Mark Lawrence - The Liar's key

“Ullamere’s grandson.” The Red Queen inclined her head. “One of eight. The apple that fell furthest from the tree.” She fixed her gaze upon me, eyes grave. I wondered if she knew quite how far I’d fallen from her tree. . if we were talking apples then Jalan Kendeth had dropped from the Red Queen’s boughs, rolled down a hill, into a stream, and been carried out to sea to beach on the shores of a whole other country.

“And the mass murder?” I got back to my point, glancing around for the Silent Sister once more, to find with a start that she now stood behind the throne, her seeing eye hard as a stone. I remembered how she looked that night in her rags, painting her curse on the walls of the opera house.

“This is a war that started before I was born, boy.” Grandmother’s voice came low and threatening. “It isn’t about who wears what crown. It’s not for the survival of a city, a country, a way of life, or an ideal. Troy burned for a pretty face. This is about more than that.”

“Name it then! All this grand talk is very well, but what I saw were people burning.” The words escaped me, unstoppable as a sneeze. I had no idea why I was goading the woman. All I really wanted was to be out of there, back to my old pursuits, working the Jalan charm on the ladies of Vermillion. And yet here I was criticizing the second most powerful woman in the world as if I were her tutor. I quickly started to apologize. “I-”

“Good to see you’ve grown, Jalan. Garyus said the north would make or break you.” I swear I saw her lips twitch with the faintest suggestion of approval. “If we fail in this. If the change that the Builders set in motion is not arrested, or more likely reversed, if magic runs wild and the worlds crack open, each bleeding into the next. . then everything is at stake. The rocks themselves will burn. There will be no countries, no people, no life. That’s what the long war is about. That is what is at stake.”

I drew a breath at that. “Even so. .” I started, mind whirling. War is a game, games take two players, the other side have their own goals. “The Lady Blue and all those working for her. . they’re not looking to destroy the world. Or if they are then there’s something in it for them. Everyone’s got an angle.”

The Red Queen looked over her shoulder at that, eye to eye with her elder sister. “Not completely stupid then.”

The Silent Sister smiled, her teeth narrow, yellow, each set apart from the next. She extended her hand, reaching past the queen’s shoulder, and I flinched, remembering her touch. Fingers uncurled and somehow in her palm lay a poppy, so red that for an instant I thought it a wound.

“Smoking the poppy is an addiction that steps around people’s sense, a hunger that reduces proud men and clever women to crawling in the mire in search of more.” The Red Queen took the flower from her sister’s hand and in her fingers it became smoke, a crimson mist, lifting and fading. “Magic is a worse drug, its hooks sink deeper. And it is magic that fractures the world, magic that will drag us to our end. The world is broken-each enchantment tears the cracks a little wider.”

“The Lady Blue wants to doom everyone because she can’t bear to give up her spells?” Even as I asked it my tone changed from disbelief to credulity. The old whores on Mud Lane would sell more than their bodies for the coin to buy another hit of the resin Maeres squeezed from his poppies. They’d sell more than their souls if they had more to barter.

“In part,” Grandmother agreed. “I doubt she could give up her power. But more than that, she believes there is a place for a self-selected few, beyond the conjunction of the spheres. The Lady Blue thinks that those steeped deeply enough in their magic will survive the end and find new forms in a new existence, just as some among the Builders survived their Day of a Thousand Suns. Perhaps she sees herself as the first god to be born into what will come. Her followers she views as an elite, chosen to found a very different world.”

“And you. . don’t believe?” With a start I realized I’d been addressing her without formality all this time and added in a belated, “Your majesty.”

“What I think would follow such an ending is of no matter,” she said. “I have a duty to my people. I will not allow this to happen.”

And in the end, whatever Alica Kendeth said about the stakes, here was a queen defending her lands, her cities, and those subject to her rule. “And the burnings? The whole damn opera house?” I saw her eyes narrow and added, “Your majesty.”

“The world may be wearing thin but still there are very few places where the unborn may return. The opportunities are seldom, and short-lived, hard to predict. A certain spot in a certain hour. If it is missed there may not be another window through which they may pass for months, and it might lie a thousand miles away. To bring an unborn through the veil at any other juncture requires an enormous expenditure of resource.

“The size of this city’s population and the magics that are worked here make Vermillion a spawning ground for the unborn. My sister can give no warning, only detect and destroy the things as they emerge. The people around these events are food for the new unborn-it would use their flesh to repair itself, to build larger and more terrifying forms, and to feed its power. The only way to ensure the unborn’s destruction is to burn out the nest before it realizes that it is under attack.”

“But I saw it-at the opera house I saw the unborn. It escaped and pursued us north. That thing wasn’t like the others. At the circus an unborn came for us, miscarried from womb to grave and bursting from the ground in the dead of night. And in the Black Fort Snorri’s son, and then the captain of them. .”

The Red Queen pursed her lips. I might almost think her impressed that I’d seen four separate unborn and yet stood before her with my insides on the inside.

“The creature you saw first was not newly returned but there to seed the event, one of two. Each unborn starts with a child killed in the womb. The longer that child stays in the deadlands the harder it is to birth into the living world, but the more it will be able to meet whatever potential lay in its blood. This was to be a very special unborn, perhaps the greatest of all of their kind. The two worst of the Dead King’s servants were there to ease this one into the world: the Unborn Prince and Captain. The passage is made less difficult by the death of a close relative. It is likely the relative they needed was among the audience. It was a rare chance to test my sister’s magics against the key figures in the ranks of those armed against us and to block the arrival of a powerful new servant for the Dead King.”

I swallowed, remembering again the eyes that had regarded me through the slit of a porcelain mask. Then, realizing that my role in the failure of the curse was a bad place to let the conversation rest, I carried on. “And the Unborn Prince escaped and tracked us north to stop-”

“The Unborn Prince went south,” Grandmother said. “The Unborn Captain to the north. They informed the Dead King of events, no doubt, and sent agents against you, but the prince went south, to Florence, where he works against us even now.”

“Ah.”

“When you broke her spell my sister glimpsed a possibility. The crack you put into her working allowed the two elder unborn to escape but she saw a way for the main investment of her power to be carried between two unusual men, and that the tides of chance would bear you to our foe in the north.”

“Tides of chance?” That wasn’t mere chance. I’ve bet on some long odds at the gambling table when drunk but I’ve never thrown the dice at quite so slim an opportunity.