The Liar's Key

It took a while for Snorri to haul me up—he seemed to lack his usual strength and groaned with the effort of raising me, his shirt stained dark on his injured side. Kara was still cleaning off the larger chunks of dog meat when I finally got up. I discovered I also had a few pieces of my own to pick off. Hennan recovered the orichalcum and I pocketed it. Kara and I had lost our lanterns over the edge and soon enough I might need my own source of light. Whatever the dog handlers were up to I could see no signs of them against the patch of brightness overhead. I wiped my mouth and found it bloody. I must have bitten my tongue when I slammed into the edge of the drop.

“Let’s go.” This time Snorri led off.

I followed after Kara, making my descent gingerly, boots still slippery and my chest one large ache from top to bottom.

The second leg of the climb proved longer than the first and the circle of sky seemed to grow as small and distant as the moon. A weight settled about me—an echo of the unimaginable tonnage of rock around us. I’d come from the frozen mountains of the north to bury myself beneath the baked hills of Florence, and whatever waited for us down there it seemed that our journey must be coming to its close. All those miles, all those months, and Loki’s key accompanying us every step, the sole reason for our long migration. I wondered if the trickster god watched us from the wilds of Asgard, laughing at the joke which only he truly understood.

The visions came at the worst possible moment, when my arms ached from too many fathoms of climbing, my hands ran slippery with sweat, and the darkness folded around me on every side. A vast thickness of rock stretched above my head, and an unknown fall beneath me. The taste of my own blood brought the memories rushing in. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. The remnants of Kara’s spell still plagued me, burning with whatever magic I held in my veins, amplifying her simple casting into something that threatened to unravel the whole history of my line into my dreaming. The suspicion that the völva had planned this outcome still lingered. Certainly plunging me into weeks of dream-sleep had given her far more opportunity to work on Snorri and to steal the key if he wouldn’t relinquish it.

The vision drew my thoughts from present suspicions to past ventures. We had been chasing the Lady Blue, Alica and myself, chasing her through the palace into the private quarters of the elder Gholloth, he whom legend had it was the true heir of the last emperor Adam the Third, albeit a bastard nephew. We never spoke that story too loud, indeed it hadn’t been told to me until my twenty-first birthday, little more than a year ago. There’s nothing more likely to unite the enemies of any kingdom than a legitimate claim on the Empire throne.

Memory painted my grandmother’s pursuit on the darkness as I descended, so vivid that it overwrote my sight and I sought the rungs utterly blind, all the while with corridors flashing through my mind, felled guards, broken doors, Alica Kendeth sprinting ahead of me, fearless and swift.

We wove past the carnage, speed our only goal, and still we came too late, past the wreckage of Gholloth the First’s elite bodyguard stationed at the doors of the old man’s bedchambers. The Lady Blue had felled three men in plate armour. God knows what magics she used and what it cost her. These would have been swift warriors, seasoned, loyal beyond question, deadly with sword and knife. They lay shattered as if each had been turned to glass and struck with a hammer, the sharp edges of their injuries softened by what leaked from them.

In the old man’s bedchamber, its wall hung with paintings of the sea, we found the king, the emperor if not for lies, treachery, and war. He lay at peace among his linens, clutching the red flower of his lifeblood to his chest. If you had lived somewhere where the emperors’ statues haunt every turn you would know at a glance that their blood ran from him. I saw it in the line of his jaw, the angle of his nose, the broadness of his shoulders, even slumped in death.

Alica’s cry held more rage than grief, but both were present. Then she saw it, and I followed her gaze. In the corner of the room a tall mirror stood. Silvered glass within an ebony frame. Such a thing would cost you a hundred in crown gold should you seek it in Vermillion today. But instead of reflecting the room it stood like a narrow window into some other place. A place where a figure ran, marked by the sapphires twinkling across her hair as she crossed a dreamland where crystal shards longer than lances and thicker than men jutted from the bedrock like the spines of a hedgehog.

My grandmother reached the mirror, and I swear she would have run headlong into it, but it shattered before her, a thousand glittering pieces of it filling the air, sliding down one across the other against the ebony board behind.