The second leg of the climb proved longer than the first and the circle of sky seemed to grow as small and distant as the moon. A weight settled about me—an echo of the unimaginable tonnage of rock around us. I’d come from the frozen mountains of the north to bury myself beneath the baked hills of Florence, and whatever waited for us down there it seemed that our journey must be coming to its close. All those miles, all those months, and Loki’s key accompanying us every step, the sole reason for our long migration. I wondered if the trickster god watched us from the wilds of Asgard, laughing at the joke which only he truly understood.
The visions came at the worst possible moment, when my arms ached from too many fathoms of climbing, my hands ran slippery with sweat, and the darkness folded around me on every side. A vast thickness of rock stretched above my head, and an unknown fall beneath me. The taste of my own blood brought the memories rushing in. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. The remnants of Kara’s spell still plagued me, burning with whatever magic I held in my veins, amplifying her simple casting into something that threatened to unravel the whole history of my line into my dreaming. The suspicion that the v?lva had planned this outcome still lingered. Certainly plunging me into weeks of dream-sleep had given her far more opportunity to work on Snorri and to steal the key if he wouldn’t relinquish it.
The vision drew my thoughts from present suspicions to past ventures. We had been chasing the Lady Blue, Alica and myself, chasing her through the palace into the private quarters of the elder Gholloth, he whom legend had it was the true heir of the last emperor Adam the Third, albeit a bastard nephew. We never spoke that story too loud, indeed it hadn’t been told to me until my twenty-first birthday, little more than a year ago. There’s nothing more likely to unite the enemies of any kingdom than a legitimate claim on the Empire throne.
Memory painted my grandmother’s pursuit on the darkness as I descended, so vivid that it overwrote my sight and I sought the rungs utterly blind, all the while with corridors flashing through my mind, felled guards, broken doors, Alica Kendeth sprinting ahead of me, fearless and swift.
We wove past the carnage, speed our only goal, and still we came too late, past the wreckage of Gholloth the First’s elite bodyguard stationed at the doors of the old man’s bedchambers. The Lady Blue had felled three men in plate armour. God knows what magics she used and what it cost her. These would have been swift warriors, seasoned, loyal beyond question, deadly with sword and knife. They lay shattered as if each had been turned to glass and struck with a hammer, the sharp edges of their injuries softened by what leaked from them.
In the old man’s bedchamber, its wall hung with paintings of the sea, we found the king, the emperor if not for lies, treachery, and war. He lay at peace among his linens, clutching the red flower of his lifeblood to his chest. If you had lived somewhere where the emperors’ statues haunt every turn you would know at a glance that their blood ran from him. I saw it in the line of his jaw, the angle of his nose, the broadness of his shoulders, even slumped in death.
Alica’s cry held more rage than grief, but both were present. Then she saw it, and I followed her gaze. In the corner of the room a tall mirror stood. Silvered glass within an ebony frame. Such a thing would cost you a hundred in crown gold should you seek it in Vermillion today. But instead of reflecting the room it stood like a narrow window into some other place. A place where a figure ran, marked by the sapphires twinkling across her hair as she crossed a dreamland where crystal shards longer than lances and thicker than men jutted from the bedrock like the spines of a hedgehog.
My grandmother reached the mirror, and I swear she would have run headlong into it, but it shattered before her, a thousand glittering pieces of it filling the air, sliding down one across the other against the ebony board behind.
Alica Kendeth fell to her knees then, careless of the glass, and set her head to the ebony planks. She swore an oath. I saw it on her lips, but the words eluded me as I stepped down, foot questing for the next rung, and jolted to a halt against the mine floor.
THIRTY-FIVE
The salt mine took me by surprise. I had expected some kind of grubby burrows where men scraped the stuff from the rock. Instead we found ourselves in a space huge as any cathedral, cut entirely into a seam of crystal-white salt, shot through with darker veins to give a marbled effect in places, like the grain of some vast tree, as if they’d cut into Yggdrasil that the Norse say grows in the empty heart of creation with worlds depending from its boughs.
Immediately before us lay a circular plate of silver-steel, thick as a man is tall, ten yards across, and pitted with corrosion though I’d never seen corruption lay a finger on such steel in the few places I’d encountered it.
“This must be ancient.” Kara stepped around it.
“The Builders knew this place before Kelem ever did,” Snorri said.
The floor beneath our feet was crushed salt, but here and there the poured stone of the Builders could be seen, slabs of it, cracked and broken.
“Let’s have a better look.” I took the orichalcum from my pocket and let the light pulse. Huge pillars stood where the salt remained untouched, supporting the roof, each carved all about with a deep spiral pattern so they looked like great ropes.