The Liar's Key

Kelem turned his head to watch my progress. I saw his dry hands drip with my mother’s blood. I saw the Red Queen, a child, kneeling before the ruin of her grandfather. I felt the pain that cored me when I woke from the blood-dream that showed me Mother dying and returned her to my memories.

“You carry something I have bought and sold, Prince Jalan.” Perhaps Kelem could see the wheels turning in my head. Perhaps he knew he was losing me.

“I do?” I continued to hunt the sound, moving between the pillars.

“The sword at your hip. I recognize its taint. I procured it from a necromancer named Chella decades ago. It didn’t come cheap, but the Blue Lady paid me ten times that price and more.”

I paused, hand on the hilt of the weapon, glancing back at Kelem. “This? This was yours?”

“The Lady Blue had allies aplenty among the necromancers, long before there was a Dead King or any hint of him. She has been building their strength for years, seeding the unborn with such toys as that which you bear.”

“If I have a price, Kelem, this is not lowering it.” I cast about, straining for direction, willing the knocking to sound again. “Edris Dean tried to kill me with this blade.”

“You were not his target, though,” Kelem said. “Neither was your mother.”

I stopped and faced him.

“Your sister.” The spiders moved his jaws. “The planets aligned for that one. The stars held their breath to see her born. The Silent Sister thought the child would grow to replace her, to exceed her, to make this empire whole. And more . . .”

“To heal the world,” I breathed. Grandmother thought I might be the one to undo the doom the Builders had laid upon us, but it wasn’t me: our salvation had never been born.

“The sword you carry put your sister in Hell. Unborn. Sell the key to me and the author of her death will be thwarted in her ambition. With Loki’s key I will own creation, and what I own I do not allow to come to harm.”

My fingers flinched from the hilt as if it had grown too hot to touch. Edris’s blade hadn’t just cursed Snorri’s son as it slew him in the womb, marking him to be unborn . . . it had done the same to my sister.

“What do you think the unborn were doing in Vermillion, Prince Jalan?” Kelem asked, silver legs stretching the leathery skin across his skull’s grin. “The Dead King’s captain, and the Unborn Prince, both of them in the same place, practically in the shadow of the palace walls? Both daring the Silent Sister’s magics . . .”

“They were bringing an unborn into the world . . .” Even now the memory of the Unborn Prince made me shudder—just his eyes upon me through the slit of that mask.

“All that for a single unborn?” Kelem’s head tilted with the question. “Haven’t the Dead King’s servants brought forth unborn in all manner of scattered spots, none of them half as dangerous as Vermillion?”

I recalled a grave horror rising in the cemetery where Taproot’s circus had camped.

Kelem spoke again. “The older the unborn, the longer it has spent in Hell, the more powerful it is . . . the harder to return. And this one . . . this one needed a hole torn in the world, a hole so large a city might fall through. This one needed the strength of the two most powerful unborn this side of death’s veil. This one . . . she needed the death of blood relatives to open her path. The death of a close relative best of all. A brother perhaps . . .”

“My . . . my sis—” The horror of it took me in its grasp, my feet rooted.

“Your sister was to be the Red Queen’s champion. The Lady Blue took that piece and made it hers. As the Unborn Queen she might be the Dead King’s bride, she might be his fist in the living world, the unknowing servant of Lady Blue, heralding the end of all things. That is who is waiting for death’s door to open. That is why you should sell me the key and leave it closed. She needs your life, Prince Jalan. If she destroys you in the deadlands it will tear a hole through which she can be born at last into this world. If she comes through by some other path then killing you will cement her place here and stop her being cast back by the enchantments that might otherwise banish her.” Kelem’s chair moved closer, legs clicking beneath it. “You’ve no real choice here, Jalan. A sensible man like you. A pragmatist. Take the gold.”

“I—” Kelem made sense. He made sense and offered a pile of gold so large a man could roll about in it. I could see it in my mind’s eye, heaped and gleaming. But . . . the old bastard’s hands were dripping with my mother’s blood.