And there, at the end of all things, I hesitated. Let Loki’s key finish its work and I would be guaranteed safe passage into the new world that the Lady Blue had so desired. A god. The status I had always sought, all that and far more, delivered into my lap. No longer the superfluous princeling eking out a life at the margins of my grandmother’s court. Turn the key back to the left, and the great engines would shut down, the magic would leave this place, and with nothing to drive it forward, the Wheel that the Builders set turning, changing the balance between desire and the solid stuff of the world, would slow and eventually stop. Perhaps it might even turn back and return us to the lives men had known all those long years since some fool scattered us across the face of the Earth.
Listen to the wise, though, and you would know they saw a doom postponed, not ended. The Silent Sister saw that same Wheel turn under the pressure of man’s greed for power and crack everything apart, pitching us minor mortals into fire and destruction. I could save myself now and end countless nations . . . or consign myself and all those people to the fire in a few short years. Beneath my hand the key smoked and all around me the engine whined and roared. The key still battled the lock, fighting for control, and the engine, without the fractal mirror to moderate its energies, ran wild.
The many screens to either side of me continued to show their portions of a larger scene, as if they perforated the wall, revealing what was happening in the mind of the machine beyond.
“I need—”
“Men don’t know what they need.” A figure turned, cutting across the first and unseen speaker. “They barely know what they want.” He looked like a short man, though there was nothing to measure him against and the screens showed him larger than life. Neither young nor old, his dark hair standing as if in shock. He wore a coat of many colours. But as he turned it became a golden jacket sewn all over with innumerable pockets. In the next moment, the blacks of a Florentine modern, replete with three-tiered hat. Whatever he wore, he looked familiar. “Me? I’m just a jester in the hall where the world was made. I caper, I joke, I cut a jig. I’m of little importance.”
“Professor . . .” I saw the old man’s face there, traces of him behind Loki’s confidence and cunning.
The god continued to address his unseen target. “Imagine though . . . if it were me that pulled the strings and made the gods dance. What if at the core, if you dug deep enough, uncovered every truth . . . what if at the heart of it all . . . there was a lie, like a worm at the centre of the apple, coiled like Oroborus, just as the secret of men hides coiled at the centre of each piece of you, no matter how fine you slice?”
I clutched the key tight and the black ice of it slid beneath my grasp. The screens went dark.
“Wouldn’t that be a fine joke now?” Loki stood beside me. “W-what do you want?” I tried to move away without releasing the key.
“Me?” Loki shrugged. “I’m finished when you break my key, and it will break when its job is done. Turn it left, turn it right. Make up your mind, Jalan.”
“I . . . I don’t know.” Sweat ran down me, my hand pale from loss of blood, trembling. “Was the Lady Blue telling the truth when she—”
“Truth?” Loki threw up his hands, fingers fluttering. “Lies are our foundation—we each start with a lie and build a life upon it. Lies are more durable than the truth, more mutable, able to change to meet requirements.”
“I need the truth. You set me on this path with the truth when you showed me my mother die. The key didn’t drop me in the desert at random . . . it was all part of a plan. Meeting Jorg Ancrath, finding the steel to kill Maeres Allus. You were building me for this task, just as you built the key and sent it out in the world to gather strength.”
“Perhaps.” Loki shrugged. “The facts are a liar’s best friends. So many truths are uncovered in the search for a plausible lie. Why not work with them?” He turned to gesture at the chamber, a hall of wonders, strewn with death. “What a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive. The Great Scott wrote that, back when the moon wore a younger face.” A sigh. As the darkness smoked about the key in my grasp Loki seemed to diminish, growing older, the light within him fading. “This was my first work and it is, I will admit, tangled. Where’s the coward that would not dare to fight for such a land? Another of the Great Scott’s lines—and here you are, my coward. Do you dare?”
“ButshouldI—”
“I don’t care!” Loki boomed across me, haggard now, and ill. “Only know that you don’t need the truth. The truth didn’t set you free. It was a lie. You didn’t see your mother die. You weren’t in the room. You weren’t even in Roma Hall that day.”
“What?”
“I lied to you.”
“What . . .”
“Hate, courage, fear . . . all lies. Don’t look for reasons. Do what you feel. Not what you feel to be right—just what you feel.”
“I have the scar . . .” My free hand moved toward my chest where Edris’s sword had caught me that day.
“You did that climbing a fence.”
“You lying bast—”
“Yes, I know. Now hurry up could you? I’m falling apart here.”
I looked back past the false god, a thing made real by the dreams of men, and saw, standing at the blood-smeared window to the other room, the hulking figure of my friend, only his eyes clearly visible where a hand had wiped the glass clean.
I turned the key.
THIRTY-THREE
Garyus was buried as a king in the cathedral of Our Lady in Vermillion. The funeral procession wound from Victory Plaza in the palace out across the city, along the Corelli Line overlooking the river and down toward the Appan Gate. We had snow, the first snow to fall in Vermillion in eight years, as if the city had dressed for the occasion, covered up its scars and stains and dirt for just one day to see the old man laid to rest.
I carried the coffin with my cousins, and Captain Renprow filled in the sixth space. The Red Queen appointed him to the honour for carrying Garyus up into the Blue Lady’s tower through magics no other soldier had survived, and for the heroics he displayed in getting my great-uncle to Blujen in the first place a week earlier, against Renprow’s own strong advice, it must be said.
“For this, Marshal Renprow, we thank you. We thank you for carrying our brother.”
“He carried me, your majesty.” Renprow bowed. “And it was my honour.”
“He carried us all.” The Red Queen nodded and bowed her face. “For many years.”
We set his coffin in a sepulchre of white marble within the cathedral, bound by magics that would secure him from any necromancy. I said the words over him in his resting place. I think I spoke them clearly and with meaning.
“Be at peace, my brother.” Grandmother laid her hand upon the cold stone, and beside her, seen by no one else but me, the Silent Sister put her own pale hand where her twin’s name was graven, and from her dark eye a single tear fell, sparkling.
I came to see Snorri leave from the river docks. I had bought him a boat. A good one, I hoped. I called it The Martus. Darin left a child to carry his line and a wife who loved him. Martus needed something, and a boat to carry his name into the world was the best I could offer.
Snorri stood at the wall beside the stone steps we had once run down, escaping Maeres Allus’s thugs. The wound on his face was healing, and his broken arm was hidden beneath a thick bearskin cloak fastened with a heavy golden clasp—a gift from the queen.
“We have snow here! Why are you leaving?” I spread my arms to encompass the unreal whiteness of Vermillion. Dockhands shivered around us in their too-thin coats as they loaded the last of his stores.
“The North calls me, my friend. And this isn’t snow—this is a frosting. In the North we—”
“Dance naked on such days. I know! I’ve seen it.” I clapped a hand to his good arm. “I’ll allow it . . . but come back, you hear? As soon as you’ve had your fill of frostbite and bad food, come back and warm up again.”
“I will.” A grin, white teeth in the bristling blackness of his short beard.
“Seriously. I mean it. Life will be too dull without all your nonsense.” I had more to say but it left me, along with the air from my lungs, as Hennan shot up the steps and bundled into me. “Ouch! Careful! Wounded hero here!” I put an arm round him and ruffled his red hair in the way that used to annoy me so much when my father did it to me. “Kara! Rescue me!”