan until I found him. Hennan led me to Snorri. There, I didn't come after anyone out of heroism. I came because I couldn't sleep. Weeks of not sleeping will have a man ready to try anything for peace."

"Weeks?" Kara smiled and turned away.

"Weeks!"

"But we were only captured five days ago," she said.

I stared at her retreating back, trying to re-evaluate myself. Perhaps I did have a conscience after all . . .

Snorri took his hand from me and stepped back. "We both know the key is a curse, Jal. There's no happiness in it, only trickery. You'll save yourself more sorrow than you can imagine if you give it up."

He held Loki's key out to me, compa.s.sion in his eyes. "But you're right-you earned it. I had no right to demand it from you." Kara turned and stared with such intensity that I thought at any moment she might leap forward and s.n.a.t.c.h the thing from him.

Part of me suspected Snorri had it right-I should refuse it. Even so, if I had a future in Vermillion it probably started with me placing Loki's key into my grandmother's care. And more than that I just plain didn't want to give it up.

I took the key from him. "I'm not going through the door if we find it, but I'll come with you and carry this burden until the last. And if you stand before that door and ask me to unlock it . . . I will." I made it a bold and manly speech, meeting him eye to eye. "It's what a friend would do." Also keeping his company while heading in an unexpected direction would probably be my best chance at not being caught by Umbertide's authorities and thrown back in jail. Kara shot me a suspicious glance as if she could read my mind, but if she could then after all those weeks l.u.s.ting for her in that boat her opinion of me probably couldn't be lowered. I gave her a winning smile, slapped Hennan on the back and led off, the key deep in my pocket once more.

"Where are you going?" Kara asked as I pa.s.sed her. "I thought you said you didn't know the way."

She had me there so I veered toward the river and knelt to wash my hands. "Cleanliness is next to G.o.dliness, dear lady, and since I'm keeping the company of heathens I should at least aspire to was.h.i.+ng the dirt off."

We camped by the river that evening beside a slow meander where the Umber snaked across its floodplain. All of us took the opportunity to wash off the best part of a week's worth of prison filth. I had to remind myself several times that Kara was a treacherous dark-sworn heathen witch because she looked d.a.m.n good dry and dirty and a whole lot better clean and wet. I'd been far too long without a woman. Being so focused on gambling does that to you. It's the only drawback. Well, that and the losing.

I say "camped" but "lying down in a vineyard" would be more accurate. Fortunately the sky was clear and the air kept warm with the memory of the day's heat. Kara sat with Snorri, cleaning his injuries and applying a paste made from some herb or other found along the riverbank. The cuts he'd taken from the manacles were deep and ugly and like to sour if not treated. Even with a chirurgeon wounds are apt to turn bad in the heat and once ill humours are in the blood they'll drag you to an early grave no matter who you are.

The main wound, the one Kelem's a.s.sa.s.sin put on Snorri, Kara couldn't treat. I could see it would give him no peace, and the way he kept looking to the south-east let me know where it drew him. How much of his thinking was his own now, I wondered. If Kara truly had sealed Baraqel away from Snorri so as to give her more chance of working her charms and stealing the key then she had done him a double wrong. While he was light-sworn his own magics had worked against the wound. With Snorri undefended the rock-sworn infection would only grow until either it killed him or claimed his will.

When Kara had finished with Snorri I tried to get her to see to my nose, after all she broke it, but she claimed it wasn't broken and if anything I should be tending her eye.

"Jal gave you that?" Snorri looked up from the grapes he'd been trying, wincing at their sourness this early in the season.

"Long story." I lay back quickly and stared up at the first stars, just piercing their way through the deep maroon of the sky. My shoulders burned where Edris Dean's blood had soaked them and had started to blister and peel as if I'd been out in the sun too long. It hurt but I consoled myself with the thought it probably hurt the necromancer more. If I'd had to let another gallon flood over me to know he was dead and done it would have been a price worth paying.

I wondered if the Silent Sister had seen this when she looked into a future so bright it blinded her. Or perhaps she'd not looked past the destruction of the unborn seeking the key beneath the Bitter Ice. Had she moved to stop the Dead King gaining Loki's key only to have her two agents of destruction, one her own flesh and blood, deliver the thing to Kelem? From what Grandmother told me Kelem was closely tied to the Lady Blue and hers was the hand that sought to steer the Dead King. We'd carried it a thousand miles and more from frozen wastes to the dry and burning hills of Florence, bringing it to the very door the Silent Sister never wanted to open . . . In the end it seemed that Loki's key had tricked even my great-aunt, reaching back through the years to fool her.

As the sun set I heard knocking. I looked around, but the others were settling down, Hennan already with his head buried in his arms. It came again, as if on all sides. I'd heard it before, in the debtors' jail, for a minute or two . . . The evening seemed full of whispers as the sky flushed crimson and the sun sank behind the mountains. The knocking came louder, then faded. I thought of Aslaug, of her dark appet.i.tes and the long-limbed beauty of her. It occurred to me, too late to act even if minded to, that I'd heard this knocking only since I held the key. Kara had somehow locked Aslaug away from me-did I now hold the means to open the way once more?

I noticed Kara watching me and decided to hang the key about my neck on a thong. Pockets are too easily picked and I didn't trust her not to try. I'd scarcely finished tying the knots when exhaustion leapt on me from the shadows. I hadn't slept in what seemed like days and felt as tired as I had ever been. I thought of Sageous, waiting to walk my dreams, and with a shudder I pulled the key from my s.h.i.+rt. I pressed it to my forehead. "Lock him out." A whisper, but heartfelt. It seemed worth a try. I shoved the key back, yawning those huge yawns that stretch your jaw and fill your ears with the sound of sleep.

I lay down and let dreams wash around me while the stars came out in force and the hills throbbed with the song of crickets serenading the night. My grandmother's war had swept us up, me, Snorri, Kara, the boy, Tuttugu, all of us-her sister had set us on the board and they played us. The Red Queen making her moves from the throne about which I orbited, slung north, slung south always seeking to return, and the Lady Blue watching from her mirrors, her own pieces upon the gaming table. Was Kelem hers too, I wondered, or another player?

All day, since near-choking on the blood that Kara's punch brought flooding from my nose, the dream I'd escaped had continued to run its course, whispering at the edge of hearing, painting itself on the back of my eyelids if I blinked. Now I closed my eyes and listened hard. In my time I'd been both a player and been played. I knew which I liked best, and I knew that learning the rules is a vital first step if you intend to leave the board. One more yawn and the dream devoured me.

The banqueting hall of the great palace at Vermillion lies below me, though grander, more full, and more merry than I have ever seen it. I'm standing in the musicians' gallery, a place I've crept to before to spy on feasts when I was too young to attend them-not that Grandmother is given to hosting such things, save for the great mid-winter banquet of Saturnalia, which she holds mainly to annoy the pope. Uncle Hertet on the other hand will honour any festival, pagan or otherwise, that gives an excuse to broach wine casks and summon his proxy court to the palace so they can all pretend the queen has died and play out their roles before age diminishes them further.

The hall below me however has more n.o.bles shoulder to shoulder than Uncle Hertet ever attempted to dine, and on the walls garlands of holly and ivy festoon in profusion, berry red upon glossy emerald, chains of silver bells, and displays of swords and pole arms fanning out enough sharp iron to equip an army. I look left, then right. Alica stands to one side, a child of eleven or twelve, Garyus and his sister to the other, with me occupying the gap the twins have put between them and my grandmother. The girls stand, gripping the carved mahogany of the banister; Garyus sits, resting his ill-made legs.

The glittering crowd below hold my eye, the finery of a departed age, a fortune in silks and taffeta, each lord glittering with wealth displayed for every other. Hardly one among the hundreds would be alive when I woke, claimed by age, the children beside me old beyond my imagination. For the longest time I'd believed my grandmother had come into the world creased and seamed, carrying her wrinkles from the womb, the iron grey in her red tresses as ancient as the lichen on statues. To see her young unsettles me in ways I can't explain. It tells me that one day it really will be my turn to be old.

The feast is almost over, though food still mounds the platters and servants scuttle hither and thither to refill and replenish. Here and there are empty seats, a lord stands, unsteady, bows toward the host, and walks toward the great doors with the overly careful gait of a man in his cups. Elsewhere guests are flagging, pus.h.i.+ng back plates. Even the dogs at the margins of the hall have lost their enthusiasm for dropped bones, barely prepared to snarl their owners.h.i.+p.

At the head of the great table, presiding over fifty yards of polished oak near hidden beneath silver platters, goblets, candelabras, tureens, and ewers for wine and water, sits a man I know only from paintings. His portraits are rare enough to make me wonder if the Red Queen burned them. Gholloth, second of his name, a blond giant of a man, sits there-red-faced from the drink now, his tunic elaborately embroidered and blazoned with the red banner of the March, but wine-stained and straining at the seams. On canvas they paint him forever young and glorious as he looked on the beaches of Adora, or was imagined to look. They show him at the start of the invasion that was to tie the dukedom to the Red March throne. The War of Barges they called it because he took his forces on river barges across the sixteen miles of sea to reach Taelen Point. Now he looks to be fifty or more and wearing his years poorly, as old when he sired my grandmother as his own father had been when he sired him. Where the elder Gholloth might be I can't say, dead perhaps, or a toothless ancient hunched upon his throne with a bowl of soup.

The twins aren't watching their father though: the Silent Sister is staring at someone with unusual intensity, even for her, and Garyus follows her gaze, frowning. Alica and I join them. We're watching a woman about halfway along the table. She doesn't stand out to me, neither old nor young, not pretty, more motherly, modestly covered, her gown a lackl.u.s.tre affair of black and cream, only her hair sparkles, raven-dark beneath a web of sapphires held on silver wire.

"Who is she?" Alica asks.

"Lady s.h.i.+val, minor n.o.bility from one of the Port Kingdoms, Lisboa I think." Garyus frowns, raking his memory. "Has King Oth.e.l.lo's ear, an unofficial adviser of sorts."

"Elias is watching her," Alica says, and Garyus blinks, looking across the room to where a man stands by the wall in the shadows, away from the diners, ostensibly filling his pipe. There's something familiar about the fellow. It's in the swift and restless movement of his hands. He reaches up to light a taper from the wall lantern and his upturned face catches the glow.

"Taproot! By Christ!" They don't hear me of course. I'm not here, just a dreamer floating in the memories my blood carries. It can't be Taproot. This man is in his forties, and the Dr. Taproot I know can't be past his fifties. Besides, how would my great-grandfather's courtier be traipsing across the Broken Empire at the head of a circus? This must be an ancestor of his. But just observing him, seeing the quick and bird-like motion of his head as he scans the tables, always returning to our lady beneath her net of sapphires, I know it's him. I know when he opens his mouth I'll hear "watch me" and restless hands will conduct the conversation.

"Elias will-"

"This woman is beyond him. -- says she's here to kill . . . someone." Garyus cuts Alica off, waving her away with irritated jerks of his over-tight arm. Again their sister's name escapes me, just a silence where it should sound.

"I didn't hear her say anything," Alica says, peering at her sister who is still fixated upon the woman below, her gaze unwavering. "Who is this woman to kill?"

"Grandfather," says Garyus, half a whisper. "She seeks to change the destiny of our line."

"Why?" It's not the question I would ask, certainly not at eleven. I'd be asking where we should hide.

"-- won't say," Garyus replies.

The Silent Sister breaks her staring at the woman below to glance my way. For an instant I'm sure she sees me-I'm transfixed by those mismatched eyes, the blue and the green. She returns to her study.

"She doesn't know?" Alica asks.

"Be quiet, child," Garyus says, though he's just a boy himself. He looks serious now, old beyond his years, and sad, as if a great weight has been laid upon him. "I could have been king," he says. "I could have been a good king."

My grandmother frowns. She hasn't it in her to lie to him, even this young when the whole world is half make-believe. "Why are we talking about that again?"

Garyus sighs and sits down. "-- needs my strength. She needs to see, or this woman will kill us all before we can stop her."

Alica's frown deepens. "--'s done that before . . . hasn't she?"

Garyus's nod is slight enough to be missed. "Even before we were birthed."

"Don't do it." Alica is speaking to them both. "Tell Father. Set the guards on her. Have her thrown in-"

"-- needs to see." Garyus hung his head. "This woman is more than she seems. Much more. If we don't know her before we act, we will fail."

The Silent Sister leans over the bal.u.s.trade now, staring at the woman with such intensity that it trembles in each line of her over-thin body, staring so hard that I almost expect to see the path between them light up with some recognition of the energies being spent. Garyus hunches in on himself, a slight gasp escaping his lips.