The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War #2)(125)

One more page, one more page, one more and then I saw it, a word like any other, buried amid its fellows but anchoring my eyes. Sageous. And as I said it the dream-witch’s face rose from the page, carrying the text with it so that the words lay across his skin, sinking in like tattoos. And his name—well that disappeared into the black slit of his mouth, now opening wider and wider to speak my own.

“Prince Jalan.”

“You!” I leapt to my feet, letting the book tumble to the floor. I stood in the room where I first met him, a guest bedroom in the Tall Castle, Crath City, Ancrath. “What the hell?”

“You’re dreaming, Prince Jalan.”

“I . . . I knew that.” I brushed myself down and glanced around. It didn’t look like a dream. “Why are you here? Looking for Baraqel to skewer you again?” I didn’t like the man one bit and wanted him out of my head quickly.

“I don’t think either of your friends will trouble us tonight, Prince Jalan, light nor dark.” He touched a word on his left arm then another on his right as he spoke of light and darkness. “And I am here to see if anything can be salvaged. You were supposed to free the boy and then be led to the Norsemen. With so much gold at your disposal it shouldn’t have been beyond you to free them too. You could have hired an army with what you carried. Instead I find you locked with the child in a debtors’ cell.”

“I was . . . supposed to?” I stared at the heathen trying to make sense of his gibberish. “The dreams?” I put a hand to my face. “You sent the dreams. I thought I was going mad!” All those nights haunted by Hennan’s fate. I knew that wasn’t like me. “You bastard!” I took a step toward him, then finding my legs would no longer listen to me, I stopped.

“It seems I over-estimated you, Prince Jalan.” Sageous shooed me back and my traitor legs obeyed. “A man who walks himself into a prison is unlikely to be able to walk himself out. I fear my employer will have to accept both your failure and his resulting losses.”

“Employer?”

“Kelem wishes you to free your companions from the custody of House Gold so that they may continue their journey and bring Loki’s key to him. I do not believe this will be possible however.”

“But Kelem owns the banking clans . . .” Though now I said it I did recall talk of strife between them.

“The House Gold has its own ambitions and has grown close to other interests in recent years.”

“The Dead King!” It made sense now. Or at least it was moving in that direction. “The clockwork soldiers and the corpse flesh . . .”

“Even so.” Sageous nodded.

“So the bank captured Snorri hoping to find Loki’s key? And when they get it they’ll give it to the Dead King.” That didn’t sound good.

“Perhaps, perhaps not. They have, as I said, their own ambitions. However, the key has yet to be found. Your Norsemen must know where it lies and so Kelem wished you to free them.”

“He could have asked!”

Sageous smiled as if we both knew the answer I would have given. He’d pointed me at Hennan, a gentle push that would normally be misconstrued as the nagging of a guilty conscience. It seemed important to Kelem that Snorri not feel pushed toward their encounter for fear of changing his mind. I took some small comfort in the fact that neither the dream-witch nor the door-mage seemed to understand either of us. Conscience would never compel me into harm’s way, and nothing would ever turn Snorri from his path, certainly not the fact that Kelem so badly wanted him to pursue it.

Sageous’s smile hung for a moment then fell away as if it had never been. “And to the purpose of my visit.” Sageous advanced on me, intimidating though he was the smaller man by more than a head. “Where is Loki’s key?” His eyes became drowning pools and terror washed over me. I fell into darkness screaming only the truth. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know!

I woke sweat-soaked, screaming the words, Hennan shaking me and shouting for me to wake up.

? ? ?

After the dream-witch’s visit I resolved never to sleep again.

? ? ?

It took a day’s insistence and the privacy of another food riot to get Hennan to talk about the key. Once the food got into his system and he found a little energy the boy wanted to talk about everything under the sun, about Kara, about how Snorri got taken down, about what happened to Tuttugu. I wouldn’t listen. I had one question—where is the key? In the end the need to talk about something, even if it was the one thing he’d promised not to talk about, was what broke Hennan’s resolve.

“Kara hid it,” he said.

“Snorri wouldn’t trust her with the key.”

“He watched her do it.”

“Did they bury it somewhere?” I don’t know what I’d been anticipating, but the idea of the key in a box under four foot of soil, or jammed in some remote crevice on a cliff face, didn’t offer much hope. A thing like that wouldn’t stay hidden. The unborn felt its pull and it seemed as though the necromancers could track it too. If the only thing the Central Bank wanted wasn’t still there once I’d bargained our release for its exchange then we’d all leave the prison the same way and nobody would be happy but the pigs. And if I did find out where it was, Sageous would pick the fact from my mind the very next time I fell asleep. Kelem getting the key might be the lesser of two evils compared to the Dead King getting his claws on it, but it still seemed a pretty evil evil to me. The only hope would be to find out where it was and use that information to my advantage before I next fell asleep.