Mark Lawrence - The Liar's key

I forced the words out. “How long ago did you get taken?”

Hennan frowned in the candle light. “I don’t know. Everything feels like forever down here and there’s no days.”

“Guess.”

“A couple of days before you came?”

That sinking feeling became something more savage as if some great hand were trying to pull me through the cell floor. I thought he’d been in the cell the whole time I’d been in Umbertide. “But you’re so thin. .”

“I’ve been living off rubbish and sleeping in the streets for. . weeks. Snorri didn’t come by road. Not at first. They took a boat down the river-”

“The Seleen?” The cunning bastards. They hadn’t trusted me to keep quiet about the key and knew the Red Queen would come after them. They’d done what northmen do. Taken to sea.

“Yes, they got a merchant to take them down the coast on his ship. Only they had problems and it took them a long time. They put in at some port on the Florentine coast and walked to Umbertide. I saw them coming through the Echo Gates. I used to sleep by there, up on a roof.”

“So you met up with them and. .”

“Soldiers took us a few hours later.”

“Soldiers?”

“Well, men in uniform anyway, with swords.”

“And what had you done?”

“Nothing. Kara got us a room and we’d gone to a tavern and Snorri got me something to eat. They were talking about how they would find Kelem once they reached his mines-Kara said they weren’t far off. And then the soldiers came. Snorri knocked some down and we barricaded ourselves into the room. And that’s when Kara convinced Snorri to let her hide the key. Snorri said. .” Hennan frowned again, as if trying to remember the exact words. “‘Hide it with the boy. He needs something to give them.’”

“Shit.” Not good. Not good at all.

“What? What’s wrong?” Hennan said, as if there weren’t already enough wrong for me to curse every time I opened my mouth.

“If they want the key they’ll be coming here soon enough.”

Hennan was all questions then, but for once I couldn’t think of any plausible lies and the truth was too ugly to share. When I thought that House Gold had held Snorri for weeks without coming to the debtors’ prison to question their other captives things had seemed less urgent. If they’ll wait three weeks then chances are they’ll wait another one, and another. My own questions spiralled in my skull, chased by inconvenient answers. Why would they capture Snorri if not for the key? What could be more dangerous in a city where locked vaults lay everywhere than a key that opened everything? Why would Snorri give the key to a child? Because when they came to question the boy Snorri needed to know Hennan had something to give them rather than be tortured for information he didn’t have. And the biggest question was how long-how long would the northmen hold out once the bankers stopped asking nicely and got out the hot irons? If it were me I’d be babbling out every secret I ever knew before they’d even got past harsh language. They’d had them three days. If they were asking questions the hard way then nobody could hold out much longer than that, not even Snorri.

Common sense said the bank was after the key and they’d be coming to my cell once they’d broken Snorri. Or , and the thought only increased my panic, once they’d broken Tuttugu, which would take far less time. Without the key I wasn’t ever getting out of this cell, except as a bag of bones destined for the back door. We needed to get out as soon as possible-now in fact. But until we had a key’s shadow we didn’t have a key, and without a key we could do nothing but hurry up and wait.

A whole day passed before Racso’s return-a day and a sleepless night in which each hour crawled and I sweated through every minute. I couldn’t imagine how either northman could be holding out so long under interrogation and each distant clunk of metal on metal had me sure that someone had come for Hennan. But in the end it was our jailer that came, with a new debtor in tow, fresh meat for the cells. Or rather a long-term debtor whose funds had finally run so low that she’d been judged ready for the final stop in her repayment plan. The gate should have been unlocked nearly a day earlier when a bag of bones named Artos Mantona died quietly in the middle of the floor, being too weak to keep his corner place. We shouted through the bars but if Racso heard he showed no inclination to remove the corpse, probably thinking a replacement would be along sooner or later and he’d kill two birds with one stone.

By the looks of some of the gaunt faces in the light of my flickering candle Artos might not be the only inmate waiting to be dragged away for the pigs by the time Racso deigned to unlock. One of the “heavies” I paid in apples to keep the starving masses off my back, a man bearing the unlikely name of Artemis Canoni, had taken a turn for the worse despite the improvement my arrival had wrought in his diet. I’d never seen a man go downhill so fast. He seemed to curl up about some hidden pain, growing smaller by the hour. Another fellow nursed a wet cough, not wet in the normal spluttery way, but in the ragged sound of his lungs and the bubbling corruption to be heard inside his straining chest. I kept away from him.

“Get back, you defaulting maggots!” Racso’s bellow always made me flinch, each utterance of it scoring the hate I had for him a little deeper. The debtors moved back from the bars as Racso’s baton rattled across them, the actual maggots stayed where they were, chewing on the ruins of Artos Mantona’s eyeballs with tiny mouths. “Back!”

Hennan and I stayed where we were, sitting around our candle, the latest in a line of them, now burned down to its last few inches. We’d positioned ourselves as close to the bars as we thought would be tolerated.

Behind Racso stood a middle-aged woman in grey rags, regarding us with horror. She looked gaunt rather than starved, and once among the other inmates she would seem almost healthy.

“Move that debtor beside the gate.” Racso nodded at Artos’s remains. “You there, stay close and roll him through.” He counted through his keys and approached the gate with the chunk of iron best suited to opening it. He held his lantern in the other hand, sending a confusion of shadows swinging this way and that, the pattern of the bars playing back and forth across the floor. I opened my hand to reveal the small rune in my palm, colder than it should be, heavier too.

“Come on, dammit.” A desperate mutter as I chased shadows, trying to catch them in my hand. There wasn’t any blasted shadow that looked like a key, just random blurs and the sweeping shadow of the bars.

“What you got there, yer worship?” Racso helped the woman in with a kindly shove between the shoulder blades. “Something to trade?” The old wreck he’d detailed to move Artos struggled to roll him through the gap. The rotten stink that went up made him retch over the body as he rolled it. “Something good?”

I stood up, holding my palm out toward him. The movement came too fast and, ever suspicious, he slammed the gate, turning the key in the lock. A few seconds earlier and Artos’s dead legs would have kept the gate from closing, but the old man had pushed them through just in time. What I would have done then I’m not sure. Certainly pitting my skull against Racso’s baton did not appeal. He looked to have the sullen strength possessed by many fat men with slab-like arms. Not a showy, muscular strength, just the killing kind.

“Easy, emperor! Nothing sudden. Nothing sudden!” He squinted at my hand as he withdrew the key. “Don’t look like much.”

“Take a closer look!” I stepped forward and he stepped back, lantern waving, key jutting at me as if to ward off attack. I’d tried too hard though, unnerved him, let the need show.