The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War #2)(129)

It proved a long and miserable test of endurance, there in the unbroken night of the cells. I moaned and sighed about it, until I remembered Hennan had endured the place alone before I arrived, much of his time starving and parched. I kept quiet after that even though I thought it had probably been easier on him, raised as he was to the hardships of peasant life.

Artemis Canoni stopped answering my calls to have the inmates and their prying hands kept from my person, and took to moaning in a corner—whatever had been eating at his insides seeming now to have gained the upper hand. My other bodyguard, Antonio Gretchi, a former cobbler to Umbertide’s moneyed classes, proved unequal to the task on his own, and so I indentured a new servant for the price of a wizened apple and set him to his duties—which meant stamping on any hand that he encountered creeping in my direction in the dark.

For hour stacked upon empty hour we sat on the hard ground, too hot, too thirsty, and listening, always listening for the rustle of any approach. My head kept nodding, imagination creeping in to paint pictures on the darkness, tempting me into dream. I jerked my head up with a curse, more desperate each time. Occasionally someone would start to speak, sometimes a muttered conversation with a confidant, sometimes a long slow litany uttered into the dark. In the anonymity of blindness people confessed their sins, spoke their desires, made their peace with the Almighty, or, in some cases, bored the arse off everyone with endless dreary recollections from profoundly dull lives. I wondered how long I would have to sit there before the company became acquainted with every detail of events at the Aral Pass and I progressed to a comprehensive reconstruction of all Vermillion’s bordellos. Quite possibly another day would get me there.

The low mutter of conversation rose and fell in cycles, petering out to long silences then building again, sparked by a memory that built into a recounted moment and split into half a dozen threads running through our number. The thing had a natural rhythm to it, and when that rhythm broke it jarred me out of my reverie. The muttering of four or five people had stopped at once. Even the wet death rattle of Mr. Cough paused.

“What is it?” I asked. It clearly needed someone of royal blood to voice the important questions.

Silence, save for a scraping noise, something heavy being pulled across flagstones.

“I said—” The scraping noise came again and I realized with a start that whatever was making the sound was beyond the bars.

I held my breath. Silence. Fear kept that breath trapped in my lungs, only to burst out in a shriek when Mr. Cough suddenly started choking on his own held breath, hacking so hard I felt sure his lungs must be filling with blood. When he finally trailed off a couple of people started to mutter again, the tension broken. With a dull thud something fell against the bars—and everyone swallowed their words, the breath trapped in their chests once more. Inmates shuffled back further into the cell starting to curse and cry out in fear.

“What the hell?”

“How can—”

“There’s no one out there . . .”

And then someone said it. “Artos?” The corpse that had been left sprawled just beyond the gate.

“Maybe he wasn’t dead.”

“He was dead. I checked him. He was my friend.”

“Maggots were eating his eyes.”

“Of course he was dea—” A second dull thud of meat against bars cut the conversation off.

“Oh shit.”

“Sweet Jesu!”

“Artos? Is that you?”

The darkness seethed with possibilities—none of them good.

“It is Artos, isn’t it?” Hennan’s voice, closer to me than I’d imagined. I flinched.

“Yes.”

“And he is dead, isn’t he?” A small hand seeking mine.

“Yes.” In my left hand I held the key, removed from its hiding place, the witch’s spell undone . . . Loki’s key ready for use once more, and once more free to draw the attention of any foul thing that might be seeking it.

The thud of meat on iron came again. I imagined what I couldn’t see. Artos, staggering back from the impact on dead legs, face still crawling, ready to lunge forward once more, answering the call of what I held in my hand.

“Don’t worry.” I used my bluff hero-of-the-pass voice, loud enough for everyone but aiming the message at just one pair of ears. “Don’t worry. He’s out there, and we’re in here. If he couldn’t manage to get through those bars in all the months they held him trapped on this side, he’s not going to manage to get back through them before Racso’s next visit, now is he?”

I’d barely got the words out before Mr. Cough drew in another gurgling breath as if he were drowning in whatever filth was filling his lungs. On cue, after that chilling breath rattled into Mr. Cough, my former bodyguard Artemis Canoni loosed a soft cry of agony from his corner of the cell. Neither Hennan nor I said it, but from the sudden tension in his hand I think we came to the understanding in the same moment. Artos might be trapped out there—but if Mr. Cough or Artemis Canoni were to meet their maker within the next ten hours or so before Racso came back . . . the Dead King would have a new corpse to play with, and this time we’d be trapped in the cell with whatever he chose to stand back up again. Suddenly my concern for my fellow inmates reached new heights.

“Give that man with the cough some room, dammit! Don’t crowd him. Someone give him some water—there’s a copper in it for the man that does. And Artemis—where’s my faithful Artemis got to? Water for him too. And here’s a crust to dip into it.”