The Liar's Key

The guardsmen snapped erect at that last barked command. The captain, standing to attention, gestured at the church doors with his eyes.

“I very much doubt I’ll find him in there, captain!” But I returned up the steps in any case and set both hands to the left door, pushing through with a measure of violence.

For a while I stood blind, waiting for my eyes to adjust from the brilliance of the day to the softness of candles and the muted spectrum of stained glass. Dim shapes resolved and I stepped in. Three old ladies kneeling at the pews, an ancient bent over the bank of votive candles, and a stooped grey figure standing facing the wall about halfway along the north aisle. I hadn’t really expected to find my father among them. At the far end beneath the mandala window a black-frocked priest stood turning a page at the lectern. I took another step forward. There wouldn’t be any point asking if Father was hidden away in the transepts, but even so something drew me in. Perhaps just the coolness. The day outside was starting to get hellish hot. Maybe my time in Norseheim had lowered my tolerance for Red March summers because it proved a blessed relief to get out of the glare for a moment.

It wasn’t until I made my way along the north aisle that I realized the stooping man was facing my mother’s stone—a plaque bearing her name and lineage, and behind it, buried in the thickness of the walls, her remains. And—as I now remembered and perhaps no one else knew—those of my unborn sister.

“Prince Jalan?” The man looked up at me, grey and old before his time, lined with pain. He took a step toward me, hobbling, his right leg ruined. For some reason I matched his advance with a step back.

“Robbin?” One of my father’s retainers, though at first I hadn’t been sure of it in the gloom. He stood with his head bathed in green light. It streamed down through the serpent in the high window where Saint George battled the dragon. Now though I saw past his stoop and his old man’s hair, I looked beyond one decade and half of another. “Robbin?” Once more, for a moment, I couldn’t see him properly—damned incense in these churches stings your eyes something rotten. I squeezed my eyes against the tears and saw Robbin as he’d been fifteen years before, battling Edris Dean, putting himself between the assassin and Mother and me. The wound that crippled him he took in my service. I pressed fingers to my eyes to clear them, wondering how many times I’d mocked or cursed him for his slowness over the years as he hobbled about on errands for my father.

“Yes, highness.” He started struggling to go down on one knee like men do before the throne. “Th-they said you were dead.”

I grabbed him and hauled him up before he fell on his face or did something more embarrassing. “I don’t feel dead.” I let him go and took a step back. “Now, unless my father is lurking in here I’ll go off and look for him somewhere he’s likely to be. Our good cardinal should be able to settle the matter of whether I’m dead or not once and for all.”

I straightened the front of Robbin’s jerkin where I’d grabbed it to pull him to his feet, and with a curt nod I left him standing there, still half-stunned. My footsteps echoed loud among the pillars and the old widows amid the pews watched my departure, judgement written in every wrinkle.

•   •   •

“He’s not there. Let’s try the house.” I waved the captain and his men after me and led the way to the grand entrance of Roma Hall. A carriage and four stood in front of the steps, the driver head down as if he’d been waiting a while. I ignored it and hurried up to the doorway.

I didn’t recognize the flunky who opened the doors in response to my pounding, but I knew the two guards behind him, squinting against the brightness of the day in their house uniforms.

“Alphons! Double! Good to see you. Where’s my father?” I pushed past the butler and on into the hall, its niches filled with those Indus statues the cardinal still collects to the vexation of his priests. The doormen fell in with me sputtering all the “but you’re dead” nonsense that I could tell was going to become quite tiresome over the next few days.

“Jalan!” My brother Darin striding toward me, dressed for travel, a man beside him heaving a chest. “I knew you’d jump out of that fire into some frying pan!” He looked pleased, not overjoyed, but pleased. “There was a rumour running in the wine halls that you’d joined the circus!” Darin opened his arms to embrace me, handsome face split by a wide and apparently genuine grin.

“Fucker!” I punched him in the mouth, hard enough to knock him on his arse and to cut my knuckles on his teeth.