*
Safely back at the caves, Eleanor dug out Nicholas’s key and placed it on the table next to the other two – then stopped, frozen in surprise and horror. She hadn’t really looked at it in the forest, but here it was obvious. It was a completely different design.
“Bastard!” she muttered. “That bastard. He was carrying the wrong key.”
At some point when she wasn’t looking, Nicholas and Ivan had changed her plan. Ragal picked up his own key and the new one, holding them side by side.
“Are you saying this isn’t the third key, after all?”
“Yes. Nicholas showed me his key in his office – it was clearly the same design as these two.” She picked up Nathaniel’s key from the table. “Just with these pins spaced a bit wider, this one up a bit...”
“Then we have failed.” Ragal looked even older than usual. “We won’t get a second chance.”
Eleanor was still studying Nathaniel’s key. She turned it slowly in her hand, squinting at the head, considering every detail.
“Wait,” she said. “Let me have that back a moment.” She held her hand out to Ragal for the second one.
“What is it?” he asked as he placed it into her palm.
“I have an idea.” She held the two keys side by side, looking from one to the other, and smiled. “I think I can do this. Now, I just need Harold.”
The others looked confused, but she offered no explanation before pocketing the keys and almost running to the makeshift smithy. Harold had set up his workshop in a high-roofed cave, and was engraving the hilt of a small curved dagger when she came in. He looked up as she approached.
“I love that you still care about the details, even in days like these,” she said. “Really. But I think I’m going to need to divert your efforts for a time.”
“Oh?” He laid the dagger down on his worktop. “Wait a moment, I’ve got something for you first.”
He reached into one of the pockets of his leather apron and brought out a small silver object.
“Young Raf gave me a sketch and asked me to make this up. Now, what can I do for you?”
Eleanor took the pendant and stared at it, speechless. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to tell it apart from the original if she held them side by side, except for the slightly sharpened point that would make the bottom of this one into a lethal weapon just as soon as she filled it with an appropriate poison.
“Thank you,” she said at last. “When did he possibly have time..?”
“He came to see me just as he was leaving for the Shadows. Said you’d want me to do this one thing before I gave up my smithy.”
“Unbelievable.” She tucked it safely inside her coin purse and brought out one of the keys. “Now, back to business. If I asked you to make a copy of this, that’d be so easy as to be boring, wouldn’t it?”
“It’d be easy enough to make a moulding, yes.”
“Well, I’d hate to bore you.” She pulled the second key from her pocket. “What I need is a third key, that happens to be similar to these two.”
“Similar?”
“Yeah, I need this middle pin brought into line with this left one,” – she held the keys side by side and pointed as she spoke – “and this second pin somewhere to the right, and this...”
Harold interrupted her: “Are these what I think they are?”
“If you think they’re the keys to our fallback plans, then yes.”
“You’ve seen the third key.”
She nodded.
“And you want me to make a copy, based on your memories of its shape.”
“Yes.”
“And you know that if we get this wrong...”
“I know. We can’t afford a mistake.”
“Okay.” He reached across and took both the keys from her hands. “Let’s get to work.”
He pulled a ball of soft clay from his bag and broke it into three chunks. He made one deep impression with each of the keys, then turned back to Eleanor, kneading the third lump of clay in his fingers.
“Now you’re going to talk me through this one pin at a time. Are there any that are in exactly the same place as pins from the other two keys?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Start from the top, then.”
“Okay. We’ll need those two closer together – so that left one lines up here, and the right one just here.” She pointed with the tip of her littlest finger, but still couldn’t get enough precision. She thought for a moment before pulling a hairpin from her head. “Hang on, let’s try that again. This line here, and then here.”
Harold nodded and made two small, careful pin pricks in his clay, then held up both other keys in turn to compare the alignment of the marks to Eleanor’s description.
“The next one’s more complicated,” she said. “It was a pin the size of this one, at the bottom, but up here. No, not quite where that one is, just a fraction further right.”
The negotiation of each pin – size, position, angle – was a long and painful process, but eventually Harold had etched a plan of the key into the surface of his clay.
“And what about depth?” he asked. “They’re all different depths, look.”
She examined the jagged pattern of the other two keys. “Give me a moment to think,” she said. “I didn’t really have that long to study it.”
“Take as long as you need. I’m going to make up wax models of these other two.”
He took his two clay imprints, poured molten wax into the holes, and set them aside to harden while he continued his engraving. Eleanor sat with her eyes closed, visualising the moment when Nicholas had shown her the key. Every so often she opened her eyes to check something against one of the two keys on the table in front of her.
When the wax had solidified Harold broke the clay away from the moulds, using first his fingernail and then a slim file to scrape fragments of clay from between the pins of the wax keys.
“One more time,” he said. “If you could remind me which of these other pins corresponds to each of these marks I’ve made. And then, the depths.”
Eleanor started to repeat herself, and then stopped short. “Wait. We’re doing this all wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“Whoever created these keys wasn’t quite as smart as we’ve been giving him credit for. I don’t need to remember the depths and the settings. You don’t need to trust my memory, there’s a pattern here.”
Harold squinted at the two keys. “A pattern? I can see they’re the same style, of course, but I don’t see any pattern.”
“It’s complicated. I never could have worked it out if I hadn’t seen all three parts.” She struggled to believe it herself, it was such a convoluted series of transformations. But as she checked each pin, the mapping held. “Whoever made this, he’s... he’s like Daniel. Obsessed with symmetry and logic and neatness. He couldn’t make three keys and just make them different, even though they needed to be distinct. He had to do something that would make a kind of sense if you looked at all three together.”
“Okay, we’re going to try this a couple of different ways,” Harold said. “We’ll do one just as you described it to me, and one by following this pattern. And if we get the same result, we might yet dare to trust it.”
Revolution (Chronicles of Charanthe #2) Page 40