The Liar's key

TWENTY-THREE

Having escaped both Maeres Allus and Count Isen I rode on south buoyed up by the kind of good spirits I hadn’t had since. . well, since being on the road with Snorri. My good mood lasted until early evening when the sullen heat piled up a thunderhead of titanic proportions that proceeded to try and drown everyone on the Appan Way. I took shelter beneath a huge oak a hundred yards off the road in the midst of a tobacco field. Lightning began to fracture the sky, the thunder rolling back and forth. Nor nickered and pulled, skittish and threatening to bolt with each new crash from above. They do say it’s foolish to stand beneath a tree when there’s lightning all about, but getting soaked through when there’s shelter to hand seemed more foolish so I decided it was probably an old wives’ tale and ignored the advice. Soon enough a small crowd of travellers had joined me-a couple of old wives among them.

We stood waiting for the rain to slacken off, the commoners gossiping among themselves, me keeping a dignified silence and listening in surreptitiously.

“. . Nobby? Ain’t seen Nobby in donkey’s years. Had a flat head did Nobby-last time I saw him he had a flagon of beer balanced on his head and a beer in each hand. . must’ve been twenty years ago. .”

“. . two dozen palace riders! Going like the devil they were, headed south. More following behind, checking everyone. .”

“Gelleth! No? Truly?. . Must have been a judgment on them. A godless lot they are up north. .”

Out on the road a tight pack of riders hastened north toward Vermillion. Through the rain, and with their cloaks sodden and dark, it was hard to make out the uniform but I could see that it was a uniform, which made it pretty certain they were some portion of the cavalry that Grandmother had sent out after Snorri. Probably the Undoreth and Kara were in the middle of the bunch, quite possibly each tied across a saddle.

When the ferocity of the downpour abated I took to the road again and pushed on at a decent pace. The sun re-emerged and the puddles began to steam. Two hours later the road ahead lay dusty and parched as if the rain had never happened. There’s a lesson in that somewhere. The road forgets. Make your life a journey, keep moving toward what you want, leave behind anything that’s too heavy to carry.

• • •

The miles passed easily enough. I took a room at a decent inn and got a quantity of lampblack with which I set to obscuring the distinctive flash of white along Nor’s nose. Sometimes it’s better to travel incognito than in style.

I pressed on, day after day, expecting to find Hennan on the road still hunting the good life with Snorri, not knowing the Norse had been captured and taken back to Vermillion with that damned key.

The further I rode the more impressed I was with Hennan’s fortitude and pace. By the time I reached the Florence border I assumed I must have missed him along the way. That or some harm had come to him. The type of harm that grabs you from behind and buries your body in a shallow grave. The idea gave me a peculiar type of pain, deeper and different from the simple fear of what Snorri would say if he found out I’d let the boy run away and get himself killed. I shrugged the feeling off, attributing it to indigestion from the pastry I’d had off a roadside salesman some hours before. The nearer I got to Florence the less the local food seemed to agree with me.

Ten miles before the frontier between Red March and Florence the Appan Way joins the Roma Road and becomes subsumed by the larger route, our traffic lost in the to and fro of that great artery of Empire. For all of us heading south an air of anticipation grew. After Vyene, and Vermillion of course, there is no greater city than Roma in any fragment of the Broken Empire, and the taste of Roma lay thick in the air. The sight of papal messengers reminded us all how close the pope lay now. Scarcely an hour would pass without one of the pope’s riders clattering by, flamboyant in their purple silks atop lean stallions, glossy black and bred for endurance. Monks traipsed the road in columns of ten or thirty, chanting prayers or calling the plainsong up and down their length, and priests of every shade and flavour beat their paths north and south. I recalled that my own father must have passed this way with his retinue scarcely a week earlier. I guessed the old man must be in Roma by now, presented before her holiness and perhaps having it explained to him what a cardinal should be and by just how wide a margin he had missed the mark.

My banking papers and obvious breeding got me through the border checkpoint, a pleasant enough inn with an attached barracks full of ornately armoured and overheated Florentine soldiers. The country on the other side of the frontier proved as dry and as hot as the southern stretches of Red March had. Where streams ran they grew olive groves, tobacco, chillies and oranges. Where there were no streams they farmed rocks, with the occasional goat watching on.

Sleepy whitewashed villages observed the Roma Road from the slopes of the arid foothills. In time the villages became towns and the foothills reached up toward mountains. The Roma Road, forced at last from its stubborn addiction to straightness, began to wind and turn, bending its will to that of the surrounding terrain. The air grew a touch fresher and the peaks’ shadows filled the valleys, making each evening a blessed relief from the heat of the plains.

Umbertide revealed itself as the road wound down from a high pass into the broad and fertile valley of Umberto. The city, viewed from an elevation, lay white and splendid, surrounded by orderly farming districts and outlying villas of enviable size. The impression of wealth and peace only grew as the remaining distance shrank.

My papers won me swift passage through the city gates and soon I was trailing one of the urchins who wait by the entrance of every city, touting to lead you to the best example of whatever it is you’re seeking, be it a bed for sleeping, a bed for fornication, or a hostelry to wash the road dust from your throat. The trick is to remind them that if it doesn’t look like the best then they’ll get your boot up their arse rather than a copper in hand.

I took a room at the boarding house the boy led me to and stabled Nor across the road. After cleaning myself up with a washbowl and rag I took my meal in the communal hall and waited out the noonday heat listening to the local chatter. The travellers in Mistress Joelli’s house of good repute came from every corner of the empire and held little in common save for their business in Umbertide. There didn’t seem to be a man among them who wasn’t in search of a loan or finance for some or other venture. And they all carried the scent of money about them.

That afternoon found me in the cool marble vault of the reception hall at House Gold. Visitors paced, their footsteps echoing, clerks passed through, bound on definite courses, and receptionists scribbled behind marble counters, raising their heads only when some new arrival presented themself.

“Prince Jalan Kendeth to see Davario Romano Evenaline.” I waved the papers at the small and pinch-faced man behind the counter, affecting that strain of boredom that my brother Darin uses so well on officials.

“Take a seat, please.” The man nodded to a bank of chairs against the far wall and scribbled something in his ledger.

I held my ground, though tempted to lean over the counter and slam the fellow’s head into it.

A long moment passed and the man looked up again, mildly surprised to see me still there.

“Yes?”

“Prince Jalan Kendeth to see Davario Romano Evenaline,” I repeated.

“Take a seat please, your highness.”

It looked to be the best I’d get out of him without the application of a hammer and so I stalked off to view the street from one of the tall windows. Halfway across the foyer I spotted a familiar face and veered away. Some faces are hard to forget-this face, tattooed as thickly as any clerk’s ledger with heathen script, was impossible to forget. I’d seen it last in Ancrath, in a peculiarly lucid dream, urging me to have Snorri killed. I found myself facing a row of chairs along the wall beside the counter and took a place beside a dark fellow in light robes. I kept my head down, hoping Sageous hadn’t seen me, my eyes on his feet as he continued across the marble floor. I didn’t draw another breath before the dream-witch exited into the street.

“He saw you.”

I turned to look at the man beside me, a fellow of modest build in the kind of loose, flowing robe that keeps a body cool in places where the heat is even less tolerable than in Umbertide. I gave him a nod. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, I always say, and we had both suffered at the hands of the jumped-up desk clerk. Perhaps we might also share an enemy in Sageous.

“He was depositing gold,” the man said. “Maybe a fee from Kelem. He has spent time in the Crptipa Hills. It makes a body wonder what two such men might work at together.”

“Do you know Sageous?” I tensed, wondering if I were in danger.

“I know of him. We’ve not met, but I doubt there are two such men wandering the world.”

“Ah.” I slumped back in my chair. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Knowing everyone’s business was everyone’s business in Umbertide.

“I know you.” The man watched me with dark eyes. He had the mocha tones of North Afrique, hair black, tight-curled, and tamed with ivory combs that bound it close to his skull.

“Unlikely.” I raised a brow. “But possible. Prince Jalan Kendeth of Red March.” Not knowing the man’s station I omitted any promise of being at his service.

“Yusuf Malendra.” He smiled, revealing jet-black teeth.

“Ah. From the Mathema!” All the mathmagicians of Liba blackened their teeth with some kind of wax. I’d always felt it a peculiarly superstitious practice for a sect otherwise so bound with logic.

“You’ve been to our tower in Hamada, Prince Jalan?”

“Uh. Yes. I spent my eighteenth year studying there. Can’t say I learned much. Numbers and I agree only to a certain point.”

“That will be where I know you from then.” He nodded. “Many things escape me, but faces tend to stay.”

“You’re a teacher there?” He didn’t look old enough to be a teacher, thirty maybe.

“I have a number of roles, my prince. Today I am an accountant, come to audit some of the caliph’s financial affairs in Umbertide. Next week perhaps I’ll find myself wearing a different hat.”

A metallic whir turned our heads from the conversation. A sound halfway between that of a hand rooting in the cutlery drawer and that of a dozen angry flies. A shadow loomed across us, and looking up I saw the towering architecture of what could only be one of the banking clans’ famous clockwork soldiers.

“Remarkable,” I said. Mostly because it was. A man built of cogs and wheels, his motion born of meshing gears and interlocking steel teeth, one thing turning the next turning the next until an arm moved and fingers flexed.

“They are impressive.” Yusuf nodded. “Not Builder-work though. Did you know that? The Mechanists made them over a century after the Day of a Thousand Suns. A marriage of clockwork that descends to scales smaller than your eye can perceive. It wouldn’t have worked before the Builders turned their Wheel of course, but one wheel turns another as they say, and many things become possible.”

“Jalan Kendeth.” The thing’s voice came out higher and more musical than I had been expecting. In truth I hadn’t been expecting it to speak at all, but if I had I would have imagined something deep and final, like lead blocks falling from a height. “Come.”

“Amazing.” I stood to measure myself against the construction and found I didn’t reach to its shoulder. The soldier unsettled me. A mechanism, lifeless and implacable, and yet it walked and spoke my name. Apart from there being something deeply unnatural and wrong about a heap of cogs aping life itself I felt most uncomfortable at the thought of something so dangerous, and so near, that lacked the usual levers by which I manipulated potential opponents, such as flattery, pride, envy, and lust. “And they can bend swords? Punch through shields like the stories tell?”

“I’ve not seen such,” Yusuf said. “But I did see one carry a vault door into a bank being refurbished. The door could not have weighed less than fifty men.”

“Come,” the soldier repeated.

“I’m sure it can ask better than that, can’t it? Or has its spring for manners unwound?” I grinned at Yusuf and rapped my knuckles on the soldier’s breastplate. “Ask me again, properly.” My knuckles stung so I rubbed them with my other hand. “Fifty men, you say? They should build more and take over the world.” I walked around the thing, peering into the occasional chink in the filigreed plates of its armour. “I would.”

“Men are cheaper to make, my prince.” Again the black smile. “And besides, the art is lost. Look at the workmanship on the left arm.” He pointed. The arm was larger than its counterpart, a thing of brass and iron, marvellously worked, but on closer inspection the gears, pulleys, cables and wheels, though ranging from tiny and intricate to large and chunky, never became smaller than something I might just about imagine a very skilled artisan producing.

“It’s driven from the torso, and lacks any strength of its own,” Yusuf said. “Most soldiers are part replacement these days, and the clock-springs that were wound to give them power are winding down-the knowledge required to rewind such mechanisms was lost before the clans took ownership of the Mechanists’ legacy.”

As Yusuf spoke my eyes fixed upon an indentation between the soldier’s shoulders, a complex depression into which many metal teeth projected. Perhaps a winding point, though how one might work it I had no idea.

“Come, Prince Jalan.” The soldier spoke again.

“There.” I walked past it into the open space of the hall. “You see, you can address me properly if you try. I advise that you study the correct forms of address. Perhaps you might master them before you unwind completely and become an interesting drawing room ornament.”

Iron fingers flexed and the soldier came toward me on heavy feet. It brushed past and led on through the crowd. I took some measure of comfort knowing the thing actually did appear to have attitude and that I’d managed to get beneath its metal skin.

I followed the mechanism up a flight of marble stairs, along a broad corridor with offices to either side in which a great number of clerks sat at desks checking through rolls of figures, tallying and accounting, and up a second flight to a polished mahogany door.

The office behind the door had that mix of Spartan design and money that the very richest aspire to. When you’ve moved past the stage of needing to show everyone how wealthy you are with gaudy displays of your purchasing power you reach a stage at which you return to simple and purposeful design. With cost being no object, each part of your environment will be constructed of the absolute best that money can buy-though it may require close inspection to determine it.

I of course still aspired to the stage at which I could afford my gaudy displays. I could however appreciate the utilitarian extravagance of the paperweight on the desk in front of me being a plain cube of gold.

“Prince Jalan, please take a seat.” The man behind the desk didn’t bow, didn’t rise to greet me, in fact he barely glanced up from the parchment in front of him.

It’s true that the niceties of courtly etiquette are rarely offered to me outside the confines of the palace, but it does pain me to have such conventions ignored by people who should know better. It’s one thing for some peasant on the road to fail to recognize my station, but a damned banker with not a drop of royal blood in his veins and yet sitting on a pile of gold, metaphorically, that would dwarf the value of some entire countries. . well that sort of injustice practically demands that the man smarm all over any person of breeding to make up for it. How else are they to persuade us not to damn their eyes, march our armies into their miserable little banks and empty the vaults out to serve some higher purpose? It’s certainly what I plan to be doing when king!

I took the seat. A very expensive one and not the least bit comfortable.

He scratched something with his quill and looked up, eyes dark and neutral in a bland and ageless face. “You have a letter of deputization, I understand?”

I lifted the scroll Great-uncle Garyus had sent me, drawing it back a fraction as the man reached for it. “And you would be Davario Romano Evenaline of the House Gold, Mercantile Derivatives?” I let him chew the consequence of failing to introduce himself.

“I am.” He tapped a little nameplate angled toward me on his desk.

I passed the scroll across, lips pursed, and waited, staring at the dark and thinning hair atop his head as he bent to read.

“Gholloth has placed a significant trust in your hands, Prince Jalan.” He looked up with considerably more interest, a hint of hunger even.

“Well. . I guess my great-uncle has always been very fond of me. . but I’m not entirely clear how I’m to represent his interests. I mean they’re just ships. And they’re not even here. How far is it to the nearest port? Thirty miles?”

“To the nearest port of consequence it is closer to fifty miles, prince.”

“And, between you and me, Davario, I’m not fond of boats of any kind, so if there’s any setting sail involved. .”

“I think you rather miss the point, Prince Jalan.” He couldn’t help that smug little smile that people get when they’re correcting foolishness. “These vessels don’t concern us except in the abstract. We’ve no interest here in ropes and barnacles, tar and sailcloth. These ships are assets of unknown value. There’s nothing finance likes to speculate about more. Your great-uncle’s ships are no common merchant ships hopping along coasts. His captains are adventurers bound for distant shores in ocean-going vessels. Each ship is as likely never to return, sunk on a reef or the crew eaten by savages, as it is to limp into an empire port groaning with silver, or amber, or rare spices and exotic treasures stolen from unknown peoples. We trade here in possibilities, options, futures. Your paper. .” Here he held it aloft. “. . once the seals are checked by an expert archivist against our proofs. . gives you a position in the great game we play here in Umbertide.”

I frowned. “Well, games of chance and I are no strangers. This trading in papers. . is it a bit like gambling?”

“It’s exactly like gambling, Prince Jalan.” He fixed me with those dark eyes and I could imagine him sitting across a poker table in some shadowy corner rather than across his exquisite desk. “That’s what we do here. Only with better odds and larger wagers than in any casino.”

“Splendid!” I clapped my hands together. “Count me in.”

“But first the authentication. It should be complete by tomorrow evening. I can give you a note of credit and have the soldier outside escort you back to your residence. The streets are safe enough but one shouldn’t take unnecessary risks where money is concerned.”

I didn’t much like the idea of the clockwork soldier following me back to Madam Joelli’s. A touch of caution I’d developed on the road made me want to let as few people as possible know where I lay my head, and besides, the thing made me uncomfortable.

“My thanks, but I can make my own way. I wouldn’t want to have the thing wind down halfway there and have to carry it back.”

Davario’s turn to frown, an expression of annoyance, quickly gone. “I see you’ve been listening to gossip, Prince Jalan. It’s true much of the city’s clockwork is winding down, but we have our own solutions here in the House Gold. You’ll find we’re a progressive organization-the sort of place a keen young trader like yourself might fit in. Consider keeping your business in-house and we may have a good future together, prince.” He pulled from just beneath the lip of the desk what looked like a drinking horn attached to some kind of flexible tube, and spoke into it. “Send in the beta-soldier.” Davario nodded toward the door. “You’ll see something special here, Prince Jalan.”

The door swung open on noiseless hinges and a clockwork soldier walked in, smaller than the one that led me to the office in the first place, its gait smoother, a porcelain face instead of the side-on view of brass spacing plates and clockwork that lay behind the first soldier’s copper eyes and voice grille. A man came in behind the soldier, presumably the technician responsible, a white-faced and humourless fellow in the tight-fitting blacks and peculiar headwear of a modern.

“Show our guest your hand, beta,” Davario said.

The construct raised its arm with a whirr of meshing teeth and presented me with its left hand, a corpse-white thing, in every regard human save for its bloodless nature and the fact that brass rods slid into the flesh behind the knuckles and moved to flex and curl the fingers.

“The clockwork pokes around a dead hand? Did you buy some beggar’s hand, or rob it from a grave?” The thing turned my stomach. It gave off no discernible aroma but somehow made my nose twitch with revulsion.

“Donated to clear a debt.” Davario shrugged. “The bank will have its pound of flesh. But you’re wrong, Prince Jalan. The rods don’t drive the hand. The hand pulls on the rods and winds secondary springs within the torso. Not as efficient as the Mechanist clock springs, but something we can build and repair, and adequate for mobility if constantly rewound by flesh augmentation.”

The white fingers before me curled into a fist and returned to the soldier’s side.

“But the hand is. .” The hand was dead. “This is necromancy!”

“This is necessity, prince. Necessity spawning invention from her ever-fertile womb. Need breeds strange bedfellows and those who trade in a free market find all manner of transactions coming to their door. And of course it doesn’t stop with just a hand or a leg. The whole exoskeleton of a clockwork soldier can. . potentially. . be clothed in cadaverous flesh. So you see, Prince Jalan, you need have no fears for the security and vigour of House Gold. The last of the Mechanists’ work may indeed be winding down, but we, we are winding up, gearing for a bright future. Your great-uncle’s investments and trades are safe with us, as are those of the Red Queen.”

“The Red Qu-”

“Of course, Red March has been at war or on a war footing these past thirty years. Some say west would be east by now if it weren’t for the Red Queen sitting in between them and saying ‘no’ to all comers. And that’s all well and good, but a war economy consumes rather than generates. Umbertide has financed your grandmother’s war for decades. Half of Red March is mortgaged to the banks you can see from Remonti Tower just across the plaza at the end of the street.” Davario smiled as if this were good news. “By the way, allow me to introduce Marco Onstantos Evenaline, Mercantile Derivatives South. Marco has recently been appointed to help audit our Red March account.”

The modern standing behind the abomination that Davario seemed so proud of offered me the thinnest of smiles and watched me with dead eyes.

“Charmed,” I said. All of a sudden I wasn’t sure which unnerved me most, the monstrosity of corpse and metal before me, or the white-faced man standing in its shadow. Something was seriously amiss with the man. A coward knows these things, just as the cruel and violent have an instinct for seeking out cowards.

Without further remark Marco led the clockwork soldier from the room.

“He’s a banker then, this Marco?” I asked as the door shut behind them.

“Among other things.”

“A necromancer?” I had to ask. If the House Gold were extending the use of their clockwork soldiers by means of such crimes against nature then I had to wonder who was doing the work for them and if the Dead King had his bony fingers in their pie.

“Ah.” Davario smiled and showed his small white teeth, too many of them, as if I’d made a witticism. “No. Not Marco. Though he has worked closely with our practitioners. Necromancy is an unfortunate word with overtones of skulls and graveyards. We’re much more. . scientific here, our practitioners adhere to strict guidelines.”

“And what of Kelem?” I asked.

The banker stiffened at that. A nerve touched.

“What of him?”

“Does he approve of these. . innovations? Of your practitioners and their arts?” I really wanted to ask if Kelem owned half of Red March but perhaps I didn’t want to hear the answer to that question.

“Kelem is a respected shareholder in many of Umbertide’s institutions.” Davario inclined his head. “But he does not control the House Gold nor make our policy. We are a new breed here, Prince Jalan, with many profitable associations.”

Davario took a piece of parchment from his drawer, heavy grade and cut into a neat rectangle. The thing had been marked all over with precise scrollwork and an exquisitely detailed crest of arms. He took his quill and wrote “100” in a clear space near the middle, signing his name below.

“This is a credit note for one hundred florins, Prince Jalan. I hope it will be sufficient for your needs until your great uncle’s paperwork is certified.” He slid it across the desk to me.

I picked it up by the corner, and shook it as I might a suspect letter. It hadn’t any weight to it. “I do favour cold currency. .” I turned the note over, the reverse decorated in more scrollwork. “Something more solid and real.”

A small frown creased the flesh between Davario’s eyes. “Your debts aren’t currency, my prince, and yet they’re every bit as real as your assets.”

My turn to frown. “What do you know about my debts?”

The banker shrugged. “Little more than that they exist. But if you sought to borrow money from me I would know far more about them by sunset.” His face became serious and despite our civilized surroundings I felt little doubt that in the matter of collecting what might be owed to the House Gold Davario Romano Evenaline would be no more inclined to show mercy than Maeres Allus. “But I wasn’t talking about your debts: it’s your Uncle Hertet’s debts that are the stuff of legend. He’s been borrowing against the promise of the throne since he came to his majority.”

“He has.” I managed to stop the words becoming a question. I knew the heir-apparently-not liked to spend and had several ventures on the go, including a theatre and a bathhouse, but I had assumed that the Red Queen indulged him in recompense for her failure to either be a doting mother or to die.

Davario returned to his theme. “Debts are very real-they’re not hard currency but they are hard facts, my prince. This note is a promise: it carries the reputation of the House Gold. The whole of Umbertide, the whole of finance, runs on promises, a vast network of interlinked promises, each balanced on the next. And do you know what the difference is between a promise and a lie, Prince Jalan?”

I opened my mouth to tell him, paused, thought, thought some more, and said, “No.” I’d uttered plenty of both and the only difference seemed to be the side you looked at them from.

“Well and good, if we ever found someone who did we might have to kill them. Ho ho ho.” He spoke his laugh, not even pretending humour. “A lie may prove true in the end, a promise might be broken. The difference might be said to be that if a person breaks one promise then all their promises are suspect, worthless, but if a liar tells the truth by accident we don’t feel inclined to treat all their other utterances as gospel. The promise of this note is as strong, or weak, as the promise of every bank in this broken empire of ours. If it breaks, we plunge into the abyss.”

“But. . but. .” I grappled with the idea. I’m an easy man to put the fear of God into. . unless it actually is God you’re talking about, then I’m rather more relaxed, but this notion of kingdoms and nations standing or falling on the reputation of a collection of grubby bankers took more imagination than I could muster. “Any promise can be broken,” I offered, trying to think of anyone whose promise I might actually stake something on. For a promise that benefited me rather than the other person I could only come up with Snorri. Tuttugu would try not to let you down, but that’s not the same as actually not letting you down. “Most promises are broken.” I set the note back upon the table. “Except mine of course.”

Davario nodded. “True, just as every man has his price, every promise has a fault along which it might be fractured. Even the bank has its price, but fortunately nobody can afford to pay it, and so to all intents and purposes it is as incorruptible as the holy mother in Roma.”

And that took my faith in the paper away again in a stroke. Even so I took it, and left with the necessary pleasantries, once more turning down the idea of an escort.

In the lengthening shadows and narrow alleys of Umbertide I almost regretted the decision not to have a mechanical monster walk me home. To find necromancy waiting for me in the city’s innermost circles did nothing to settle my nerves after the narrowly avoided horrors of my journey. At each turn I felt hidden eyes upon me and picked up my pace a little more, until by the time I reached my lodgings I’d almost broken into a run and my clothes were soaked with sweat.

I wondered about Hennan too, lost on the road, and about Snorri; was he in Vermillion now, a broken man, the key taken from him?