The Liar's Key

by Mark Lawrence

  “Uh.” Panic seized me and my legs got ready to run away. The lout extended a raw-boned hand, reaching for my neck.

  “Knock him flat, Jal!” Hennan piped up unhelpfully from behind me. He’d got that damned “Jal” habit from Snorri.

  Inspiration struck before the bully did. “Look!” I said, and opened the hand with the key to reveal the gleaming gold disc in my grimy palm. For a second his face lit with reflected light while an amazed and stupid grin spread across his face. “Fetch!” And I tossed it through the bars into the cell behind him. A score of filthy grey bodies immediately threw themselves on top of the double florin and with a snarl my tormentor turned and charged into the fray roaring dire threats.

  “Spend it in good health.” I closed the gate behind him and locked it, slipping the key into my pocket.

  I turned back, expecting my audience to be at least a little impressed but it turned out they hadn’t gone quiet because of my little drama at gate number five. Racso stood in the mouth of the corridor, three guardsmen behind him, big men draped in chain-mail shirts with bare steel in their hands.

  “Get. Back. In.” Racso dropped each word like a stone. He’d replaced his usual baton for one ending in an ugly lump of black iron. The grey sea of bodies drew back toward the cells, the multitude of their shadows swaying and swelling across the walls as the orichalcum pulsed within my grip. A few more seconds and my chance would be gone entirely.

  “Look!” I shouted, digging out a handful of gold from the fold of my shirt and holding it toward the ceiling.

  That got their attention. Scores of heads turned on scores of scrawny necks. The peculiar nature of our incarceration meant that in my hands I held their freedom. Despite threats, sharp iron, or blunt instruments, there were few here who couldn’t buy their way out the door even now with ten double florins. Many of them could purchase their release with just one or two coins and at the very least a single coin would give them a year of food and drink, another year between them and feeding the pigs.

  I let the money do my talking. I threw the whole handful over the heads of Racso and the guardsmen and sent it rattling on down the corridor behind them.

  The effect was immediate. The debtors surged forward without a moment’s hesitation. Even Racso and the guards were looking in the direction of the departing florins. The debtors didn’t so much attack the men in their way, but rather they flowed over them, and each other, a rolling tidal advance.

  I grabbed Hennan and hurried on at the rear of the wave, setting a booted foot to the back of Racso’s thick neck as he struggled to rise. Always kick a man when he’s down, I say. It’s the best chance you’ll get.

  The debtors who had collected the most gold, scrambling for it in the half-crazed melee with almost no light to see by, now pressed on through the prison, desperate to pay out their debt before their hard-stolen florins were taken from them in turn. Those who had done less well in the free-for-all gave chase, anxious to even the distribution of funds.

  Unfortunately a few of the crowd paused to think about where the money had come from and were still paused as Hennan and I reached them. A shabby man of middling years stepped out into my path, an old woman at his shoulder naked but for smeared filth; to the side waited a young woman with straggling dirty-blond hair, heavyset and mean-eyed, wearing what seemed to have once been a sack. Three older men, small and similar enough to be relations, moved from the shadows to back them up.

  “Cough up.” The young woman held out her hand. “Three doubles will cure my ills. Heard you’re a prince. Three doubles is the cheap way past me, lover-boy.”

  Immediately the rest of them started clamouring out their demands and crowding forward in a grimy rabble.

  “Get back!” I boomed, and they stopped. Royal breeding will do that for you. The accent, the posture, and centuries of breeding the lower classes to obey, all combine to allow a prince’s outrage to carry rather further than the common man’s. “How dare you?” I drew myself up to my full height, puffing out my chest, and raised my hand to strike any of them who came near. The threat of violence must have been somewhat muted by the fact I kept my left arm clamped across my belly, holding thirty or forty more double florins tight against myself.

  “Well?” I roared. The debtors seemed frozen by my reprimands, staring at me slack-jawed. I took a sharp pace forward and all of them bolted for it, a half dozen and more of them scampering away down the dark corridor. “Well!” I grinned down at Hennan, quite surprised how successful I’d been. “I think—” Two large hands clamped about my throat and cut me off. I whipped around in panic, scattering gold, before the grip fully tightened, and found myself facing what had really scared the other debtors off. My eyes met the dead gaze of a guard whose head flopped at a wholly unnatural angle. His neck must have been broken at some point during the exodus of debtors over his prone body.

  Fear is marvellous stuff. Not only will it get you running considerably faster than you thought possible, it will lend you more strength than you should rightly own. Not enough strength, sadly, to break the hold a dead man has on your neck, since being dead seems to lend some men strength as well, but enough for me to drive my assailant back across the chamber. I slammed him into the bars of a cell. I think I also managed to knee Racso in the face on the way past as he sat up, groaning . . .

  The charge took everything out of me and I hung in the dead man’s grip, black spots crowding my vision and a feeling of distance sliding over me. The pain in my neck and lungs receded as the world drew away, shrinking to a single bright spot. I had time in that soft and enfolding darkness to reflect on two things. First, that being choked by corpses was becoming something of a habit, and second, that my only chance for survival depended upon the greed of the many and the quick thinking of a singular child.

  As the last traces of my vision faded from me I saw a dozen hands reach out through the bars, pinning the dead man to them. And just before the pounding of my heart grew so loud as to drown out all other sound, I heard the grating of a sword being dragged across stone.

  • • •

  I woke suddenly, freezing and wet.

  “Hold it!” Hennan’s voice in the dark.

  “W—” My throat hurt too much to say more.

  “Take this.” Something hard pressed into my palm and brilliance erupted, filling the space with razored white light. I closed my hand around the orichalcum and screwed my eyes shut. The boy had thrown water over me . . . I hoped it was water.

  It then occurred to me that I appeared to be a lot more naked than I had been. My next question started off as a “Where are my clothes?” but changed swiftly into “Where the hell is my money?”

  “They took it.” Hennan pointed at the last few grey backs pressing on down the corridor, a very trampled Racso in their wake. The guardsman who had been choking me lay twitching close by, furious glare fixed on me, though lacking the limbs required to make good on the threat.

  “I gave them the sword through the bars and they cut him into pieces.” Hennan winced at the memory of it.

  I levered myself up. The linen wraps my coins had been sewn into lay strewn around, stained by pooling blood. Unclenching my hand, I found Loki’s key still in my grip, my flesh marked with its impression.

  “How did they—” I rubbed my bruised throat. “Get out?”

  “I got Racso’s keys,” Hennan said.

  “You let them rob me!”

  “They had you by the legs and were taking your gold anyway. The big one said if I let them out they wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “Uh.” I supposed he had an excuse. I levered myself up, pulled on my ripped trews—they’d been very thorough in their search for florins—and got unsteadily to my feet. “C’mon.”

  We hurried after the departed debtors.

  • • •

  As hoped, close on two hundred well-motivated debt
ors put quite a hole in the prison’s security. Instead of following them toward the front entrance where they were either rioting or busy buying their way out, I found a passage leading further back. We came through three locked gates, past a deserted guard post, and out via a heavy door into a stinking high-walled yard. A full moon bathed the scene in a silvery light that disguised rather than revealed. I wrapped the orichalcum in a cloth and shoved it deep into my pocket.

  “Come on.” I led the way, stepping around the lime pits where they put the remains of debtors whose relatives had paid the body-price. Two rickety carts stood against the wall, one heaped with several skin and bone corpses bound for the pigs.

  “But . . .” Hennan grabbed my hand and anchored me.

  “What?” The anger at finding myself penniless broke out to colour my tone.

  “They’re dead,” Hennan whispered.

  “Well I’d hope so . . .” I frowned at him. He might only be a child but he’d seen plenty of dead bodies before. Then it dawned on me why we might have been better off chancing the rioting and the possibility of recapture in the front of the prison. “Shit.”

  A dry scraping sound came from the lime pits behind us and on the cart the three emaciated corpses started scrambling to untangle themselves. “Run!”

  I’m only a little ashamed to say I outsprinted the boy. Old habits die hard. It’s good to be faster than what’s chasing you, but really the important thing in running away is to be faster than the slowest of those being pursued. Rule number one: be ahead of the next man. Or child.

  The gates to the outside world towered above me, thick slabs of dry timber, iron studded, a heavy locking mechanism in the middle. I shoved in the key with an ecstasy of fumbling, turned it and pushed through with a strength born of desperation. Hennan shot through the narrow gap seconds later, a white figure hard on his heels, lime powder smoking its trail. Together we slammed the gate and Loki’s key locked it just as the first body hammered into the timbers.

  THIRTY

  “Keep running!” I grabbed Hennan’s hand and dragged him across the street that ran behind the prison. We took the first alleyway that presented itself. Dark alleys might be dangerous places but when you’re on the run from a debtors’ prison in a banking town, with dead inmates anxious to eat the soft parts of you, even the worst alley in Christendom is the frying pan not the fire.

  The narrow passages shadowed the moon as effectively as the sun, and save for the odd chink of lamplight escaping from the buildings we ran near blind. At each corner I imagined some beggar’s corpse might be standing there in the darkness, with arms wide-stretched and a hungry grin. Turn after turn proved me wrong: it was Hennan who stopped me, not some dead man hunting the key.

  The boy’s strength gave out within just a few minutes, at first he only needed a moment here and there to catch his breath, but the stops got longer and soon it was a choice of carry, drag, abandon, or stop. I felt pretty tired myself, so we stopped, hunkering down in a gated archway leading into somebody’s walled garden. I could only hope that the dead saw no better without light than the living, and that the gate at our backs would at least stop attack from that direction.

  “We just have to get past the city gates and head north. They might send riders up the Roma Road so we’ll need to take another route. The border could be a problem . . . but that’s days away.” I paused to haul in some much-needed air. “It’d be a damn sight easier if we had some money.” I allowed myself a moment’s silence to remember my lovely gold, variously thrown, scattered, and stolen in that blasted prison. My eyes prickled with the injustice of it all. I’d had a king’s ransom in that case and even when they took that I had enough tied about my person to ransom his favourite dog . . . I may even have shed a manly tear in the privacy of that darkness.

  “We need to get Snorri and the others first,” Hennan said.

  “Kara will be fine: she probably got out in the rioting. Besides, she’s a witch, I’m surprised she hasn’t used her magic and escaped already. In fact . . .” In fact I was suddenly hit by the realization that her being in the debtors’ prison at all was pretty odd. Wouldn’t they be keen to put her to the question as well?

  “We’ve got to get them out.” Hennan’s voice came insistent through the dark. “We can’t leave them in there to die!”

  “Well, yes, of course I want to rescue Snorri and Tuttugu, Hennan, it’s just . . .” It’s just I don’t want to at all because we’ll be captured or killed. “There’s no way of doing it. Not with only one man. Not even if that man’s a prince. No, what we need to do is get back to Vermillion as fast as possible and then send help.”

  “Send . . . help?” He might be just a kid but he wasn’t buying it.

  “Yes. I’ll tell the Red Queen and—”

  “They can’t wait that long! They need us to get them out now!”

  “They’ll have to wait. I don’t even know where they are for Christ’s sake!” I did, though. They’d be in the Frauds’ Tower. The grimmest of all Umbertide’s prisons, a squat grey tower wherein all the plots and ploys used outside bank-law to steal money were unravelled and undone, using a variety of variously sharp or hot or crushing implements to ensure a thorough solution. Those who stole money inside bank-law of course were very well rewarded, and known as bankers. In Umbertide the fraudster got a rawer deal than the murderer, and murderers were laid beneath a wide plank called “the door” upon which rocks were piled one at a time until the criminal was judged to be dead.

  I’d been lucky not to go straight to the Tower myself, and probably it would have been just a matter of time before I was transferred there once the full scope of my tax and tariff evasions became clear. Or perhaps my family connections had kept me out. Either way heading there now seemed like the worst idea ever.

  “I’m not going without them.” Hennan, his voice steely with determination.

  “The world doesn’t work like that, Hennan.” I tried for a fatherly tone, firm but fair. Not that I really had much to go on by way of experience. “You can’t always do something just because it’s the right thing to do. You’ve got to be sensible about these matters. Think them through.”

  “You’ve got the key. It got us out of one prison. It could get us into another.”

  He had a point. A point I needed to counter. I mean, I could have just cuffed him to the floor and set off for the hills on my own. Lord knows a prince of Red March doesn’t have to answer to a child, a common-born child at that . . . a common-born, foreign child! But the fact was that somewhere along the line something had changed, perhaps it was some lingering damage that Baraqel had inflicted on me . . . but, damn it, I knew if I just left him behind it would start to niggle at me and leave me no peace, or at least not enough peace to properly enjoy myself. So, it seemed in my best interest to convince the little bastard to come with me.

  “It’s not only a matter of keys, Hennan,” I began in a consoling tone. “There are other considerations. It’s not safe for a boy of your age. For a start the Dead King wants the key. We can’t hang around here, there are too many corpses, there’s too much for him to work with . . . cities are built on layer upon layer of dead people . . . it’s all that holds them up. And even if we made it to the right jail—”

  “There are guards. A key won’t get you past the jailers.” The speaker unhooded her lantern close by, dazzling me. I scrambled back, blocked by the gate. My hands found Hennan and held him in front of me as some kind of small and ineffectual shield.

  “Uh . . . ah . . . you have me at a disadvantage, madam.” I blinked and averted my gaze, trying to clear my eyes.

  “You need to run, Jalan. Give me the key and the Dead King will follow it instead of you.” The voice seemed familiar.

  “Kara?” I squinted through screwed up eyes. But the figure in front of me was small, a girl no older than Hennan, blond and pale, holding the lantern before
her, her dress a simple thing of white linen, a servant’s garb.

  “Give me the key and run. They’re out to get you, Jalan. You need to be safe in Vermillion.” The little girl held her hand out, palm up and open.

  I blinked away tears, my eyes adjusting to the light. “What?” It didn’t make sense.

  “Hennan can come with me.” She seemed frayed around the edges now, as if the shadows were nibbling at her. Frayed and . . . taller.

  “No.” I gripped his shoulders tighter and he gasped, trying to twist loose. Something kept me unwilling to relinquish the boy.

  “Come on, Jalan, this isn’t your place. You need to get away. You need to run.” The words had a cadence to them, a rhythm that got under my skin. I did need to get away—I did need to run. No argument there.

  The girl seemed more of a memory now—I could still imagine her there, see the blueness of her eyes, but if I blinked I saw Kara holding the lantern, ragged and dirt-smeared.

  “It’s just a glamour, a spell to fool the eye, shake it off, and look clear,” she said, and there she was, Kara, as if she’d never been anything else. “A casting to keep me from the Frauds’ Tower. Quick. We won’t have long, the dead are moving.” And still she kept her hand out.

  Hennan wrenched free of my grip. I thought he would run into her arms. Hell, I would if I knew I’d get a nice protective hug. But he ran off into the night instead—the ungrateful bastard.

  Kara glanced after him and shook her head in annoyance. “He’ll have to catch us up. We need to go now! Give me the key.”

  “Can’t you just hide it again?” I didn’t want to give it up—it was the only thing of value I had left. Just maybe it might earn me enough credit with Grandmother to forgive the loss of Garyus’s ships to my creditors. Besides, Kara wanted it too much. A poker player learns the signs—whatever else she said the only thing that mattered to her was that I hand her the key. “Turn it back into a rune again so the dead can’t sense it.”