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

He tracked the coin down and stamped on it to halt its progress. “Now that weren’t right, debtor.” He called the ones closest to dying debtor, as if it excused everything happening to them. “Ain’t right to send a man running after a coin like he’s a street beggar. Not even for a silver.” He straightened, bit the coin, and crossed back toward us, the florin in his meaty fist. He barked a laugh at the arms withdrawing between the bars. “Take more’n a key to get out of Central Prison. I could open all eight of these gates and wouldn’t none of you maggots get halfway out. You’d need all these here.” He patted the ring at his hip, making the keys hooked upon it jangle. “And a sword-son to get past the guard. There’s close on a dozen standing between you lot and freedom.” He frowned over the arithmetic. “Six or seven anyway.”

Racso looked down at the coin in his palm, his face almost lit with the glow of it. “Easy money.” He laughed and slapped his belly, shadows swinging. “I’ll be back for the debtor.” He toed Artos’s corpse. “Got me some spending to do.” And off he walked, whistling his song of cool breezes and open fields.

I sat in my island of light, the candle flame guttering around its wick, Loki’s key in my hand, and in the thickness of the shadow on all sides desperate men muttered about silver coins.

TWENTY-NINE

We waited for Racso to come back. We didn’t need his key but I needed light for my plan and before the light I’d needed darkness. We had to wait. I didn’t want to wait. I didn’t want the boredom or the misery or the sense of uncertainty, but most of all I didn’t want to fall asleep and find Sageous waiting there for me.

It proved a long and miserable test of endurance, there in the unbroken night of the cells. I moaned and sighed about it, until I remembered Hennan had endured the place alone before I arrived, much of his time starving and parched. I kept quiet after that even though I thought it had probably been easier on him, raised as he was to the hardships of peasant life.

Artemis Canoni stopped answering my calls to have the inmates and their prying hands kept from my person, and took to moaning in a corner—whatever had been eating at his insides seeming now to have gained the upper hand. My other bodyguard, Antonio Gretchi, a former cobbler to Umbertide’s moneyed classes, proved unequal to the task on his own, and so I indentured a new servant for the price of a wizened apple and set him to his duties—which meant stamping on any hand that he encountered creeping in my direction in the dark.

For hour stacked upon empty hour we sat on the hard ground, too hot, too thirsty, and listening, always listening for the rustle of any approach. My head kept nodding, imagination creeping in to paint pictures on the darkness, tempting me into dream. I jerked my head up with a curse, more desperate each time. Occasionally someone would start to speak, sometimes a muttered conversation with a confidant, sometimes a long slow litany uttered into the dark. In the anonymity of blindness people confessed their sins, spoke their desires, made their peace with the Almighty, or, in some cases, bored the arse off everyone with endless dreary recollections from profoundly dull lives. I wondered how long I would have to sit there before the company became acquainted with every detail of events at the Aral Pass and I progressed to a comprehensive reconstruction of all Vermillion’s bordellos. Quite possibly another day would get me there.

The low mutter of conversation rose and fell in cycles, petering out to long silences then building again, sparked by a memory that built into a recounted moment and split into half a dozen threads running through our number. The thing had a natural rhythm to it, and when that rhythm broke it jarred me out of my reverie. The muttering of four or five people had stopped at once. Even the wet death rattle of Mr. Cough paused.

“What is it?” I asked. It clearly needed someone of royal blood to voice the important questions.

Silence, save for a scraping noise, something heavy being pulled across flagstones.

“I said—” The scraping noise came again and I realized with a start that whatever was making the sound was beyond the bars.

I held my breath. Silence. Fear kept that breath trapped in my lungs, only to burst out in a shriek when Mr. Cough suddenly started choking on his own held breath, hacking so hard I felt sure his lungs must be filling with blood. When he finally trailed off a couple of people started to mutter again, the tension broken. With a dull thud something fell against the bars—and everyone swallowed their words, the breath trapped in their chests once more. Inmates shuffled back further into the cell starting to curse and cry out in fear.