The Liar's Key Read online

  “Well,” said Old Hrothson. “There’s always the priests.”

  All of them laughed, even the honour guards.

  “No really,” the younger Hrothson spoke for the first time. “My father can advise you about war, crops, trade, and fishing. Do you speak of the wisdom of this world or the other?”

  “A little of both,” Snorri admitted.

  “Ekatri.” Old Hrothson nodded. “She has returned. You’ll find her winter hut by the falls on the south side, three miles up the fjord. There’s more in her runes than in the smokes and iron bells of the priests with their endless tales of Asgard.”

  The son nodded, and Snorri took his leave. When he glanced back both men were as they had been when he left them five years before, gazing out to sea.

  • • •

  An hour later Snorri approached the witch’s hut, a small roundhouse, log-built, the roof of heather and hide, a thin trail of smoke rising from the centre. Ice still fringed the falls, crashing down behind the hut in a thin and endless cascade, pulses of white driving down through the mist above the plunge pool.

  A shiver ran through Snorri as he followed the rocky path to Ekatri’s door. The air tasted of old magic, neither good nor ill, but of the land, having no love for man. He paused to read the runes on the door. Magic and Woman. Völva it meant. He knocked and, hearing nothing, pushed through.

  Ekatri sat on spread hides, almost lost beneath a heap of patched blankets. She watched him with one dark eye and a weeping socket. “Come in then. Clearly you’re not taking no answer for an answer.”

  Snorri ducked low to avoid the door lintel and then to clear the herbs hanging from the roof stays in dry bunches. The small fire between them coiled its smoke up into the funnel of the roof, filling the single room with a perfume of lavender and pine that almost obscured the undercurrent of rot.

  “Sit, child.”

  Snorri sat, taking no offence. Ekatri looked to be a hundred, as wizened and twisted as a clifftop tree.

  “Well? Do you expect me to guess?” Ekatri dipped her clawed hand into one of the bowls set before her and tossed a pinch of the powder into the embers before her, putting a darker curl into the rising smoke.

  “In the winter assassins came to Trond. They came for me. I want to know who sent them.”

  “You didn’t ask them?”

  “Two I had to kill. The last I disabled, but I couldn’t make him speak.”

  “You’ve no stomach for torture, Undoreth?”

  “He had no mouth.”

  “A strange creature indeed.” Ekatri drew out a glass jar from her blanket, not a thing northmen could make. A thing of the Builders, and in the greenish liquid within, a single eyeball, turning on the slow current. The witch’s own perhaps.

  “They had olive skin, were human in all respects save for the lack of a mouth, that and the ungodly quickness of them.” Snorri drew out a gold coin from his pocket. “Might be from Florence. They had the blood price on them, in florins.”

  “That doesn’t make them Florentines. Half the jarls in Norseheim have a handful of florins in their warchests. In the southern states the nobles spend florins in their gambling halls as often as their own currency.” Snorri passed the coin over into Ekatri’s outstretched claw. “A double florin. Now they are more rare.”

  Ekatri set the coin upon the lid of the jar where her lost eye floated. She drew a leather bag from her blankets and shook it so the contents clacked against each other. “Put your hand in, mix them about, tip them out . . . here.” She cleared a space and marked the centre.

  Snorri did as he was bidden. He’d had the runes read for him before. This message would be a darker one, he fancied. He closed his hand around the tablets, finding them colder and heavier than he had expected, then drew his fist out, opened it palm up and let the rune stones slip from his hand onto the hides below. It seemed as though each fell through water, its path too slow, twisting more than it should. When they landed a silence ran through the hut, underwriting the finality of the pronouncement writ in stone between the witch and himself.

  Ekatri studied the tablets, her face avid, as if hungry for something she might read among them. A very pink tongue emerged to wet ancient lips.

  “Wunjo, face down, beneath Gebo. A woman has buried your joy, a woman may release it.” She touched another two face up. “Salt and Iron. Your path, your destination, your challenge, and your answer.” A gnarled finger flipped over the final runestone. “The Door. Closed.”

  “What does all that mean?” Snorri frowned.

  “What do you think it means?” Ekatri watched him with wry amusement.

  “Am I supposed to be the völva for you?” Snorri rumbled, feeling mocked. “Where’s the magic if I tell you the answer?”

  “I let you tell me your future and you ask where the magic lies?” Ekatri reached out and swirled the jar beside her so the pickled eyeball within spun with the current. “The magic might be in getting into that thick warrior skull of yours the fact that your future stands on your choices and only you can make them. The magic lies in knowing that you seek both a door and the happiness you think lies behind it.”

  “There’s more,” Snorri said.

  “There is always more.”

  Snorri drew up his jerkin. The scrapes and tears the Fenris wolf had given him were scabbed and healing, bruises livid across his chest and side, but across his ribs a long single slice lay glistening, the flesh about it an angry red, and along the wound’s length a white encrustation of salt. “My gift from the assassins.”

  “An interesting injury.” Ekatri reached forward with withered fingers. Snorri flinched but kept his place as she set her hand across the slit. “Does it hurt, Snorri ver Snagason?”

  “It hurts.” Through gritted teeth. “It only gives me peace when we sail. The longer I stay put the worse it gets. I feel a . . . tug.”

  “It pulls you south.” Ekatri removed her hand, wiping it on her furs. “You’ve felt this kind of call before.”

  Snorri nodded. The bond with Jal exerted a similar draw. He felt it even now, slight, but there, wanting to pull him back to the tavern he’d left the southerner in.

  “Who has done this?” He met the völva’s one-eyed gaze.

  “Why is a better question.”

  Snorri picked up the stone Ekatri had named the Door. It no longer felt unduly cold or heavy, just a piece of slate, graven with a single rune. “Because of the door. And because I seek it,” he said.

  Ekatri held her hand out for the Door and Snorri passed the stone to her, feeling a twinge of reluctance at releasing it.

  “Someone in the south wants what you carry, and they want you to bring it to them.” Ekatri licked her lips, again—the quickness of her tongue disturbing. “See how one simple cut draws all the runes together?”

  “The Dead King did this? He sent these assassins?” Snorri asked.

  Ekatri shook her head. “The Dead King is not so subtle. He is a raw and elemental force. This has an older hand behind it. You have something everyone wants.” Ekatri touched the claw of her hand to her withered chest, the motion just glimpsed beneath the blankets. She touched on herself the same spot where Loki’s key lay against Snorri’s flesh.

  “Why just the three? Sent in the midst of winter. Why not more, now that travelling is easy?”

  “Perhaps he was testing something? Does it seem reasonable that three such assassins should fail against one man? Perhaps the wound was all they were intended to give you. An invitation . . . of a kind. If it wasn’t for the light within you battling the poison on that blade you would belong to the wound already, busy rushing south. There would be no question of any delay or diversion to speak to old women in their huts.” She closed her eye and seemed to study Snorri with her empty socket a while. “They do say Loki’s key doesn’t like to be taken. Given, surely, b
ut taken? Stolen, of a certainty. But taken by force? Some speak of a curse on those who own it through strength. And it doesn’t do to anger gods, now does it?”

  “I mentioned no key.” Snorri fought to keep his hands from twitching toward it, burning cold against his chest.

  “Ravens fly even in winter, Snagason.” Ekatri’s eye hardened. “Do you think if some southern mage knew of your exploits weeks ago, old Ekatri would not know of it by now in her hut just down the coast? You came seeking wisdom: don’t take me for a fool.”

  “So I must go south and hope?”

  “There is no ‘must’ about it. Surrender the key and the wound will heal. Perhaps even the wounds you can’t see. Stay here. Make a new life.” She patted the hides beside her. “I could always use a new man. They never seem to last.”

  Snorri made to stand. “Keep the gold, völva.”

  “Well, it seems my wisdom is valued today. Now that you’ve paid for it so handsomely perhaps you might heed it, child.” She made the coin vanish and sighed. “I’m old, my bones are dry, the world has lost its savour, Snorri. Go, die, spend yourself in the deadlands . . . it matters little to me, my words are a pretty noise for you, your mind is set. The waste sorrows me, young and full of juice you are, but in the end, in the end we’re all wasted by the years. Think on it, though. Did those who stand in your path just start to covet Loki’s key this winter?”

  “I—” Snorri knew a moment of shame. His thoughts had been so narrowed on the choice he’d made that the rest of the world had escaped him.

  “As your tragedies draw you south . . . wonder how those tragedies came to be and whose hand truly lay behind them.”

  “I’ve been a fool.” Snorri found his feet.

  “And you’ll keep being one. Words can’t turn you from this course. Maybe nothing can. Friendship, love, trust, childish notions that have left this old woman . . . but, whatever the runes have to say, these are what rule you, Snorri ver Snagason, friendship, love, trust. They’ll drag you into the underworld, or save you from it. One or the other.” She hung her head, stared into the fire.

  “And this door I seek? Where can I find it?”

  Ekatri’s wrinkle of a mouth puckered into consideration. “I don’t know.”

  Snorri felt himself deflate. For a moment he had thought she might tell him, but it would have to be Skilfar. He started to turn.

  “Wait.” The völva raised a hand. “I don’t know. But I can guess where it might lie. Three places.” She returned her hand to her lap. “In Yttrmir the world slopes into Hel, so they say. In the badlands that stretch to the Yöttenfall the skies grow dim and the people strange. Go far enough and you’ll find villages where no one ages, none are born, each day follows the next without change. Further still and the people neither eat nor drink nor sleep but sit at their windows and stare. I’ve not heard that there is a door—but if you wish to go to Hel, that is a path. That is the first. The second is Eridruin’s Cave on the shore of Harrowfjord. Monsters dwell there. The hero Snorri Hengest fought them, and in his saga it speaks of a door that stands in the deepest part of those caverns, a black door. The third is less sure, told by a raven, a child of Crakk, white-feathered in his dotage. Even so. There is a lake in Scorron, the Venomere, dark as ink, where no fish swim. In its depths they say there is a door. In older days the men of Scorron threw witches into those waters, and none ever floated to the surface as corpses are wont to do.”

  “My thanks, völva.” He hesitated. “Why did you tell me? If my plan is such madness?”

  “You asked. The runes put the door in your path. You’re a man. Like most men you need to face your quarry before you can truly decide. You won’t let go of this until you find it. Maybe not even then.” Ekatri looked down and said no more. Snorri waited a moment longer, then turned and left, watched by a single eye floating in its jar.

  • • •

  “Assassins?” I lifted my head, the room continuing to move after I stopped. “Nonsense. You never mentioned any attack.”

  Snorri lifted his jerkin. A single ugly wound ran down his side, far back, just past the ribs, salt crusted as he’d described. I may have seen it when Borris’s daughters were washing him back in Olaafheim after the Fenris wolf got hold of him, or perhaps he had been turned the wrong way . . . in any event I didn’t recall it in my inebriation.

  “So how much does it cost to hire assassins then?” I asked. “Just for future reference. And . . . where’s the money? You should be rich!”

  “I gave most of it to the sea, so that Aegir would grant us safe passage,” said Snorri.

  “Well that didn’t bloody work!” I banged the table, perhaps a little harder than I meant to. I can be an excitable drunk.

  “Most of it?” Tuttugu asked.

  “I paid a völva in Trond to treat the wound.”

  “Did a piss-poor job from what I could see,” I interjected, holding on to the table to keep from sliding past it.

  “It was beyond her skill, and while we stay here it only grows worse. Come, we’ll sail at dawn.”

  Snorri stood and I guess we followed, though I’ve no memory of it.

  SEVEN

  I woke the next morning under sail and with a head sore enough to keep me curled in the prow groaning for the mercy of death until well past noon. The previous evening returned to me in fragments over the course of the next few days but it took an age to assemble the pieces into anything that made sense. And even then it didn’t make much sense. I consoled myself with our steady progress toward home and the civilized comforts thereof. As my head eased I planned out who I would see first and where I’d spend my first night. I would probably ask for Lisa DeVeer’s hand, assuming she hadn’t been dragged to the opera that night and burned with the rest. She was the finest of the old man’s daughters and I’d grown very fond of her. Especially in her absence. Thoughts of home kept me warm, and I huddled in the prow, waiting to get there.

  • • •

  The sea is always changing—but mostly for the worse. A cold and relentless rain arrived with the next morning and plagued us all day, driven by winds that pushed the ocean up before them into rolling hills of brine. Snorri’s dreadful little boat wallowed around like a pig trying to drown, and by the time evening threatened even the Norsemen had had enough.

  “We’ll put in at Harrowheim,” Snorri told us, wiping the rain from his beard. “It’s a little place I know.” Something about the name gave me a bad feeling but I was too eager to be on solid ground to object, and I guessed that even driven as he was the Norseman would rather spend the night ashore.

  So, with the sun setting behind us we turned for the dark coastline, letting the wind hurl us toward the rocks until at the last the mouth of a fjord revealed itself and we sailed on in. The fjord proved itself a narrow one, little more than two hundred yards wide, its shores rising steeper than a flight of stairs, reaching for the serrated ridges of sullen rock that cradled the waters.

  Aslaug spoke to me while the two Norsemen busied themselves with rope and sail. She sat beside me in the stern, clad in shadow and suggestion, impervious to the rain and the tug of the wind.

  “How they torment you with this boat, Prince Jalan.” She laid a hand on my knee, ebony fingers staining the cloth, a delicious feeling soaking into me. “Baraqel guides Snorri now. The Norseman doesn’t have your strength of will. Where you were able to withstand the demon’s preaching Snorri is swayed. His instincts have always been—”

  “Demon?” I muttered. “Baraqel’s an angel.”

  “You think so?” She purred it close by my ear and suddenly I didn’t know what I thought, or care overmuch that I didn’t. “The creatures of the light wear whatever shapes you let them steal from legend. Beneath it all they are singular in will and no more your friend or guardians than the fire.”

  I shivered in my cloak wishing I had a good blaze to
warm myself by right now. “But fire is—”

  “Fire is your enemy, Prince Jalan. Enslave it and it will serve, but give it an inch, give it any opportunity, and you’ll be lucky to escape the burning wreckage of your home. You keep the fire at arm’s length. You don’t take a hot coal to your breast. No more should you embrace Baraqel or his kind. Snorri has done so and it has left his will in ashes—a puppet for the light to work its own purposes through. See how he looks at you. How he watches you. It’s only a matter of time before he acts openly against you. Mark these words, my prince. Mark—”

  The sun sank and Aslaug fell into a darkness that leaked away through the hull.

  • • •

  We drew up at the quays of Harrowheim in the gathering gloom, guided in by the lights of houses clustered on the steepness of the slope. To the west some sort of cove or landslip offered a broad flattish area where crops might be grown in the shelter of the fjord.

  An ancient with a lantern waved us alongside his own boat where he’d been sat picking the last fish from his nets.

  “You’ll be wannin’ me ta walk you up,” he said, all gums and wisps of beard.

  “Don’t trouble yourself, Father.” Tuttugu getting onto the quay with far more grace than he showed on land. He stooped low over the man’s boat. “Herring, eh? White-Gill. Nice catch. We don’t see them for another few weeks up in Trond.”

  “Ayuh.” The old man held one up, still flipping half-heartedly in his fingers. “Good ’uns.” He put it down as Snorri clambered out, leaving me to stagger uncertainly across the rolling boat toward the step. “Still. Better go with you. The lads are twitchy tonight. Raiders about—it’s the season for ’em. Might fill you full of spear before you know it.”

  My boot, wet with bilge water, slipped out from under me at “raiders” and I nearly vanished into the strip of dark water between quay and boat. I caught myself painfully on the planks, biting my tongue as I clutched the support. “Raiders?” I tasted blood and hoped it wasn’t a premonition.