Sageous smiled as if we both knew the answer I would have given. He’d pointed me at Hennan, a gentle push that would normally be misconstrued as the nagging of a guilty conscience. It seemed important to Kelem that Snorri not feel pushed toward their encounter for fear of changing his mind. I took some small comfort in the fact that neither the dream-witch nor the door-mage seemed to understand either of us. Conscience would never compel me into harm’s way, and nothing would ever turn Snorri from his path, certainly not the fact that Kelem so badly wanted him to pursue it.
Sageous’s smile hung for a moment then fell away as if it had never been. “And to the purpose of my visit.” Sageous advanced on me, intimidating though he was the smaller man by more than a head. “Where is Loki’s key?” His eyes became drowning pools and terror washed over me. I fell into darkness screaming only the truth. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know!
I woke sweat-soaked, screaming the words, Hennan shaking me and shouting for me to wake up.
? ? ?
After the dream-witch’s visit I resolved never to sleep again.
? ? ?
It took a day’s insistence and the privacy of another food riot to get Hennan to talk about the key. Once the food got into his system and he found a little energy the boy wanted to talk about everything under the sun, about Kara, about how Snorri got taken down, about what happened to Tuttugu. I wouldn’t listen. I had one question—where is the key? In the end the need to talk about something, even if it was the one thing he’d promised not to talk about, was what broke Hennan’s resolve.
“Kara hid it,” he said.
“Snorri wouldn’t trust her with the key.”
“He watched her do it.”
“Did they bury it somewhere?” I don’t know what I’d been anticipating, but the idea of the key in a box under four foot of soil, or jammed in some remote crevice on a cliff face, didn’t offer much hope. A thing like that wouldn’t stay hidden. The unborn felt its pull and it seemed as though the necromancers could track it too. If the only thing the Central Bank wanted wasn’t still there once I’d bargained our release for its exchange then we’d all leave the prison the same way and nobody would be happy but the pigs. And if I did find out where it was, Sageous would pick the fact from my mind the very next time I fell asleep. Kelem getting the key might be the lesser of two evils compared to the Dead King getting his claws on it, but it still seemed a pretty evil evil to me. The only hope would be to find out where it was and use that information to my advantage before I next fell asleep.
“Tell me they gave it to someone for safekeeping—someone we can trust.” I couldn’t think of anyone I could trust, but maybe Snorri had more friends and was less troubled by that particular problem.
“Snorri didn’t give it away,” Hennan said.
“Well where is it then?” I hissed, fending off an old man who’d stumbled past our guards after being elbowed in the face over the ownership of an apple core.
The boy scratched his head as if this were a difficult question.
“Hennan!” I tried to keep the exasperation from my voice.
He withdrew his hand and opened it. A small iron tablet lay in his palm, no bigger than the nail of my little finger, set with a single rune. Kara wore the same things in her hair, or had until she sewed the Hardassa’s ruin with them close to the Wheel of Osheim. Hennan must have had it hidden in the matted filth of his own hair.
“How will this help?” I didn’t say it wouldn’t—I’d seen marvels spring from such runes.
Hennan frowned, trying to remember the exact words. “Let the shadow of a key fall upon it and it will unlock the truth and reveal the lie.”
“It will . . . what?” He’d forgotten the spell. All we had was garbled nonsense. The death of a small hope hurts more than an age of despair. That constant fear swelled again from the pit of my stomach and tears stung my eyes.
“It is the key.” Hennan kept his gaze on the rune. “But we can’t see it or use it until the charm’s taken off.”
It sounded like madness. “With a shadow?”
“Yes.”
“Of a key?”
“Yes.”
“Christ.” I lay back, shoulders to the roughness of the wall. “You think any of this lot have a key?” I leant to the side and grabbed the ankle of the old man who’d collapsed to the floor. “You! You got a key?” I started laughing, too loud, the kind of laughter that hurts your chest and isn’t but a hair from sobbing.
? ? ?
There’s one thing to be said for sitting in a cell with absolutely nothing to do but keep what’s yours and nurse your hunger—it gives you time. Time to think, time to plan. Obviously to give the lie to this nonsense Kara had spun Hennan, or possibly prove it true, we needed someone with a key. The only someone likely to come down into the bowels of the prison was our friend Racso. So all we needed to do was to get the shadow of Racso’s key to fall across it, and we’d have our opportunity when he next unlocked the cell.
Racso wouldn’t be back until he felt like selling the debtors food and water, probably another twelve hours or so. I sat back against the wall and invited Hennan to tell me just how Snorri had managed to get them all locked up.
“And how the hell did you find them?”