The Liar's Key

“Crap,” I said.

Ta-Nam and the cell monkey turned to go, throwing us into deep shadow. Step by step the light left us, darkness stealing in from all sides, the debtors advancing with it.

“Crap.” It bore repeating.

Hennan, who had seemed so light, grew heavier still in my arms. A sense of betrayal rose through me and the loss of Snorri settled on me suddenly and from nowhere. Friendship felt somehow more valuable than unbreakable contracts. Whatever his faults the northman would never have stood there and let this happen to me.

TWENTY-SEVEN

The saving grace of the Central Bank prison is that the inmates are not criminals. They’re not murderers, addicts, and thieves, but instead they’re the kind of people who could run up debts serious enough to warrant action and with sources reputable enough to make that action incarceration rather than a knife to the guts. Add to that the fact that the people surrounding me in my dark and stinking cell were three-quarters starved, weaker than a healthy child, and an utterly terrifying prospect became merely very grim.

The debtors around me proved so in awe of the handful of change in my pocket that I was able to establish order with the promise of a couple of copper halves. If they’d known I was wearing enough gold to buy out the debt of everyone in all eight of the cells facing into the central chamber then perhaps more base instincts would have taken over and the crowd would have become a monster. Hennan lay silent beside me while I fended off the more persistent of our cellmates with promises and shoves.

I watched the darkness and worried. My immediate fear of course was that the guards would come to take my remaining wealth but Umbertide was not like other places, and its debtor prisons were bizarre institutions, run on the strictest of rules. A debtor entering the prison could buy themselves out at any time if they had the means, but they were not compelled to do so. A debtor owned whatever assets they managed to keep and the hope was that many would be able to continue their enterprises from the comfortable front of the prison, earning sufficient coin to balance their ledgers. A portion of any coin spent maintaining life and limb in the prison went to the creditors in any case, so every day I survived I would be chiselling away at my mountainous bills.

After what seemed forever, and might have been less than an hour, the jailer returned. His tardiness and the relaxed slope of his shoulders told me that he’d not yet spoken with the boys at the entrance. Perhaps they didn’t even know I’d been detained—but sooner or later news of the wealth about my person would spread. What had drawn the man back was the change he’d seen earlier when I paid him to unlock the cell. He knew I had copper hexes left and a handful of halves, and came not to steal but to sell. Such was the way of things in Umbertide.

He set his lantern on the floor and held out a candle, a fat thing as thick as his forearm and half as long, cheap yellow tallow that would smoke and sputter, but it’d burn a while.

“Some light, yer lordship?” He offered me that same grin he’d had when locking the gate. By rights it should be gap-toothed and off colour, in truth he had small even teeth all polished to a surprising whiteness.

“Your name, jailer?” Always good to make the personal connection.

“Racso, they call me.” He glared around at the pale faces pressed to the bars on all sides. “And don’t you lot forget it.”

“Racso then.” I knew without coin I’d be no more to him than the dying flesh clinging to bones on all sides. “How much for the candle?”

“Two halves. Or I can let you have a third of it for one. Lighting it is free.” He smiled. “First time.”

Although I had Umbertide’s civilized ways to thank for not being robbed with violence and stabbed in my cell, “civilized” seemed the wrong word for it. A set of rules to die by. Clinging to life by pennies and halves until the money ran out. Somehow the beatings and shivs offered by the jailers and inmates of more usual prisons felt more honest at that moment, sat there bartering for the rudiments of life.

“How much to buy the boy out? What’s he owe?” It couldn’t be much. I was amazed he could have run up any official debt at all.

“Ah.” Racso scratched his belly, an uneasy look on his face. “That’s a puzzler that is.”

“A puzzler? He’s in debtors’ prison. He’s a debtor. How much does he owe?”

“Well . . .”

“It’s just a number.”

“Sixty-four thousand.” A mutter rippled through the cells.

“Pennies?”