The Liar's Key
“This is a place of death!” Kara, yelling from the opposite spar of the arch. “The necromancer—” She broke off to apply her knife to a skeletal hand gripping her leg, more Hardassa closed upon her swiftly.
The dead men strewn in Snorri’s wake also started to rise. Bony hands began to claw at Baraqel’s feet, even reaching for Aslaug. The avatars of dark and light, rather than rushing at each other as Snorri and I had done, had to pause in order to deal with the necromancy reaching up to bring them down.
“Run!” Kara shouted, and free of the bones’ grip, she dived headfirst into the archway.
I hesitated for a moment. It looked a lot like a wider version of the crack that had pursued me in Vermillion. The archway seethed with darkness and light making war, a mixture I’d seen reduce people to bloody and widely scattered chunks. For all I knew small pieces of Kara now decorated the grass on the far side of the arch.
“Don’t!” hissed Aslaug, more limbs springing from her torso to pin Norsemen to the ground before they could reach me. Long, thin, hairy limbs. “Stay!” While the arch had been dark she’d been urging me through, but now she wanted me to stay?
That convinced me. I ran toward the swirling dark-light.
“Wait!” Aslaug’s shriek a mix of rage and anguish. “The völva lied to you, she’s a—”
I leapt through. The weight on my leg told me that the boy had come too. All the sounds behind me cut off in an instant and I started to fall.
• • •
The best thing I can say about what followed is that it probably hurt less than being butchered with an axe.
FOURTEEN
I’m falling. I stepped through an archway and now I’m falling, punching a me-shaped hole through endless night until it finally does end, falling through a white blindness, no kinder than the dark, through sharpness and thorns, through pain so fierce it steals time, and at last into dream. Cool, enfolding dream-stuff, grey as clouds . . .
• • •
I fall screaming through the cloud base, forgetting in my terror that this is dreaming, and plummet at last into the midst of the seven-towered castle of Ameroth wherein my grandmother stands besieged by an army of fifty thousand. An army wielded like a blade by the warlord Kerwcjz. The Harrow of Slov they call him—the iron fist of Czar Keljon who dwells upon the eastern steppes but would rather sit in Vyene, emperor by right of war.
• • •
We stand once more upon the outer walls atop the broad expanse of one of the seven towers. High as we are, smoke wreathes us, blotting out the sky, so thick that had I not fallen from heaven’s vault and down through the burning I would be unsure whether morning had yet taken flight.
• • •
Grandmother is there again, Alica Kendeth—princess of the Red March, not yet twenty, broadsword in hand, her armour battered, the gilding worn, enamel splintering away where blows have dented her breastplate. The same iron look in her eyes as when she loosed an arrow into her sister’s heart. She stands taller than me, and yet Ullamere Contaph towers above her in his demon-black Turkman plate, a livid wound scored from the bridge of his nose past the corner of his mouth.
Shattered rock and pieces of the battlements strew the tower top. Soldiers man the walls, less thickly than before. Dead are heaped beside the stairway down into the tower. Dead in two mounds, one pile flecked with the crimson of the March, the other more varied. Men of Slov lie there, entwined with warriors of the Mayar. There a knight of Sudriech, sprawled across him two Zagre axemen, faces tattooed in the blue wards those peoples favour. There has been an assault, recently turned. I wonder how many more of the foe lie heaped and broken at the tower base among the wreckage of their ladders, coiled amid their ropes . . .
“We have to fall back to the second wall.” Contaph’s wound gapes as he speaks. I see teeth through the gory mess of his cheek.
“No,” says Alica.
“We’re spread too thin, princess.” There’s no heat in his voice, just weariness. “This castle was built to be held by more men.”
“I’m not interested in holding this castle. I mean to destroy Kerwcjz and let the Czar know he has overreached himself this time.”
“Princess!” Exasperation now. “Attack was never an option. It—”
“It was the only option we ever had.” She starts toward the stairs. She calls to Contaph over her shoulder. “Bring five hundred of the very best to the keep. Choose by skill, not blood. I want warriors. Father can make more nobles easier than he can make more warriors.”