“You should have defended the mirror,” I told Edris, and set my hand to the hilt of my sword—the blade I’d taken from Edris back in Frauds’ Tower in Umbertide. “Now your mistress is locked away.”
“I thought you might make it here,” he said. “You and the Northman.” He nodded to the blood-spattered window. Not much could be seen through it save the outlines of men, all in violent motion. “And the bitch.” He rubbed absently at his neck and the black scar above the collarbone. “Thought you might break it for me, so I did. You see, I never did much care for the Lady, and she never did quite trust me, what with my refusal to show in any future the wise can read. I’m for her plan, and all. It’s just I’d rather see myself at the head of the table when the new gods meet in the world that comes after this one. Edris, Lord of Creation. It has a nice ring to it, so it does.” He raised his wicked sword, its point a hand-span from my belly. “If you could pass over that key now, and I’ll do the honours.” He nodded beyond the pillars. The light from the mirror revealed the back wall, projecting its own cracks across the many screens set there, cracks that were still healing, perhaps halfway now to a full repair. In the middle of the back wall was the silver plate the professor described, the legend “Manual Over-ride” above it. A dark line in the middle that must be the key slot.
I looked down at the sharp point level with my navel then glanced back at Grandmother and the Silent Sister, on their knees, straining to stand but being pressed inexorably down, blood starting to leak from the corners of their eyes. I thought of Hennan in Frauds’ Tower with Edris Dean’s blade against his neck. I’d given the boy Loki’s key to give to the necromancer and he’d thrown it back at me. Refusing to let me purchase his freedom. My eyes returned to the sword point before me. At the last it always comes down to the sharp end. Edris had threatened me with horrors I couldn’t imagine. I couldn’t properly imagine seeing that black iron slide into my gut.
A sharp cry of agony rang out behind me. An old woman’s hurt. Something dark and bloody hit the window beside me, sliding away without a sound. It had been a slight figure . . . perhaps Hennan . . .
I threw the key and, the Lord have mercy on my impious soul, I prayed to Loki, even though I knew him to be nothing more than an imprint of an old professor, stamped onto the stuff of the world and shaped by legend. I prayed and followed the key’s rotation through the air with a single word, “Off!,” chosen for no better reason than that I wanted the opposite of whatever Edris Dean wanted. We would all still be bound for Hell in a handcart if the engine shut down: the Wheel would continue to roll, albeit more slowly, driven by man’s inability not to use power for personal gain. But more than anything I wanted Edris Dean to go to Hell first.
You can’t of course throw a key at a small keyhole ten yards away and expect it to hit, let alone stick in and turn. But Loki is the god of tricks.
There’s one benefit of doing very stupid things. They surprise people. Throwing the key across the room surprised Edris Dean just enough for me to clear my steel and sweep his belated thrust away from my belly whilst leaping backwards. A hot wet feeling across my hip let me know I hadn’t escaped unscathed, but at least Edris’s sword wasn’t sticking through me.
Edris thrust again and I turned his blade. Behind him all the panels in the far wall lit, torrents of numbers rolling down across them as if a river of digits were pouring over a cliff. The key, now bedded in the lock, started to smoke gently, as if the obsidian was giving off darkness as a vapour. All the previous grindings, groanings and shuddering seemed as nothing compared to the tortured sounds now reaching through the metal floor. Somewhere, deep in the heart of the Builders’ engines of calculation a cryptological war of codes and cyphers was being fought, as the key sought both to over-master the security that guarded the Wheel’s prime function, and to solve the problems that had defeated Professor O’Kee for so many years, allowing the engines to wind down in such a way that they didn’t pitch us over the fall we were seeking to avoid.
Edris swung at my head. I parried, the clash of steel almost lost in the cacophony around us. At the end of things, with so many ways to die surrounding me, I found fear to be less important to me than the fact that the man who butchered my mother stood before me. I parried again and lunged, cutting through his tunic and leaving a bright scratch across the mail underneath.
“If you kill me you won’t have time to force the key the other way!” I shouted. “And if you try to do it before you kill me I’ll cut your head off.”
Edris made a wild swing and leapt back. He wiped his mouth, bloody from a bitten tongue, and regarded me, breathing heavily.
Through the mirror facet on the wall between us I glimpsed Grandmother and the Silent Sister, both on all fours, their arms buckling under invisible weight, the Lady Blue stepping toward them in triumph.
“You came to save the world, Alica,” she hissed. “But you neglected to bring anyone to save you.”
The Sister managed to raise her head, her dark eye a hole into midnight, her blind eye a hole onto the noon-day sun. Snorri’s goddess, Hel, had such eyes. The old woman managed to raise a hand, fingers clawed, and for a moment the Lady’s advance halted, but only for moments. The Sister’s head dropped once more, face lost behind grey straggles.
Edris watched, as fascinated as me by the spectacle. The hands that had played us across their board our whole lives now met for a final reckoning.
“They didn’t bring me. I came.” A figure at the Lady Blue’s doorway, covered in masonry dust, ghost-grey. At first it didn’t look human: too bulky, too many limbs at odd angles.
A step forward and the new figure collapsed, now making a kind of sense. One man carrying another. The man on his knees, short, stocky, dark beneath the dust, the face of a clerk rather than a hero, despite his uniform and the sword at his hip. Captain Renprow, adjutant to the marshal in Vermillion, my right hand in organizing the defence.
“No!” If the mirror had truly been a window I might have thrown myself through it. The smaller figure, sent sprawling, rolling among the mirror shards, was twisted as cruelly as any victim upon Cutter John’s table. An old man, deformed, barely able to turn himself, and yet, in that moment as he raised his misshapen head, more noble than any man I’ve seen upon a throne.
“Madam.” Garyus’s voice came rough from his throat. The journey from Red March could not have been easy on him—the journey from the base of the tower still less so. “You underestimate how much a son of Kendeth is prepared to sacrifice for his sister.”
One twisted hand reached out and old fingers with over-large knuckles wrapped around the Silent Sister’s ankle. I saw the pain of even that small action in his face—the cold had always troubled Garyus’s joints, and in Slov the winter has teeth.
The Silent Sister flexed her shoulders then straightened her arms, head still lowered. The sound of shattering filled the air. She got to her knees, drawing in a rattling breath.
“Down!” The Lady Blue brought both hands together as if crushing something between them.
The Silent Sister stood, a slow, deliberate motion, accompanied at each stage by the sound of glass breaking until there was nothing left to break. In the Lady Blue’s hands the last two looking-glasses shattered. The Lady spread her fingers with a gasp and shards of mirror tinkled down amid dripping blood, her palms sliced by the fragments.