Mark Lawrence - The Liar's key

“Maybe he wasn’t dead.”

“He was dead. I checked him. He was my friend.”

“Maggots were eating his eyes.”

“Of course he was dea-” A second dull thud of meat against bars cut the conversation off.

“Oh shit.”

“Sweet Jesu!”

“Artos? Is that you?”

The darkness seethed with possibilities-none of them good.

“It is Artos, isn’t it?” Hennan’s voice, closer to me than I’d imagined. I flinched.

“Yes.”

“And he is dead, isn’t he?” A small hand seeking mine.

“Yes.” In my left hand I held the key, removed from its hiding place, the witch’s spell undone. . Loki’s key ready for use once more, and once more free to draw the attention of any foul thing that might be seeking it.

The thud of meat on iron came again. I imagined what I couldn’t see. Artos, staggering back from the impact on dead legs, face still crawling, ready to lunge forward once more, answering the call of what I held in my hand.

“Don’t worry.” I used my bluff hero-of-the-pass voice, loud enough for everyone but aiming the message at just one pair of ears. “Don’t worry. He’s out there, and we’re in here. If he couldn’t manage to get through those bars in all the months they held him trapped on this side, he’s not going to manage to get back through them before Racso’s next visit, now is he?”

I’d barely got the words out before Mr. Cough drew in another gurgling breath as if he were drowning in whatever filth was filling his lungs. On cue, after that chilling breath rattled into Mr. Cough, my former bodyguard Artemis Canoni loosed a soft cry of agony from his corner of the cell. Neither Hennan nor I said it, but from the sudden tension in his hand I think we came to the understanding in the same moment. Artos might be trapped out there-but if Mr. Cough or Artemis Canoni were to meet their maker within the next ten hours or so before Racso came back. . the Dead King would have a new corpse to play with, and this time we’d be trapped in the cell with whatever he chose to stand back up again. Suddenly my concern for my fellow inmates reached new heights.

“Give that man with the cough some room, dammit! Don’t crowd him. Someone give him some water-there’s a copper in it for the man that does. And Artemis-where’s my faithful Artemis got to? Water for him too. And here’s a crust to dip into it.”

It took a bit of organizing but I did my best for them. Not that I had much faith in the curative powers of stale water and staler bread. Our friend outside kept bumping against the bars, and our friends inside kept muttering about why he might be doing it, but in the end with nothing to see and nothing to be done about it, we settled back into an uneasy quiet.

The truth about sheer terror is that even for a world-class coward like me it’s unsustainable. When the dreaded thing doesn’t happen hour after hour it becomes something that whilst still terrible allows a little room around the edges through which other thoughts may slip. Thoughts came. Thoughts that seeded suspicions into the blindness of the cell. Suspicions, watered by darkness, growing, slowly but relentlessly. The Red Queen’s war lay at the midst of my troubles. Her elder sister had sent me to the distant north to find the key I now held. And what was I doing in Umbertide? The Silent Sister’s twin had sent me here. It had seemed a mercy at the time, an escape from the dangers at home. . but was it? Red March mortgaged to the banks of Florence, a power struggle between House Gold and others against Kelem, the Broken Empire’s unofficial master of coin, the Dead King sticking his bony fingers into the pie. . the last staging post for Snorri before heading into the hills bearing Loki’s key to seek the door-mage out. . and young Prince Jalan thrust into the middle of it all by a man I’d come to understand more fully in Umbertide than I ever had in the palace-a man the traders here considered Red March’s unofficial master of coin. I thought of Garyus slumped in his bed, looking two steps from death as he sent me on my way with the only kind words I heard on my return. I thought of him lying there and tried to square that image with the new ones being built behind my eyes. With a start I realized I was holding Loki’s key tight to my chest. I lowered my hand, wondering if its lies were bleeding into me even now.

I sat pondering, clutching Loki’s key, shifting position every few minutes to keep from getting sore against the flagstones, until every part of me was sore and it didn’t matter any more. I would rather have set the key in a pocket but I couldn’t risk losing it, and so I held it tight, that slick and treacherous surface seeming to slide beneath my fingers like melting ice.

To start with I’d gripped the thing as if it might bite me, remembering how at my first touch memories had pulsed through me, images from the day Edris Dean killed my mother. But the key didn’t bite any more than old Artos found a way through the cell’s bars. I sat with it cool in my fist for an hour or more, listening to the sounds of the dungeon. At one point I heard a knocking, as if someone were rapping on a door close by-though I knew we had only bars and gates, no door. The knocking grew louder, more insistent, though no one around me mentioned it, and the darkness around my ears seemed crowded with whispers just beyond the edge of hearing. It lasted a minute, another, and then no more.

The fear subsided into unease, disquiet fermented into boredom, and only the long battle against sleep remained as the blind hours passed. That was when the key struck. It felt as if the key were hauled sideways. I could let it go or be dragged along with it. Darkness melted into vision though I fought with all my strength to stay where I was, and struggled to see only what lay about me. My efforts blew away in a cold wind. I stood once more on the margins of the Wheel of Osheim. The archway, that empty arch through which we’d escaped from Edris and the Hardassa Vikings stood once more before me, a lone work of the wrong-mages in the bizarre wilderness through which Kara had guided us. Of the völva, of Snorri and Tuttugu, there was no sign. No sign of me either, just my disembodied point of view, watching, unblinking, waiting for the lie, waiting for the key’s deception. And nothing came. I held a dim awareness of my body, somewhere else, in another place and time, the key a cold and heavy bar locked tight in my grip.

“It’s an odd sort of vision that shows me nothing. .” The words sounded only in my head. In Osheim the wind spoke and everything else lay silent. I stared at the arch, and at the strangely sculpted encrustations of black and glassy rock that punctuated the surrounding terrain. I looked up at the mauve wound of the sky. “What?”

Light reflecting from one of the nearer outcroppings drew my eye. Obsidian they called this stuff. I knew it not from the lecturing of some tutor but because there had been a fad back in Vermillion for jewellery made from the material. For several months one autumn everyone who was anyone was wearing it, and after Lisa DeVeer had dropped enough heavy hints on me from the considerable height of her balcony, I borrowed sufficient money to buy her a necklace fashioned from polished beads and discs of obsidian. She wore it once if I recall. . The key burned cold in my hand and suddenly I knew what it had been made from and from whence it came.

“Ah hell.” No story that begins “near the Wheel of Osheim” ends well. I looked down and saw that I’d arrived in body as well as spirit. In my hand, where the key should be was nothing but Hennan’s iron rune tablet. A moment later it was the shadow of a key. Then the key. “Kara hid you in a shadow. .” My eyes roamed up the sides of the arch, gaze sliding uncomfortably over the symbols set there in stone. “She’s dark-sworn?” I remembered the ease with which she cast Aslaug from her boat. She hadn’t opposed the spirit with light or fire, just ordered her gone. . and Loki’s daughter had fled.