The Liar's Key Read online

  Snorri and Tuttugu had left no trail so Beerentoppen’s broken peak was all I had to guide me. Baraqel had told them where Skilfar was but damned if I could remember what he’d said. I stumbled gasping and spluttering around the vast boulders that decorated any even vaguely flat surface, and skittered a dangerous path across slopes littered with brittle stones that may have been spat from the volcano . . . or dropped by pixies for all I knew.

  One skitter took me a little too far. I hit a rock, tripped, and sprawled, coming to a halt not more than a foot from a drop big enough to be the killing kind. “Shit.” The closest of my pursuers were three hundred yards off and moving fast. I got to my feet, hands bloody.

  I’m very good at running away. For best results put me in a city. Among streets and houses I do well. In such surroundings a good sprint, tight cornering, and an open mind when it comes to hiding places will see a man clear under most circumstances. The countryside is worse—more things to trip you up, and the best hiding spots are often taken. On a bleak mountainside it comes down to endurance, and when a fellow has been wrung out by sea sickness, not to mention rolled on by the kind of wolf that would only need two friends to bring down a mammoth . . . well, it’s not going to end well.

  Fear is a great motivator. It returned me to my feet and set me jogging on. I didn’t dare look back for fear of missing my footing again. I clutched my side, rasped in one breath after the next, and tried to keep from weaving across the slope. Hope is almost as bad as fear for goading a man past the point at which he should give up. Hope persuaded me I was opening a lead. Hope convinced me the next rise would reveal Snorri and Tuttugu just ahead. When, in a sudden pounding of footsteps, the Hardassa man caught up with me and brought me down, I fell with a wheeze of surprise, despite it having been inevitable from the moment I spotted their longboat closing on the beach.

  The Viking crashed down on top of me, pressing my face to the rock. I lay panting while the rest of the pursuit gathered round. My view offered only their boots but I didn’t need to see any more than that to know they would be a fearsome bunch.

  “Prince Jalan Kendeth. Good to meet you again.” A southern accent, a touch winded.

  The weight lifted from me as my captor rolled clear. I took my time getting into a sitting position. Looking up, I found Edris Dean staring down at me, feet braced against the slope, hand on hip. He seemed pleased. The dozen Red Vikings arrayed around him looked less pleased. More of them stretched out back down the slope, toiling upward.

  “Don’t kill me!” It seemed like a good place to start.

  “Give me the key and I’ll let you go,” Edris said, still with the smile.

  The thing about staying alive is staying useful. As a prince I’m always useful . . . as an heir and a figurehead. As a debtor I was useful as long as Maeres believed I might be able to pay him back. As Edris’s captive, too far from home to be a good prospect for ransom, my only real use lay in being a link to Loki’s key. “I can take you to it.” It might only mean a few more hours of life but I’d sell my own grandmother for that. And her palace.

  Edris waved a couple of the Hardassa men forward. One took the rations sack I’d been too preoccupied to ditch, the other started to go through my clothes, and not gently. “My friends here tell me there’s only one reason to put in at this shore.” He pointed up at Beerentoppen. “I don’t need you to find the witch.”

  “Ah!” The Viking was being particularly thorough and his hands were freezing. “Uh. But. You need me to . . .” I hunted for a reason. “Skilfar! Snorri’s got the key and he’s going to give it to Skilfar. You’ve got to catch him before he gets to her.”

  “I don’t need you for that either.” Edris took the dagger from his belt. A plain iron pig-sticker.

  “But . . .” I eyed the blade. He had a good point. “He’ll trade the key for me. You don’t want to fight him—didn’t go so well last time. And . . . and . . . he might throw the key away. If he threw it as you charged him you could spend a week hunting these slopes and still not find it.”

  “Why would he trade Loki’s key against your life?” Edris sounded doubtful.

  “Blood debt!” It came to me in a flash. “He owes me his life. You don’t know Snorri ver Snagason. Honour’s all he has left. He’ll pay his debt.”

  Edris twitched his mouth in a sneer, quickly gone. “Alrik, Knui, he’s your responsibility. Take his weapons.”

  The pair searching me and my belongings took away my sword and knife. Edris strode past, setting a good pace, the others following in his wake. “You keep up now, my prince, or we’ll have to cut you loose and take our chances.”

  Alrik, a dark-bearded thug, started me off with a shove between the shoulders. “Quick.” The Red Vikings spoke the old tongue among themselves and some had a few words of Empire. Knui followed on. I had no illusions concerning what was meant by “cutting me loose.”

  Hurrying after Edris, I kept a good eye on the ground ahead, knowing a twisted ankle would see me gutted and left to die. Now and then I stole a glance at the mountain slopes to either side. Somewhere out there the necromancer might be watching, and even in these direst of straits I had time to be scared of her.

  • • •

  Climbing to the Beerentoppen crater with Edris in the lead proved every bit as horrific as running before him. Staggering up ever-steeper rock-faces, hands and knees raw, feet blistered and bruised, panting hard enough to vomit a lung, I actually wished I could be back in the Sea-Troll bobbing about on the ocean.

  Hours passed. Noon passed. We got high enough to see across the snow-laden peaks north and south, the going becoming even more vertical and more treacherous, and still no Snorri. It astonished me that without knowing he was pursued Snorri had kept ahead of us. Especially with Tuttugu. The man was not made for climbing mountains. Rolling down them he’d be good at.

  Afternoon crawled into evening and I crawled after Edris, driven on by the threat of Alrik’s hatchet and by well-placed kicks from Knui. The peak of the mountain looked to be broken off, ending in a serrated rim. The slopes took on a peculiar folded character, as if the rock had congealed like molten fat running from a roasting pig. We got to within a few hundred yards of the top when Edris’s scouts returned to report. They yabbered in the old tongue while I lay sprawled, willing some hints of life back into limp legs.

  “No sign of Snorri.” Edris loomed over me. “Not out here, not in the crater.”

  “He must be somewhere.” I half wondered if Snorri had lied, if he’d gone off on some different quest. Maybe the next cove held a fishing town, a tavern, warm beds . . .

  “He’s found the witch’s cave, and that’s bad news for all of us. Especially you.”

  I sat up at that. Fear of imminent death always helps a man find new reserves of energy. “No! Look—” I forced my voice to come out less shrill and panicky. Weakness invites trouble. “No. I wanted Snorri to give Skilfar the key—but he didn’t agree. Chances are he’ll still have it when he comes out. He’s a hard man to argue with. And then you can trade.”

  “When a man starts changing his story it’s difficult to give credence to anything he says.” Edris eyed me speculatively, a look that had probably been the last thing half a dozen men ever saw. Even so, the blind terror that had held me since sighting their longboat had started to ebb. There’s an odd thing about being among men who are casually considering your murder. On my ventures with Snorri I’d been plunged into one horror after another, and run screaming from as many of them as I could. The terror that a dead man inspires, trailing his guts as he lurches after you, or that cold chill the hot breath of a forest fire can bring, these are reactions to wholly alien situations—the stuff of nightmare. With men though, the regular everyday sort, it’s different. And after a winter in the Three Axes I’d come to see even the most hirsute axe-clutching reavers as fairly common fellows with the same aches, pains, gripes and
ambitions as every other man, albeit in the context of summers spent raiding enemy shores. With men who bear you no particular ill will and for whom your murder will be more of a chore than anything else, entailing both the effort of the act and of the subsequent cleaning of a weapon, the business of dying starts to seem a bit everyday too. You almost get swept up in the madness of the thing. Especially if you’re so exhausted that death seems like a good excuse for a rest. I returned his stare and said no more.

  “All right.” Edris ended the long period of decision and turned away. “We’ll wait.”

  The Red Vikings distributed themselves across the slopes to seek the entrance to Skilfar’s lair. Edris, Alrik, and Knui stayed with me.

  “Tie his hands.” Edris settled down against a rock. He drew his sword from its scabbard and took a whetstone to its edge.

  Alrik bound my hands behind me with a strip of hide. None of them had brought packs, they’d just given chase. They had no food other than what they’d stolen from me, and no shelter. From our elevation we could see along the mountainous coast for several miles in each direction, and out across the sea. The beach and their longboat lay hidden by the volcano’s shoulder.

  “Is she here?” The necromancer plagued my thoughts, images of dead men rising kept returning to me, unbidden.

  Edris let a long moment pass before a slow turn of the head brought his gaze my way. He gave me an uneasy smile. “She’s out there.” A wave of his hand. “Let’s hope she stays there.” He held his sword toward me. “She gave me this.” The thing put an ache in my chest and made me shiver, as if I remembered it from some dark dream. Script ran along its length, not the Norse runes but a more flowing hand reminiscent of the markings the Silent Sister used to destroy her enemies. “Kill a babe in the womb with this piece of steel and the poor wee thing is given to Hell. Just waits there for its chance to return unborn. The mother’s death, the death of any close relative, opens a hole into the drylands, just for that lost child, and if you’re quick, if you’re powerful, all that potential can be born into the world of men in a new and terrible form.” He spoke in a conversational tone, his measure of regret sounding genuine enough—but at the same time a cold certainty wrapped me. This was the blade that had slain Snorri’s son in his wife’s belly, Edris the man who started the foul work that the necromancers continued and that ended with Snorri facing his unborn child in the vault at the Black Fort’s heart. “You watch the slopes, young prince. The necromancer’s out there, and that one you really don’t want to meet.”

  Alrik and Knui exchanged glances but said nothing. Knui took off his helm, setting it on his knees, and rubbed his bald scalp, scraping his nails through sweat-soaked straggles of red-blond hair to either side. In places the helm had left him raw, bouncing back and forth on the long climb. The day had taken its toll on all of us and despite the awfulness of my predicament my head started to nod. With the horror of Edris’s words rattling about in my brain I knew I wouldn’t ever sleep again, but I lay back to rest my body. I closed my eyes, sealing away the bleakness of the sky. A moment later oblivion took me.

  • • •

  “Jalan.” A dark and seductive voice. “Jalan Kendeth.” Aslaug insinuated herself into my dream, which up until that point had been a dull repetition of the day, climbing the Beerentoppen all over again, endless images of rocks and grit passing under foot, hands reaching for holds, boots scrabbling. I stopped dead on the dream-slopes and straightened to find her standing in my path, draped in shadow, bloody with the dying sun. “What a drab place.” She looked about herself, tongue wetting her upper lip as she considered our surroundings. “It can’t really be this bad? Why don’t you wake up so I can see for real.”

  I opened a bleary eye and found myself staring out at the setting sun, the sky aflame beneath louring clouds. Alrik sat close by sharpening his hatchet with a whetstone. Knui stood a little way off where the slope dropped away, watching the sun go down, or pissing, or both. Edris seemed to have disappeared, probably to check on his men.

  Aslaug stood behind Alrik, looking down on the dark mass of his hair and broad shoulders as he tended his weapon. “Well this won’t do at all, Jalan.” She leaned to peer behind me at my hands, wedged between my back and the rock. “Tied up! And you, a prince!”

  I couldn’t very well answer her without drawing unwanted attention, but I watched, filled with the dark excitement her visits always provoked. It wasn’t that she made me brave exactly, but seeing the world when she stood in it just took the edge off everything and made life seem simpler. I tested the bonds on my wrists. Still strong. She made life simple . . . but not that simple.

  Aslaug set one bare foot on the helmet Alrik had set beside him, and laid her finger against the side of his head. “If you launched yourself at him and struck the top of your forehead against this spot . . . he would not get up again.”

  I gestured with my eyes toward Knui, just ten yards down the slope.

  “That one,” she said. “Is standing next to a fifteen foot drop . . . How quickly do you think you could reach him?”

  Under normal circumstances I’d still be arguing about the head butt. I would have guessed as zero the likelihood that I could pick myself up, cover the distance to Knui without falling on my face. To then knock Knui off the cliff while not following him over was surely impossible. I also wouldn’t have the nerve to try it, not even to save my life. But with Aslaug looking on, an ivory goddess smoking with dark desire, a faint mocking smile on perfect lips, the odds didn’t seem to matter any more. I knew then how Snorri must have felt when he battled with her beside him. I knew an echo of the reckless spirit that had filled him when the night trailed black from the blade of his axe.

  Still I hesitated, looking up at Aslaug, slim, taut, wreathed in shadows that moved against the wind.

  “Live before you die, Jalan.” And those eyes, whose colour I could never name, filled me with unholy joy.

  I tilted away from the boulder that supported me, rocked onto my toes, and started to fall forward before straightening my legs with a sudden thrust. Suppressing the urge to roar I threw myself like a spear, forehead aimed for the spot on Alrik’s temple where Aslaug had laid her finger.

  The impact ran through me, filling my vision with blinding pain. It hurt more than I had thought it would—a lot more. For a heartbeat or two the world went away. I recovered to find myself lying across Alrik’s unresisting form, head on his chest. I rolled clear, trying to see out of eyes screwed tight against the pain. Down the slope Knui had turned from the cliff edge and his contemplation of the sea.

  Getting on your feet on a steep incline with your hands bound behind you is not easy. In fact I didn’t quite manage it. I lurched, half-stood, unbalanced, and set off down the mountainside flat out, desperately trying to get each foot in front of me in time to keep from diving face first into the rock.

  Knui moved quickly. I aimed at him as the only chance for stopping my headlong dash. He’d already advanced a couple of yards and was unslinging his axe when, totally out of control, I cannoned into him. Even braced against the impact, Knui had no chance. Wiry and tougher than leather he might be, but I was the bigger man and carrying more momentum than anyone on a mountainside would ever want. Bones crunched, I carried him backward, we held for a broken second teetering on the cliff edge, and with a single cry we both went over.

  Hitting Alrik had been harder and more painful than I wanted or expected. Hitting Knui proved much worse. Both were gentle taps compared to hitting the ground. For the second time in under a minute I passed out.

  I came to lying face down on something soft. And damp. And . . . smelly. I couldn’t see much or move my arms.

  “Get up, Jalan.” For a moment I couldn’t understand who was speaking. “Up!”

  Aslaug! I couldn’t get up—so I rolled. The softness proved to be Knui. Also the dampness and the smell. His face registered surpris
e, the expression frozen in. The back of his head had . . . spread, the rocks crimson with it. I struggled to my knees, hurting myself on the stones. Aslaug stood beside me, against the cliff, her head and shoulders rising above the edge where Knui had stood. Shadow coiled up about her, vine-like, her features darkening.

  “Y—You said the drop was fifteen foot!” I spat blood.

  “I was next to you, Jalan. How could I see?” An infuriating smile on her lips. “It got you moving though. And any fall on a mountain can kill a man, with a little luck.”

  “You! Well . . . I.” I couldn’t find the right words, the fear had started to catch up with me.

  “Better get your hands free . . .” She pressed back against the stone, crouching now, indistinct as the horizon ate the sun and gloom swelled from every hollow.

  “I . . .” But Aslaug had gone and I was speaking to the rocks.

  Knui’s axe lay a little further down the slope. I shuffled toward it and with considerable difficulty positioned myself so I could start to saw at the hide strip around my wrists, watching all the while for other Hardassa men or Edris himself to come running into view.

  Even a sharp axe takes a god-awful long time to cut through tough hide. Sitting there by Knui’s corpse it felt like forever. Every few seconds I let my gaze slip from lookout duty to check he hadn’t moved. I had a poor record with killing men on mountainsides. They tended to get up again and prove more trouble dead than alive.

  At last the hide parted and I rubbed my wrists. Looking up, Aslaug’s second lie became apparent. She had said if I head butted Alrik where she pointed that he wouldn’t be getting up again. Yet there he was, standing at the top of the four-foot “cliff” that Knui and I sat at the bottom of. He didn’t seem pleased. More importantly, he had his hatchet in one hand and a wide-bladed knife with a serrated back in the other.