The Liar's Key

by Mark Lawrence

  The man gasped something, his eyes bulging, shot through with burst veins.

  “Put him down so he can answer my question, Guardian.”

  The soldier opened his hand and the man fell with all the grace of a grain sack.

  I came a few steps closer. Close enough to smell that the man had soiled himself. “Tell me again. And make sure you get it right or Guardian here will come back and pull your arms off.”

  “Cells ten and thirteen, level four.” The clerk heaved in a wheezing breath. “Please don’t hurt—” The soldier swept him in its grip again.

  “Keep going then!” I shooed the soldier on. “Wait, stop!” It jerked to a halt, teetering mid-step. “Go back and get the guard from the street.” Even if he didn’t wake up in a hurry he would attract attention left lying in the road.

  Guardian dutifully clunked outside and returned with the unconscious guard over one shoulder. I closed and bolted the door once the soldier was through.

  “Stairs!” I waved the mechanism on and it moved past me, through the foyer, great feet clanking on stone until it reached the central spiral of steps. A large gate of crossed iron bars, a boss set with a rose symbol at each junction, sealed the stairs. Various doors led off into rooms or corridors around the stairwell and a thorough man, or at least a cautious man like me, should really have secured the ground floor first to ensure a clear escape and no attackers sneaking up from behind. On the other hand, Edris Dean had almost certainly gone straight up to Snorri’s cell with his torture warrant. I set Loki’s key into the gate’s lock and turned it. “Level four! That’s what the man said!”

  On level one a jailer startled from his doze, nearly falling off his chair. He managed a brief and startled shout before Guardian clubbed him with the clerk. The familiar human stink told me they kept prisoners here and unlocking doors off the stairwell revealed the jailer’s sleeping quarters, a storeroom, broom closet, and a corridor leading to a passage that paralleled the Tower’s perimeter, running in a circle between two concentric rings of cells. Heavy doors, each set with a small barred window, lined the passage walls. Guardian deposited the door guard, ground floor guard, jailer, and clerk into the first of these, surprising the ragged and elderly man inside with this unexpected company.

  Returning to the stairs behind Guardian, I could hear cries of alarm from the levels above us. Evidently the jailer’s strangled squeak and subsequent flattening with a blunt instrument hadn’t gone unnoticed.

  “Up! Up!” I clapped my hands. “And you, stay close.” I motioned Hennan to my side and held my short sword ready. The fear had started nipping at my heels now. Guardian led on. The jailer on the second level had kept his station, standing with brass-banded club in hand and flanked by two guardsmen, steel drawn. Guardian advanced on them, arms wide, as they stared in disbelief. The jailer dropped his club, one guardsman managed a half-hearted thrust that glanced off the soldier’s armour, and all three were swept up into a metal embrace.

  “We’ll lock them up.” I hurried past to unlock the door to the corridor and then the first door off the corridor. Guardian followed to toss its captives into what proved this time to be an empty cell. “Quickly!” I didn’t know how much time we had, but I knew for sure it was running out fast.

  Guardian set off up the stairs with me right behind. Almost before the soldier had taken its first step a prison guard hurtled down the spiral hollering the kind of battle cry that sounds mostly like terror, his short sword raised on high. The man had no time to register what he was up against before being backhanded into the wall. Guardian caught the guard’s limp form in both hands on the rebound.

  “Damn.” The crimson smear along the stonework told an unpleasant story. “Careful! You don’t need to hurt them!” I’m not perhaps the most generous of souls but generally there’s no murder in me. It’s not conscience so much as being squeamish, and also afraid of the repercussions. For Edris Dean though I would make an exception and call it justice.

  Guardian took three more strides carrying the guardsman, clearing five steps a time and leaving them spattered with blood. Without warning the guardsman’s head snapped back up revealing a gleam of fractured white skull in the scarlet mess where the left side of his head should be. His eyes found me and the appetite in them made my legs too weak for stair climbing. Hennan crashed into my back.

  “He’s dead!” Fear reduced my voice to a squeak. The guardsman started to struggle in Guardian’s grip. “Quick! Make an end of him!” I found my shout.

  Guardian carried out his instruction with gruesome efficiency, ramming the corpse’s head into the wall with a steel palm and pressing until nothing remained but a splat of bloody porridge and bone shards dribbling down the wall. I vomited acidic yellow drool onto the step in front of me.

  “Keep hold of the body and keep moving.” I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand then looked for somewhere to wipe the back of my hand. I moved on past my own mess and the one on the wall, clutching at my nose which being sick had made throb like a bastard for some reason, and trying to shield my eyes so I didn’t have to see the corpse still twitching in Guardian’s grip.

  “At least they’re easier to deal with when you’ve got help.” Hennan, close behind me, sounding less scared than I felt.

  “One dead man isn’t the problem,” I said, still sounding nasal. “They know where we are now.” If the Dead King had looked at us through those eyes he could be steering every dead body in the city our way. I wondered just what might be waiting for us outside when we came back down the stairs. Up until this point the worst my imagination had shown me was rank upon rank of city guard.

  We stepped from the stairwell through the arch onto the third floor, keeping close to Guardian. It looked identical to the floor below, absent the jailer and guards. I could see down the short corridor into the passage that circled the Tower—something seemed off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “We’ve got to check for guards,” I said. “Can’t have them escaping to raise the alarm.” Or creeping up behind us.

  Guardian took three heavy steps into the room. Another heavy footstep and something huge loomed from the side where the column of the stairs had hidden it. It came out swinging—swinging a large iron door, which immediately resolved what had looked wrong about the place: the corridor to the cells should have been hidden behind a locked door.

  The impact of the blow knocked Guardian off his feet and sent him slamming into the wall, reducing the jailer’s desk to splinters on his way. For a moment Hennan and I stood horrified, gazing up into the gleaming red-copper eyes of a clockwork soldier both broader and taller than Guardian. The thing held the dented iron door over its head in a pincered grip, ready to squash us like flies. And, unlike flies, we were neither of us quick enough off the mark when the soldier began to swing the door down toward us. Cogs whirred as great brass and steel muscles contracted and the iron door came speeding down, on course to reduce us both to stains.

  Guardian leapt to intervene, as if driven by a single huge and coiled spring he shot in beneath the blow, narrowly missing taking my head off, and drove into the newcomer’s chest. Both went tumbling across the stone floor, their progress arrested by a crunching impact with the opposite wall. They rose, locked in combat, each gripping the other’s hands and straining to break some vital part.

  “We should help Guardian.” Hennan said it with conviction but made no move to do anything.

  “We should get to Snorri and Tuttugu while we still can,” I said, although “we should run away while we still can” very nearly came out instead. I grabbed the boy and pushed him back onto the stairs. Behind us the two metal combatants thrashed around with no concern for bystanders. A wild kick from Guardian knocked a chunk of stone nearly as big as my head from the corner where the cell passage led off and sent it ricocheting off the walls. I couldn’t tell who was winning but although the tower-soldier
was the larger of the two, Guardian had been fully wound for the first time in centuries and the extra strength that bought him soon began to make itself told. Metal strained against metal, joints creaked, reinforcing bars groaned under the pressure, and gears ratcheted up through their cycles.

  “Jal!” Hennan tugging at me.

  A rivet from the tower-soldier’s armour shot free and hit the arch above my head, pulverizing a small piece of the stonework. Taking my cue, I ducked back and hurried past the boy, off up the stairs.

  The fourth floor had a different smell to it, a stench of blood and vomit. You couldn’t miss it, not even with a broken nose. On the jailer’s station downstairs a truncheon and lantern had hung; on this level manacles, ropes and gags depended from various pegs in addition to the usual tools of the trade. This floor had more to it than just wasting away people’s lives in small stone boxes. Here they hurt people. Every piece of me wanted to run—it felt as though I were voluntarily putting myself into Cutter John’s care. A sharp metallic retort echoed up the stairwell as some vital part of one of the soldiers surrendered to the pressures mounting against it.

  “We should check the cells.” Hennan, stepping forward. “Find Snorri and Tutt.” He’d never seen the horrors I’d seen, never been tied to a table and visited by Maeres Allus. Also he wasn’t a coward. The short sword trembled in my grip, feeling too heavy, and awkward. Every piece of me wanted to flee, but somehow the sum of them stepped forward on uncertain legs, pushing Hennan behind me. A small voice behind my eyes cut through the baying panic—without Snorri at my side I wouldn’t get far out of the city, perhaps not even past the reach of the Tower’s shadow. When I reasoned it as a more forward-looking version of running for the hills my legs seemed better prepared to play their role.

  I went to the jailer’s station and took the lantern from its hook. The jailers had left in a hurry, perhaps gathering together on the top floor to make a stand. If so I hoped they stayed there. If they found their courage and came down in a group I’d be sunk. I made a quick check for any sign of jailers or guardsmen then unlocked the door to the cell corridor. The stink lay thicker here, sharp with something new and unpleasant . . . a burnt smell.

  Hennan tried to rush on ahead. I held him back. “No.” And advanced, short sword out before me, lantern in the other hand, sending the blade’s shadow dancing across the walls.

  “Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen.” Hennan read the numbers from above the doors. I didn’t know if he could read but his grandfather had at least taught him the Roman number runes.

  “Watch the corridor for me,” I told him. I didn’t know what waited beyond the door but it probably wasn’t something he needed to see.

  “It’s dark!” Hennan waved an arm at the gloom.

  “So watch for a light!” I turned from him, held my lantern up, out of my line of sight, and placed the key into the lock. It fitted perfectly as always, almost eager to turn. With the door unlocked I returned the key to my pocket and drew the short sword I’d stolen. Edris could be waiting on the other side. The door creaked as I pushed it and the stink hit me immediately, a sewer stench, laced with vomit and decay, together with smoke and an awful aroma of burned meat.

  Tuttugu looked smaller in death than he had in life. The weight that he’d carried across frozen tundra and wild oceans despite meagre rations seemed to have dropped from him in less than a week in the Tower. They’d torn away his beard leaving just scraps of it here and there amid raw flesh. He lay upon the table they had tortured him on, still bound hand and foot, the marks of the iron on his arm, belly, thighs. The brazier still smoked, three irons with cloth-wrapped handles jutting from its small basket of coals. They’d been ready, waiting for the authorization, and set to work immediately.

  I stood, looking around stupidly, not knowing what to do. The chamber was otherwise empty, a water jug on its side on the floor, broken, a bucket in the corner. And, seeming at odds with its surroundings, a mirror in a wooden frame hung from a chain-hook above the table, a cheap thing and tarnished, but out of place.

  Blood from Tuttugu’s cut throat pooled about his head. It had soaked into the red curls of his hair and dripped between the planks to the flagstones beneath. He must have been alive when we entered the Tower . . .

  “Hennan!” I spun around.

  Edris already had the boy, his sword at his neck, the other hand knotted in his hair. They stood opposite the doorway, against the corridor wall.

  “You hid in one of the other cells . . .” I should have been terrified for myself, or angry for Tuttugu, or worried for the child, but somehow none of those emotions would come, as if the part of me that dealt with such things had had enough and gone home for the night.

  “So I did.” Edris nodded.

  I hadn’t seen a friend dead before. I’d seen dead men aplenty, and some of them I’d liked well enough. Arne Deadeye and the quins I’d liked. But Tuttugu, lowborn and foreign as he was, had become a friend. I could admit that now he was gone.

  “Let the boy go.” I lifted my short sword. The steel Edris held to Hennan’s neck was rune-marked and stained with necromancy, its blade considerably longer than mine, but whether that would still prove an advantage in the confines of the corridor I couldn’t say. “Let him go.”

  “I will,” Edris nodded, that crooked smile of his on narrow lips, “to be sure. Only first give me this key everyone’s talking about, hey?”

  I watched his face, shadows twitching across it. The half-light caught his age, seamed with old scars, grey, but toughened by the years rather than diminished. I set the lantern down, keeping back out of his reach, and fished for the key in my pocket. In the moment my fingers made contact a younger face pulsed across Edris’s, the one he’d worn when he killed my mother, killed my sister inside her, and driven the same blade he held now into my chest. Just for a beat of my heart. Only his eyes remaining unchanged.

  I drew the key out, a piece of blackness like the shape of a key, cut through the world into night. The Norse called it Loki’s key, in Christendom they’d name it the Devil’s key, neither title offered anything but tricks, lies, and damnation. The Liar’s key.

  Edris’s smile broadened to show teeth. “Give it to the boy. When we’re safely past whatever’s making that racket downstairs I’ll take it from him and let him go.”

  To some men the desire for revenge can be a craving that will lead them on through one danger into another—it can consume them, a burning light outshining all others making them blind to danger, deaf to caution. Some call those men brave. I call them fools. I knew myself for a prince of fools to have let my anger lead me into the Tower in the first place, in defiance of all reason. Now, even with Tuttugu dead behind me and his murderer before me, all the anger in me blew out like a flame. The sharp edge at Hennan’s throat captured the light, and my attention. Shadows outlined the tendons stretched taut beneath the skin, the veins, the swell of his neck. I knew what a ruin one quick draw of that steel would make of it. Edris had opened Mother’s throat with the same economy a butcher uses when slaughtering pigs. With the same indifference. With the same edge.

  “What’s it to be, Prince Jalan?” Edris pressed the blade closer, hand to the back of the boy’s head to help press him into the cut.

  All I wanted was to be out of there, miles away on the back of a good horse, riding for home.

  “Here.” I walked toward them with the key held out. “Take it.”

  Hennan looked at me with furious eyes, giving me that same mad look Snorri was wont to offer up at the worst possible times.

  “Take it!” I made a snarl of the order and stepped out through the doorway. Even so, and with Edris twisting his hand still tighter into the boy’s hair, I didn’t think Hennan was going to accept it. And then he did.

  Hennan snatched the key from me and I slumped, relief washing over me. I saw that look come over the boy, eyes widening as
the thing fed its poisons into him, opening doors in his mind, filling him with whatever visions and lies it had stored up for Hennan Vale.

  “No!” And in one sharp motion Hennan tossed the key past me, into Tuttugu’s cell.

  I found myself lunging at Edris, the point of my blade driving at the place his smile had fallen from. He proved quick—damn quick—managing to raise his sword and deflect my thrust. I may have nicked the lobe of his ear as the blow slipped past. Hennan spun away, leaving plenty of hair in Edris’s grip, but the boy slipped, struck his head against the wall and tumbled on to collapse boneless somewhere in the dark length of the corridor.

  “Ah.” I backed off into the doorway. All around me the sounds of movement in the cells, the occupants roused by the clash of steel, a muffled bellowing close at hand. “Sorr—”

  Edris made to cut off my apology with his sword so I saved my breath for defending. Swordplay on the training ground is one thing, but when an evil bastard is trying to cut bits off you most of that goes out the window. Your mind, at least my mind, remembers almost nothing when soaked in the raw terror of someone doing their level best to kill you. Any memory is done by your muscles which, if they’ve been trained year in year out, with or without much enthusiasm on your part, will make the best they can of what they learned in order to keep you alive.

  The sound of sword hammering into sword in close confines is deafening, terrifying. I turned one thrust after the next, backing slowly, yelping when they came too close.

  “Take the damn key.” I inserted the gasp into the melee.

  Fifteen more years didn’t weigh heavy on Edris. He showed the same quickness and skill that had got the better of my mother’s guard, Robbin, back in the Star Room. It proved all I could do to fend him off. The reach of his long sword meant I’d no chance of getting to him even if I’d had a heartbeat to make any sort of attack.