“It’s locked and there are men with swords on the other side,” I said, staring at the soldier’s gleaming metal skull.
On the smooth forehead where my face distorted in hideous reflection a small metal disc lay raised a hair above the surrounding. I banged the side of it with the base of the key and slid it aside to reveal a small circular hole no wider than the pupil of an eye. I pressed the cone-shaped point of the key to the hole and willed Loki’s piece of trickery into action. It took a moment’s concentration before the obsidian started to flow again, liquid night reforming beneath my fingers, cold with possibility, draining into the narrowness of the hole until all I held was the end of a thin black rod.
“You’re mine.” I whispered it, remembering Yusuf waiting with me in the House Gold, the blackness of his smile as he told me how the Mechanists’ machine coded a rod to each new owner and that rod, inserted into the specified clockwork soldier’s head, would transfer its loyalty to the person who had purchased it. I felt the rod change, felt it lock, and then, with a twist, I drew it slowly out, six obsidian inches of it. “Mine!” Louder now.
“But . . .” Hennan, frowning as I jumped down beside him. “You broke it . . .”
“I unwound it,” I said. “There’s a difference. And it was pretty much unwound in any case.” I moved back around to the winding port. The key changed to fit the indentation as I reached toward it. “Let’s . . .” I started to turn the key in the opposite direction to my first attempt. “See . . .” I put some muscle into it. “What . . .” Throughout the soldier’s torso cogs began to whisper and whirr. “We . . .” I kept turning. “Can . . . Do.”
I’m no scholar or artificer but I seem to recall that the physic of things is much like that of life. You don’t get anything for nothing, and if you want a lot out you’ve got to put a lot in. I wanted a lot out of my newest possession and I didn’t want to put a lot in. By rights I should have stood there winding for an hour just to get the thing to take a single step forward, but the key I held had its own rules. The key had been crafted to unlock, to remove obstacles, to allow the user to get where they wanted to. I wanted to get to a fully wound soldier. Its failure to work was the obstacle before me. I remembered how when I’d held the orichalcum I could, with enough focus and will, direct the wild pulsing of its illumination into a single brilliant beam and steer it forward until my concentration failed and it fell apart. I summoned that same focus and tried to will whatever potential I had in me into a single beam driven through the black rod in my hand and into the metal mass of the soldier.
With each turn of the key the noise from within the soldier grew, wheels rotating, springs groaning, cogs buzzing in a fury of motion, creaks and twangs as things deep within grew tighter, tighter, and tighter still. I thought of Edris Dean and turned the key though it resisted me and threatened to tear the very skin from my palm rather than rotate another degree. The soldier groaned, its armour flexed as deep inside the reservoirs of its power clenched into potent cores that might drive it on for another seven centuries. The great head above me turned on a neck of silver-steel collars, gears meshing, cricks giving with high pitched retorts. And the eyes that found me blazed even in the light of the new day.
“Jalan Kendeth,” it said in a voice sharp with angles and twanging like lute strings wound too tight.
“Prince Jalan,” I corrected it. “See this child.” I pointed and waited for the head to swivel and fix upon Hennan. “Hennan Vale. We’re going into this jail to extract two prisoners. You are to precede us and protect us from anyone trying to stop us.”
The soldier’s head rotated back toward me, a smooth and sudden motion, far more rapid than its movements prior to rewinding. “This will contravene numerous laws applying in the city of Umbertide.”
“Duly noted. Let’s go.” And I waved it toward the formidable door that gave access into the Frauds’ Tower.
The soldier strode smartly to the door and rapped four times. I heard rattling, someone mutter, and the door began to open. The soldier jerked it wide and the guardsman behind came sprawling out into the street, dragged by the door handle. He landed face first a short distance before me. I kicked him in the head as he got to all fours.