The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War 2)

I mounted without too much difficulty and reached down a hand to swing Hennan up behind me. The spear, Gungnir, knocked against my leg, tied there across Nor’s side, still in its wrappings. It occurred to me I could ride off with it. Hope is always dangerous, and this spear, this false hope, was what Tuttugu, and maybe Kara, clung to. It made presenting themselves before Kelem seem less like suicide. Without it they might refuse at the last mile and perhaps even turn Snorri from his path.

“Gungnir!” Tuttugu started forward. I almost set my heels to Nor’s ribs, but in the end I reached down to pull loose the ties and took the spear in hand. The thing shivered in my grip as if half-alive, much heavier than it had a right to be.

I tossed it to Tuttugu. “Careful with that. I’ve a feeling it’s sharp both ends.”

That done and their bags removed, I saluted the table and set off at a trot along the gravelled road to Vermillion.

“We should have gone with them.” Hennan, his voice jolting to the beat of Nor’s gait.

“He’s going to ask some madman in a salt mine to show him the doorway into death so that he can unlock it. A madman who sent assassins after him. Does that sound like something anyone should be doing?”

“But they’re your friends.”

“I can’t afford friends like that, boy.” The words came out angry. “That’s an important lesson right there—learning how to let go of people. Friends are useful. When they stop having something you want—brush them off.”

“I thought we . . .” Hurt in his voice.

“That’s different,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re still friends. Who else am I going to pass my card tricks on to?”

NINETEEN

Hennan and I rode without conversation after parting with Snorri, Tuttugu, and Kara. I steered Nor through the thickening traffic converging on the Appan Way to enter the great city. The roadside houses were fully fledged taverns now, or shop fronts offering all a man might want for the highway. In the distance a glittering curve of the Seleen caught the sunlight and fractured it. My head had started to pound in the heat, and the stink of the capital reached out to us on the slightest of breezes.

•   •   •

The gates to Vermillion stand open year on year. By the time the Appan Way meets the great walls it has already passed through a quarter mile of the outer town, slum dwellings on the fringes, set back from the road, more gentrified homes further in, some two and three storeys intermixed with open tree-lined squares and public buildings. Grandmother regularly has notices posted reminding the inhabitants of these houses that the land will be cleared with fire should the city ever need to be defended—but each year the outer town spreads a little more, reaches a little further out along the five roads that feed Vermillion.

A scattering of guards endured the heat on the great gatehouse overlooking the Appan’s course north, more lurked in the shadow of the wall at ground level, but these would seldom stir for anything less than a laden cart. Hennan and I passed through on Nor’s back without challenge. Within moments we were clattering along Victory Street, past the Grand Old Stables, now given over to public use, and beside the cool delights of Fountain Square where cherry trees line the avenue to the new cathedral.

It seemed unreal—almost a dream—all this had been waiting here for me the whole time. While I shivered on the Bitter Ice, as close to death as a man can come, people strolled these streets, buying sweetmeats, watching the acrobats, letting the Seleen slip past, gambling, loving, getting drunk . . . I’d covered three thousand miles and here, here in this small patch of stonework, this terracotta encrustation, lay my whole life.

I let the horse move with the pace of the city’s traffic and watched the buildings as we passed, at once familiar and strange.

A dark-faced man in the shadowed entrance to Massim’s marked my progress along the street with rather too much interest. Maeres Allus, so long an abstract worry, almost forgotten, suddenly loomed large once more in my thinking. I shook the reins and made Nor pick up his feet.

“We’ll go straight to the palace.” I’d thought perhaps to look in on a few places, drop the boy off, get the lay of the land, but now decided it was better first to learn whatever could be learned in the safety of the palace. Better to make my presence known to my family so that Maeres couldn’t have me dragged off to some lonely warehouse without anyone ever knowing I’d survived the fire at the opera.

Behind me Hennan said nothing. Eking a life from the wasteland around the Wheel of Osheim might prepare you for many things, but the city of Vermillion was not one of them. I felt his head turn this way and that, trying to take it all in. To me it seemed smaller than in my memory—to Hennan probably larger than in my tales. We build our expectations out of what we know already. I hoped he wasn’t going to prove clingy. A prince of Red March can hardly be expected to shepherd a beggar boy around the corridors of power . . .