The Liar's Key

“We could climb the . . .” Hennan trailed off, silencing himself—I didn’t even have to tell him that we couldn’t.

“God damn it, the big idiot can’t think that . . . I? That’s just not reasonable! I don’t even—”

“Shhhh!” Hennan turned and pushed me back.

Two men passed our side street, deep in conversation. We crouched, hidden behind a flight of steps, me fighting a sudden urge to sneeze.

“. . . the other one. The regulations though! Do this, do that, get this signed . . . ah Jesus! Ten forms, two courts, and five days just to set a hot iron to flesh!” A solid man, thick-necked, silhouetted against the brightening Patrician Street. Something familiar about him.

“Everything in its time, specialist, and in its turn. It is not as if the duress applied so far has been . . . gentle. The law requires that beating, the stick, and the flail are used before irons. A case must be made for each, along with the correct . . .” The second man’s voice trailed off as they carried on down the street. A horse clattered by in the opposite direction, black-clad rider astride its back. Soon the streets would be full of errands as banking hours arrived.

I raised myself above the steps and looked down at Hennan. “There was something . . .” The second man had seemed familiar too, though I only saw him in silhouette, a smaller man, a modern to judge by the stupidity of his hat. Something about his gait, very precise, very measured. And the voice of the first . . . he’d had an accent. “Come on!”

I dragged Hennan to the corner and, crouching, peered after the pair. They’d crossed over to present themselves to the clockwork soldier at the Tower door and stood with their backs to us. The soldier dwarfed them both, taking the scroll offered by the taller of the two in a surprisingly delicate pincered grip. The modern turned a fraction so I caught his profile. Like all his kind, he had the white face of a man who avoided the sun with fanaticism, but this particular shade of fish-belly white went past even the pallor of a Norseman in winter. “Marco!”

“Who’s—” I clamped a hand over Hennan’s mouth and pulled him back.

“Marco,” I said. “A banker. One of the least human humans I’ve ever met, and I’ve known some monsters.” Also the last person I wanted to see since I owed his bank more than I owed Maeres Allus. But what was he doing here? Had it been the House Gold who put a sixty-four thousand florin debt on a beggar boy and set him to starve in debtors’ prison? Was it House Gold that had turned the wheels and cogs of Umbertide justice to licence hot irons to loosen Snorri’s tongue?

I risked another glance around the corner. Marco had already set off up the street. The soldier held the door of the Frauds’ Tower ajar for the specialist and as the man slipped through the gap I caught a glimpse of him. Just a glimpse, a snatch of dark tunic, grey trews, dusty boots, and his hair—I saw that too—close-cropped to the skull, iron grey, with just a band of it yet untouched by age, running front to back, a crest so black as to almost be blue.

“Ow!” Hennan tore free of my grip where my fingers dug into his arm. “What was that for?”

“Edris Dean,” I said. “Edris fucking Dean.” And I stood and walked out into the new day.

THIRTY-TWO

I’m cursed with berserker blood. Perhaps it’s the Red Queen’s taint, her penchant for violence breaking out of me in rare but concentrated bursts. It’s happened twice to my knowledge and I don’t remember anything but fragments of the time that followed, just loose images of blood and dying, my blade cutting a red path through other men’s flesh. That, and the screaming. Mostly mine. I can’t remember the emotion of it, not anger, not hate, just those images as if seeing pieces of another man’s nightmare.

Walking out into Patrician Street in the first light of what must be my last day I still had my fear but it seemed as though I’d put it in a small box somewhere at the back of my mind. I heard its shrieks of terror, its demands, its attempts at reasoning with me . . . but, like the boy’s shouts at my back, it was just noise. Perhaps the lack of sleep had me dreaming on my feet. Nothing felt quite real. I didn’t know what I would do except that Edris Dean would be dead at the end of it. As I approached the clockwork soldier I lifted a hand before me steady and sure, no sign of a tremor in it.

The thing took a step toward me, looking down to study my features, copper eyes burning. At each move it made a thousand gears hummed, a million teeth meshed, from the minute, through small to large, to cog-jaws big enough to eat me. “Yes?” A proper clockwork voice this time, a metallic rasping that somehow made sense.