The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War #2)(140)
I risked another glance around the corner. Marco had already set off up the street. The soldier held the door of the Frauds’ Tower ajar for the specialist and as the man slipped through the gap I caught a glimpse of him. Just a glimpse, a snatch of dark tunic, grey trews, dusty boots, and his hair—I saw that too—close-cropped to the skull, iron grey, with just a band of it yet untouched by age, running front to back, a crest so black as to almost be blue.
“Ow!” Hennan tore free of my grip where my fingers dug into his arm. “What was that for?”
“Edris Dean,” I said. “Edris f*cking Dean.” And I stood and walked out into the new day.
THIRTY-TWO
I’m cursed with berserker blood. Perhaps it’s the Red Queen’s taint, her penchant for violence breaking out of me in rare but concentrated bursts. It’s happened twice to my knowledge and I don’t remember anything but fragments of the time that followed, just loose images of blood and dying, my blade cutting a red path through other men’s flesh. That, and the screaming. Mostly mine. I can’t remember the emotion of it, not anger, not hate, just those images as if seeing pieces of another man’s nightmare.
Walking out into Patrician Street in the first light of what must be my last day I still had my fear but it seemed as though I’d put it in a small box somewhere at the back of my mind. I heard its shrieks of terror, its demands, its attempts at reasoning with me . . . but, like the boy’s shouts at my back, it was just noise. Perhaps the lack of sleep had me dreaming on my feet. Nothing felt quite real. I didn’t know what I would do except that Edris Dean would be dead at the end of it. As I approached the clockwork soldier I lifted a hand before me steady and sure, no sign of a tremor in it.
The thing took a step toward me, looking down to study my features, copper eyes burning. At each move it made a thousand gears hummed, a million teeth meshed, from the minute, through small to large, to cog-jaws big enough to eat me. “Yes?” A proper clockwork voice this time, a metallic rasping that somehow made sense.
The boy stood at my side now. I could see him reflected in the silver-steel of the soldier’s armour, warped and distorted, but still Hennan. He’d tried to drag me back, tried to stop my advance, and found he couldn’t. Strange, when this was what he’d been demanding all along. We’re like that. Give us everything we ask for and suddenly it’s too much.
The soldier’s breastplate gleamed, bearing few scratches despite its age, but in one place, low in the side, a puncture wound spoiled the perfection, a dark, angular hole, driven through the thickness of the silver-steel, a gauge no man could support and a metal no smith could work. “You can be hurt then . . .” I turned and took the boy by the shoulder. “Go to the door, Hennan.” I angled him and thrust him toward it.
“State the nature of your request.” The soldier flexed its fingers, articulated in many places and each as long as my forearm. It put me in mind of the unborn monster built from the graves in Taproot’s campsite. It had taken an elephant to put that down, and the soldier looked like an elephant might just bounce off it.
“I just came to see what the boy is doing,” I said. “It looks as if he’s breaking in.”
The soldier pivoted about its spine, the upper half of it rotating toward the door behind it. A clockwork soldier doesn’t worry about presenting its back to a potential enemy. All that slamming a battle-axe between its shoulders would do is ruin a good axe and remove any doubt concerning whether you were an enemy or not.
I had one hand in my pocket. It closed now about the key. Loki’s key. The thing felt cold against my fingers, slick, as if it would slip from them at the first chance for treachery. I pulled it clear and a dark pulse of joy rang up my arm.
High above me, between silver shoulder plates, a circular depression edged with intricate teeth glittered in the light. Up close I could see not just one ring of teeth but a second set further back and narrower, then a third and fourth, and more, forming a cone-shaped indentation maybe two inches across. The key held the shape of the one whose shadow Racso set upon it, a crude and heavy thing, a notched rectangular plate on a thick shaft some six inches long.
Olaaf Rikeson had held this key before Snorri had. It had been taken from his frozen corpse, and before he died Rikeson had raised an army with it. An army that thought it could march on the gates of Jotenheim and face down the giants that even the gods feared. Olaaf had opened more than doors with this key—he had opened hearts, he had opened minds.
Reaching as high as I could, I lunged forward and slammed the key into the soldier’s winding lock. The obsidian flowed beneath my grip, colder than ice, searing my skin, but I kept hold and in the moment it met the lock the key became a thick black rod ending in a cone pitted with an infinity of notches.
There’s a rule for doing and undoing, a rule older than empires, even a word to go with it, clockwise, and the opposite, anti-clockwise. One direction to wind up, the opposite to wind down. In the heat of the moment, in the cold terror of the moment, I just guessed. I set every part of my strength behind the task. For three pulses of my heart, each seeming to boom out slower than the most solemn funeral beat, the bastard thing wouldn’t move. Time congealed all about me. The soldier halted its own rotation with a shuddering clunk and began to turn back toward me, starting to drag the key from my hand. One arm reached for me, articulating against the elbow joint in a way that gave the lie to any pretence of humanity. Long metal fingers stretched wide to encircle my waist, each ending in talons razored to slice flesh from bone.