The Liar's key

THIRTY-TWO

I’m cursed with berserker blood. Perhaps it’s the Red Queen’s taint, her penchant for violence breaking out of me in rare but concentrated bursts. It’s happened twice to my knowledge and I don’t remember anything but fragments of the time that followed, just loose images of blood and dying, my blade cutting a red path through other men’s flesh. That, and the screaming. Mostly mine. I can’t remember the emotion of it, not anger, not hate, just those images as if seeing pieces of another man’s nightmare.

Walking out into Patrician Street in the first light of what must be my last day I still had my fear but it seemed as though I’d put it in a small box somewhere at the back of my mind. I heard its shrieks of terror, its demands, its attempts at reasoning with me. . but, like the boy’s shouts at my back, it was just noise. Perhaps the lack of sleep had me dreaming on my feet. Nothing felt quite real. I didn’t know what I would do except that Edris Dean would be dead at the end of it. As I approached the clockwork soldier I lifted a hand before me steady and sure, no sign of a tremor in it.

The thing took a step toward me, looking down to study my features, copper eyes burning. At each move it made a thousand gears hummed, a million teeth meshed, from the minute, through small to large, to cog-jaws big enough to eat me. “Yes?” A proper clockwork voice this time, a metallic rasping that somehow made sense.

The boy stood at my side now. I could see him reflected in the silver-steel of the soldier’s armour, warped and distorted, but still Hennan. He’d tried to drag me back, tried to stop my advance, and found he couldn’t. Strange, when this was what he’d been demanding all along. We’re like that. Give us everything we ask for and suddenly it’s too much.

The soldier’s breastplate gleamed, bearing few scratches despite its age, but in one place, low in the side, a puncture wound spoiled the perfection, a dark, angular hole, driven through the thickness of the silver-steel, a gauge no man could support and a metal no smith could work. “You can be hurt then. .” I turned and took the boy by the shoulder. “Go to the door, Hennan.” I angled him and thrust him toward it.

“State the nature of your request.” The soldier flexed its fingers, articulated in many places and each as long as my forearm. It put me in mind of the unborn monster built from the graves in Taproot’s campsite. It had taken an elephant to put that down, and the soldier looked like an elephant might just bounce off it.

“I just came to see what the boy is doing,” I said. “It looks as if he’s breaking in.”

The soldier pivoted about its spine, the upper half of it rotating toward the door behind it. A clockwork soldier doesn’t worry about presenting its back to a potential enemy. All that slamming a battle-axe between its shoulders would do is ruin a good axe and remove any doubt concerning whether you were an enemy or not.

I had one hand in my pocket. It closed now about the key. Loki’s key. The thing felt cold against my fingers, slick, as if it would slip from them at the first chance for treachery. I pulled it clear and a dark pulse of joy rang up my arm.

High above me, between silver shoulder plates, a circular depression edged with intricate teeth glittered in the light. Up close I could see not just one ring of teeth but a second set further back and narrower, then a third and fourth, and more, forming a cone-shaped indentation maybe two inches across. The key held the shape of the one whose shadow Racso set upon it, a crude and heavy thing, a notched rectangular plate on a thick shaft some six inches long.

Olaaf Rikeson had held this key before Snorri had. It had been taken from his frozen corpse, and before he died Rikeson had raised an army with it. An army that thought it could march on the gates of Jotenheim and face down the giants that even the gods feared. Olaaf had opened more than doors with this key-he had opened hearts, he had opened minds.

Reaching as high as I could, I lunged forward and slammed the key into the soldier’s winding lock. The obsidian flowed beneath my grip, colder than ice, searing my skin, but I kept hold and in the moment it met the lock the key became a thick black rod ending in a cone pitted with an infinity of notches.

There’s a rule for doing and undoing, a rule older than empires, even a word to go with it, clockwise, and the opposite, anti-clockwise. One direction to wind up, the opposite to wind down. In the heat of the moment, in the cold terror of the moment, I just guessed. I set every part of my strength behind the task. For three pulses of my heart, each seeming to boom out slower than the most solemn funeral beat, the bastard thing wouldn’t move. Time congealed all about me. The soldier halted its own rotation with a shuddering clunk and began to turn back toward me, starting to drag the key from my hand. One arm reached for me, articulating against the elbow joint in a way that gave the lie to any pretence of humanity. Long metal fingers stretched wide to encircle my waist, each ending in talons razored to slice flesh from bone.

Maybe the additional fear lent me strength, or Loki had had his joke by that point, but without warning the lock surrendered and the key turned. It gave with a sharp jerk accompanied by a sound like something expensive breaking. A resonating metallic twang followed, and a multi-tonal whirring as a thousand wheels, flywheels, cogs and escapements spun free. The soldier ground to a halt just as the key wrenched from my grip and that metal face turned my way. The whole thing slumped, the strange light dying from those copper eyes, and within the span of a single second the entirety of that great steel behemoth stood inert before me, no hint of sound, and without rumour of motion.

The fingers of the soldier’s hand nearly met around my chest, the point of the claw on the longest finger having sliced a three-inch tear into my shirt, a small crimson stain just beginning to spread through the fabric at the far end.

“Shit!” I took hold of the finger and tried to pry it back. Hennan rushed to help, glancing nervously at the soldier as he tugged. Despite the mechanism’s apparently relaxed slump there wasn’t any give in the thing, I might as well be caged in iron bars.

“Slip through,” Hennan said.

“What?” The most emaciated corpse behind the debtors’ prison couldn’t slip through the gap between the fingers.

Hennan raised his arms above his head by way of answer and wriggled down onto his haunches.

“Ah.” Undignified, but what the hell? I followed his example and a moment later was crawling out from beneath the soldier’s hand with no additional injuries save for the brocaded epaulette torn from my shoulder.

“You stopped it!” Hennan stood gazing up at the soldier, showing a degree of awe now that he was close up that had proved lacking when we’d watched from the corner and he’d urged me to storm the place with nothing but my bare fists to defeat the guards.

“If I can’t do better than that we’re in trouble.” Some large part of my mind had set itself screaming at me to run. But Edris Dean’s face floated over that noise, not as he’d been on Beerentoppen this spring, but as he’d looked when Mother slipped bloody from his sword. The scarlet stain from the soldier’s claw spread like a memory of the wound Edris’s blade gave me that day. It grew slowly, blossoming from the site of the old injury that had nearly taken my life. For a moment the sight hypnotized me.

“Jal!” Hennan, urgent, tugging at my sleeve.

“Prince Jalan,” I said. “Unhand me.” I shook him off, recovered the key, and walked around to face the soldier head on. The street lay empty left and right. A messenger clattered through the cross-roads fifty yards further on, intent on his business. I reached up and took hold of the soldier’s shoulder, stepping onto its knee and hauling myself up.

“Jal-Prince-we should. .” Hennan gestured at the door.

“It’s locked and there are men with swords on the other side,” I said, staring at the soldier’s gleaming metal skull.

On the smooth forehead where my face distorted in hideous reflection a small metal disc lay raised a hair above the surrounding. I banged the side of it with the base of the key and slid it aside to reveal a small circular hole no wider than the pupil of an eye. I pressed the cone-shaped point of the key to the hole and willed Loki’s piece of trickery into action. It took a moment’s concentration before the obsidian started to flow again, liquid night reforming beneath my fingers, cold with possibility, draining into the narrowness of the hole until all I held was the end of a thin black rod.

“You’re mine.” I whispered it, remembering Yusuf waiting with me in the House Gold, the blackness of his smile as he told me how the Mechanists’ machine coded a rod to each new owner and that rod, inserted into the specified clockwork soldier’s head, would transfer its loyalty to the person who had purchased it. I felt the rod change, felt it lock, and then, with a twist, I drew it slowly out, six obsidian inches of it. “Mine!” Louder now.

“But. .” Hennan, frowning as I jumped down beside him. “You broke it. .”

“I unwound it,” I said. “There’s a difference. And it was pretty much unwound in any case.” I moved back around to the winding port. The key changed to fit the indentation as I reached toward it. “Let’s. .” I started to turn the key in the opposite direction to my first attempt. “See. .” I put some muscle into it. “What. .” Throughout the soldier’s torso cogs began to whisper and whirr. “We. .” I kept turning. “Can. . Do.”

I’m no scholar or artificer but I seem to recall that the physic of things is much like that of life. You don’t get anything for nothing, and if you want a lot out you’ve got to put a lot in. I wanted a lot out of my newest possession and I didn’t want to put a lot in. By rights I should have stood there winding for an hour just to get the thing to take a single step forward, but the key I held had its own rules. The key had been crafted to unlock, to remove obstacles, to allow the user to get where they wanted to. I wanted to get to a fully wound soldier. Its failure to work was the obstacle before me. I remembered how when I’d held the orichalcum I could, with enough focus and will, direct the wild pulsing of its illumination into a single brilliant beam and steer it forward until my concentration failed and it fell apart. I summoned that same focus and tried to will whatever potential I had in me into a single beam driven through the black rod in my hand and into the metal mass of the soldier.

With each turn of the key the noise from within the soldier grew, wheels rotating, springs groaning, cogs buzzing in a fury of motion, creaks and twangs as things deep within grew tighter, tighter, and tighter still. I thought of Edris Dean and turned the key though it resisted me and threatened to tear the very skin from my palm rather than rotate another degree. The soldier groaned, its armour flexed as deep inside the reservoirs of its power clenched into potent cores that might drive it on for another seven centuries. The great head above me turned on a neck of silver-steel collars, gears meshing, cricks giving with high pitched retorts. And the eyes that found me blazed even in the light of the new day.

“Jalan Kendeth,” it said in a voice sharp with angles and twanging like lute strings wound too tight.

“Prince Jalan,” I corrected it. “See this child.” I pointed and waited for the head to swivel and fix upon Hennan. “Hennan Vale. We’re going into this jail to extract two prisoners. You are to precede us and protect us from anyone trying to stop us.”

The soldier’s head rotated back toward me, a smooth and sudden motion, far more rapid than its movements prior to rewinding. “This will contravene numerous laws applying in the city of Umbertide.”

“Duly noted. Let’s go.” And I waved it toward the formidable door that gave access into the Frauds’ Tower.

The soldier strode smartly to the door and rapped four times. I heard rattling, someone mutter, and the door began to open. The soldier jerked it wide and the guardsman behind came sprawling out into the street, dragged by the door handle. He landed face first a short distance before me. I kicked him in the head as he got to all fours.

“Son of a bitch!” I’d been about to apologize for kicking the man while he was down but it hurt me more than him. I hobbled around his senseless form muttering more explicit curses under my breath, pausing only to slide his short sword from its scabbard.

The clockwork soldier had vanished inside by the time I reached the entrance. I managed to grab Hennan’s shoulder and haul him back. “Fools rush in. And granted this whole exercise is deeply stupid, but let’s not make it worse.” I pushed him behind me and peered into the foyer. The soldier stood there with a guardsman in one metal hand and a clerk, plucked from behind the counter, in the other. Maybe they were gripped too tightly to holler for help or they were too scared of being ground to pulp, but either way they both held quiet.

“Well, done. . erm. . do you have a name?” I looked up at the soldier.

“Guardian.”

“Well done, Guardian. Best not to kill anyone you don’t have to. We can put these two in a cell if they behave themselves.” I should be terrified. I should be four blocks away and still sprinting, but when I tried to reach for my fear all I found was Edris’s face as it had been fifteen years ago, and Mother sliding off his sword for the thousandth time, with that same look of surprise. “You, clerk.” I pointed unnecessarily at the balding man, his pot belly bulging through the gaps between Guardian’s many-knuckled fingers, his face purpling. “What cell are the northmen in and how do we get there?”

The man gasped something, his eyes bulging, shot through with burst veins.

“Put him down so he can answer my question, Guardian.”

The soldier opened his hand and the man fell with all the grace of a grain sack.

I came a few steps closer. Close enough to smell that the man had soiled himself. “Tell me again. And make sure you get it right or Guardian here will come back and pull your arms off.”

“Cells ten and thirteen, level four.” The clerk heaved in a wheezing breath. “Please don’t hurt-” The soldier swept him in its grip again.

“Keep going then!” I shooed the soldier on. “Wait, stop!” It jerked to a halt, teetering mid-step. “Go back and get the guard from the street.” Even if he didn’t wake up in a hurry he would attract attention left lying in the road.

Guardian dutifully clunked outside and returned with the unconscious guard over one shoulder. I closed and bolted the door once the soldier was through.

“Stairs!” I waved the mechanism on and it moved past me, through the foyer, great feet clanking on stone until it reached the central spiral of steps. A large gate of crossed iron bars, a boss set with a rose symbol at each junction, sealed the stairs. Various doors led off into rooms or corridors around the stairwell and a thorough man, or at least a cautious man like me, should really have secured the ground floor first to ensure a clear escape and no attackers sneaking up from behind. On the other hand, Edris Dean had almost certainly gone straight up to Snorri’s cell with his torture warrant. I set Loki’s key into the gate’s lock and turned it. “Level four! That’s what the man said!”

On level one a jailer startled from his doze, nearly falling off his chair. He managed a brief and startled shout before Guardian clubbed him with the clerk. The familiar human stink told me they kept prisoners here and unlocking doors off the stairwell revealed the jailer’s sleeping quarters, a storeroom, broom closet, and a corridor leading to a passage that paralleled the Tower’s perimeter, running in a circle between two concentric rings of cells. Heavy doors, each set with a small barred window, lined the passage walls. Guardian deposited the door guard, ground floor guard, jailer, and clerk into the first of these, surprising the ragged and elderly man inside with this unexpected company.

Returning to the stairs behind Guardian, I could hear cries of alarm from the levels above us. Evidently the jailer’s strangled squeak and subsequent flattening with a blunt instrument hadn’t gone unnoticed.

“Up! Up!” I clapped my hands. “And you, stay close.” I motioned Hennan to my side and held my short sword ready. The fear had started nipping at my heels now. Guardian led on. The jailer on the second level had kept his station, standing with brass-banded club in hand and flanked by two guardsmen, steel drawn. Guardian advanced on them, arms wide, as they stared in disbelief. The jailer dropped his club, one guardsman managed a half-hearted thrust that glanced off the soldier’s armour, and all three were swept up into a metal embrace.

“We’ll lock them up.” I hurried past to unlock the door to the corridor and then the first door off the corridor. Guardian followed to toss its captives into what proved this time to be an empty cell. “Quickly!” I didn’t know how much time we had, but I knew for sure it was running out fast.

Guardian set off up the stairs with me right behind. Almost before the soldier had taken its first step a prison guard hurtled down the spiral hollering the kind of battle cry that sounds mostly like terror, his short sword raised on high. The man had no time to register what he was up against before being backhanded into the wall. Guardian caught the guard’s limp form in both hands on the rebound.

“Damn.” The crimson smear along the stonework told an unpleasant story. “Careful! You don’t need to hurt them!” I’m not perhaps the most generous of souls but generally there’s no murder in me. It’s not conscience so much as being squeamish, and also afraid of the repercussions. For Edris Dean though I would make an exception and call it justice.

Guardian took three more strides carrying the guardsman, clearing five steps a time and leaving them spattered with blood. Without warning the guardsman’s head snapped back up revealing a gleam of fractured white skull in the scarlet mess where the left side of his head should be. His eyes found me and the appetite in them made my legs too weak for stair climbing. Hennan crashed into my back.

“He’s dead!” Fear reduced my voice to a squeak. The guardsman started to struggle in Guardian’s grip. “Quick! Make an end of him!” I found my shout.

Guardian carried out his instruction with gruesome efficiency, ramming the corpse’s head into the wall with a steel palm and pressing until nothing remained but a splat of bloody porridge and bone shards dribbling down the wall. I vomited acidic yellow drool onto the step in front of me.

“Keep hold of the body and keep moving.” I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand then looked for somewhere to wipe the back of my hand. I moved on past my own mess and the one on the wall, clutching at my nose which being sick had made throb like a bastard for some reason, and trying to shield my eyes so I didn’t have to see the corpse still twitching in Guardian’s grip.

“At least they’re easier to deal with when you’ve got help.” Hennan, close behind me, sounding less scared than I felt.

“One dead man isn’t the problem,” I said, still sounding nasal. “They know where we are now.” If the Dead King had looked at us through those eyes he could be steering every dead body in the city our way. I wondered just what might be waiting for us outside when we came back down the stairs. Up until this point the worst my imagination had shown me was rank upon rank of city guard.

We stepped from the stairwell through the arch onto the third floor, keeping close to Guardian. It looked identical to the floor below, absent the jailer and guards. I could see down the short corridor into the passage that circled the Tower-something seemed off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

“We’ve got to check for guards,” I said. “Can’t have them escaping to raise the alarm.” Or creeping up behind us.

Guardian took three heavy steps into the room. Another heavy footstep and something huge loomed from the side where the column of the stairs had hidden it. It came out swinging-swinging a large iron door, which immediately resolved what had looked wrong about the place: the corridor to the cells should have been hidden behind a locked door.

The impact of the blow knocked Guardian off his feet and sent him slamming into the wall, reducing the jailer’s desk to splinters on his way. For a moment Hennan and I stood horrified, gazing up into the gleaming red-copper eyes of a clockwork soldier both broader and taller than Guardian. The thing held the dented iron door over its head in a pincered grip, ready to squash us like flies. And, unlike flies, we were neither of us quick enough off the mark when the soldier began to swing the door down toward us. Cogs whirred as great brass and steel muscles contracted and the iron door came speeding down, on course to reduce us both to stains.

Guardian leapt to intervene, as if driven by a single huge and coiled spring he shot in beneath the blow, narrowly missing taking my head off, and drove into the newcomer’s chest. Both went tumbling across the stone floor, their progress arrested by a crunching impact with the opposite wall. They rose, locked in combat, each gripping the other’s hands and straining to break some vital part.

“We should help Guardian.” Hennan said it with conviction but made no move to do anything.

“We should get to Snorri and Tuttugu while we still can,” I said, although “we should run away while we still can” very nearly came out instead. I grabbed the boy and pushed him back onto the stairs. Behind us the two metal combatants thrashed around with no concern for bystanders. A wild kick from Guardian knocked a chunk of stone nearly as big as my head from the corner where the cell passage led off and sent it ricocheting off the walls. I couldn’t tell who was winning but although the tower-soldier was the larger of the two, Guardian had been fully wound for the first time in centuries and the extra strength that bought him soon began to make itself told. Metal strained against metal, joints creaked, reinforcing bars groaned under the pressure, and gears ratcheted up through their cycles.

“Jal!” Hennan tugging at me.

A rivet from the tower-soldier’s armour shot free and hit the arch above my head, pulverizing a small piece of the stonework. Taking my cue, I ducked back and hurried past the boy, off up the stairs.

The fourth floor had a different smell to it, a stench of blood and vomit. You couldn’t miss it, not even with a broken nose. On the jailer’s station downstairs a truncheon and lantern had hung; on this level manacles, ropes and gags depended from various pegs in addition to the usual tools of the trade. This floor had more to it than just wasting away people’s lives in small stone boxes. Here they hurt people. Every piece of me wanted to run-it felt as though I were voluntarily putting myself into Cutter John’s care. A sharp metallic retort echoed up the stairwell as some vital part of one of the soldiers surrendered to the pressures mounting against it.

“We should check the cells.” Hennan, stepping forward. “Find Snorri and Tutt.” He’d never seen the horrors I’d seen, never been tied to a table and visited by Maeres Allus. Also he wasn’t a coward. The short sword trembled in my grip, feeling too heavy, and awkward. Every piece of me wanted to flee, but somehow the sum of them stepped forward on uncertain legs, pushing Hennan behind me. A small voice behind my eyes cut through the baying panic-without Snorri at my side I wouldn’t get far out of the city, perhaps not even past the reach of the Tower’s shadow. When I reasoned it as a more forward-looking version of running for the hills my legs seemed better prepared to play their role.

I went to the jailer’s station and took the lantern from its hook. The jailers had left in a hurry, perhaps gathering together on the top floor to make a stand. If so I hoped they stayed there. If they found their courage and came down in a group I’d be sunk. I made a quick check for any sign of jailers or guardsmen then unlocked the door to the cell corridor. The stink lay thicker here, sharp with something new and unpleasant. . a burnt smell.

Hennan tried to rush on ahead. I held him back. “No.” And advanced, short sword out before me, lantern in the other hand, sending the blade’s shadow dancing across the walls.

“Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen.” Hennan read the numbers from above the doors. I didn’t know if he could read but his grandfather had at least taught him the Roman number runes.

“Watch the corridor for me,” I told him. I didn’t know what waited beyond the door but it probably wasn’t something he needed to see.

“It’s dark!” Hennan waved an arm at the gloom.

“So watch for a light!” I turned from him, held my lantern up, out of my line of sight, and placed the key into the lock. It fitted perfectly as always, almost eager to turn. With the door unlocked I returned the key to my pocket and drew the short sword I’d stolen. Edris could be waiting on the other side. The door creaked as I pushed it and the stink hit me immediately, a sewer stench, laced with vomit and decay, together with smoke and an awful aroma of burned meat.

Tuttugu looked smaller in death than he had in life. The weight that he’d carried across frozen tundra and wild oceans despite meagre rations seemed to have dropped from him in less than a week in the Tower. They’d torn away his beard leaving just scraps of it here and there amid raw flesh. He lay upon the table they had tortured him on, still bound hand and foot, the marks of the iron on his arm, belly, thighs. The brazier still smoked, three irons with cloth-wrapped handles jutting from its small basket of coals. They’d been ready, waiting for the authorization, and set to work immediately.

I stood, looking around stupidly, not knowing what to do. The chamber was otherwise empty, a water jug on its side on the floor, broken, a bucket in the corner. And, seeming at odds with its surroundings, a mirror in a wooden frame hung from a chain-hook above the table, a cheap thing and tarnished, but out of place.

Blood from Tuttugu’s cut throat pooled about his head. It had soaked into the red curls of his hair and dripped between the planks to the flagstones beneath. He must have been alive when we entered the Tower. .

“Hennan!” I spun around.

Edris already had the boy, his sword at his neck, the other hand knotted in his hair. They stood opposite the doorway, against the corridor wall.

“You hid in one of the other cells. .” I should have been terrified for myself, or angry for Tuttugu, or worried for the child, but somehow none of those emotions would come, as if the part of me that dealt with such things had had enough and gone home for the night.

“So I did.” Edris nodded.

I hadn’t seen a friend dead before. I’d seen dead men aplenty, and some of them I’d liked well enough. Arne Deadeye and the quins I’d liked. But Tuttugu, lowborn and foreign as he was, had become a friend. I could admit that now he was gone.

“Let the boy go.” I lifted my short sword. The steel Edris held to Hennan’s neck was rune-marked and stained with necromancy, its blade considerably longer than mine, but whether that would still prove an advantage in the confines of the corridor I couldn’t say. “Let him go.”

“I will,” Edris nodded, that crooked smile of his on narrow lips, “to be sure. Only first give me this key everyone’s talking about, hey?”

I watched his face, shadows twitching across it. The half-light caught his age, seamed with old scars, grey, but toughened by the years rather than diminished. I set the lantern down, keeping back out of his reach, and fished for the key in my pocket. In the moment my fingers made contact a younger face pulsed across Edris’s, the one he’d worn when he killed my mother, killed my sister inside her, and driven the same blade he held now into my chest. Just for a beat of my heart. Only his eyes remaining unchanged.

I drew the key out, a piece of blackness like the shape of a key, cut through the world into night. The Norse called it Loki’s key, in Christendom they’d name it the Devil’s key, neither title offered anything but tricks, lies, and damnation. The Liar’s key.

Edris’s smile broadened to show teeth. “Give it to the boy. When we’re safely past whatever’s making that racket downstairs I’ll take it from him and let him go.”

To some men the desire for revenge can be a craving that will lead them on through one danger into another-it can consume them, a burning light outshining all others making them blind to danger, deaf to caution. Some call those men brave. I call them fools. I knew myself for a prince of fools to have let my anger lead me into the Tower in the first place, in defiance of all reason. Now, even with Tuttugu dead behind me and his murderer before me, all the anger in me blew out like a flame. The sharp edge at Hennan’s throat captured the light, and my attention. Shadows outlined the tendons stretched taut beneath the skin, the veins, the swell of his neck. I knew what a ruin one quick draw of that steel would make of it. Edris had opened Mother’s throat with the same economy a butcher uses when slaughtering pigs. With the same indifference. With the same edge.

“What’s it to be, Prince Jalan?” Edris pressed the blade closer, hand to the back of the boy’s head to help press him into the cut.

All I wanted was to be out of there, miles away on the back of a good horse, riding for home.

“Here.” I walked toward them with the key held out. “Take it.”

Hennan looked at me with furious eyes, giving me that same mad look Snorri was wont to offer up at the worst possible times.

“Take it!” I made a snarl of the order and stepped out through the doorway. Even so, and with Edris twisting his hand still tighter into the boy’s hair, I didn’t think Hennan was going to accept it. And then he did.

Hennan snatched the key from me and I slumped, relief washing over me. I saw that look come over the boy, eyes widening as the thing fed its poisons into him, opening doors in his mind, filling him with whatever visions and lies it had stored up for Hennan Vale.

“No!” And in one sharp motion Hennan tossed the key past me, into Tuttugu’s cell.

I found myself lunging at Edris, the point of my blade driving at the place his smile had fallen from. He proved quick-damn quick-managing to raise his sword and deflect my thrust. I may have nicked the lobe of his ear as the blow slipped past. Hennan spun away, leaving plenty of hair in Edris’s grip, but the boy slipped, struck his head against the wall and tumbled on to collapse boneless somewhere in the dark length of the corridor.

“Ah.” I backed off into the doorway. All around me the sounds of movement in the cells, the occupants roused by the clash of steel, a muffled bellowing close at hand. “Sorr-”

Edris made to cut off my apology with his sword so I saved my breath for defending. Swordplay on the training ground is one thing, but when an evil bastard is trying to cut bits off you most of that goes out the window. Your mind, at least my mind, remembers almost nothing when soaked in the raw terror of someone doing their level best to kill you. Any memory is done by your muscles which, if they’ve been trained year in year out, with or without much enthusiasm on your part, will make the best they can of what they learned in order to keep you alive.

The sound of sword hammering into sword in close confines is deafening, terrifying. I turned one thrust after the next, backing slowly, yelping when they came too close.

“Take the damn key.” I inserted the gasp into the melee.

Fifteen more years didn’t weigh heavy on Edris. He showed the same quickness and skill that had got the better of my mother’s guard, Robbin, back in the Star Room. It proved all I could do to fend him off. The reach of his long sword meant I’d no chance of getting to him even if I’d had a heartbeat to make any sort of attack.

“I don’t want the damn thing!” I backed through the cell’s doorway and Edris stepped up to it in pursuit, the lantern in the corridor silhouetting him. Mad thoughts yammered at me, rising amid the terror seething through my mind, an insane desire to throw myself on him and rip out his guts-the sorts of notions that get you killed.

There’s a problem with continually stamping down on the least sensible instincts that drive men to recklessly endanger themselves. Even the most reasonable and level-headed of us have only limited space to store such unwanted emotion. You keep putting the stuff away, shoving it to the back of your mind but like an over-full cupboard there comes a point where you try to cram one more thing into it and all of a sudden something snaps, the catch gives, the door bursts open and everything inside spills out on top of you.

“Just let me live!” But even as I said it the red veil I’d been trying to hold back descended. A liquid and fiery joy rose through me and while a tiny voice deep inside me wailed “no” I launched myself at the man who killed my mother.

With the entrance between us Edris’s long sword became a liability, confined between the door jambs. I swept his next thrust aside, pinning his blade to the side of the doorway with my own and smashing my forearm into his face. I felt his nose break. Spinning inside Edris’s reach, keeping his sword pinned until the last moment, I set my back to him and brought the elbow of my sword arm around into the side of his head with all the force I could muster. Without turning, I took my blade in both hands, reversed the point, and stabbed it under my armpit into his chest, grating between his ribs.

I pulled away at Edris’s roar of pain, stumbling into the cell, my sword caught on bone and torn from my grasp. His blade hit the flagstones behind me with a clatter. I stopped myself just short of sprawling over Tuttugu’s remains on the table and turned, hopping on my lead foot, on the edge of balance. Edris Dean stood in the doorway, leaning against one side for support, both hands on the short sword I’d driven into him, low on his chest. Blood ran scarlet over the steel.

“Die, you bastard.” It came out as a whisper. The battle madness had left me as quickly as it came. I coughed and found my voice, putting some royal authority into it. “You killed a princess of the March-you deserve worse than Tuttugu got.” It seemed too easy for him to just die there and slip away. “Be thankful I’m a civilized man. .” Unkind words might not amount to much after the driving in of a sword but they were all the salt I had to rub in his wound.

Edris watched his blood patter on the floor, in shock at his reversal of fortune. He raised his hands, dripping, and looked up at me, dark crimson welling from his mouth. The fact that he then smiled, showing bloody teeth, rather took the wind from my sails, but I carried on, trying not to let the uncertainty colour my voice. I knew enough about wounds to know the one I’d given him was fatal. “The necromancer who gives you your orders. . she won’t be pleased. I can’t see your corpse getting a decent burial.” I tried to smile back.

“That.” Edris drew a rattling breath, some of it sucked in around my steel, bubbling blackly. “Was a mistake.”

“Damned right! And the first mistake you made was going up against m-” A horrible thought interrupted me. I realized Edris had me trapped weaponless in the cell. . “You’re hoping when you die the necromancer is going to stand you up again to finish the job!”

“Are all royalty this stupid? Or did that bitch mother of yours breed with her brother to make you?” Edris straightened away from the door jamb, grinding his teeth against the pain, and took hold of the hilt of my sword where it jutted from his body. “There’s no necromancer watching from the hills, you moron.” He pulled the blade clear and the wound bled black. “I am the necromancer!” A laugh or a cough tore from him spattering blood between us. A few droplets hit my upraised hands and burned there like hot metal poured from the crucible.

My only chance lay in speed and agility. Edris might be gaining strength but he still moved with a certain stiffness, awkward around his injury. I backed a step, another, and prepared to spring when he cleared the doorway. Something caught in the back of my tunic. I tugged but found myself firmly snagged. Edris stepped into the cell, my short sword black and dripping in his fist.

“The closer to death we are the harder it is to kill us.” He smiled again, his face in shadow with just the glimmer of his eyes to hint at the murder there.

“Now-wait, just let’s stay-”

He didn’t wait but came on unhurried, sword held without a tremor, point level with my face. In desperation I risked a glance back to see what I’d caught myself on. Tuttugu glared at me from the table, the familiar hunger of the dead burning in his eyes. The hand secured closest to me at the corner of the table had twisted inside the metal band about its wrist and locked fingers in the loose material of my tunic.

I pulled harder but I’d paid handsomely for the garment and the linen wouldn’t rip. Looking back toward the door I found Edris directly in front of me now, sword arm drawn back ready to punch my own short sword through my head.

“No!” A hopeless wailing appeal for mercy as I fell to both knees, head bowed in supplication. Not perhaps the best way for a prince of Red March to die, but all my audience were dead or halfway there. “Please. .”

The only answer I got was the wet thunk of steel cutting flesh, and blood spilling about my shoulders. The pain came intense and searing, a burning that engulfed my neck and back, blood ran everywhere, and immediately a sense of faintness engulfed me, a deep weariness reaching up from somewhere to drag me down. I stayed where I’d fallen, waiting for the light to fade or beckon or whatever it’s supposed to do in your last moments.

“Bitch.” Edris, but in a choking voice.

I puzzled over “bitch” but realized I had to let go of questions and slip away. . The legs before me moved, perhaps to let me fall, but beyond them I saw another pair. . more shapely. . emerging beneath a dirty skirt. That made me look up. Edris had moved toward the doorway, his neck at an uncomfortable angle and spilling blood from a cut that looked to have made a decent attempt to reach his spine. Kara circled with him, sporting a magnificent black eye and holding her own stolen short sword, as black with gore as the necromancer’s.

The blood that drenched me had belonged to Edris, burning me with its necromancy. I remained on my knees, blood dripping from my hair and hands, still anchored by Tuttugu’s grip.

Despite his second mortal wound Edris took a quick step toward Kara, sword questing before him.

“Better run, Edris Dean, or I’ll finish the job. Skilfar always told me how it would please her to drink from your skull and toast the Lady Blue.” Kara swatted at his blade, the two swords clashing.

Edris made some reply but the words he gargled from his throat came too broken to interpret.

Kara laughed. A cold sound. “You think dead things scare me, Dean?” And as she spoke the lantern grew dim, every shadow thickening and reaching, the darkness writhing in each corner as if the blackest of monsters stirred from slumber there. Edris feinted to the right, threw the short sword at her, then staggered, ungainly, toward the doorway. Kara made to follow, her own blade ready to thrust into his back but she stopped short, fixated by something on the wall opposite. Another mirror, identical to the first. Quite how I’d missed it I didn’t know. She seemed fascinated by her reflection. Glancing at Edris I saw him slowing, starting to turn. A third mirror hung above the doorway, I caught a glimpse of something blue, darkly reflected, a swirl of robes?

“Jalan.” Kara spoke between gritted teeth, adding nothing to her declaration of my name.

“What?” Looking to the left I saw more mirrors I hadn’t noticed, two of them hung at head height. Edris completed his turn. He would have been facing Kara if she hadn’t been staring at the mirror that first caught her attention. Edris grinned, black blood welling over his jaw. He started to draw the knife at his belt, a wicked bit of Turkman iron, nine dark inches of it, thin and notched.

“Break. The. Mirror.” Kara forced each word past her teeth as if it were a struggle she was barely equal to.

“Which mirror?” There must have been a dozen and it made no sense. I couldn’t have missed them. “And with what?” I caught sight of blue robes again, fleeting reflections, here, then there, and eyes, eyes in the shadowed infinity behind the glass, just a gleam, but watching.

“Now!” All she could manage.

Edris had the blade out, arm awkward from the large hole I’d put through his pectoral muscle.

With a lunge, still held by my jerkin in Tuttugu’s dead hand, I caught hold of the broken jug on the floor, and spun to throw it at the mirror I first saw. At least six mirrors hung there now, clustered together. Their reflections showed nothing of the cell but instead revealed some other dark space where candles burned, as if each mirror were some small window onto a chamber beyond. Those half-seen eyes found me, made me their focus, robbing the strength from my arm, fogging my mind with a blueness deeper than sea, brighter than sky. I threw anyway, blind, guessing my target. The sound of shattering glass came loud enough to knock me down if I’d not been on my knees already. I threw my arms up, expecting to be drowned beneath a deluge of shards. But nothing came.

I looked around and found Kara halfway across the cell still looking dazed.

Edris stumbled out through the doorway.

“Hennan’s out there!” I shouted, intending it for Kara but realizing as I said it that I’d just reminded the necromancer too. Without pause, Kara went after him-decent of her since the last thing the boy did for her was slug her around the back of the head with a sock full of florins.

Her exit left me on my knees in a pool of my own distress, belly on display to the world with my tunic hitched up under my armpits, a handful of it still gripped by the dead thing secured on the table. I glanced around wildly, looking for the black shape of Loki’s key, lost amid the filth on a floor cast into deep shadow. By luck, sharp eyes, or some trick of the key itself, I saw it, tantalizingly close but out of reach. I strained, stretching my arm until the joints threatened to pop, waggling my fingertips as if that would close the six-inch gap.

“Let go, damn you!”

It might have been coincidence but in the moment I made my demand something gave and I lunged forward, almost flattening my broken nose on the flagstones. I rose with the key in hand and hid it in my waistband as Kara returned, lantern held before her, guiding an unsteady Hennan at her side.

“Edris?” I asked.

“Got away,” she said. “There’s a pair of clockwork soldiers fighting two levels down. He didn’t look fast enough to get past them.” She shrugged.

“Shouldn’t you be chasing him? Doesn’t your grandmother want to drink her nightcap from his skull?”

A grim smile. “I made that up.”

She sat Hennan against the wall. “Stay there.” And crossed to the table. I managed to stand as she reached it. She stretched out an arm above Tuttugu’s face and he strained to bite her.

“Don’t-”

She turned her head toward me, a sharp motion. “Don’t what?”

“I-” I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that he’d been my friend and I’d not saved him. “You’re dark-sworn!” The best accusation I could find.

“We’re all sworn to something.” She reached out with care and set a finger to Tuttugu’s forehead. His corpse went limp, and when she drew back her finger it revealed one of her small iron rune tablets, remaining where she touched. “He is beyond their use now.” She straightened, eyes bright. “Tuttugu was a good man. He deserved better.”

“Will he go to Valhalla?” Hennan asked, still sitting hunched on the floor. He looked as though his head had yet to clear from its collision with the wall.

“He will,” said Kara. “He died fighting his enemies and didn’t give them what they wanted.”

I looked down at the mess they had made of him. My eyes prickled unaccountably. He must have been beaten every day. The soles of his feet were raw, toes broken. “Why?” It made no sense. “Why didn’t he just tell them where the key was?” The bank had no interest in killing the Norsemen. If Tuttugu had given up the key early on they might have been banished and sent off on the north road before Edris Dean even knew they’d been captured.

“Snorri,” Kara said. “If he gave up the key he would have been giving up Snorri’s children. Or at least he knew that’s how Snorri would see it.”

“For God’s sake! He couldn’t have been that scared of Snorri.”

“Not scared.” Kara shook her head. “Loyal. He couldn’t do that to his friend.”

I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes and tried to clear my thoughts. As I took them away I became aware once more of the muffled bellowing from down the corridor. It hadn’t stopped-I’d just blocked it out. “Snorri!”

The others followed me as I ran to cell ten and unlocked the door. They had Snorri chained to heavy iron rings set into the wall, his mouth bound by a leather gag. He showed no signs of torture but the wound he’d borne with him from the north, the cut from the assassin’s blade, was now a strip of raw flesh an inch wide, a foot and a half in length, crusted with salt that grew in needle-like crystals, some as long as a fingernail.

Snorri strained at the restraints, wrists bleeding where the manacles bit them. Kara crossed the room, taking a small knife from her belt and reaching up for the northman’s gag.

“Wait!” I ran forward to catch her arm. “I’ll do it.”

She met my gaze with furious eyes. “You think I’m going to cut his throat?”

“You wanted to leave him here!” I shouted, wrestling the blade from her hand.

“So did you!” she spat back.

“I didn’t want to- I just- Anyway, you wanted to take the key to that witch up north!”

“So did you. Just to a different witch and not so far north.”

I didn’t have an answer for that so I sawed away at the strap binding Snorri’s gag in place. Tough leather gave easily before the keen edge. That’s how Tuttugu should have given. The idiot should have saved himself. I pulled the gag away and Snorri slumped forward, choking.

Kara came forward, reaching up to hold his head. I watched her and realized it made no sense. “If Skilfar wanted the key why didn’t she just take it when Snorri was right there before her? It’s. . you who wants it?” Kara’s own greed or Skilfar using her to steal it so as to avoid the curse? In the end it made no difference.

“Get the shackles off.” She gestured with her head.

“I can’t, they’re held with rivets. It needs a blacksmith.” I kept my eyes on her, looking for signs of treachery.

She turned from Snorri, concern hardening into something else. “You still haven’t understood what you have in your hand. Use it! And use your head.”

I bit back a curt response and decided not to remind her who the prince was here. I had to stand on tiptoes to reach the manacle on Snorri’s wrist and expecting little I took the key, still shaped for the cell door, and pushed its end to the first of the two iron rivets that had sealed it shut. The thing resisted. I applied more pressure and with a screech of protest it slid out and fell to the floor. I repeated the operation and broke the manacle open. Snorri slumped forward.

“Where’s Tutt?” He managed to raise his head but whatever strength had kept him battling the chains had gone.

I let Kara answer him while I removed the manacle on his other wrist.

“Valhalla.” She turned away and went to stand by Hennan, setting a hand to his shoulder. The boy flinched but didn’t shake her off.

Free of the second manacle, Snorri collapsed to his knees and fell forward to rest his head on his arms against the floor. I removed the manacles on his ankles and reached out to set a hand on his back but withdrew it before I made contact. Something about him made me think I might be safer putting my hand into a box of wildcats.

“Can you walk?” I asked. “We need to get out of here.”

“No!” Snorri thrust himself off the ground with a roar. “We’re not leaving until they’re all dead! Every last one of them!”

Kara stepped up to him as he got to his feet. “And where does it end? Which is the last one? A jailer from the ground floor? The man who delivers food to the Tower? The banker who signed the arrest order? His assistant?”

Snorri pushed her away, snarling. “All of them.” He pulled the short sword from my belt, too quick to stop.

I held the key out before him. “Tuttugu died so you could use this. He stood against hot irons because they thought him the weaker man, the man they could turn from his course.” I pressed it into Snorri’s palm, though careful to remove it again-it was, after all, all I had. “If you stay clockwork soldiers will come-you’ll die here-Tuttugu’s pain will have meant nothing.”

“Pain never means anything.” A growl, head down, face framed by dirty straggles of black hair, a glimpse of burning blue eyes behind. He made to leave.

“Tuttugu remembered your children,” I told him. “Perhaps you should too.”

His hand seized my throat, so fast I didn’t see it coming. All I knew was that somehow I’d been pinned to the wall and breathing had stopped being an option.

“Never”-the point of his sword stood just inches from my face, aimed between my eyes-“speak of them.” I thought he might kill me then, and in the surprise of it I hadn’t time to be scared. But my words seemed to reach him-perhaps because I couldn’t add any more-and a moment later he let go, his shoulders sagging. I found that my feet had left the ground, and dropped down, jolting my spine.

“Enough now?” Kara glanced between us, frowned and led on out of the cell. Hennan followed, then Snorri, with me to bring up the rear.

We got as far as Tuttugu’s cell. Edris’s long sword still lay on the floor close to the entrance. I picked it up, tentative, half expecting it to bite me. The thing had bitten me before.

“A pyre.” Snorri pointed in at Tuttugu’s corpse. “We build a pyre. Big enough so his smoke reaches Asgard.”

“Where in the hell-”

“Doors.” Snorri cut me off. “Open the cells. Use the key to undo the hinges. Bring them in here.”

And so we did. Door after door opened and taken down. A tap of the key had the hinge pins flying out. Kara enjoined each occupant to find keys on any dead jailer and to release the prisoners on the upper floors. They all agreed, but then again they were all in for fraud so whether any of them did put their own escape second and fellow prisoners first I’ve no idea.

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 gods 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 assets 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 partitioned, 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 snatched 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 cocked 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.”