“Give that man with the cough some room, dammit! Don’t crowd him. Someone give him some water—there’s a copper in it for the man that does. And Artemis—where’s my faithful Artemis got to? Water for him too. And here’s a crust to dip into it.”
It took a bit of organizing but I did my best for them. Not that I had much faith in the curative powers of stale water and staler bread. Our friend outside kept bumping against the bars, and our friends inside kept muttering about why he might be doing it, but in the end with nothing to see and nothing to be done about it, we settled back into an uneasy quiet.
The truth about sheer terror is that even for a world-class coward like me it’s unsustainable. When the dreaded thing doesn’t happen hour after hour it becomes something that whilst still terrible allows a little room around the edges through which other thoughts may slip. Thoughts came. Thoughts that seeded suspicions into the blindness of the cell. Suspicions, watered by darkness, growing, slowly but relentlessly. The Red Queen’s war lay at the midst of my troubles. Her elder sister had sent me to the distant north to find the key I now held. And what was I doing in Umbertide? The Silent Sister’s twin had sent me here. It had seemed a mercy at the time, an escape from the dangers at home . . . but was it? Red March mortgaged to the banks of Florence, a power struggle between House Gold and others against Kelem, the Broken Empire’s unofficial master of coin, the Dead King sticking his bony fingers into the pie . . . the last staging post for Snorri before heading into the hills bearing Loki’s key to seek the door-mage out . . . and young Prince Jalan thrust into the middle of it all by a man I’d come to understand more fully in Umbertide than I ever had in the palace—a man the traders here considered Red March’s unofficial master of coin. I thought of Garyus slumped in his bed, looking two steps from death as he sent me on my way with the only kind words I heard on my return. I thought of him lying there and tried to square that image with the new ones being built behind my eyes. With a start I realized I was holding Loki’s key tight to my chest. I lowered my hand, wondering if its lies were bleeding into me even now.
I sat pondering, clutching Loki’s key, shifting position every few minutes to keep from getting sore against the flagstones, until every part of me was sore and it didn’t matter any more. I would rather have set the key in a pocket but I couldn’t risk losing it, and so I held it tight, that slick and treacherous surface seeming to slide beneath my fingers like melting ice.
To start with I’d gripped the thing as if it might bite me, remembering how at my first touch memories had pulsed through me, images from the day Edris Dean killed my mother. But the key didn’t bite any more than old Artos found a way through the cell’s bars. I sat with it cool in my fist for an hour or more, listening to the sounds of the dungeon. At one point I heard a knocking, as if someone were rapping on a door close by—though I knew we had only bars and gates, no door. The knocking grew louder, more insistent, though no one around me mentioned it, and the darkness around my ears seemed crowded with whispers just beyond the edge of hearing. It lasted a minute, another, and then no more.
The fear subsided into unease, disquiet fermented into boredom, and only the long battle against sleep remained as the blind hours passed. That was when the key struck. It felt as if the key were hauled sideways. I could let it go or be dragged along with it. Darkness melted into vision though I fought with all my strength to stay where I was, and struggled to see only what lay about me. My efforts blew away in a cold wind. I stood once more on the margins of the Wheel of Osheim. The archway, that empty arch through which we’d escaped from Edris and the Hardassa Vikings stood once more before me, a lone work of the wrong-mages in the bizarre wilderness through which Kara had guided us. Of the v?lva, of Snorri and Tuttugu, there was no sign. No sign of me either, just my disembodied point of view, watching, unblinking, waiting for the lie, waiting for the key’s deception. And nothing came. I held a dim awareness of my body, somewhere else, in another place and time, the key a cold and heavy bar locked tight in my grip.