The Liar's Key

“Break. The. Mirror.” Kara forced each word past her teeth as if it were a struggle she was barely equal to.

“Which mirror?” There must have been a dozen and it made no sense. I couldn’t have missed them. “And with what?” I caught sight of blue robes again, fleeting reflections, here, then there, and eyes, eyes in the shadowed infinity behind the glass, just a gleam, but watching.

“Now!” All she could manage.

Edris had the blade out, arm awkward from the large hole I’d put through his pectoral muscle.

With a lunge, still held by my jerkin in Tuttugu’s dead hand, I caught hold of the broken jug on the floor, and spun to throw it at the mirror I first saw. At least six mirrors hung there now, clustered together. Their reflections showed nothing of the cell but instead revealed some other dark space where candles burned, as if each mirror were some small window onto a chamber beyond. Those half-seen eyes found me, made me their focus, robbing the strength from my arm, fogging my mind with a blueness deeper than sea, brighter than sky. I threw anyway, blind, guessing my target. The sound of shattering glass came loud enough to knock me down if I’d not been on my knees already. I threw my arms up, expecting to be drowned beneath a deluge of shards. But nothing came.

I looked around and found Kara halfway across the cell still looking dazed.

Edris stumbled out through the doorway.

“Hennan’s out there!” I shouted, intending it for Kara but realizing as I said it that I’d just reminded the necromancer too. Without pause, Kara went after him—decent of her since the last thing the boy did for her was slug her around the back of the head with a sock full of florins.

Her exit left me on my knees in a pool of my own distress, belly on display to the world with my tunic hitched up under my armpits, a handful of it still gripped by the dead thing secured on the table. I glanced around wildly, looking for the black shape of Loki’s key, lost amid the filth on a floor cast into deep shadow. By luck, sharp eyes, or some trick of the key itself, I saw it, tantalizingly close but out of reach. I strained, stretching my arm until the joints threatened to pop, waggling my fingertips as if that would close the six-inch gap.

“Let go, damn you!”

It might have been coincidence but in the moment I made my demand something gave and I lunged forward, almost flattening my broken nose on the flagstones. I rose with the key in hand and hid it in my waistband as Kara returned, lantern held before her, guiding an unsteady Hennan at her side.

“Edris?” I asked.

“Got away,” she said. “There’s a pair of clockwork soldiers fighting two levels down. He didn’t look fast enough to get past them.” She shrugged.

“Shouldn’t you be chasing him? Doesn’t your grandmother want to drink her nightcap from his skull?”

A grim smile. “I made that up.”

She sat Hennan against the wall. “Stay there.” And crossed to the table. I managed to stand as she reached it. She stretched out an arm above Tuttugu’s face and he strained to bite her.

“Don’t—”

She turned her head toward me, a sharp motion. “Don’t what?”

“I—” I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that he’d been my friend and I’d not saved him. “You’re dark-sworn!” The best accusation I could find.

“We’re all sworn to something.” She reached out with care and set a finger to Tuttugu’s forehead. His corpse went limp, and when she drew back her finger it revealed one of her small iron rune tablets, remaining where she touched. “He is beyond their use now.” She straightened, eyes bright. “Tuttugu was a good man. He deserved better.”

“Will he go to Valhalla?” Hennan asked, still sitting hunched on the floor. He looked as though his head had yet to clear from its collision with the wall.

“He will,” said Kara. “He died fighting his enemies and didn’t give them what they wanted.”

I looked down at the mess they had made of him. My eyes prickled unaccountably. He must have been beaten every day. The soles of his feet were raw, toes broken. “Why?” It made no sense. “Why didn’t he just tell them where the key was?” The bank had no interest in killing the Norsemen. If Tuttugu had given up the key early on they might have been banished and sent off on the north road before Edris Dean even knew they’d been captured.

“Snorri,” Kara said. “If he gave up the key he would have been giving up Snorri’s children. Or at least he knew that’s how Snorri would see it.”