The Liar's Key

by Mark Lawrence

  “No.”

  I wondered how far I could push him. Kelem clearly feared Loki’s curse more than he feared losing sixty-four thousand in gold. But perhaps less than he feared opening the door into death.

  I held up a hand and stepped to Kara’s side, leaning in close to whisper in her ear. Damn but I wanted her, even there, even then, even sweat-slick and with the suspicion in her eyes. “Kara . . . how dangerous is this curse?”

  She stepped back, her fingers on my chest. “Why didn’t Skilfar take the key from Snorri?”

  “Um . . .” I battled to remember. “The world is better shaped by freedom. Even if it means giving foolish men their head—that’s what you said?” I looked from her to Snorri. “She let him keep it because . . . she’s wise. Or something.”

  Kara raised her eyebrows. “Doesn’t sound very likely, does it?”

  “Skilfar was scared too?”

  “It’s Loki’s key. God of trickery. Nothing as straight forward as strength is going to decide its ownership. Or it would have been Thor’s key an age ago!”

  “It has to be given,” Snorri said. “Olaaf Rikeson took it by strength and Loki’s curse froze his army, ten thousand strong.”

  “So . . . when you gave me the key back in the olive groves . . .”

  “I trusted a friend, yes.”

  “Hell.” Snorri had placed his future in my hands. That was far more trust than I could hold on to. It was like telling a dog to guard a steak. It was stupid. “You don’t know me at all, Snorri.” Somehow, even with sixty-four thousand in crown gold glittering in my immediate future I felt low. A fever perhaps, or poisoning from the sour salts of the lower mine.

  Maybe it was the way Snorri didn’t even argue his case but just stood there like the huge over-loyal idiot he was, having the gall to expect the same foolishness from me.

  “Thirty-two thousand, the cure, and the idiot gets his door open.”

  “No.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake! How much to open that damned door?”

  “That door shouldn’t ever be opened. Even if you took no gold, only offered me the key to show you death’s door, I would hesitate. There’s a reason the ghosts of my youth are scattered across Hell. It wasn’t just chance that one stepped out to oppose you when you approached Eridruin’s door. Opening that door is dangerous. Passing through still more so.” Kelem’s jaw moved as the voice issued from his neck. In his mouth something glittered, silver across the black thing that had been his tongue.

  “Why? Why would a dead thing like you care?” I didn’t even want that door open—why I was arguing rather than wondering how to carry my gold back to Red March I didn’t know.

  “I’m not dead.” Kelem tilted his head. “Merely . . . well preserved.”

  I stood, the key tight in my hand, watched by the witch, the warrior, the boy, and the old bones in the chair. Something in the quality of the light from the crystals changed, as subtle as a slight shift in the wind, but I felt it.

  “What would you do with this key, Master Kelem?” I asked him, starting to pace from one column to the next.

  “I have a palace of doors. It’s only natural that I should want one key that could unlock any of them.” Kelem’s throne rotated to allow him to track me. “Without a key the opening and closing of such doors is a complex and tedious business, dangerous even, and one that can exhaust an old man like me. These thirteen before me. These are difficult, but over the years I’ve managed all but three. The doors to darkness and light still defy me. Those on the far side hear me trying though, oh yes.” A scratching sound that might be laughter. “They fear me, hate me, and hold the doors tight against my efforts. The dark knows that if I control the door, I own them. The light knows it too.

  “Long ago I was told that one of these doors would never open for me, that my doom lay beyond it. Loki himself told me this, the father of lies. And I believed him because he is always honest. He takes pride in it—knowing that a partial truth cuts deeper than a lie.” Kelem waved a desiccated hand in my direction. “The key will unlock the doors, and the last one—that will be the one I will leave closed. That one I will lock again, and lock so well that it will never open, not in the lives of men.”

  It’s unnerving when the person you’re bargaining with lets you know how valuable what you have is to them. In the market we pretend not to care, we insult the thing we desire, denigrate it. Kelem’s honesty told me two things. That I could trust his offer, and that I would be a fool to refuse it because one way or another he would own the key.

  “That black one.” I pointed to it. “It’s death’s door? The gate to Hell?”

  “No, that is one of the three that defy me still. The gate to Hell is opened easily enough, the Day of a Thousand Suns left it hanging off its hinges—it’s the first of the thirteen that I learned.”

  I stared at the black crystal. “It’s the night gate then.” Even as I said them the words felt wrong.

  “Do you think so, Prince Jalan? Has your connection to the dark grown so weak?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “It’s not that one . . .” I passed another pillar, trailing my fingers across it.

  “That door is Osheim, Prince Jalan. The door is the Wheel, the Wheel is a door. It’s the door I need to own.”

  “The Lady Blue would open them all,” I said. “She thinks the time for doors is passing and soon all worlds will bleed one into the other. She wants to open the ways and marshal the destruction to ensure her place in whatever hell results.”

  “I’ve been misinformed about educational standards in Red March,” Kelem said, two spiders the size of silver eyeballs tugging at the dry corners of his mouth to make a smile. “You’ve been well taught, Prince Jalan. But the Lady Blue really only wants to turn the Wheel. She could do that by opening the black door, but the black door is opening by itself. It has been for centuries. Ever so slowly, but speeding up. Each door that is opened, each thing that passes through from one world to another . . . it weakens the walls between those places, and as the walls start to crack, the door of Osheim opens, the Wheel turns. With Loki’s key the Lady Blue could end the world today by opening that door before us. Without it she must rely on the Dead King opening death’s door wide enough to fracture the walls around it . . . and, by doing so, turn the Wheel and herald the end of all things.”

  “And where do you stand, Master Kelem?” The conversation had grown too big for me. I just wanted to escape with my money and enough years to spend it in.

  “I’m a financier, a man of trade, Prince Jalan. Everything has its price. I buy, I sell. There’s no harm in this surely? Buying what can be bought, selling it to those with the need and the means to pay. The rich must have what they crave—surely you agree with that?

  “On this point my position should be clear enough. I’m refusing to open one door, just briefly, to save myself tens of thousands in gold. That hardly paints me as a man who would be overly keen to set them all open wide, now does it? I might want to own the darkness and the light and the creatures therein, but ending creation? What good would my wealth do me then? True, the Lady Blue and I have interests in common, but I am not her ally in this ambition.”

  You were her ally in another ambition, equally bloody, and long ago. The words twitched behind my lips. He had been part of the plot that killed the first Gholloth. Maybe the second had died by his command also. Had he directed the Lady Blue, or she him? Either way both of them had stained their hands with the blood of Kendeths. Snorri’s family too counted among their crimes, his whole clan, the Undoreth, gone, just one man remaining now that Tuttugu had died beneath Edris Dean’s blade. And Edris was the Lady Blue’s creature, my mother’s death her plan, my unborn sister just something broken in the process. I saw again the vision of the lady vanishing into the mirror, the Red Queen kneeling there among the shards, her grandfather slain, the linens of his
bed crimson. Perhaps it was Alica Kendeth’s legendary anger that infected my blood, perhaps my own, a pale flame to be sure, but feed any such spark enough fuel and it will blaze.

  I heard the knocking again, that knocking I’d been hearing every once in a while since the debtors’ prison. It sounded louder here, reverberating among the columns. None of the others looked up.

  “Do you—” I broke off, the knocking came from my left. I turned and walked back toward Kelem and the others. Kelem, master of doors. Kelem, sender of assassins.

  Knock. Knock. Knock. Steady, rhythmic, louder by the moment. I’d heard it every day of late. Was it sunset a mile above us . . . had I heard this sound every sunset since I took the key? Had Snorri heard it when he held the key, sounding each dawn since the wrong-mages’ door had closed Aslaug and Baraqel off from us? Knock. Knock. Knocking had woken me from my dreaming that spring morning back in Trond. Knock. Some doors are better left unopened.

  Kelem turned his head to watch my progress. I saw his dry hands drip with my mother’s blood. I saw the Red Queen, a child, kneeling before the ruin of her grandfather. I felt the pain that cored me when I woke from the blood-dream that showed me Mother dying and returned her to my memories.

  “You carry something I have bought and sold, Prince Jalan.” Perhaps Kelem could see the wheels turning in my head. Perhaps he knew he was losing me.

  “I do?” I continued to hunt the sound, moving between the pillars.

  “The sword at your hip. I recognize its taint. I procured it from a necromancer named Chella decades ago. It didn’t come cheap, but the Blue Lady paid me ten times that price and more.”

  I paused, hand on the hilt of the weapon, glancing back at Kelem. “This? This was yours?”

  “The Lady Blue had allies aplenty among the necromancers, long before there was a Dead King or any hint of him. She has been building their strength for years, seeding the unborn with such toys as that which you bear.”

  “If I have a price, Kelem, this is not lowering it.” I cast about, straining for direction, willing the knocking to sound again. “Edris Dean tried to kill me with this blade.”

  “You were not his target, though,” Kelem said. “Neither was your mother.”

  I stopped and faced him.

  “Your sister.” The spiders moved his jaws. “The planets aligned for that one. The stars held their breath to see her born. The Silent Sister thought the child would grow to replace her, to exceed her, to make this empire whole. And more . . .”

  “To heal the world,” I breathed. Grandmother thought I might be the one to undo the doom the Builders had laid upon us, but it wasn’t me: our salvation had never been born.

  “The sword you carry put your sister in Hell. Unborn. Sell the key to me and the author of her death will be thwarted in her ambition. With Loki’s key I will own creation, and what I own I do not allow to come to harm.”

  My fingers flinched from the hilt as if it had grown too hot to touch. Edris’s blade hadn’t just cursed Snorri’s son as it slew him in the womb, marking him to be unborn . . . it had done the same to my sister.

  “What do you think the unborn were doing in Vermillion, Prince Jalan?” Kelem asked, silver legs stretching the leathery skin across his skull’s grin. “The Dead King’s captain, and the Unborn Prince, both of them in the same place, practically in the shadow of the palace walls? Both daring the Silent Sister’s magics . . .”

  “They were bringing an unborn into the world . . .” Even now the memory of the Unborn Prince made me shudder—just his eyes upon me through the slit of that mask.

  “All that for a single unborn?” Kelem’s head tilted with the question. “Haven’t the Dead King’s servants brought forth unborn in all manner of scattered spots, none of them half as dangerous as Vermillion?”

  I recalled a grave horror rising in the cemetery where Taproot’s circus had camped.

  Kelem spoke again. “The older the unborn, the longer it has spent in Hell, the more powerful it is . . . the harder to return. And this one . . . this one needed a hole torn in the world, a hole so large a city might fall through. This one needed the strength of the two most powerful unborn this side of death’s veil. This one . . . she needed the death of blood relatives to open her path. The death of a close relative best of all. A brother perhaps . . .”

  “My . . . my sis—” The horror of it took me in its grasp, my feet rooted.

  “Your sister was to be the Red Queen’s champion. The Lady Blue took that piece and made it hers. As the Unborn Queen she might be the Dead King’s bride, she might be his fist in the living world, the unknowing servant of Lady Blue, heralding the end of all things. That is who is waiting for death’s door to open. That is why you should sell me the key and leave it closed. She needs your life, Prince Jalan. If she destroys you in the deadlands it will tear a hole through which she can be born at last into this world. If she comes through by some other path then killing you will cement her place here and stop her being cast back by the enchantments that might otherwise banish her.” Kelem’s chair moved closer, legs clicking beneath it. “You’ve no real choice here, Jalan. A sensible man like you. A pragmatist. Take the gold.”

  “I—” Kelem made sense. He made sense and offered a pile of gold so large a man could roll about in it. I could see it in my mind’s eye, heaped and gleaming. But . . . the old bastard’s hands were dripping with my mother’s blood.

  The knocking sounded again, close by. None of them could hear it but me. I came closer to the source of the noise. BANG. BANG. BANG. Almost deafening. Kara said something but I couldn’t hear her. A flicker of motion drew my eye, a black fist pounding against the surface of the crystal pillar closest to me, from the inside, the arm lost in a darkness that had polluted the column’s clarity like ink drops in water.

  “Every man has his price.” Somehow Kelem’s voice reached me through the din. I wondered what Snorri’s price was, what my grandmother’s price might be. Even Garyus, the third Gholloth, with his love of gold, his mastery of commerce . . . even he wouldn’t sell a friend for as little as money. I didn’t think it of Garyus—I both did and did not want to think it of me.

  Sixty-four thousand . . . Kelem wouldn’t show Snorri the door even if I sacrificed all those thousands. And even if he did Snorri would just march in to die—horrors would spill into the world, my unborn sister among them. Snorri would die and I’d own nothing but my rags, a tiny worthless corner of a salt mine, and a few other dribs and drabs that would be lucky to sell for fifty florins in total. There wasn’t a choice to make here. Always take the—

  Blood. It seemed the whole floor swam with it, ankle deep and rising. I saw it drip from Gholloth’s bed. I saw Garyus twist in the crimson swirls as the Silent Sister took his strength. It ran red from Tuttugu’s opened neck. I saw it drip scarlet from Edris’s blade as Mother slid from the steel. And I saw the hands behind each act, the blue and the grey, each stained with what I held precious, sacred.

  BANG. BANG. BANG.

  This whole nightmare had started with Astrid pounding on my door, dragging me from a good dream. Every part of my return had been about the opening of one door or another. It had been a mistake to open that first door too. I should have stayed in bed.

  And yet . . . somehow my hand found itself reaching out to the crystal column towering above us. Somehow I found myself drawing forth Loki’s key.

  “No!” Kelem’s shout.

  The clatter of metal limbs as his spiders raced toward me. The roar as Snorri threw himself into their path, heedless of his injury and pain, swinging his father’s axe.

  Against all reason I found myself pressing the jet-black key to that impossibly flat surface, driving it into the neat dark eye of the keyhole that appeared beneath it . . . turning it as the voices rose behind me amid the din of combat.

  The door blasted open with a force that sent me skid
ding across the floor. Midnight boiled out of it, imps of ebony, all horns and hooves and curling tails, huger and more terrible shapes rising behind them, wings canopied, bat-like creatures, serpents, shades of men, and in the midst of it all, surging forward, Aslaug, wrought in night-stained bone, her lower carriage a frenzy of arachnid legs that made Kelem’s toys seem delicate and wholesome.

  “Take him through!” I screamed, pointing at Kelem, compelling the forces of night with whatever magic and potential lay in me, calling on the bond I had been sworn to. The horde, sighting their tormentor and would-be lord, surged through the narrow portal, borne on a wave of liquid night. Aslaug fell upon Kelem in an instant, a howling, tearing fury as if my own rage had infected her. The rest followed and in their frenzy the creatures of darkness flooded over the ancient mage, black imps sinking fangs into each wizened limb, inky tentacles reaching from the portal to whip around him. They hated him anyway, for presuming to rule them, for his endless attempts to open and own the night door, and for so nearly succeeding.

  The dark-throng dragged Kelem away, a riptide of horror, his throne and platform scraping through the face of the column, a mess of stained and twisted silver-steel legs left twitching in his wake. In the silent moment that followed a faint laughter echoed, not in my ears, through my bones—a laugh both merry and wicked, the kind that infects the listener and makes them smile. It came from the key. A god laughing at his own joke.

  Snorri and I lay where we threw ourselves in the moment, sprawled on opposite sides of the deluge.

  “Die, you bastard!” I shouted it after the door-mage, scrambling to my feet. I hoped Kelem would suffer there in the endless dark and that as he did he thought of the Kendeths and of the debt he owed us.

  Aslaug remained, the crushed body of a mechanical spider in her hand, silver legs giving the occasional jerk. She towered above Kara, her face furious. Snorri got to his knees and shoved Hennan behind the next pillar. “Stay there!” A handful of night-imps still prowled the perimeter of the darkness smoking around the portal and other, less wholesome, things writhed half-seen behind them.