“Men who can get information from captives quickly are a valuable resource in war, Jal.”
“It’s a mistake. Red March doesn’t have an inquisition. We’re the good ones . . . I’ll tell the queen. I’ll—”
“Look behind the wall.” Spoken softly to the night.
The rain fell harder now and I didn’t want to look behind the wall.
“Make your own decision, Jalan. But do it with your eyes open.” She brushed past me, bound for the tent.
The rain started to fall in earnest and clouds had stolen the light of moon and stars, but a tongue of flame still licked from a pile of blackened beams ten yards past the wall on which Kara had been sitting. With a curse I hunched my shoulders against the coldness of the raindrops and leaned over the wall where it stood at its lowest.
A girl’s corpse lay curled at the foot of the wall. She lay there as she had lain for our whole conversation, as she had lain when we pitched the tent and while we slept, eyes to the sky filled with cold water. Half her face had been burned black, the skin peeling away in dark squares, but I could tell she had been young, pretty even, her hair long and dark like my mother’s. I almost pulled away without realizing the bundle against her chest was a baby. I wish I had.
We came into Blujen on a grey morning beneath a cold rain. Tears for the dead.
A squad of ten Red March infantry escorted us along the town’s high street. Fire had erased many of the signs of fighting but I didn’t have to look hard to see them. In one place bodies lay in a heap, civilians uniformed in mud, a silent mound. The Dead King would have them hunting me if I stayed long enough for him to register the key. I saw soldiers bringing timbers ready to build a pyre, taking their leisure and complaining beneath their loads. If they had been at Vermillion’s walls a week earlier they would be running to build it!
We spotted the tower before we saw any sign of the Red Queen or her forces. I say we saw the tower but in truth it was only the gleaming reflection of the sky, and as we drew closer, our own reflections warped, along with the surrounding ruins, across the surface of a mirror-wall. The men told me that the tower had been as any other, tall, rock-built, a ring of slit windows beneath a tiled conical roof. As the first soldiers had reached it the mirror-wall sprang up and had held ever since, immune to assault, reflecting back all violence.
The troops occupying the ruins, smeared with ash and mud, some bearing wounds, watched us with hard eyes. They must have known me as the marshal that let Vermillion burn. Some offered up a grim nod as we passed. Perhaps they knew how the Red Queen would deal with such failure and pitied me.
They took us to the royal pavilion, an edifice in scarlet dwarfing the campaign tents of the generals and the pavilions of her lords beyond them. Sir Robero, one of grandmother’s seasoned campaigners from the Scorron conflicts, took the Norse into his custody while a pair of royal guards led me on. I surrendered my sword and dagger at the entrance.
Grandmother’s pavilion had fared better than my tent: a silk outer skin, taut above a more durable waxed felt, seemed to have kept out the worst of the Slovian autumn, though I was gratified to see a collecting bowl to one side being fed by a steady drip-drip-drip from a seam high above.
Guards and officers drew back to clear a path to her wooden throne. The place smelled of wet bodies and old sweat. A dozen lanterns couldn’t quite break the gloom and the rich rugs beneath my feet were thick with muddy tracks. Grandmother sat stiff-backed but older, as if ten years had passed since we last met, iron grey threading the dark red of her hair. “Tell me of my city.”
How much did she know already? I couldn’t see the Silent Sister amongst the crowd. I straightened myself before the Red Queen, now hunched in her chair, and there in the half-light I told Vermillion’s tale. And among all that talk of burning half the city to save what lay within the walls, of her son’s treachery, and of my brothers’ deaths . . . I quite forgot to lie.
“And now we’re riding to Osheim with Loki’s key on the steward’s instructions.” A silence followed my last words. I waited for judgment.
“It is what it is.” Grandmother sounded tired. I’d never seen her tired before.
“I offer you the key, your highness.” I went down on one knee and held the key up in both hands. The old desire to keep it had largely eroded since it became apparent that the key was my ticket to Osheim. “I’m sure it would unlock the Lady Blue’s tower for you.”
“When I most wanted this . . . you gave it elsewhere.” She leaned forward, a gnarled hand reaching. “You seemed to have strong opinions regarding my brother’s right to determine the fate of this key.”
I kept my mouth shut, knowing it would only dig me a deeper hole. The key felt icy across my palms—as if it might slip away any moment.
The queen’s fingers extended toward Loki’s gift, lie-dark and gleaming. “No.” The hand became a fist. “Garyus deserves our trust . . . my faith. You will take this to Osheim and undo the Builders’ folly.”
A sigh escaped me and looking up I closed a hand about the key. “Send someone more suited to the task?”
Grandmother favoured me with a rare smile, albeit a grim one. “It was you who reminded me of my brother’s worth, Jalan. I wouldn’t support his plan only to gainsay his choice of champion.”
“Champion?” I widened my eyes at that, unable to entirely stamp out the burst of foolish pride rising through me.
“Besides,” she said. “You have the Northman with you. He seems capable.”
I begged for an escort north of course, but Grandmother insisted that Red March soldiers would draw more trouble than they averted while travelling through the fragments of empire. I countered that they could travel unmarked by uniform or device, but she repeated Garyus’s nonsense about small groups passing unchallenged where larger ones would draw notice. The actual surprise came when she turned down my offer to unlock the Lady Blue’s tower.
The Red Queen led me from her tent. “Mora Shival’s wall will not withstand my sister for much longer.”
It took me a moment to reconnect the Lady Blue with her name—I preferred to think of her as a title. A name made her too human. Once she was young, like me, like Kara. Thinking of her that way was uncomfortable. Time’s river would carry us on, twisting with each eddy of the current . . . and what might we turn into?
“But . . . a twist of the key and . . .” I mimed the opening of gates.
We stood alone, a rain-laced wind tugging our cloaks, a score of guards ten yards back, and before us the mirrored finger of the Lady Blue’s tower, aiming at heaven.
“They say no wrong-mage has ever left the Wheel.” The Red Queen kept her eyes on the mirror-wall as if seeking some meaning in the distortion there. “They are incorrect. Two have. Mora Shival was one of the two who escaped. She has a gate within her tower. A marriage of her arts and the science of the Builders. A fractal glass. Most of her mirror-doors are broken now, and those that survive will break when this wall is broken. The fractal glass, though, that one will survive and it leads to—”
“Osheim.”
Grandmother inclined her head.
“Wait. If she can run to Osheim why doesn’t she go there now? You’ve said yourself armies are no use there. The Wheel is a better defence than this wall of hers.”