The Liar's key

TWENTY-NINE

We waited for Racso to come back. We didn’t need his key but I needed light for my plan and before the light I’d needed darkness. We had to wait. I didn’t want to wait. I didn’t want the boredom or the misery or the sense of uncertainty, but most of all I didn’t want to fall asleep and find Sageous waiting there for me.

It proved a long and miserable test of endurance, there in the unbroken night of the cells. I moaned and sighed about it, until I remembered Hennan had endured the place alone before I arrived, much of his time starving and parched. I kept quiet after that even though I thought it had probably been easier on him, raised as he was to the hardships of peasant life.

Artemis Canoni stopped answering my calls to have the inmates and their prying hands kept from my person, and took to moaning in a corner-whatever had been eating at his insides seeming now to have gained the upper hand. My other bodyguard, Antonio Gretchi, a former cobbler to Umbertide’s moneyed classes, proved unequal to the task on his own, and so I indentured a new servant for the price of a wizened apple and set him to his duties-which meant stamping on any hand that he encountered creeping in my direction in the dark.

For hour stacked upon empty hour we sat on the hard ground, too hot, too thirsty, and listening, always listening for the rustle of any approach. My head kept nodding, imagination creeping in to paint pictures on the darkness, tempting me into dream. I jerked my head up with a curse, more desperate each time. Occasionally someone would start to speak, sometimes a muttered conversation with a confidant, sometimes a long slow litany uttered into the dark. In the anonymity of blindness people confessed their sins, spoke their desires, made their peace with the Almighty, or, in some cases, bored the arse off everyone with endless dreary recollections from profoundly dull lives. I wondered how long I would have to sit there before the company became acquainted with every detail of events at the Aral Pass and I progressed to a comprehensive reconstruction of all Vermillion’s bordellos. Quite possibly another day would get me there.

The low mutter of conversation rose and fell in cycles, petering out to long silences then building again, sparked by a memory that built into a recounted moment and split into half a dozen threads running through our number. The thing had a natural rhythm to it, and when that rhythm broke it jarred me out of my reverie. The muttering of four or five people had stopped at once. Even the wet death rattle of Mr. Cough paused.

“What is it?” I asked. It clearly needed someone of royal blood to voice the important questions.

Silence, save for a scraping noise, something heavy being pulled across flagstones.

“I said-” The scraping noise came again and I realized with a start that whatever was making the sound was beyond the bars.

I held my breath. Silence. Fear kept that breath trapped in my lungs, only to burst out in a shriek when Mr. Cough suddenly started choking on his own held breath, hacking so hard I felt sure his lungs must be filling with blood. When he finally trailed off a couple of people started to mutter again, the tension broken. With a dull thud something fell against the bars-and everyone swallowed their words, the breath trapped in their chests once more. Inmates shuffled back further into the cell starting to curse and cry out in fear.

“What the hell?”

“How can-”

“There’s no one out there. .”

And then someone said it. “Artos?” The corpse that had been left sprawled just beyond the gate.

“Maybe he wasn’t dead.”

“He was dead. I checked him. He was my friend.”

“Maggots were eating his eyes.”

“Of course he was dea-” A second dull thud of meat against bars cut the conversation off.

“Oh shit.”

“Sweet Jesu!”

“Artos? Is that you?”

The darkness seethed with possibilities-none of them good.

“It is Artos, isn’t it?” Hennan’s voice, closer to me than I’d imagined. I flinched.

“Yes.”

“And he is dead, isn’t he?” A small hand seeking mine.

“Yes.” In my left hand I held the key, removed from its hiding place, the witch’s spell undone. . Loki’s key ready for use once more, and once more free to draw the attention of any foul thing that might be seeking it.

The thud of meat on iron came again. I imagined what I couldn’t see. Artos, staggering back from the impact on dead legs, face still crawling, ready to lunge forward once more, answering the call of what I held in my hand.

“Don’t worry.” I used my bluff hero-of-the-pass voice, loud enough for everyone but aiming the message at just one pair of ears. “Don’t worry. He’s out there, and we’re in here. If he couldn’t manage to get through those bars in all the months they held him trapped on this side, he’s not going to manage to get back through them before Racso’s next visit, now is he?”

I’d barely got the words out before Mr. Cough drew in another gurgling breath as if he were drowning in whatever filth was filling his lungs. On cue, after that chilling breath rattled into Mr. Cough, my former bodyguard Artemis Canoni loosed a soft cry of agony from his corner of the cell. Neither Hennan nor I said it, but from the sudden tension in his hand I think we came to the understanding in the same moment. Artos might be trapped out there-but if Mr. Cough or Artemis Canoni were to meet their maker within the next ten hours or so before Racso came back. . the Dead King would have a new corpse to play with, and this time we’d be trapped in the cell with whatever he chose to stand back up again. Suddenly my concern for my fellow inmates reached new heights.

“Give that man with the cough some room, dammit! Don’t crowd him. Someone give him some water-there’s a copper in it for the man that does. And Artemis-where’s my faithful Artemis got to? Water for him too. And here’s a crust to dip into it.”

It took a bit of organizing but I did my best for them. Not that I had much faith in the curative powers of stale water and staler bread. Our friend outside kept bumping against the bars, and our friends inside kept muttering about why he might be doing it, but in the end with nothing to see and nothing to be done about it, we settled back into an uneasy quiet.

The truth about sheer terror is that even for a world-class coward like me it’s unsustainable. When the dreaded thing doesn’t happen hour after hour it becomes something that whilst still terrible allows a little room around the edges through which other thoughts may slip. Thoughts came. Thoughts that seeded suspicions into the blindness of the cell. Suspicions, watered by darkness, growing, slowly but relentlessly. The Red Queen’s war lay at the midst of my troubles. Her elder sister had sent me to the distant north to find the key I now held. And what was I doing in Umbertide? The Silent Sister’s twin had sent me here. It had seemed a mercy at the time, an escape from the dangers at home. . but was it? Red March mortgaged to the banks of Florence, a power struggle between House Gold and others against Kelem, the Broken Empire’s unofficial master of coin, the Dead King sticking his bony fingers into the pie. . the last staging post for Snorri before heading into the hills bearing Loki’s key to seek the door-mage out. . and young Prince Jalan thrust into the middle of it all by a man I’d come to understand more fully in Umbertide than I ever had in the palace-a man the traders here considered Red March’s unofficial master of coin. I thought of Garyus slumped in his bed, looking two steps from death as he sent me on my way with the only kind words I heard on my return. I thought of him lying there and tried to square that image with the new ones being built behind my eyes. With a start I realized I was holding Loki’s key tight to my chest. I lowered my hand, wondering if its lies were bleeding into me even now.

I sat pondering, clutching Loki’s key, shifting position every few minutes to keep from getting sore against the flagstones, until every part of me was sore and it didn’t matter any more. I would rather have set the key in a pocket but I couldn’t risk losing it, and so I held it tight, that slick and treacherous surface seeming to slide beneath my fingers like melting ice.

To start with I’d gripped the thing as if it might bite me, remembering how at my first touch memories had pulsed through me, images from the day Edris Dean killed my mother. But the key didn’t bite any more than old Artos found a way through the cell’s bars. I sat with it cool in my fist for an hour or more, listening to the sounds of the dungeon. At one point I heard a knocking, as if someone were rapping on a door close by-though I knew we had only bars and gates, no door. The knocking grew louder, more insistent, though no one around me mentioned it, and the darkness around my ears seemed crowded with whispers just beyond the edge of hearing. It lasted a minute, another, and then no more.

The fear subsided into unease, disquiet fermented into boredom, and only the long battle against sleep remained as the blind hours passed. That was when the key struck. It felt as if the key were hauled sideways. I could let it go or be dragged along with it. Darkness melted into vision though I fought with all my strength to stay where I was, and struggled to see only what lay about me. My efforts blew away in a cold wind. I stood once more on the margins of the Wheel of Osheim. The archway, that empty arch through which we’d escaped from Edris and the Hardassa Vikings stood once more before me, a lone work of the wrong-mages in the bizarre wilderness through which Kara had guided us. Of the völva, of Snorri and Tuttugu, there was no sign. No sign of me either, just my disembodied point of view, watching, unblinking, waiting for the lie, waiting for the key’s deception. And nothing came. I held a dim awareness of my body, somewhere else, in another place and time, the key a cold and heavy bar locked tight in my grip.

“It’s an odd sort of vision that shows me nothing. .” The words sounded only in my head. In Osheim the wind spoke and everything else lay silent. I stared at the arch, and at the strangely sculpted encrustations of black and glassy rock that punctuated the surrounding terrain. I looked up at the mauve wound of the sky. “What?”

Light reflecting from one of the nearer outcroppings drew my eye. Obsidian they called this stuff. I knew it not from the lecturing of some tutor but because there had been a fad back in Vermillion for jewellery made from the material. For several months one autumn everyone who was anyone was wearing it, and after Lisa DeVeer had dropped enough heavy hints on me from the considerable height of her balcony, I borrowed sufficient money to buy her a necklace fashioned from polished beads and discs of obsidian. She wore it once if I recall. . The key burned cold in my hand and suddenly I knew what it had been made from and from whence it came.

“Ah hell.” No story that begins “near the Wheel of Osheim” ends well. I looked down and saw that I’d arrived in body as well as spirit. In my hand, where the key should be was nothing but Hennan’s iron rune tablet. A moment later it was the shadow of a key. Then the key. “Kara hid you in a shadow. .” My eyes roamed up the sides of the arch, gaze sliding uncomfortably over the symbols set there in stone. “She’s dark-sworn?” I remembered the ease with which she cast Aslaug from her boat. She hadn’t opposed the spirit with light or fire, just ordered her gone. . and Loki’s daughter had fled.

I looked at the arch and remembered how Kara had prepared it with spells before getting Snorri to use the key. The arch had opened onto the dark and Aslaug had emerged, then Baraqel had broken through, setting light at war with darkness within the span of the portal, forming some kind of recreation of the powers at the heart of the Silent Sister’s spell. Only then had the völva urged us through, leading the way. And from that moment to this I hadn’t heard another word from Aslaug nor had Snorri mentioned Baraqel. Their voices suddenly silent and their influence fading to nothing in the space of a week. It hadn’t seemed that odd until now. Everything about magic is strange and untrustworthy in any case. . but. . Kara had led us to that arch, she had worked enchantment upon it, and then as well as transporting us from danger it had stripped away our patrons, the strength given to us by my great-aunt. Granted, they were strange spirits we bore and not to be trusted, and granted my great-aunt was as mad a witch as might be found in the Broken Empire, but even so they had been a form of power, our only protection from the worst of what our enemies might bring to bear upon us. . and Kara had taken them from us.

I walked through the arch and found myself on the other side, back on that same blasted heath. When Kara had activated it the arch had taken us to the darkness beneath Halradra. . but I’d come from darkness this time and required light. For the longest moment I stood staring back at the archway, remembering the darkness of my cell and the darkness of the caves beneath the volcano. Light. That was why we were waiting. We needed light. And, as if a key had turned, pieces of memory aligned and I had my answer.

I closed my eyes, opened them again, and found it dark, just as it had always been. Near silence-the low muttering of two people across the width of the cell, the rattle of a dying man’s breath, the scraping shuffle of a dead man beyond the bars. I patted my pockets and cursed myself for a fool.

I worked blind, breaking free double florins from the linen strips into which they’d been sewn, unwrapping the used lengths of cloth and stacking the coins between my knees. I took exquisite care not to let them chink.

“What’re you doing?” Hennan close by.

“Nothing.” I damned his keen ears.

“You’re doing something.”

“Just be ready.”

The boy had the sense not to ask what for, where many grown men would not.

With even greater care I balanced a tin plate upside down atop the stacks of coins.

“I’m going to make a light,” I said loud enough for everyone. “You should shield your eyes.”

Loki’s key opened a lot of things, memories not the least of them. I reached down into the depths of my back pocket, down among the fluff, the old handkerchief that needed cleaning, scraps of parchment, a locket with Lisa DeVeer’s likeness inside, and found the small hard lump I’d been searching for, wrapped in cloth. I slid a finger past the covering to touch the cold metal. Immediately a glow broke through the handkerchief, through the questing fingers, and shone through the fabric of my trews. Had there been a wit among our number he might have commented that for once the sun did indeed appear to be shining out of my arse. I pulled Garyus’s orichalcum cone out, hidden in my fist and yet still bright enough to light the room in the rosy hues of my blood, the illumination pulsing and erratic as a heartbeat. Gasps of awe and shock went up on all sides. Even muted by my hand the light was enough to make everyone there, me included, shield our eyes.

The awe turned to horror within moments. On all sides my fellow debtors were screaming and shuffling back from the bars. Being closest to the source, the light blinded me for longer than most so that I had to unscrew my eyes against the glare and blink helplessly to try to see what had caused the panic. When I finally focused on the thing beyond the bars a shriek nearly escaped me too and only my greatest resolve kept me from bundling back to bury myself in the crowd.

Artos had scraped off most of the maggoty flesh and the eyes that regarded us from that raw and glistening face were oozing sockets, night-dark with shadow. Even so a hunger seemed to stare from the darkness of those eye-pits, a hunger that felt horrifically familiar. Dead hands gripped the bars and a jaw full of broken teeth ground out still more fragments whilst gargling incoherent threats at us.

“In a moment I’m going to unlock the gate,” I said.

A collective gasp and a chorus of “no”s went up.

“Even if you could open it I wouldn’t go out there!” Antonio, my longest-serving bodyguard, looked from the dead man to me as if I were mad, his eyes watering from the light. “Hell, I wouldn’t go out there even if that thing weren’t standing there! The guards would just catch me in the next corridor and I’d be back here with a fine added to my debt and a beating for my troubles. We need to wait until Racso comes. He’ll bring the guard to deal with. . whatever the hell that thing is.” He paused, squinting against the glow from my hand. “How the hell are you doing that?”

“In a moment I’m going to unlock the gate,” I repeated more loudly, holding the black key before me. “The next person to die in here will end up like Artos out there-only he’ll be locked inside with us.” I looked around meaningfully at Mr. Cough, lying semi-conscious on his back, chest shuddering up, wheezing down, shuddering up. “Just think about that.”

I went over to the gate and the thing that had been Artos moved to stand opposite me. As I approached the bars it stuck its arms through, reaching for me, the remains of its face pressing forward as if somehow it might squeeze its skull through the gap. I just about managed not to jump back. These people needed courage if they were going to get me out of here. They needed a good example, needed to see some bravery on display. I couldn’t give them that but I could give them a passable impression of it.

“Not too clever are you?” I kept just out of range of the clutching fingers. There was an intelligence in those dark and gory sockets, that same awful one that had stared at me through the eyes of dead men back in the mountains with Snorri, but hunger dominated the thing’s actions, a hunger to kill me at any cost. For what felt like an eternity I stood there, knowing I couldn’t back down but without a clue what to do. Eventually I patted my pockets for inspiration. After all, Garyus’s orichalcum cone had sat there forgotten ever since my return to the palace, something else useful might be down at the bottom of another pocket. . I glanced down and discovered that the useful thing was right at the top. I pulled free a length of the linen strip that had until recently had double florins sewn into it. I made a wide noose from it-no simple task while still clutching the orichalum. With the noose complete I advanced on Artos, after a few tentative tries, I slipped it over his right wrist. Throwing my weight behind it I pulled the arm sharply to the side. The elbow joint gave with a vomit-making cracking sound, and the arm bent at an impossible angle, allowing me to bind it to the bars out of reach of Artos’s left hand. I took another length of the linen and repeated the process with the other arm.

“There.” Artos now glared at us, pinned to the gate by two broken arms, his tongue protruding and scraping over shattered teeth as if it too were trying to reach me. I set Loki’s key in the lock. It fitted perfectly and turned without protest. Click. I took hold of the gate’s outer edge and pushed it open, lending my weight to overcome the resistance as Artos lunged at me. I held the gate open with one arm and beckoned the debtors with the hand clutching our light. At each of the seven other cells scores of faces pressed to the bars, watching on amazed.

The debtors, all terrified and confused, stayed where they were; some even shuffled further back, though giving Mr. Cough a wide berth.

I sighed, stepped back, thrust my hand into my pocket and pulled out all my smaller coins, two silver florins, three hexes, a dozen halves. A jerk of my hand scattered them into the room beyond the gate. As if scalded, half the cell’s population launched themselves forward, most of the other half jumping to their feet. A number of them got jammed in the gateway, fighting each other, desperate to be the first through, right under Artos’s nose, his hands twitching uselessly at them.

I moved quickly to Hennan’s side and handed him the orichalcum. “Hold that.”

In the resulting darkness I scooped up the pile of double florins from under my plate, some fifty in all, and tipped them into my shirt, folding it up over them.

“Give it back, now.” I had to raise my voice over the cacophony rising from the riot beyond the gate. After a moment or two of fumbling we made the exchange and the place lit up once more, my hand glowing, brilliance lancing out between my fingers. “Come on.” And I led the way out, Hennan at my heels, and others following, drawn by the departing light and fear of being left alone in the dark with dying men who might not die properly.

I would have given Hennan the key and let him open the other gates but it seemed cruel to let him touch it. I had to blink at that notion. A year ago the matter of my convenience would have outweighed any worry about cruelty to a child-in fact the cruelty might have been considered an added bonus. .

I stepped over three men wrestling for ownership of a hex, and unlocked the first gate. A few of the more healthy and larger men hurried out to join the struggle for small change, most held back, almost as frightened of me with my glowing hand and black key as they had been of Artos and his half-eaten face.

By the time I reached the fifth cell people were slowly edging out of the already-open cells. I unlocked the gate and immediately a big fellow pushed through. He didn’t join the struggle for the last coin out in the centre: instead he turned on me. I had to look up to meet his gaze. Belligerent dark eyes narrowed at me beneath a shock of black hair. The man had starved with the rest of the last-stage debtors but he’d been a bruiser in his day and he seemed far less impressed with me than his fellows did.

“Been watching you eat while the rest of us go without. Been watching you throwing your money about, northerner.” His scowl deepened and he fell quiet as if he’d asked me a question.

“Northerner? Me?” That was a new one, though I guessed technically it was correct. I eyed him up, wondering if I could overpower him and definitely not wanting to have to try.

“Suppose you throw some of that money my way-in fact suppose you hand it over nicely, boy?”

The cells had fallen quiet behind me, the inmates in front of me all staring my way. All I had to defend myself was the key in my hand, clutched somewhat awkwardly because of the double florin hidden in my palm. My other hand held the orichalcum cone and I kept it tight to my stomach where it pinned up the fold of my shirt, pregnant with a modest fortune in gold.

“Uh.” Panic seized me and my legs got ready to run away. The lout extended a raw-boned hand, reaching for my neck.

“Knock him flat, Jal!” Hennan piped up unhelpfully from behind me. He’d got that damned “Jal” habit from Snorri.

Inspiration struck before the bully did. “Look!” I said, and opened the hand with the key to reveal the gleaming gold disc in my grimy palm. For a second his face lit with reflected light while an amazed and stupid grin spread across his face. “Fetch!” And I tossed it through the bars into the cell behind him. A score of filthy grey bodies immediately threw themselves on top of the double florin and with a snarl my tormentor turned and charged into the fray roaring dire threats.

“Spend it in good health.” I closed the gate behind him and locked it, slipping the key into my pocket.

I turned back, expecting my audience to be at least a little impressed but it turned out they hadn’t gone quiet because of my little drama at gate number five. Racso stood in the mouth of the corridor, three guardsmen behind him, big men draped in chain-mail shirts with bare steel in their hands.

“Get. Back. In.” Racso dropped each word like a stone. He’d replaced his usual baton for one ending in an ugly lump of black iron. The grey sea of bodies drew back toward the cells, the multitude of their shadows swaying and swelling across the walls as the orichalcum pulsed within my grip. A few more seconds and my chance would be gone entirely.

“Look!” I shouted, digging out a handful of gold from the fold of my shirt and holding it toward the ceiling.

That got their attention. Scores of heads turned on scores of scrawny necks. The peculiar nature of our incarceration meant that in my hands I held their freedom. Despite threats, sharp iron, or blunt instruments, there were few here who couldn’t buy their way out the door even now with ten double florins. Many of them could purchase their release with just one or two coins and at the very least a single coin would give them a year of food and drink, another year between them and feeding the pigs.

I let the money do my talking. I threw the whole handful over the heads of Racso and the guardsmen and sent it rattling on down the corridor behind them.

The effect was immediate. The debtors surged forward without a moment’s hesitation. Even Racso and the guards were looking in the direction of the departing florins. The debtors didn’t so much attack the men in their way, but rather they flowed over them, and each other, a rolling tidal advance.

I grabbed Hennan and hurried on at the rear of the wave, setting a booted foot to the back of Racso’s thick neck as he struggled to rise. Always kick a man when he’s down, I say. It’s the best chance you’ll get.

The debtors who had collected the most gold, scrambling for it in the half-crazed melee with almost no light to see by, now pressed on through the prison, desperate to pay out their debt before their hard-stolen florins were taken from them in turn. Those who had done less well in the free-for-all gave chase, anxious to even the distribution of funds.

Unfortunately a few of the crowd paused to think about where the money had come from and were still paused as Hennan and I reached them. A shabby man of middling years stepped out into my path, an old woman at his shoulder naked but for smeared filth; to the side waited a young woman with straggling dirty-blond hair, heavyset and mean-eyed, wearing what seemed to have once been a sack. Three older men, small and similar enough to be relations, moved from the shadows to back them up.

“Cough up.” The young woman held out her hand. “Three doubles will cure my ills. Heard you’re a prince. Three doubles is the cheap way past me, lover-boy.”

Immediately the rest of them started clamouring out their demands and crowding forward in a grimy rabble.

“Get back!” I boomed, and they stopped. Royal breeding will do that for you. The accent, the posture, and centuries of breeding the lower classes to obey, all combine to allow a prince’s outrage to carry rather further than the common man’s. “How dare you?” I drew myself up to my full height, puffing out my chest, and raised my hand to strike any of them who came near. The threat of violence must have been somewhat muted by the fact I kept my left arm clamped across my belly, holding thirty or forty more double florins tight against myself.

“Well?” I roared. The debtors seemed frozen by my reprimands, staring at me slack-jawed. I took a sharp pace forward and all of them bolted for it, a half dozen and more of them scampering away down the dark corridor. “Well!” I grinned down at Hennan, quite surprised how successful I’d been. “I think-” Two large hands clamped about my throat and cut me off. I whipped around in panic, scattering gold, before the grip fully tightened, and found myself facing what had really scared the other debtors off. My eyes met the dead gaze of a guard whose head flopped at a wholly unnatural angle. His neck must have been broken at some point during the exodus of debtors over his prone body.

Fear is marvellous stuff. Not only will it get you running considerably faster than you thought possible, it will lend you more strength than you should rightly own. Not enough strength, sadly, to break the hold a dead man has on your neck, since being dead seems to lend some men strength as well, but enough for me to drive my assailant back across the chamber. I slammed him into the bars of a cell. I think I also managed to knee Racso in the face on the way past as he sat up, groaning. .

The charge took everything out of me and I hung in the dead man’s grip, black spots crowding my vision and a feeling of distance sliding over me. The pain in my neck and lungs receded as the world drew away, shrinking to a single bright spot. I had time in that soft and enfolding darkness to reflect on two things. First, that being choked by corpses was becoming something of a habit, and second, that my only chance for survival depended upon the greed of the many and the quick thinking of a singular child.

As the last traces of my vision faded from me I saw a dozen hands reach out through the bars, pinning the dead man to them. And just before the pounding of my heart grew so loud as to drown out all other sound, I heard the grating of a sword being dragged across stone.

• • •

I woke suddenly, freezing and wet.

“Hold it!” Hennan’s voice in the dark.

“W-” My throat hurt too much to say more.

“Take this.” Something hard pressed into my palm and brilliance erupted, filling the space with razored white light. I closed my hand around the orichalcum and screwed my eyes shut. The boy had thrown water over me. . I hoped it was water.

It then occurred to me that I appeared to be a lot more naked than I had been. My next question started off as a “Where are my clothes?” but changed swiftly into “Where the hell is my money?”

“They took it.” Hennan pointed at the last few grey backs pressing on down the corridor, a very trampled Racso in their wake. The guardsman who had been choking me lay twitching close by, furious glare fixed on me, though lacking the limbs required to make good on the threat.

“I gave them the sword through the bars and they cut him into pieces.” Hennan winced at the memory of it.

I levered myself up. The linen wraps my coins had been sewn into lay strewn around, stained by pooling blood. Unclenching my hand, I found Loki’s key still in my grip, my flesh marked with its impression.

“How did they-” I rubbed my bruised throat. “Get out?”

“I got Racso’s keys,” Hennan said.

“You let them rob me!”

“They had you by the legs and were taking your gold anyway. The big one said if I let them out they wouldn’t hurt you.”

“Uh.” I supposed he had an excuse. I levered myself up, pulled on my ripped trews-they’d been very thorough in their search for florins-and got unsteadily to my feet. “C’mon.”

We hurried after the departed debtors.

• • •

As hoped, close on two hundred well-motivated debtors put quite a hole in the prison’s security. Instead of following them toward the front entrance where they were either rioting or busy buying their way out, I found a passage leading further back. We came through three locked gates, past a deserted guard post, and out via a heavy door into a stinking high-walled yard. A full moon bathed the scene in a silvery light that disguised rather than revealed. I wrapped the orichalcum in a cloth and shoved it deep into my pocket.

“Come on.” I led the way, stepping around the lime pits where they put the remains of debtors whose relatives had paid the body-price. Two rickety carts stood against the wall, one heaped with several skin and bone corpses bound for the pigs.

“But. .” Hennan grabbed my hand and anchored me.

“What?” The anger at finding myself penniless broke out to colour my tone.

“They’re dead,” Hennan whispered.

“Well I’d hope so. .” I frowned at him. He might only be a child but he’d seen plenty of dead bodies before. Then it dawned on me why we might have been better off chancing the rioting and the possibility of recapture in the front of the prison. “Shit.”

A dry scraping sound came from the lime pits behind us and on the cart the three emaciated corpses started scrambling to untangle themselves. “Run!”

I’m only a little ashamed to say I outsprinted the boy. Old habits die hard. It’s good to be faster than what’s chasing you, but really the important thing in running away is to be faster than the slowest of those being pursued. Rule number one: be ahead of the next man. Or child.

The gates to the outside world towered above me, thick slabs of dry timber, iron studded, a heavy locking mechanism in the middle. I shoved in the key with an ecstasy of fumbling, turned it and pushed through with a strength born of desperation. Hennan shot through the narrow gap seconds later, a white figure hard on his heels, lime powder smoking its trail. Together we slammed the gate and Loki’s key locked it just as the first body hammered into the timbers.