The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War #2)(162)

“Holy Hel!” Kara invoked the heathen goddess that rules the Norse in their afterlife should death not take them to Valhalla. A cold bitch by all accounts, split nose to crotch by a line dividing a left side of pure jet from a right side of alabaster.

“Fuck me.” I feel Christendom provides the more apt responses in such situations. The cavern ran before us in a wide and writhing tunnel, as if some great wyrm had burrowed here, and on every side the salts lay in vast crystals, forests of them, some a yard long, hexagonal in cross-section and so thick I might not get my hands to meet around them. Others were ten yards long and thicker than I stood tall, each face flatter than anything man can make, the angles sharp and perfect.

I knew this place. I had seen it in the visions Kara’s magic gave me. I had seen it in a mirror in my grandmother’s memories. The Lady Blue fled to these caverns after she murdered the elder Gholloth, first of my line. That bound them, Kelem and the Blue Lady. But which had been the hand behind the move I didn’t know—only that both had played the game and played it against my family. However I turned it this placed Kelem’s hand on Edris Dean’s shoulder on the day he came to Vermillion.

The spider moved between, beneath, and over the crystals without interrupting its pace, flowing around each obstacle in a whirring interplay of legs. We moved more slowly, struggling to extract any use from each lungful of scalding, over-moist air, and sweating water faster than a man could piss it away. A lethargy wrapped me, like a hot wet blanket, and I found myself paused halfway across a massive crystal shard that Snorri had just struggled over. The crystal plane beneath me returned the light of Kara’s lantern, tinting it deepest indigo. The whole shard seemed to glow with some inner fire, burning at its core impossibly far beneath me. It felt for a moment that I sat upon the surface of a calm sea, fathoms deep, with only the thinnest sheet of some brittle substance to hold me up, to keep me from sinking down to where that fire burned . . . Exhaustion bowed me, a great weight, dragging my head down toward the crystal’s surface. Loki’s key slipped from my wet shirt, dangling on its thong, the blackest I had ever seen it, its tip just a finger’s breadth above the surface that supported me . . .

“Jal!” Kara barked the word from behind me, her voice seeming to scratch like fingernails on a slate, filling me with irritation. “Jal!”

I turned my head to her, reluctant, and met her stare.

“Don’t,” she said. “The world is broken here.” She frowned, sweat running down her brow, plastering her blond hair to her forehead. Her eyes seemed defocused . . . witchy I’ll call it for lack of a better word. She tasted the air. “This is a place of doors.”

“Well . . . so they say.” I waved a hand around us. “I haven’t seen one damn door since we left the surface.”

She glanced at the crystal beneath me. “There’s a portal here. An almost-door . . . to let that key touch it would be a mistake. I don’t know where or when it might take you.”

“When?”

But she didn’t answer, just looped her hands so Hennan could scramble over the shard. The boy had wrapped rags about his hands. A good move. Mine were cut from sharp edges and already stinging with the salts.

The spider led us away from the crystal gallery, past a steaming pool of cobalt blue water, and into a hall equal to any we had yet seen but hewn from the bedrock. Along each side stood massive salt crystals, vast octagonal columns retrieved from some deep place by an artistry unknown to men, or at least to any since the Builders. Each would barely fit along the passage that brought us here and would take a hundred elephants to haul.

What salt had formed the columns I couldn’t say but each held a limpid light that sprang from no source I could see and illuminated the clear depths of them where webs and veils of ghostly white fault lines suggested shapes, hints of horrors and of angels, held forever within the heart of the crystal.

“Listen.” Kara held up her hand and even the spider paused, frozen in mid-step.

“I can’t—”

“They’re singing.” Hennan gazed around him.

Singing was too grand a word for it. Each crystal emitted a pure tone, just on the edge of hearing. As I drew near to one then the next I could discern a subtle change in the pitch, as if each were like one of those tuning forks the musicians use to set their strings.

“These are doors.” I set a hand to the surface of the one before me and the key on my chest rang with the same note, making my skin tingle with the vibration.

I counted thirteen of them, all translucent save for the one dead centre of the left row. That one stood black as lies.

Snorri came to stand beside me. He seemed diminished in this place where the scale made ants of us all. He held his axe before him, the manacle cuts on his wrists burning red and angry. His whole body curled around the assassin’s wound and a crystal excrescence clad one side of him from hip to armpit, sharp with spiky outgrowths. “Which is mine? The black one?”

“They are none of them yours, northman.” The voice rang behind us, a grating atonal thing that reminded me of the clockwork soldiers.

Turning, we saw first a throne of salt, carved in pillars and roundels, grand as any king’s. The oak boards, upon which it sat, rested on the backs of several more of the silver-steel spiders, the meshing forest of their legs moving quick as bards’ fingers across lute strings to propel both platform and throne smoothly on.