The Liar's key

FOURTEEN

I’m falling. I stepped through an archway and now I’m falling, punching a me-shaped hole through endless night until it finally does end, falling through a white blindness, no kinder than the dark, through sharpness and thorns, through pain so fierce it steals time, and at last into dream. Cool, enfolding dream-stuff, grey as clouds. .

• • •

I fall screaming through the cloud base, forgetting in my terror that this is dreaming, and plummet at last into the midst of the seven-towered castle of Ameroth wherein my grandmother stands besieged by an army of fifty thousand. An army wielded like a blade by the warlord Kerwcjz. The Harrow of Slov they call him-the iron fist of Czar Keljon who dwells upon the eastern steppes but would rather sit in Vyene, emperor by right of war.

• • •

We stand once more upon the outer walls atop the broad expanse of one of the seven towers. High as we are, smoke wreathes us, blotting out the sky, so thick that had I not fallen from heaven’s vault and down through the burning I would be unsure whether morning had yet taken flight.

• • •

Grandmother is there again, Alica Kendeth-princess of the Red March, not yet twenty, broadsword in hand, her armour battered, the gilding worn, enamel splintering away where blows have dented her breastplate. The same iron look in her eyes as when she loosed an arrow into her sister’s heart. She stands taller than me, and yet Ullamere Contaph towers above her in his demon-black Turkman plate, a livid wound scored from the bridge of his nose past the corner of his mouth.

Shattered rock and pieces of the battlements strew the tower top. Soldiers man the walls, less thickly than before. Dead are heaped beside the stairway down into the tower. Dead in two mounds, one pile flecked with the crimson of the March, the other more varied. Men of Slov lie there, entwined with warriors of the Mayar. There a knight of Sudriech, sprawled across him two Zagre axemen, faces tattooed in the blue wards those peoples favour. There has been an assault, recently turned. I wonder how many more of the foe lie heaped and broken at the tower base among the wreckage of their ladders, coiled amid their ropes. .

“We have to fall back to the second wall.” Contaph’s wound gapes as he speaks. I see teeth through the gory mess of his cheek.

“No,” says Alica.

“We’re spread too thin, princess.” There’s no heat in his voice, just weariness. “This castle was built to be held by more men.”

“I’m not interested in holding this castle. I mean to destroy Kerwcjz and let the Czar know he has overreached himself this time.”

“Princess!” Exasperation now. “Attack was never an option. It-”

“It was the only option we ever had.” She starts toward the stairs. She calls to Contaph over her shoulder. “Bring five hundred of the very best to the keep. Choose by skill, not blood. I want warriors. Father can make more nobles easier than he can make more warriors.”

“The keep, highness?” Exasperation turning to confusion. “We can hold the second wall. At least for a few weeks. The keep should be our last-”

Alica Kendeth turns at the top of the stairs and looks back at him. “We can’t allow them to gain the outer towers. Bring me five hundred and order that the towers be held. If that means surrendering the walls between-so be it.”

Contaph pales, as if the edge of a terrible thought has sliced him, and more deeply than the blade that ruined his face.

I follow my grandmother down the steps that coil through the heart of the tower, a thick-bodied construction, packed with many floors. Down past staterooms, barracks chambers, armouries, storerooms, down through a second skin, this of poured stone, a smaller and more ancient tower housed within the thickness of the newer construction. The spiral stair broadens to a zig-zag flight arching on poured buttresses. Seemingly insubstantial, even as a ghost I am nervous to test my weight against it. Each stair is just a slab-you can see beneath them, through the stairway to the flight beneath. . Even so, it has stood a thousand years and more and does not now crumble beneath the weight of my imagination. We descend through the Builder-tower, past iron doors, past doors of timber bound with steel, past a trio of Red March palace guards, and come to a chamber, a plain cube, in which sits a machine larger than a royal carriage, cast in silver steel, alive with dim light, and trembling with a faint but undeniable vibration as if deep within it some great beast draws breath in slumber.

Alica sets a hand to the silver metal. She bends, as if allowing herself to be weary in the solitude of this place, her forehead pressed to the coldness of the Builder-steel, hair, dark and red, falling about her face, eyes closed.

A moment later and she strides with purpose out of the chamber, a nod to the guards who set to sealing the door. A long corridor leads us to the main tower gates.

I follow her out through the exit. Men bow on every side. A detachment of six soldiers leave their duty at the tower to escort her. We take a broad thoroughfare through the town that crowds between the outer and inner wall of the castle. These are the homes of the castle folk, the labour force that keeps this castle running, that keeps food on the table, clothes on the defenders’ backs, mortar between the stones, oil on the cogs of the war-engines. Here and there I see damage caused by the rocks thrown from without, but this place is built to last. Sturdy. Obstinate. The people show these characteristics too. There is no despair here, not yet. Thin cheers go up as Princess Alica passes by. At one point market stalls line the street and we slow to pass through the crowd. Some instinct turns the castle-dwellers aside when our paths cross. They can’t see or hear me, but a sixth sense prevents them from contact.

The gatehouse at the second wall is pierced by a tunnel that can be sealed with four portcullises. All of them stand open. The escort is exchanged and we enter the killing-ground between the keep and the second wall. The bare flagstones echo beneath our feet. Well, not mine, I’m just dreaming.

The keep door stands on the side opposite to the four-fold gate in the inner wall, tall enough for a mounted man but small enough to be strong as the walls themselves. We pass through a smaller iron door set to one side. This is the Tower of Ameroth, reaching for the sky just as it did on my childhood visit. Though it stands now without the strange scars that lay etched into the Builder-stone when I saw it as a boy-and of course surrounded by a castle. I’m starting to wonder how I could be ignorant of whatever story explains how fifty years later no stone of that castle remained in place. Did it simply get hauled away block by block, stolen by locals decades after the war to build a castle elsewhere, or homes? There’s enough stone here for a city.

We pass by more palace guards, elite soldiers from the personal guard of Gholloth, second of that name. Why these men aren’t with my great-grandfather in his palace in Vermillion I can’t guess.

Alica pauses before a captain who stands beside an inner door. “Bring the chosen within the second wall, John.”

“Yes, princess.” Heels click together, a curt bow of the head.

“Artisans only, John. Skilled labour. Allow them their children if it eases progress. Pack them tight.”

“Yes, princess.” No emotion in his voice.

We pass through the door he guarded and a man seals it behind us. A short corridor leads to a domed chamber. A spiral staircase penetrates a remarkable thickness of Builder-stone. The ends of reinforcing iron bars gleam with a dull light where they protrude into the stairwell that has been cut down through them. This stairway must have consumed years of labour. The lamps flicker as Alica sweeps past, her armour clanking at each step.

We emerge into a room maybe ten yards square. A silver-steel ring, three yards across, is set into the stone floor and rises to about waist height, the upper surface sloping toward us. Dim lights glow there, the pattern shifting slowly between three configurations. In the middle of the ring a strange blue star burns, without heat but with a light that captures the eye. It rests a man’s height above the stone, as unsupported as any other star. I find myself staring at the thing, losing all sense of passing time. They say time is the fire in which we burn. Now I know what time looks like when it burns.

• • •

Alica walks through me-an unpleasant sensation but one that breaks me free of the star’s entrancement. Without my grandmother’s intervention I doubt I would ever have looked away. I’m careful not to look at it again. I have no idea if moments have passed, or hours.

The lights on the slanted top of the steel wall that forms a ring below the star now shine with a brightness that owes nothing to fire. The patterns have become more complex, more numerous, and shorter lived. Alica moves quickly here and there, touching one light as it glows, then another. I become aware that we are not alone. The room has few shadows but what shadows there are seem to gather in the far corner. A woman stands there, clad in grey, her robe wrinkled around her. She is almost as tall as Alica, but with a slight stoop, and looks no more than thirty-five but her hair is grey, falling lank about her face. She lifts her gaze-and finds me.

“How?” Any further questions die upon my lips. The woman’s left eye has a pearly cast to it. She raises a pale finger to her lips as if to shush me. When she lowers her hand the slightest of smiles lies behind it.

“I’m ready,” says Alica. “Are the people in place? The soldiers assembled?”

There’s nobody here but me and her silent sister, and neither of us answer.

She raises her voice. “I said-”

“Optics indicate the stasis zone fully occupied.”

Surprise nearly tears me from the dream. There’s a ghost standing before my grandmother. It wasn’t there a moment ago. A pale, see-through, honest-to-God ghost. A damned odd-looking ghost it has to be said-its face like a Greek marble, statued perfection that couldn’t ever be mistaken for life.

Alica bows her head. “Begin the event.”

“I have explained that stasis is not possible. Extensive repairs would be required before the generators could provide a sufficient pulse of energy. Generators seven and three are functioning at thirty percent, the remainder at less than ten percent. A failed stasis will result in a quickening. All that might be achieved is a bubble of quick-time, and at a peak ratio of thirty to one.”

“And I have acknowledged this. You will run the reactors beyond failsafe.”

“You do not understand the consequences of such action. The generators will fail catastrophically. Estimates place the devastation radius at-”

“Even so, you will do it.” Alica keeps her gaze on the pulsing lights.

The ghost shows no expression, its tone unwavering. It seems even less human than Captain John at the keep door, and the palace guard practise hard at looking impassive.

“I am afraid User that as a Guest you do not have such authority. This algorithm will-”

“My sister has seen beyond you, Root. She has seen past the years, though the sight of it burned her eye. You are a dance of numbers, without soul. Cleverness without wit. You will do what I say.”

“User you may not-”

“Security override Alpha-six-gamma-phi-twelve-omega.”

“Compliance. Energy pulse in three minutes. Quick-time core ratio of thirty-two to one predicted.”

We wait while the ghost counts away the seconds. Summoned by some unseen signal, Contaph descends the stairs leading a mix of palace guards, common soldiers, knights, and even a lord or two. Many of them carry the filth and stink of battle with them. Hard men, warriors born.

“Fifteen.”

The chamber is packed and more men push down the stairs. Alica vaults the steel ring and stands on the other side looking out, the blue star just behind her head, making a silhouette of it.

“Clear the stairs!” Alica shouts, urgency in her tone now. “Clear the path to the gates.”

“Fourteen.”

The shout is echoed up the stairway and beyond.

“It’s already done, princess,” Contaph says. “As you instructed.”

“Eleven.”

“Contaph, you others there. Join me.”

“Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven.”

Men pack in close. I join them, hunched beneath the star itself.

“Six.”

A faint whine can be heard rising through the clatter of arms and shuffling of feet.

“Five.”

There’s something in the air. A brittle buzzing that puts my teeth on edge even though I’m not really there.

“Four.” I risk a glance at the Silent Sister, finding her through a momentary gap. She’s watching me from her corner into which nobody wished to push.

“Three.”

“You know me don’t you?” I don’t want to talk to her. I feel like that small boy again, just turned five and presented to the Red Queen for the first time. I remember the dry touch of her, that moment when the Silent Sister first laid her hand on mine and I fell into some hot dark place.

“Two.”

She isn’t going to answer. She only smiles.

“One.”

“Yes,” she says.

“Zero.”

The blue star expands, its cold fire engulfs us and passes on through the walls of the chamber. And that’s it. Nothing has changed. We all stand frozen, waiting, waiting for whatever magic was supposed to save the castle.

“Quickly now.” Alica vaults back across the wall. It’s not something I could do in full armour. Her strength is prodigious.

The men immediately before me are swift to follow her and I scramble after them, the contact with the steel a strange greasy thing as dream-flesh seeks purchase on the real. We’ve hurried along the cleared passage through the tight-packed warriors, and are nearly at the stairs before I realize that only the men closest to the ring have made any effort to follow us, and even they’ve been damned slow about it. Alica isn’t waiting, though, and so I hasten after her.

At the top of the stairs I realize something is wrong. The soldiers here stand like statues, not even following us with their eyes. Has the Builder-magic frozen them? There’s no time to consider the matter-Alica clanks along at a flat run, aiming for the great door.

I’m amazed to see the door standing wide open, as if we weren’t at war. Glancing back, I see men from the chamber stretched out behind us, the ones farthest back moving as if they were running through thick mud. It takes a moment but I think I understand. The star’s light has sped us up. Those of us closest to it have gained the greatest speed. Quick-time, it said? Has the Builders’ engine made our seconds pass faster? Our hearts beat swifter than hummingbird wings?

Emerging from the keep, I think I must be dreaming. Then I recall that I am indeed dreaming but that these purport to be the memories of my line, bound into my blood and revealed by Kara’s magics. The inner wall has been shattered, standing in places, reduced to heaps of rubble in others. Bodies lie crushed beneath tumbled debris-waiting to scream. Where the wall has fallen the flames have reached to the keep, patterning its walls with geometric scorch-marks, and reducing all the people in their path to burning pillars.

The sky is crowded with smoke and fire and falling rock. A chunk of masonry bigger than a horse descends along an arc that will end where I stand. It tumbles as it falls, slower than an autumn leaf. I step aside and move to follow Alica. Behind me the missile strikes the wall of the keep and breaks apart with a sound that is both indescribably deep and overwritten by the high scream of stone fracturing.

Through the breaches in the walls I see only boiling fire. No sign of the town, no hint of the great outer walls and the seven vast towers. The air is full of pieces. Rocks, tiles, masonry. . There are bodies too: I see them dropping from on high as if sinking through water.

Alica runs beneath the gatehouse, under the four portcullises, still raised. Contaph and I can’t keep up with her and she opens a lead. We emerge beneath the fourth gate and step into hell. Fire still billows here. Not the flames above logs in a hearth, or the blaze of a burning house, but clouds of inferno-a living, liquid thing. It seems to be thinning as we watch, spiralling skyward to reveal a scorched wasteland where no building survives. Alica has not waited. Her passage is recorded as a hole punched through the fire. We follow, praying that our swiftness will preserve us.

Alica weaves a path past craters, fire-pits, trenches gouged by unimaginable force. She dodges around stubborn foundations jutting up in our path. She skirts the most intense knots of flame, sidesteps falling debris and jumps the blazing rubble of the outer walls in three huge leaps. I follow, finding like Contaph in his platemail that I can jump distances that would put the athletes of ancient Greece to shame. I see that we are close to the place where one of the seven towers stood-now a column of white-hot flame spiralling above a vast crater. The pieces of stonework that still hang in the air about us, called to the ground along gravity’s rainbow, all radiate from this spot.

Beyond the wall, back past bowshot, the many thousands arrayed against the Castle of Ameroth burn. We race after my grandmother across the dead ground between besiegers and besieged. The engines of war lie in flaming pieces. Chunks of flying masonry from the great walls have carved broad avenues through the ranks of the foe, torn bloody thoroughfares through their camps. Those men closest to the walls lie burning, turned by the heat into blazing fat, pooled amid charred bone. Further back, the soldiers are caught in their agony, their screams deep-throated and low to our ears. Further still and they remain standing, shields raised and smouldering, tents afire. If it is like this all around the seven towers then thousands upon thousands have died-many times more outside the walls than within them.

Alica seems to know exactly where she is going. We follow, with others from the chamber beneath Ameroth Keep strung out behind us, slower than we are but still far faster than any man should be.

We penetrate deep into the warlord’s army, past the major harm done by the exploding towers, into the heart of his host where the pavilions fly the standards of noble houses. Even here great stones have landed, crushing men, horses, tents-but nine in every ten survive. We swerve around soldiers who stand almost frozen, their eyes too slow to track us, hands starting a slow crawl toward their sword hilts.

At last we sight the tight-packed standards of Slov, the pavilions growing larger and more resplendent. Anar Kerwcjz, the Czar’s western fist, is emerging from his great canvas pavilion as we arrive, a magnificent spear in his hand. Cloth-of-gold decorates the entrance and the banners of his vassals hang on standard poles to make an avenue for his exit. The Last Blades stand thick about his residence, resplendent in their black chain mail, faces masked in jet and ivory, a feared elite whose reputation has echoed down the years so loudly that even I have heard of them.

We are slower now, as if our speed is like something gleaned from Maeres Allus’s poppies, a drug that bleeds from our veins, returning us in time to the mortal world. Even so the Last Blades have barely flinched before Alica has slid her blade along Kerwcjz’s throat. She wastes no time in decapitation-perhaps her blade would break if forced through a man’s neck at such speed. She spares the storied warlord no second glance but simply moves to the nearest soldier and repeats the act before the spray of blood from Kerwcjz’s wound is quarter way to the ground.

His spear hangs in the air, seeming somehow more real than everything around it, brighter than blood, more alive than the guards on every side. It’s a dark wood, sheathed in a tracery of silversteel, blades flaring out six inches behind the point. It calls to me, and without thinking I reach for it. My hand closes on the shaft and I feel it, there, solid beneath my fingers.

“Kill everyone!” she shouts.

And Ullamere Contaph obeys. More of her chosen arrive as the butchery begins, and set to their own bloody work. I tug the warlord’s spear into motion and follow Alica, wincing as the crimson deluge sprays over and through me.

She cuts twenty throats before the warlord hits the ground. She cuts a hundred before she has to duck beneath a sword. In places she moves through a clump of ten or twenty Slovian infantry and is on to the next concentration before the men start to fall.

It lasts for what seems an age but what must be only minutes to the army around us. Alica has killed several hundred men before she needs to parry a blow. She stands scarlet head to toe, blood arcing from her blade, flying from her hair as she turns. Blood paints her trail through the camp. Even now she must seem a blur, moving with inhuman speed and leaving dead men toppling in her wake.

The army of Red March, those few hundred survivors from Ameroth Keep, start to regroup as the Builders’ magic fades. Alica and Ullamere lead them, aiming for any strong formations still holding station about the ruined castle, and slicing them apart as they make a circuit.

In the last battle my grandmother leads her four hundred survivors against an army of two thousand Zagre axemen, who have been held back in reserve. The men of Red March are still a touch faster than men should be, a handful of them twice or three times the speed of normal humans, all of them blood-soaked and gore-stained. The Zagrans break early and scatter. It’s the last resistance. The siege is broken.

Grandmother’s troops stand crimson, silent save for the patter of blood dripping from them. She paces a few yards away, ahead of the men, climbing some fallen chunk of wall stone in two steps. She stands there, panting, her breath slowly returning to her, her armour running scarlet as she surveys her warriors. The burning ruins of her castle form her background, with the defiance of Ameroth Keep tall among the collapse of the second wall.

Ullamere Contaph steps forward. He looks up at her, raises his broadsword, and although she is only a princess it is “Red Queen!” that he roars.

“Red Queen!” The army take up the shout. “Red Queen.” Weapons raised. “Red Queen.” Their voices are thick with emotion, though whether sorrow, triumph, or both and more, I cannot say.