Mark Lawrence - The Liar's key

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.