The Liar's Key

by Mark Lawrence

  “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 t
he 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.