The Liar's Key

by Mark Lawrence

  I rubbed my sore eyes and sat back on my haunches. A yawn overwhelmed me. I felt more tired and in need of sleep than I had at any point in my life. All I really wanted to do was lie down and close my eyes . . .

  “We have to do something!” Hennan tugged at my shirtsleeve with new resolve. “Snorri would never leave you in there!”

  “I wouldn’t be in there!” I bristled at the suggestion. “I’m no fraud—” I broke off, realizing that in the eyes of Umbertide’s officialdom that was exactly what I was. Very likely only my family name had saved me the horrors of the Tower, or perhaps the paperwork just hadn’t had time to go through. Considering Umbertide’s addiction to bureaucracy, and the glacial pace with which they progressed things, the latter guess was possibly the true answer.

  I looked up with a shudder at the granite walls of the Frauds’ Tower. High above us the first rays of the sun were warming terracotta tiles on the conical roof. Snorri had held out against his jailers’ questions for days now, how many I couldn’t say, four? Five? And for what? Eventually they’d break him and, for all he knew, take the key. His pain was as pointless as his quest. Did he really think someone would save him? Who the hell was going to do that? Who did he even know? Certainly not anyone he could possibly expect to storm the jail and get him out . . .

  “We could climb the . . .” Hennan trailed off, silencing himself—I didn’t even have to tell him that we couldn’t.

  “God damn it, the big idiot can’t think that . . . I? That’s just not reasonable! I don’t even—”

  “Shhhh!” Hennan turned and pushed me back.

  Two men passed our side street, deep in conversation. We crouched, hidden behind a flight of steps, me fighting a sudden urge to sneeze.

  “. . . the other one. The regulations though! Do this, do that, get this signed . . . ah Jesus! Ten forms, two courts, and five days just to set a hot iron to flesh!” A solid man, thick-necked, silhouetted against the brightening Patrician Street. Something familiar about him.

  “Everything in its time, specialist, and in its turn. It is not as if the duress applied so far has been . . . gentle. The law requires that beating, the stick, and the flail are used before irons. A case must be made for each, along with the correct . . .” The second man’s voice trailed off as they carried on down the street. A horse clattered by in the opposite direction, black-clad rider astride its back. Soon the streets would be full of errands as banking hours arrived.

  I raised myself above the steps and looked down at Hennan. “There was something . . .” The second man had seemed familiar too, though I only saw him in silhouette, a smaller man, a modern to judge by the stupidity of his hat. Something about his gait, very precise, very measured. And the voice of the first . . . he’d had an accent. “Come on!”

  I dragged Hennan to the corner and, crouching, peered after the pair. They’d crossed over to present themselves to the clockwork soldier at the Tower door and stood with their backs to us. The soldier dwarfed them both, taking the scroll offered by the taller of the two in a surprisingly delicate pincered grip. The modern turned a fraction so I caught his profile. Like all his kind, he had the white face of a man who avoided the sun with fanaticism, but this particular shade of fish-belly white went past even the pallor of a Norseman in winter. “Marco!”

  “Who’s—” I clamped a hand over Hennan’s mouth and pulled him back.

  “Marco,” I said. “A banker. One of the least human humans I’ve ever met, and I’ve known some monsters.” Also the last person I wanted to see since I owed his bank more than I owed Maeres Allus. But what was he doing here? Had it been the House Gold who put a sixty-four thousand florin debt on a beggar boy and set him to starve in debtors’ prison? Was it House Gold that had turned the wheels and cogs of Umbertide justice to licence hot irons to loosen Snorri’s tongue?

  I risked another glance around the corner. Marco had already set off up the street. The soldier held the door of the Frauds’ Tower ajar for the specialist and as the man slipped through the gap I caught a glimpse of him. Just a glimpse, a snatch of dark tunic, grey trews, dusty boots, and his hair—I saw that too—close-cropped to the skull, iron grey, with just a band of it yet untouched by age, running front to back, a crest so black as to almost be blue.

  “Ow!” Hennan tore free of my grip where my fingers dug into his arm. “What was that for?”

  “Edris Dean,” I said. “Edris fucking Dean.” And I stood and walked out into the new day.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I’m cursed with berserker blood. Perhaps it’s the Red Queen’s taint, her penchant for violence breaking out of me in rare but concentrated bursts. It’s happened twice to my knowledge and I don’t remember anything but fragments of the time that followed, just loose images of blood and dying, my blade cutting a red path through other men’s flesh. That, and the screaming. Mostly mine. I can’t remember the emotion of it, not anger, not hate, just those images as if seeing pieces of another man’s nightmare.

  Walking out into Patrician Street in the first light of what must be my last day I still had my fear but it seemed as though I’d put it in a small box somewhere at the back of my mind. I heard its shrieks of terror, its demands, its attempts at reasoning with me . . . but, like the boy’s shouts at my back, it was just noise. Perhaps the lack of sleep had me dreaming on my feet. Nothing felt quite real. I didn’t know what I would do except that Edris Dean would be dead at the end of it. As I approached the clockwork soldier I lifted a hand before me steady and sure, no sign of a tremor in it.

  The thing took a step toward me, looking down to study my features, copper eyes burning. At each move it made a thousand gears hummed, a million teeth meshed, from the minute, through small to large, to cog-jaws big enough to eat me. “Yes?” A proper clockwork voice this time, a metallic rasping that somehow made sense.

  The boy stood at my side now. I could see him reflected in the silver-steel of the soldier’s armour, warped and distorted, but still Hennan. He’d tried to drag me back, tried to stop my advance, and found he couldn’t. Strange, when this was what he’d been demanding all along. We’re like that. Give us everything we ask for and suddenly it’s too much.

  The soldier’s breastplate gleamed, bearing few scratches despite its age, but in one place, low in the side, a puncture wound spoiled the perfection, a dark, angular hole, driven through the thickness of the silver-steel, a gauge no man could support and a metal no smith could work. “You can be hurt then . . .” I turned and took the boy by the shoulder. “Go to the door, Hennan.” I angled him and thrust him toward it.

  “State the nature of your request.” The soldier flexed its fingers, articulated in many places and each as long as my forearm. It put me in mind of the unborn monster built from the graves in Taproot’s campsite. It had taken an elephant to put that down, and the soldier looked like an elephant might just bounce off it.

  “I just came to see what the boy is doing,” I said. “It looks as if he’s breaking in.”

  The soldier pivoted about its spine, the upper half of it rotating toward the door behind it. A clockwork soldier doesn’t worry about presenting its back to a potential enemy. All that slamming a battle-axe between its shoulders would do is ruin a good axe and remove any doubt concerning whether you were an enemy or not.

  I had one hand in my pocket. It closed now about the key. Loki’s key. The thing felt cold against my fingers, slick, as if it would slip from them at the first chance for treachery. I pulled it clear and a dark pulse of joy rang up my arm.

  High above me, between silver shoulder plates, a circular depression edged with intricate teeth glittered in the light. Up close I could see not just one ring of teeth but a second set further back and narrower, then a third and fourth, and more, forming a cone-shaped indentation maybe two inches across. The key held the shape of the one whose shadow Racso set upon it, a crude and heavy thing, a notched rectangul
ar plate on a thick shaft some six inches long.

  Olaaf Rikeson had held this key before Snorri had. It had been taken from his frozen corpse, and before he died Rikeson had raised an army with it. An army that thought it could march on the gates of Jotenheim and face down the giants that even the gods feared. Olaaf had opened more than doors with this key—he had opened hearts, he had opened minds.

  Reaching as high as I could, I lunged forward and slammed the key into the soldier’s winding lock. The obsidian flowed beneath my grip, colder than ice, searing my skin, but I kept hold and in the moment it met the lock the key became a thick black rod ending in a cone pitted with an infinity of notches.

  There’s a rule for doing and undoing, a rule older than empires, even a word to go with it, clockwise, and the opposite, anti-clockwise. One direction to wind up, the opposite to wind down. In the heat of the moment, in the cold terror of the moment, I just guessed. I set every part of my strength behind the task. For three pulses of my heart, each seeming to boom out slower than the most solemn funeral beat, the bastard thing wouldn’t move. Time congealed all about me. The soldier halted its own rotation with a shuddering clunk and began to turn back toward me, starting to drag the key from my hand. One arm reached for me, articulating against the elbow joint in a way that gave the lie to any pretence of humanity. Long metal fingers stretched wide to encircle my waist, each ending in talons razored to slice flesh from bone.

  Maybe the additional fear lent me strength, or Loki had had his joke by that point, but without warning the lock surrendered and the key turned. It gave with a sharp jerk accompanied by a sound like something expensive breaking. A resonating metallic twang followed, and a multi-tonal whirring as a thousand wheels, flywheels, cogs and escapements spun free. The soldier ground to a halt just as the key wrenched from my grip and that metal face turned my way. The whole thing slumped, the strange light dying from those copper eyes, and within the span of a single second the entirety of that great steel behemoth stood inert before me, no hint of sound, and without rumour of motion.

  The fingers of the soldier’s hand nearly met around my chest, the point of the claw on the longest finger having sliced a three-inch tear into my shirt, a small crimson stain just beginning to spread through the fabric at the far end.

  “Shit!” I took hold of the finger and tried to pry it back. Hennan rushed to help, glancing nervously at the soldier as he tugged. Despite the mechanism’s apparently relaxed slump there wasn’t any give in the thing, I might as well be caged in iron bars.

  “Slip through,” Hennan said.

  “What?” The most emaciated corpse behind the debtors’ prison couldn’t slip through the gap between the fingers.

  Hennan raised his arms above his head by way of answer and wriggled down onto his haunches.

  “Ah.” Undignified, but what the hell? I followed his example and a moment later was crawling out from beneath the soldier’s hand with no additional injuries save for the brocaded epaulette torn from my shoulder.

  “You stopped it!” Hennan stood gazing up at the soldier, showing a degree of awe now that he was close up that had proved lacking when we’d watched from the corner and he’d urged me to storm the place with nothing but my bare fists to defeat the guards.

  “If I can’t do better than that we’re in trouble.” Some large part of my mind had set itself screaming at me to run. But Edris Dean’s face floated over that noise, not as he’d been on Beerentoppen this spring, but as he’d looked when Mother slipped bloody from his sword. The scarlet stain from the soldier’s claw spread like a memory of the wound Edris’s blade gave me that day. It grew slowly, blossoming from the site of the old injury that had nearly taken my life. For a moment the sight hypnotized me.

  “Jal!” Hennan, urgent, tugging at my sleeve.

  “Prince Jalan,” I said. “Unhand me.” I shook him off, recovered the key, and walked around to face the soldier head on. The street lay empty left and right. A messenger clattered through the cross-roads fifty yards further on, intent on his business. I reached up and took hold of the soldier’s shoulder, stepping onto its knee and hauling myself up.

  “Jal—Prince—we should . . .” Hennan gestured at the door.

  “It’s locked and there are men with swords on the other side,” I said, staring at the soldier’s gleaming metal skull.

  On the smooth forehead where my face distorted in hideous reflection a small metal disc lay raised a hair above the surrounding. I banged the side of it with the base of the key and slid it aside to reveal a small circular hole no wider than the pupil of an eye. I pressed the cone-shaped point of the key to the hole and willed Loki’s piece of trickery into action. It took a moment’s concentration before the obsidian started to flow again, liquid night reforming beneath my fingers, cold with possibility, draining into the narrowness of the hole until all I held was the end of a thin black rod.

  “You’re mine.” I whispered it, remembering Yusuf waiting with me in the House Gold, the blackness of his smile as he told me how the Mechanists’ machine coded a rod to each new owner and that rod, inserted into the specified clockwork soldier’s head, would transfer its loyalty to the person who had purchased it. I felt the rod change, felt it lock, and then, with a twist, I drew it slowly out, six obsidian inches of it. “Mine!” Louder now.

  “But . . .” Hennan, frowning as I jumped down beside him. “You broke it . . .”

  “I unwound it,” I said. “There’s a difference. And it was pretty much unwound in any case.” I moved back around to the winding port. The key changed to fit the indentation as I reached toward it. “Let’s . . .” I started to turn the key in the opposite direction to my first attempt. “See . . .” I put some muscle into it. “What . . .” Throughout the soldier’s torso cogs began to whisper and whirr. “We . . .” I kept turning. “Can . . . Do.”

  I’m no scholar or artificer but I seem to recall that the physic of things is much like that of life. You don’t get anything for nothing, and if you want a lot out you’ve got to put a lot in. I wanted a lot out of my newest possession and I didn’t want to put a lot in. By rights I should have stood there winding for an hour just to get the thing to take a single step forward, but the key I held had its own rules. The key had been crafted to unlock, to remove obstacles, to allow the user to get where they wanted to. I wanted to get to a fully wound soldier. Its failure to work was the obstacle before me. I remembered how when I’d held the orichalcum I could, with enough focus and will, direct the wild pulsing of its illumination into a single brilliant beam and steer it forward until my concentration failed and it fell apart. I summoned that same focus and tried to will whatever potential I had in me into a single beam driven through the black rod in my hand and into the metal mass of the soldier.

  With each turn of the key the noise from within the soldier grew, wheels rotating, springs groaning, cogs buzzing in a fury of motion, creaks and twangs as things deep within grew tighter, tighter, and tighter still. I thought of Edris Dean and turned the key though it resisted me and threatened to tear the very skin from my palm rather than rotate another degree. The soldier groaned, its armour flexed as deep inside the reservoirs of its power clenched into potent cores that might drive it on for another seven centuries. The great head above me turned on a neck of silver-steel collars, gears meshing, cricks giving with high pitched retorts. And the eyes that found me blazed even in the light of the new day.

  “Jalan Kendeth,” it said in a voice sharp with angles and twanging like lute strings wound too tight.

  “Prince Jalan,” I corrected it. “See this child.” I pointed and waited for the head to swivel and fix upon Hennan. “Hennan Vale. We’re going into this jail to extract two prisoners. You are to precede us and protect us from anyone trying to stop us.”

  The soldier’s head rotated back toward me, a smooth and sudden motion, far more rapid than its movements prior to rewindin
g. “This will contravene numerous laws applying in the city of Umbertide.”

  “Duly noted. Let’s go.” And I waved it toward the formidable door that gave access into the Frauds’ Tower.

  The soldier strode smartly to the door and rapped four times. I heard rattling, someone mutter, and the door began to open. The soldier jerked it wide and the guardsman behind came sprawling out into the street, dragged by the door handle. He landed face first a short distance before me. I kicked him in the head as he got to all fours.

  “Son of a bitch!” I’d been about to apologize for kicking the man while he was down but it hurt me more than him. I hobbled around his senseless form muttering more explicit curses under my breath, pausing only to slide his short sword from its scabbard.

  The clockwork soldier had vanished inside by the time I reached the entrance. I managed to grab Hennan’s shoulder and haul him back. “Fools rush in. And granted this whole exercise is deeply stupid, but let’s not make it worse.” I pushed him behind me and peered into the foyer. The soldier stood there with a guardsman in one metal hand and a clerk, plucked from behind the counter, in the other. Maybe they were gripped too tightly to holler for help or they were too scared of being ground to pulp, but either way they both held quiet.

  “Well, done . . . erm . . . do you have a name?” I looked up at the soldier.

  “Guardian.”

  “Well done, Guardian. Best not to kill anyone you don’t have to. We can put these two in a cell if they behave themselves.” I should be terrified. I should be four blocks away and still sprinting, but when I tried to reach for my fear all I found was Edris’s face as it had been fifteen years ago, and Mother sliding off his sword for the thousandth time, with that same look of surprise. “You, clerk.” I pointed unnecessarily at the balding man, his pot belly bulging through the gaps between Guardian’s many-knuckled fingers, his face purpling. “What cell are the northmen in and how do we get there?”