The Liar's key

THIRTY-FIVE

The salt mine took me by surprise. I had expected some kind of grubby burrows where men scraped the stuff from the rock. Instead we found ourselves in a space huge as any cathedral, cut entirely into a seam of crystal-white salt, shot through with darker veins to give a marbled effect in places, like the grain of some vast tree, as if they’d cut into Yggdrasil that the Norse say grows in the empty heart of creation with worlds depending from its boughs.

Immediately before us lay a circular plate of silver-steel, thick as a man is tall, ten yards across, and pitted with corrosion though I’d never seen corruption lay a finger on such steel in the few places I’d encountered it.

“This must be ancient.” Kara stepped around it.

“The Builders knew this place before Kelem ever did,” Snorri said.

The floor beneath our feet was crushed salt, but here and there the poured stone of the Builders could be seen, slabs of it, cracked and broken.

“Let’s have a better look.” I took the orichalcum from my pocket and let the light pulse. Huge pillars stood where the salt remained untouched, supporting the roof, each carved all about with a deep spiral pattern so they looked like great ropes.

“A whole sea died here.” Kara breathed the words into the void about us.

“An ocean.” Snorri strode forward into the cavern. The air held a strange taste, not salt, but something from the alchemist’s fumes. And dry, the place ate the moisture from your eyes. Dry as death.

“So how do we reach Kelem’s part of the mine?” Kara looked about her, frowning at the lanterns burning in niches on the distant opposite wall.

“We’re in it,” I said, putting the orichalcum away. “The miners must pass on through to where they dig. They wouldn’t leave this much salt so close to the entrance if this weren’t barred to them. . also they’d make a profit. And those lanterns. . who wastes oil like that?”

“We’re being watched.” Hennan pointed to one of the dozen corridors leading off the main chamber. I squinted along the line of his finger. Something twinkled, there in the shadows.

Snorri started to advance in that direction, and as he did the thing that had watched us emerged into the light. A spider, but monstrous in size and made of shining silver. Its legs spanned a diameter of two yards or more, its gleaming body larger than a man’s head, studded with rubies the size of pigeon eggs and clustered like an arachnid’s eyes. It came on swiftly, its limbs a complex ballet of motion, reflecting our light back at us in shards.

“Odin.” Snorri stepped back. The only time I had ever seen something give him pause.

“Why silver, I wonder?” Kara held her blade before her.

“Why a bloody spider? That seems just as good a question.” I stepped behind Snorri. I don’t mind spiders as long as they’re small enough to fit under my heel.

“Iron corrodes.” Kara kept her eyes on the thing. “Clockwork soldiers wouldn’t last long down here. Not unless they were made of silver-steel like our friend here.”

“Friend?” Snorri took another step back and I moved to avoid being trodden on.

The spider stopped short of us and started back toward the darkness it came from, moving with exaggerated slowness.

“It’s a guide,” Kara said.

“To what?” Snorri made no move to follow. “A web?”

“It’s a bit late to worry about walking into a trap now isn’t it?” Kara looked around at him, anger and exasperation mixing on her brow. “You walked us a thousand miles for this, ver Snagason, against all advice. It’s been a trap the whole time. The web had you the moment you laid hands on that key. It should never have left the ice. Kelem sent assassins to take the key from you-now you’ve brought it to him yourself. His mark is on you and he has drawn you to him.” She gestured to his stained shirt, now pierced by the crystalline growths about his wound.

Kara shook her head and set off after the spider, turning up the wick in the last of our lanterns.

For the longest time our journey reduced to the whir and click of the spider’s clockwork, the tick-tick-tick of its metal feet on the stone, and the glimmer of long limbs in motion at the margins of the lantern light. It led us down salt-walled corridors, opening from time to time onto dark and cavernous galleries whose dimensions our light could not reveal. We descended by steps and by gradient, every turn leading down, never up. Twice we passed across broad chambers, the high ceilings lost in gloom and supported on columns of the native rock-salt left in situ. The remainder of the salt had been cut out in slabs long ago and transported to the surface uncomfortably far above us.

In one of these pillared chambers salt miners, now long dead, had carved a church and set it about with saints. Paul the Apostle stood before the arched entrance one white and glittering arm raised before him, fingers half-spread as if pointing out an important truth, the bible clasped to his chest, the expression on his face hard to see in white on white.

Once we travelled a corridor of Builder-stone, smooth and perfect for a hundred yards before crumbing away and returning us to the caverns. It seemed as if they had made some complex here, not valuing the mineral wealth around them, just digging into it to hide themselves away, only for later men to excavate around them.

The deeper the corridors took us the stronger the alchemy in the air, stinging my eyes, scouring my lungs. After what must have been a mile or more of corridors and galleries we started to see doorways, carved into the salt, the arches elaborately worked but lacking any door, instead just filled with a crystalline wall of the native salt, as if a new chamber were to be excavated but plans had changed.

The air grew thicker by degrees, and warmer, as if with Hel’s promise, for surely the infernal fires could not lie much further below us. The salts changed too-from tasting like the salt of the sea to something sour that burned the tongue. The colours changed, the white adopting a taint of deepest blue that seemed to lend depth to every surface. The air lost its dryness, becoming humid as our path led deeper, so that where earlier on the sweat had been sucked from my skin before it had a chance to even show, now the air refused to take it and left it running down my limbs in trickles that did nothing to cool me.

At last the spider brought us by a long flight of steps and a short corridor into a natural cavern where rock occasionally showed through the salt-clad walls and everything had a rounded, lumpen look to it. Another turn revealed a bleached wooden bridge crossing a fast-running rill that carved down through the salt, hot and steaming as it ran. Beyond the bridge lay a chamber of wonder.

“Holy Hel!” Kara invoked the heathen goddess that rules the Norse in their afterlife should death not take them to Valhalla. A cold bitch by all accounts, split nose to crotch by a line dividing a left side of pure jet from a right side of alabaster.

“Fuck me.” I feel Christendom provides the more apt responses in such situations. The cavern ran before us in a wide and writhing tunnel, as if some great wyrm had burrowed here, and on every side the salts lay in vast crystals, forests of them, some a yard long, hexagonal in cross-section and so thick I might not get my hands to meet around them. Others were ten yards long and thicker than I stood tall, each face flatter than anything man can make, the angles sharp and perfect.

I knew this place. I had seen it in the visions Kara’s magic gave me. I had seen it in a mirror in my grandmother’s memories. The Lady Blue fled to these caverns after she murdered the elder Gholloth, first of my line. That bound them, Kelem and the Blue Lady. But which had been the hand behind the move I didn’t know-only that both had played the game and played it against my family. However I turned it this placed Kelem’s hand on Edris Dean’s shoulder on the day he came to Vermillion.

The spider moved between, beneath, and over the crystals without interrupting its pace, flowing around each obstacle in a whirring interplay of legs. We moved more slowly, struggling to extract any use from each lungful of scalding, over-moist air, and sweating water faster than a man could piss it away. A lethargy wrapped me, like a hot wet blanket, and I found myself paused halfway across a massive crystal shard that Snorri had just struggled over. The crystal plane beneath me returned the light of Kara’s lantern, tinting it deepest indigo. The whole shard seemed to glow with some inner fire, burning at its core impossibly far beneath me. It felt for a moment that I sat upon the surface of a calm sea, fathoms deep, with only the thinnest sheet of some brittle substance to hold me up, to keep me from sinking down to where that fire burned. . Exhaustion bowed me, a great weight, dragging my head down toward the crystal’s surface. Loki’s key slipped from my wet shirt, dangling on its thong, the blackest I had ever seen it, its tip just a finger’s breadth above the surface that supported me. .

“Jal!” Kara barked the word from behind me, her voice seeming to scratch like fingernails on a slate, filling me with irritation. “Jal!”

I turned my head to her, reluctant, and met her stare.

“Don’t,” she said. “The world is broken here.” She frowned, sweat running down her brow, plastering her blond hair to her forehead. Her eyes seemed defocused. . witchy I’ll call it for lack of a better word. She tasted the air. “This is a place of doors.”

“Well. . so they say.” I waved a hand around us. “I haven’t seen one damn door since we left the surface.”

She glanced at the crystal beneath me. “There’s a portal here. An almost-door. . to let that key touch it would be a mistake. I don’t know where or when it might take you.”

“When?”

But she didn’t answer, just looped her hands so Hennan could scramble over the shard. The boy had wrapped rags about his hands. A good move. Mine were cut from sharp edges and already stinging with the salts.

The spider led us away from the crystal gallery, past a steaming pool of cobalt blue water, and into a hall equal to any we had yet seen but hewn from the bedrock. Along each side stood massive salt crystals, vast octagonal columns retrieved from some deep place by an artistry unknown to men, or at least to any since the Builders. Each would barely fit along the passage that brought us here and would take a hundred elephants to haul.

What salt had formed the columns I couldn’t say but each held a limpid light that sprang from no source I could see and illuminated the clear depths of them where webs and veils of ghostly white fault lines suggested shapes, hints of horrors and of angels, held forever within the heart of the crystal.

“Listen.” Kara held up her hand and even the spider paused, frozen in mid-step.

“I can’t-”

“They’re singing.” Hennan gazed around him.

Singing was too grand a word for it. Each crystal emitted a pure tone, just on the edge of hearing. As I drew near to one then the next I could discern a subtle change in the pitch, as if each were like one of those tuning forks the musicians use to set their strings.

“These are doors.” I set a hand to the surface of the one before me and the key on my chest rang with the same note, making my skin tingle with the vibration.

I counted thirteen of them, all translucent save for the one dead centre of the left row. That one stood black as lies.

Snorri came to stand beside me. He seemed diminished in this place where the scale made ants of us all. He held his axe before him, the manacle cuts on his wrists burning red and angry. His whole body curled around the assassin’s wound and a crystal excrescence clad one side of him from hip to armpit, sharp with spiky outgrowths. “Which is mine? The black one?”

“They are none of them yours, northman.” The voice rang behind us, a grating atonal thing that reminded me of the clockwork soldiers.

Turning, we saw first a throne of salt, carved in pillars and roundels, grand as any king’s. The oak boards, upon which it sat, rested on the backs of several more of the silver-steel spiders, the meshing forest of their legs moving quick as bards’ fingers across lute strings to propel both platform and throne smoothly on.

Hunched in the salt chair like a stain against the whiteness of it, a wizened figure, a corpse I took it for at first, grey and naked, sunken, emaciated, the skin pierced in many places by sharp white crystals of salt, growing in clusters like frost on frozen twigs.

“These are my halls.” The head on that corpse-like body raised itself to view us, the glimmer of what might be an eye far back in the darkness of its sockets. Around a neck of bone and skin a device of silver-steel, bedded in the grey flesh and facing a perforated grille toward us. Similar contraptions sat in the necks of clockwork soldiers, generated their voices for them.

“Kelem-”

“You were not wise to come here, witch.” The mechanical voice cut across Kara. “Of Skilfar’s brood are you? Her judgment is usually better than this.” As Kelem spoke more spiders came into view, smaller ones, flowing over the back of his throne, some with bodies the size of hands, others no larger than a coin. They moved about the mage in a complex tide, shifting his body, changing the position of his arms, so that like a marionette he became animated in some dreadful approximation of life.

When you invest in self-deception as heavily as I do there come points at which a swift audit of the truth is forced upon you and I can attest that the sudden realization of what a fool you have been is as cruel as any knife thrust. In my mind’s eye we had sneaked into the mines and found the door Snorri sought while Kelem dreamed. Even with the spider leading us to Kelem I thought we might find what we needed before we reached him. Now it seemed that Snorri must trade away my last hope of salvation just to visit a place any knife could dispatch him to. And if Kelem chose not to bargain but simply to turn us into four columns of salt. . then all our hope lay in Kara’s spear.

“You sent assassins after me.” Snorri spoke past teeth gritted against agony. I could almost see the slow march of the salt growing across his flesh.

“If you believe that then it was foolish to come here, Snorri ver Snagason.”

“In Eridruin’s Cave you tormented me with a demon in the shape of my daughter.” Snorri lifted his axe.

“Not me, Norseman. Maybe some ghost of my past, feeling my will that you should come here to my home. But the past is a different country, I’m no longer responsible for what happens there. Age absolves a man’s crimes.”

Kara interjected, perhaps worried Snorri might attack and steal her chance with the spear. “But you sent no more assassins, no more shades. Did you think to bargain instead?”

“It is true-I do like to bargain.” Some rusty sound that may have been a laugh escaped the voice grille. “And it would seem you need something from me, Snagason. I could help you with this problem you have. .” A larger spider moved Kelem’s hand along his side, a gesture mirroring the line of the wound eating Snorri up.

“I seek a door. Nothing beyond that.” And Snorri straightened, his mouth set in a tight line of pain, the crystals cladding his side cracking, plates of salt falling clear.

Kelem scanned each of us, his sunken eyes lingering on me, then on Hennan, the legs of the spider that first raised his head now visible among the pale straggles of his hair. “I don’t believe you have the key, Snagason. Though it is a mystery why a man would give up such a treasure if he did not have to.” His gaze settled on Kara, lingering on the black and silver spear in her hand then moving to her face. “Give me Loki’s gift, little völva.”

Kara moved fast. Faster than when I punched her and she knocked me flat. Two short steps and she released Gungnir with a crack of her arm. The spear hammered into Kelem’s chest, pinning him to his throne, a throw Snorri would have been proud of.

None of us moved. Nobody spoke. A spider tilted Kelem’s head to look down at the spear. Another raised his arm to rest his forearm across the haft. “You took the wrong door, völva. They call me ‘master of the ways.’ Did you not wonder if I might not notice you passing through such portals as stand close to the Wheel of Osheim? I gave you this.” A salt-crusted finger tapped Gungnir’s dark wood. “I gave it to you to make you brave-”

“Sageous helped you.” I clamped my mouth shut on the words, not meaning to draw attention to myself.

Kelem looked my way, head tilted in acknowledgment. “My skills detected you. I guided the dream-witch to sew this into your visions. He was well paid. A hireling, no more than that. You’ve no idea how hard it was to lead your slow and plodding minds to this plan, to guide you to the tools, to place them in your hands. .” He returned his gaze to Kara. “And now that you have attacked me Loki will not mind if I simply kill you and take the key from your body. Even so, out of respect for your grandmother, I give you this last opportunity to hand it to me of your own free will.”

“I don’t have it.” Kara let her arms hang at her side, as limp as her hair, defeated.

A noise like nails on slate rasped from Kelem’s voice grille, perhaps as close to fury as he could come, this desiccated imitation of a man. His head turned sharply back to Snorri. “How. . how is it that the one with the greatest power does not also bear the greatest weapon? You gave Odin’s own spear to a witch when she didn’t even own the key. Are you mad?”

“It isn’t Odin’s spear,” Snorri said. “And when I face what lies beyond death’s door I will be carrying my own axe, the axe my fathers bore, not somebody else’s spear.”

“Say your piece, Snagason. You’ve come far enough to say it.” Kelem’s mechanical voice held a twang of amusement.

Snorri looked my way, eyes dark, no sign of blue in the curious glow of the crystals. “You should speak with Prince Jalan Kendeth, heir to the throne of Red March. My friend. The key is his.”

Kelem made a noise of disgust and jerked a dismissive arm at us. “The key you bear leaves a mark in the world. The longer it is still the deeper that mark. The more it is used the deeper that mark. Once you started your journey I had no good idea where to seek it. But now you stand before me. . I see it is true. The princeling has the prize.” His eyes, glittering deep in their dry sockets, settled on me. “I will buy the key from you. Shall we. . haggle?”

Kelem had wanted the key-bearer to attack him. He’d dropped the spear into our laps to make us bold enough to do it. If his plan had worked he could have killed us and avoided Loki’s curse just as Snorri had avoided it when the Unborn Captain had attacked him. Now his plan had failed the mage needed to have me give him the key willingly, or else steal or trick it from me. I doubted he was any good at picking pockets, but he did have deep ones of his own. . I wondered quite how deep he would dig to own it.

“I’m sure we can reach a deal.” I clutched the key tight, not intending to lose it to some thieving mechanical arachnid. As I squeezed it I saw a flash of another place, a room of many doors, just wooden ones, with Kelem standing before me, younger even than the shade we saw of him at Eridruin’s Cave. “What’s your offer?”

Kelem didn’t speak as spider legs rotated his salt-crusted skull to stare directly at me. Even while he turned to face me though I glimpsed that small square room again and heard a younger Kelem speak, “Are you a god, Loki?” His eyes on me, hard as stones.

“Wh-” I started to speak but the vision came again, cutting me off.

“Your death lies behind one of these other doors, Kelem.” It seems I’m speaking the words in that room, so many centuries ago that Kelem looks no older than Snorri.

That younger Kelem had sneered. “God of tricks they-”

“Don’t worry.” My voice, but it’s not me. “You’ll never manage to open that one.”

The vision passed and I became aware that Kelem, ancient and wizened in his throne, was addressing me.

“The Red Queen’s child?”

“Her grandson, sir. My father is cardinal-”

“Skilfar’s spawn and Alica’s, waiting on my judgment, deep in the salt earth with old Kelem. How strange the world does turn, and so swiftly. It seems only yesterday that Skilfar was young and fair, the flower of the north. And Alica Kendeth, surely she’s a child still? Must everyone grow old each time I blink?”

The spear fell from him, several spiders had been working to free it. The weapon slid to the ground.

I raised the key, cold, hard, slick, and yet somehow seeming to writhe worm-like in my grip. “Do you have an offer?” A vision of crystals growing from the rock flashed before my eyes. A mirror, white crystals, the Lady Blue fleeing, the blood of my line on her hands. It would have to be a damn good offer.

“Long before they called me door-master I was master of coin. The golden key will open almost as many doors as the black one. Hearts too.”

Those hollow eye-pits studied me a moment. “Every man has his price, boy. Yours is easy enough to guess. I’ll pay for calling you ‘boy,’ but not much. I am rich, boy, did you know that? Rich enough to make a beggar of Croesus, to make Midas’s wealth look modest. Money, boy, is the blood of empires.” Spiders raised his dry hands, tugging on tendons, manipulating bones, a silver web of them across his sunken flesh. “Money flows through these hands. Name your price.”

“I. .” Indecision paralysed me and greed took my voice. What if I asked for too little? But asking some ridiculous sum might enrage him.

“Knowing your own price is quite a thing, Jalan Kendeth. Know thyself, that’s what the philosopher said. A wisdom that has lived through the Thousand Suns. Easy to say, hard to do. Knowing your own price is most of knowing yourself, and who can expect such a thing from the young? Ten thousand in crown gold.”

“T-Ten. .” I tried to imagine it there, glittering before me, the weight of it spilling through my hands. More than I’d lost, more than was stolen from me, more than I owed. Enough to pay off the grasping hands of Umbertide, and clear my debt to Maeres Allus, with a thousand and more left over.

“Ten thousand would be an insult to a man of your breeding, Prince Jalan.” The mechanical voice dragged me from my vision. “Sixty-four thousand. Not a clipped copper more or less. We have a deal.”

Always take the money. Sixty-four thousand. A ridiculous sum, a preposterous sum. I could buy back Garyus’s ships, set myself up for a life of debauched pleasure among Vermillion’s elite, seduce the DeVeer sisters from their husbands. . I could buy Grandmother a squad of sword-sons or a warship or something equally violent to take her mind from the loss of a key she never owned. .

“The money will be waiting for you in credit at the House Gold. I will ensure all charges against you are dropped and when you’ve cleared your debts you may leave the city,” Kelem said.

“It’s not here?” That disappointed me. I wanted the mound of gold I had imagined.

“I’m not a dragon, Prince Jalan. I do not sleep upon my hoard.”

“Sixty-four thousand-in crown gold-and you undo what you’ve done to Snorri.” I hesitated then sighed. “And he gets to open death’s door before you take the key.” I glanced over at the Norseman, standing, hunched, with his hand on Hennan’s shoulder, a father’s touch. “Though I pray he finds the sense not to use it.”

“No.” Just that through the silver grille on Kelem’s withered neck, then silence.

I drew in a deep sigh and wiped the sweat from my brow. “Sixty-three thousand, fix Snorri, and he gets to open the door.” There’s an exquisite pain involved in the loss of a thousand in gold. Not one I’ll ever get used to.

“No.”

“Oh, come on.” I knuckled my brow. “You’re killing me here. Sixty-two, the cure, and the door.”

“No.”

I wondered how far I could push him. Kelem clearly feared Loki’s curse more than he feared losing sixty-four thousand in gold. But perhaps less than he feared opening the door into death.

I held up a hand and stepped to Kara’s side, leaning in close to whisper in her ear. Damn but I wanted her, even there, even then, even sweat-slick and with the suspicion in her eyes. “Kara. . how dangerous is this curse?”

She stepped back, her fingers on my chest. “Why didn’t Skilfar take the key from Snorri?”

“Um. .” I battled to remember. “The world is better shaped by freedom. Even if it means giving foolish men their head-that’s what you said?” I looked from her to Snorri. “She let him keep it because. . she’s wise. Or something.”

Kara raised her eyebrows. “Doesn’t sound very likely, does it?”

“Skilfar was scared too?”

“It’s Loki’s key. God of trickery. Nothing as straight forward as strength is going to decide its ownership. Or it would have been Thor’s key an age ago!”

“It has to be given,” Snorri said. “Olaaf Rikeson took it by strength and Loki’s curse froze his army, ten thousand strong.”

“So. . when you gave me the key back in the olive groves. .”

“I trusted a friend, yes.”

“Hell.” Snorri had placed his future in my hands. That was far more trust than I could hold on to. It was like telling a dog to guard a steak. It was stupid. “You don’t know me at all, Snorri.” Somehow, even with sixty-four thousand in crown gold glittering in my immediate future I felt low. A fever perhaps, or poisoning from the sour salts of the lower mine.

Maybe it was the way Snorri didn’t even argue his case but just stood there like the huge over-loyal idiot he was, having the gall to expect the same foolishness from me.

“Thirty-two thousand, the cure, and the idiot gets his door open.”

“No.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake! How much to open that damned door?”

“That door shouldn’t ever be opened. Even if you took no gold, only offered me the key to show you death’s door, I would hesitate. There’s a reason the ghosts of my youth are scattered across Hell. It wasn’t just chance that one stepped out to oppose you when you approached Eridruin’s door. Opening that door is dangerous. Passing through still more so.” Kelem’s jaw moved as the voice issued from his neck. In his mouth something glittered, silver across the black thing that had been his tongue.

“Why? Why would a dead thing like you care?” I didn’t even want that door open-why I was arguing rather than wondering how to carry my gold back to Red March I didn’t know.

“I’m not dead.” Kelem tilted his head. “Merely. . well preserved.”

I stood, the key tight in my hand, watched by the witch, the warrior, the boy, and the old bones in the chair. Something in the quality of the light from the crystals changed, as subtle as a slight shift in the wind, but I felt it.

“What would you do with this key, Master Kelem?” I asked him, starting to pace from one column to the next.

“I have a palace of doors. It’s only natural that I should want one key that could unlock any of them.” Kelem’s throne rotated to allow him to track me. “Without a key the opening and closing of such doors is a complex and tedious business, dangerous even, and one that can exhaust an old man like me. These thirteen before me. These are difficult, but over the years I’ve managed all but three. The doors to darkness and light still defy me. Those on the far side hear me trying though, oh yes.” A scratching sound that might be laughter. “They fear me, hate me, and hold the doors tight against my efforts. The dark knows that if I control the door, I own them. The light knows it too.

“Long ago I was told that one of these doors would never open for me, that my doom lay beyond it. Loki himself told me this, the father of lies. And I believed him because he is always honest. He takes pride in it-knowing that a partial truth cuts deeper than a lie.” Kelem waved a desiccated hand in my direction. “The key will unlock the doors, and the last one-that will be the one I will leave closed. That one I will lock again, and lock so well that it will never open, not in the lives of men.”

It’s unnerving when the person you’re bargaining with lets you know how valuable what you have is to them. In the market we pretend not to care, we insult the thing we desire, denigrate it. Kelem’s honesty told me two things. That I could trust his offer, and that I would be a fool to refuse it because one way or another he would own the key.

“That black one.” I pointed to it. “It’s death’s door? The gate to Hell?”

“No, that is one of the three that defy me still. The gate to Hell is opened easily enough, the Day of a Thousand Suns left it hanging off its hinges-it’s the first of the thirteen that I learned.”

I stared at the black crystal. “It’s the night gate then.” Even as I said them the words felt wrong.

“Do you think so, Prince Jalan? Has your connection to the dark grown so weak?”

“No.” I shook my head. “It’s not that one. .” I passed another pillar, trailing my fingers across it.

“That door is Osheim, Prince Jalan. The door is the Wheel, the Wheel is a door. It’s the door I need to own.”

“The Lady Blue would open them all,” I said. “She thinks the time for doors is passing and soon all worlds will bleed one into the other. She wants to open the ways and marshal the destruction to ensure her place in whatever hell results.”

“I’ve been misinformed about educational standards in Red March,” Kelem said, two spiders the size of silver eyeballs tugging at the dry corners of his mouth to make a smile. “You’ve been well taught, Prince Jalan. But the Lady Blue really only wants to turn the Wheel. She could do that by opening the black door, but the black door is opening by itself. It has been for centuries. Ever so slowly, but speeding up. Each door that is opened, each thing that passes through from one world to another. . it weakens the walls between those places, and as the walls start to crack, the door of Osheim opens, the Wheel turns. With Loki’s key the Lady Blue could end the world today by opening that door before us. Without it she must rely on the Dead King opening death’s door wide enough to fracture the walls around it. . and, by doing so, turn the Wheel and herald the end of all things.”

“And where do you stand, Master Kelem?” The conversation had grown too big for me. I just wanted to escape with my money and enough years to spend it in.

“I’m a financier, a man of trade, Prince Jalan. Everything has its price. I buy, I sell. There’s no harm in this surely? Buying what can be bought, selling it to those with the need and the means to pay. The rich must have what they crave-surely you agree with that?

“On this point my position should be clear enough. I’m refusing to open one door, just briefly, to save myself tens of thousands in gold. That hardly paints me as a man who would be overly keen to set them all open wide, now does it? I might want to own the darkness and the light and the creatures therein, but ending creation? What good would my wealth do me then? True, the Lady Blue and I have interests in common, but I am not her ally in this ambition.”

You were her ally in another ambition, equally bloody, and long ago. The words twitched behind my lips. He had been part of the plot that killed the first Gholloth. Maybe the second had died by his command also. Had he directed the Lady Blue, or she him? Either way both of them had stained their hands with the blood of Kendeths. Snorri’s family too counted among their crimes, his whole clan, the Undoreth, gone, just one man remaining now that Tuttugu had died beneath Edris Dean’s blade. And Edris was the Lady Blue’s creature, my mother’s death her plan, my unborn sister just something broken in the process. I saw again the vision of the lady vanishing into the mirror, the Red Queen kneeling there among the shards, her grandfather slain, the linens of his bed crimson. Perhaps it was Alica Kendeth’s legendary anger that infected my blood, perhaps my own, a pale flame to be sure, but feed any such spark enough fuel and it will blaze.

I heard the knocking again, that knocking I’d been hearing every once in a while since the debtors’ prison. It sounded louder here, reverberating among the columns. None of the others looked up.

“Do you-” I broke off, the knocking came from my left. I turned and walked back toward Kelem and the others. Kelem, master of doors. Kelem, sender of assassins.

Knock. Knock. Knock. Steady, rhythmic, louder by the moment. I’d heard it every day of late. Was it sunset a mile above us. . had I heard this sound every sunset since I took the key? Had Snorri heard it when he held the key, sounding each dawn since the wrong-mages’ door had closed Aslaug and Baraqel off from us? Knock. Knock. Knocking had woken me from my dreaming that spring morning back in Trond. Knock. Some doors are better left unopened.

Kelem turned his head to watch my progress. I saw his dry hands drip with my mother’s blood. I saw the Red Queen, a child, kneeling before the ruin of her grandfather. I felt the pain that cored me when I woke from the blood-dream that showed me Mother dying and returned her to my memories.

“You carry something I have bought and sold, Prince Jalan.” Perhaps Kelem could see the wheels turning in my head. Perhaps he knew he was losing me.

“I do?” I continued to hunt the sound, moving between the pillars.

“The sword at your hip. I recognize its taint. I procured it from a necromancer named Chella decades ago. It didn’t come cheap, but the Blue Lady paid me ten times that price and more.”

I paused, hand on the hilt of the weapon, glancing back at Kelem. “This? This was yours?”

“The Lady Blue had allies aplenty among the necromancers, long before there was a Dead King or any hint of him. She has been building their strength for years, seeding the unborn with such toys as that which you bear.”

“If I have a price, Kelem, this is not lowering it.” I cast about, straining for direction, willing the knocking to sound again. “Edris Dean tried to kill me with this blade.”

“You were not his target, though,” Kelem said. “Neither was your mother.”

I stopped and faced him.

“Your sister.” The spiders moved his jaws. “The planets aligned for that one. The stars held their breath to see her born. The Silent Sister thought the child would grow to replace her, to exceed her, to make this empire whole. And more. .”

“To heal the world,” I breathed. Grandmother thought I might be the one to undo the doom the Builders had laid upon us, but it wasn’t me: our salvation had never been born.

“The sword you carry put your sister in Hell. Unborn. Sell the key to me and the author of her death will be thwarted in her ambition. With Loki’s key I will own creation, and what I own I do not allow to come to harm.”

My fingers flinched from the hilt as if it had grown too hot to touch. Edris’s blade hadn’t just cursed Snorri’s son as it slew him in the womb, marking him to be unborn. . it had done the same to my sister.

“What do you think the unborn were doing in Vermillion, Prince Jalan?” Kelem asked, silver legs stretching the leathery skin across his skull’s grin. “The Dead King’s captain, and the Unborn Prince, both of them in the same place, practically in the shadow of the palace walls? Both daring the Silent Sister’s magics. .”

“They were bringing an unborn into the world. .” Even now the memory of the Unborn Prince made me shudder-just his eyes upon me through the slit of that mask.

“All that for a single unborn?” Kelem’s head tilted with the question. “Haven’t the Dead King’s servants brought forth unborn in all manner of scattered spots, none of them half as dangerous as Vermillion?”

I recalled a grave horror rising in the cemetery where Taproot’s circus had camped.

Kelem spoke again. “The older the unborn, the longer it has spent in Hell, the more powerful it is. . the harder to return. And this one. . this one needed a hole torn in the world, a hole so large a city might fall through. This one needed the strength of the two most powerful unborn this side of death’s veil. This one. . she needed the death of blood relatives to open her path. The death of a close relative best of all. A brother perhaps. .”

“My. . my sis-” The horror of it took me in its grasp, my feet rooted.

“Your sister was to be the Red Queen’s champion. The Lady Blue took that piece and made it hers. As the Unborn Queen she might be the Dead King’s bride, she might be his fist in the living world, the unknowing servant of Lady Blue, heralding the end of all things. That is who is waiting for death’s door to open. That is why you should sell me the key and leave it closed. She needs your life, Prince Jalan. If she destroys you in the deadlands it will tear a hole through which she can be born at last into this world. If she comes through by some other path then killing you will cement her place here and stop her being cast back by the enchantments that might otherwise banish her.” Kelem’s chair moved closer, legs clicking beneath it. “You’ve no real choice here, Jalan. A sensible man like you. A pragmatist. Take the gold.”

“I-” Kelem made sense. He made sense and offered a pile of gold so large a man could roll about in it. I could see it in my mind’s eye, heaped and gleaming. But. . the old bastard’s hands were dripping with my mother’s blood.

The knocking sounded again, close by. None of them could hear it but me. I came closer to the source of the noise. BANG. BANG. BANG. Almost deafening. Kara said something but I couldn’t hear her. A flicker of motion drew my eye, a black fist pounding against the surface of the crystal pillar closest to me, from the inside, the arm lost in a darkness that had polluted the column’s clarity like ink drops in water.

“Every man has his price.” Somehow Kelem’s voice reached me through the din. I wondered what Snorri’s price was, what my grandmother’s price might be. Even Garyus, the third Gholloth, with his love of gold, his mastery of commerce. . even he wouldn’t sell a friend for as little as money. I didn’t think it of Garyus-I both did and did not want to think it of me.

Sixty-four thousand. . Kelem wouldn’t show Snorri the door even if I sacrificed all those thousands. And even if he did Snorri would just march in to die-horrors would spill into the world, my unborn sister among them. Snorri would die and I’d own nothing but my rags, a tiny worthless corner of a salt mine, and a few other dribs and drabs that would be lucky to sell for fifty florins in total. There wasn’t a choice to make here. Always take the-

Blood. It seemed the whole floor swam with it, ankle deep and rising. I saw it drip from Gholloth’s bed. I saw Garyus twist in the crimson swirls as the Silent Sister took his strength. It ran red from Tuttugu’s opened neck. I saw it drip scarlet from Edris’s blade as Mother slid from the steel. And I saw the hands behind each act, the blue and the grey, each stained with what I held precious, sacred.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

This whole nightmare had started with Astrid pounding on my door, dragging me from a good dream. Every part of my return had been about the opening of one door or another. It had been a mistake to open that first door too. I should have stayed in bed.

And yet. . somehow my hand found itself reaching out to the crystal column towering above us. Somehow I found myself drawing forth Loki’s key.

“No!” Kelem’s shout.

The clatter of metal limbs as his spiders raced toward me. The roar as Snorri threw himself into their path, heedless of his injury and pain, swinging his father’s axe.

Against all reason I found myself pressing the jet-black key to that impossibly flat surface, driving it into the neat dark eye of the keyhole that appeared beneath it. . turning it as the voices rose behind me amid the din of combat.

The door blasted open with a force that sent me skidding across the floor. Midnight boiled out of it, imps of ebony, all horns and hooves and curling tails, huger and more terrible shapes rising behind them, wings canopied, bat-like creatures, serpents, shades of men, and in the midst of it all, surging forward, Aslaug, wrought in night-stained bone, her lower carriage a frenzy of arachnid legs that made Kelem’s toys seem delicate and wholesome.

“Take him through!” I screamed, pointing at Kelem, compelling the forces of night with whatever magic and potential lay in me, calling on the bond I had been sworn to. The horde, sighting their tormentor and would-be lord, surged through the narrow portal, borne on a wave of liquid night. Aslaug fell upon Kelem in an instant, a howling, tearing fury as if my own rage had infected her. The rest followed and in their frenzy the creatures of darkness flooded over the ancient mage, black imps sinking fangs into each wizened limb, inky tentacles reaching from the portal to whip around him. They hated him anyway, for presuming to rule them, for his endless attempts to open and own the night door, and for so nearly succeeding.

The dark-throng dragged Kelem away, a riptide of horror, his throne and platform scraping through the face of the column, a mess of stained and twisted silver-steel legs left twitching in his wake. In the silent moment that followed a faint laughter echoed, not in my ears, through my bones-a laugh both merry and wicked, the kind that infects the listener and makes them smile. It came from the key. A god laughing at his own joke.

Snorri and I lay where we threw ourselves in the moment, sprawled on opposite sides of the deluge.

“Die, you bastard!” I shouted it after the door-mage, scrambling to my feet. I hoped Kelem would suffer there in the endless dark and that as he did he thought of the Kendeths and of the debt he owed us.

Aslaug remained, the crushed body of a mechanical spider in her hand, silver legs giving the occasional jerk. She towered above Kara, her face furious. Snorri got to his knees and shoved Hennan behind the next pillar. “Stay there!” A handful of night-imps still prowled the perimeter of the darkness smoking around the portal and other, less wholesome, things writhed half-seen behind them.

“Send them back,” I hollered. Kara might have dealt harshly with Aslaug before but the völva was dark-sworn and the forces of night were hers to command if she had the will. Their allegiance hadn’t shattered just because she had crossed one of their number.

I didn’t need to urge Kara-the effort of her working showed in every line as she raised her arms in rejection.

“Out, night-spawn. Out lie-born. Out daughter of Loki! Out child of Arrakni!” Kara repeated the incantation that had once driven Aslaug from her boat, her hands held before her, clawed in threat. All around her the darkness drew back, as if sucked through the doorway by a straw, down into the realms of night.

“I don’t think so, little witch.” Aslaug speared Kara with two black legs, pinning her to the next column, her robe tenting up around the impaling limbs.

Kara raised her head, bloody about the mouth and snarled, “Back!”

“Go back, Aslaug!” I shouted, and she turned that beautiful, terrifying face toward me.

“You can’t just use me like that, Jalan. I’m not something to be cast aside once you’ve had what you wanted.” I could almost believe the hurt on the stained ivory of her face was real.

I held my hands palm up in apology. “It’s what I do. .”

Snorri’s short sword, thrown point over hilt over point, hammered between Aslaug’s shoulder blades.

“Back!” Kara screamed.

“Back!” I shouted. I couldn’t even feel bad about it.

And with darkness bubbling around the sword blade jutting from her chest, with her hands clutching at the sides of the column, with her black legs scrabbling for purchase against the retreating tide, Aslaug fell back, shrieking, into the night from which she came.

I rushed forward, tripping on a spider leg, and almost pitched headfirst after the demon. In the last moment I managed to catch at the door, invisibly thin, and slam it shut before me, smacking my face into it a split second later. Clinging on to consciousness, I fumbled the key forward and locked the door again.

“Christ on a bike.” I fell back into my own darkness and didn’t even feel my head hit the ground.