Prince of Fools

I leaned back against the wall for a moment, closing my eyes and trying to convince myself that the grave-scent hanging in the air was imagination. Perhaps it was, or perhaps the pursuit had been as close as I feared, but either way the locking of that door was a good thing. A very good thing indeed. Snorri shot home heavy bolts, top and bottom. Better still.

“Keep moving.” He waved me on, careful not to touch me; the air crackled and spat if we got too close and my skin glowed so bright I could almost light the way. Four doors stood between the hall and the strong-room. Snorri locked all four behind us, bolting them too in case the enemy held additional copies of the keys.

With the last door sealed behind us we collapsed upon the sacks heaped around the walls. The lanterns revealed a small cubic room without windows or any exit but the one we entered by.

“What’s in the sacks?” Tuttugu asked, patting one that protruded from beneath him.

“Black corn, wheat flour, some salt.” Snorri gestured at two barrels in the opposite corner. “Crushed ice, and in the other one, whiskey.”

“We could survive a month on this,” I said, trying to imagine it.

“Daylight. That’s all we’re waiting for. In the morning we attack.” Snorri looked grim.

As much as I wanted to argue, it made sense. No relief would come, no reinforcements were inbound. Either they would break in eventually, or we would starve in our own filth. Even so, I knew when it came to leaving, to actually putting ourselves in the hands of the unborn, they would have to drag me. I’d rather slit my wrists and be done with it.

“What’s out there, Snorri?” I lay back and watched the shadows dance on the ceiling. “Did Aslaug tell you that? Did she say what she’d seen in the darkness?”

“Unborn. Maybe a dozen of them. And the worst of them, the Unborn Captain. The Dead King’s hand in the North. All digging out troops for whatever war he’s planning. The troops are just a bonus. What they’re really after is Rikeson’s key. Not that Rikeson fashioned it. Aslaug says he tricked Loki out of it. Or Loki let it seem that way, but really it was Loki who tricked Olaaf Rikeson into taking it.”

Tuttugu stretched out his leg, sniffing and pulling his furs about him. He wrinkled his nose, disapproving of the air.

“Baraqel doesn’t tell me anything useful. I guess all the best secrets are told at night.” I didn’t pay too close a heed to Aslaug’s talk of Loki. It seemed the voices that the light and the dark used to speak to us were ones we’d given them, taken from our expectations. Only natural then that explanations should come to Snorri wrapped in heathen tales, whilst I got the true version, spoken by an angel such as one might see in the stained glass at the cathedral in Vermillion.

Vermillion! God, how I wanted to be back there. I remembered that day, the day I left the city—that crazy chaotic whirl of a day—and before I had even broken my fast on that morning the Red Queen had been bending our ears, all of us grandchildren, and at the last when I was desperate to be off about my own plans, hadn’t Grandmother been talking of tasks, of quests, of hunting for . . . a key?

“Smells like something crawled in here and died.” Tuttugu interrupted my thoughts. He sniffed again, casting a suspicious glance my way.

I shushed him with a waved hand. The pieces were coming together in my mind. The Red Queen’s story about a door into death, an actual door. Who would ever want to open such a door?

“The Dead King—”

“Jal—” Tuttugu tried to cut across me.

“I’m thinking!” But death’s door couldn’t ever be opened—the lock had no . . . “Loki’s key can open anything!”

“Jal!” Snorri surging to his feet. “Get down!”

An empty sack fell across my shoulders as I threw myself forwards, forgetting how much it would hurt. I heard grain shifting and spilling. The grave-stink intensified into something almost physical.

“No!” Tuttugu screamed, and threw himself at whatever had risen behind me, axe raised. I hit the ground and my world lit with the agony of the impact against my broken ribs. A meaty thud and through slitted eyes I caught a glimpse of Tuttugu flying back across the room. He hit the wall with the kind of crunch that meant he wouldn’t be getting up again.

I rolled over and the unborn towered above me, uncoiling long and scabrous limbs, shedding the full sacks and empty sacking that it had hidden beneath. A freshly skinned face peered down at me, the top of that wet and hairless scalp nearly scraping the ceiling. The eyes held the same feral hunger as those that had haunted me for all this long and wild flight from Red March, but they weren’t the same eyes that had set me running on the night of the opera what seemed a lifetime ago. These terrified but held little of that awful knowing.