The Liar's Key

Ta-Nam walked behind me as a guard that’s for protection rather than show always will, keeping his charge in sight at all times. Every now and then I’d glance back to check he was still there, my silent shadow. I’d yet to see him in action but he certainly looked the part, and the prowess of the sword-sons had been a thing of legend for centuries. Muscled for strength but not past the point where a price is paid in quickness, impassive, solid, watching the world without judgment. Darker even than a Nuban, his head shaved and gleaming.

“I don’t even know why we’re going,” I told Ta-Nam over my shoulder. “It’s not like I owe him anything. And he left me! I mean, of all the ingratitude . . .”

We made slow but steady progress. I’d come to learn the layout of the city in the weeks I’d spent here—despite most of my hours passing in the gloom of the exchange, bilking traders, playing the percentages, and lying from the hip.

Umbertide’s narrow streets and grand sun-baked plazas hold a mix of people hardly less unusual than its most upmarket restaurants. The ubiquitous black-cloaked messengers thread cosmopolitan crowds. The lure of the city’s wealth draws visitors from every quarter of the known world, most of them rich already. There are perhaps no other places on the map where you might find a Ling merchant from the Utter East at table sipping java with a Liban mathmagician and with them a Nuban factor draped in gold chain. I’ve even seen a man from the Great Lands across the Atlantis Ocean striding the streets of Umbertide, a lighter brown than the tribes of northern Afrique and with blue eyes, his robe feathered and set with malachite beads in mosaiced profusion. What ship bore him across the wideness of that ocean I never did find out.

The alley broadened into what might almost be called a street, bracketed on each side by plaster-clad tenements reaching five and six storeys, all faded and shuttered, cracked and discoloured, though inside the luxury would shame many a mansion and the cost of such an abode would beggar most provincial lords. Ahead a fountain tinkled at the crossing of two streets, though I couldn’t see it yet, just hear its music and sense the coolness.

“Prince Jalan.” The flow of the crowd thinned around me.

“Corpus Armand.” Formally I should name him to the House Iron but he’d already trampled protocol by not listing my family and domains. I glanced back at Ta-Nam—when a modern discards protocol you know it means trouble. A modern breaches etiquette the way an Ancrath murders your family, i.e. it’s not unheard of but you know it means they’re pissed off.

Corpus drew himself up to his full unimpressive height and stalked into my path. Behind him his soldier whirred into position, looming above its master. They made a curious pair, the modern clad in his close-fitting blacks, wholly unsuited to the heat, his skin a dead white where it showed, not a Norse pale, but an albino colouration achieved with bleaches and, if the rumours were true, no small amount of witchcraft. Behind him the soldier held almost trollish proportions, taller than any man, lean, long-limbed, glimpses of mechanism where the armour plates met, steel talons flexing as cables wound about their wheels or vanished down past the wrist-guard.

“Your note for the Goghan deal is void, prince. The Waylan and Butarni both refused it.”

“Ah,” I said. Being refused by any bank was bad enough. Having your credit voided by two of the oldest in Florence effectively ruled a man out of all the best games of finance that Umbertide had to offer. “Well, this is a grievous oversight! How dare mere banks impugn the name of Kendeth? They might as well call the Red Queen a whore!”

Ta-Nam moved to my side. Umbertide regulations prohibited the carrying of weapons larger than knives in the old town, but with the razored pieces of chrome steel at his hips the sword-son constituted mass murder on legs. Unfortunately the automaton behind Corpus was reputedly immune to stabbing.

Corpus narrowed his dark little eyes at me. “Nations stand or fall on finance, Prince Jalan. A fact I’m sure your grandmother is well aware of. And finance stands on trust—a trust cemented by the honouring of debts and of contracts.” He held out the promissory notes in question, fine crisp documents on the thickest parchment, scroll-worked around the edges and signed by my good self along with three witnesses of certified standing. “Restore my trust, Prince Jalan.” Somehow the white-faced little creep managed to slide an impressive level of threat around all his formality.

“This is all nonsense, Corpus, my dear fellow. My credit should be good.” I meant it too. I’d taken great care when hollowing out my finances to leave a skeleton of assets sufficient to keep the edifice standing for at least a day or two after my departure. All I had to do was transform my overly heavy heap of gold into some still more portable form of wealth—one that didn’t depend on bank vaults, trust, or any of that foolishness—and I’d be off on the fastest horse stolen money could buy. In fact, if not for my investigator finding me at luncheon, I would already be at the doors of a certain diamond merchant purchasing the largest gems in his collection. “My credit is as good as any—”