? ? ?
And Hennan told me. The food supplies he had taken from the Roma Hall kitchens ran out after two days. Hungry and tired, he had managed to get a ride with an old couple visiting relatives in Hemero. The pair of ancients appeared to be taking all their worldly possessions with them in their cart but found room for the boy atop the heap. Hennan’s part of the bargain was to fetch and carry water, gather kindling, take the horses to pasture, and carry out miscellaneous chores. To me it sounded as if the old folks had taken pity on a strangely pale beggar boy. In any event the arrangement got him safely to within ten miles of the Florentine border.
Back roads took Hennan across the invisible line between the two kingdoms at a point without any guards to turn him away. He arrived sunburned and hungry in Umbertide, exhausting the last of the provisions that his ageing benefactors had sent him off with. Getting into the city had been an adventure of sewers and climbing, Umbertide having enough street children of its own without the soldiers at its gates letting any more in.
It wasn’t until Hennan had nearly finished the tale of his getting into Umbertide that I realized what the real problem was. The understanding struck as a cold contraction of the stomach and a sudden reluctance to ask the questions that needed answers.
I forced the words out. “How long ago did you get taken?”
Hennan frowned in the candle light. “I don’t know. Everything feels like forever down here and there’s no days.”
“Guess.”
“A couple of days before you came?”
That sinking feeling became something more savage as if some great hand were trying to pull me through the cell floor. I thought he’d been in the cell the whole time I’d been in Umbertide. “But you’re so thin . . .”
“I’ve been living off rubbish and sleeping in the streets for . . . weeks. Snorri didn’t come by road. Not at first. They took a boat down the river—”
“The Seleen?” The cunning bastards. They hadn’t trusted me to keep quiet about the key and knew the Red Queen would come after them. They’d done what northmen do. Taken to sea.
“Yes, they got a merchant to take them down the coast on his ship. Only they had problems and it took them a long time. They put in at some port on the Florentine coast and walked to Umbertide. I saw them coming through the Echo Gates. I used to sleep by there, up on a roof.”
“So you met up with them and . . .”
“Soldiers took us a few hours later.”
“Soldiers?”
“Well, men in uniform anyway, with swords.”
“And what had you done?”
“Nothing. Kara got us a room and we’d gone to a tavern and Snorri got me something to eat. They were talking about how they would find Kelem once they reached his mines—Kara said they weren’t far off. And then the soldiers came. Snorri knocked some down and we barricaded ourselves into the room. And that’s when Kara convinced Snorri to let her hide the key. Snorri said . . .” Hennan frowned again, as if trying to remember the exact words. “‘Hide it with the boy. He needs something to give them.’”
“Shit.” Not good. Not good at all.
“What? What’s wrong?” Hennan said, as if there weren’t already enough wrong for me to curse every time I opened my mouth.
“If they want the key they’ll be coming here soon enough.”
Hennan was all questions then, but for once I couldn’t think of any plausible lies and the truth was too ugly to share. When I thought that House Gold had held Snorri for weeks without coming to the debtors’ prison to question their other captives things had seemed less urgent. If they’ll wait three weeks then chances are they’ll wait another one, and another. My own questions spiralled in my skull, chased by inconvenient answers. Why would they capture Snorri if not for the key? What could be more dangerous in a city where locked vaults lay everywhere than a key that opened everything? Why would Snorri give the key to a child? Because when they came to question the boy Snorri needed to know Hennan had something to give them rather than be tortured for information he didn’t have. And the biggest question was how long—how long would the northmen hold out once the bankers stopped asking nicely and got out the hot irons? If it were me I’d be babbling out every secret I ever knew before they’d even got past harsh language. They’d had them three days. If they were asking questions the hard way then nobody could hold out much longer than that, not even Snorri.