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

THIRTY-THREE

A crowd had started to gather by the time we left through the Tower doors. The whole top half of the Frauds’ Tower belched smoke through its windows. Before we left I set Guardian to checking the building for Edris Dean and explained how many pieces he was to tear the corpse into. “Oh, and let everybody out,” I added. The idea of leaving anyone to fry didn’t sit well with me, but mainly I wanted as many fraudsters let loose on Umbertide as possible. That way the authorities might have too much on their plate to put great efforts in recapturing me.

No one challenged us, surrounded as we were by other inmates all pouring into the street and vanishing down alleys into the maze of Umbertide. If Edris Dean had escaped the building he must have had more important things to do than raise the alarm because there were no more than two city guardsmen in the road and both of those were trying to look inconspicuous in case anyone suggested they stem the tide of escaping prisoners. I sincerely hoped Edris had crawled away to die but at the very least it seemed likely that even a necromancer would require some time and resources to repair the kind of wounds he had sustained.

•   •   •

With the morning sun climbing above the rooftops we hurried along narrow streets following Hennan who had learned the ways in and out of the city that honest folk didn’t use or know of. The easiest way to leave Umbertide proved to be by climbing over the walls rather than scrambling through the sewer pipes that got Hennan into the city. It would have been a tight and malodorous squeeze for Kara—Snorri and I would not have fitted. Besides, the walls of any city not at war are poorly watched, and with the column of smoke from the Frauds’ Tower to draw the eye of any guard who might actually have been watching, it proved easy enough to find a stretch of wall we might escape over.

The only real problems were in buying a rope and grapple. It’s damn hard to come up with a good reason for wanting a grapple in the first place and even harder to find a blacksmith who doesn’t tell you to pay now and come back in three days to collect it.

•   •   •

“Throw it higher,” Kara urged as the iron hook narrowly missed my head on its second descent.

I paused and favoured her with a narrow-eyed stare, remembering I’d not forgiven her for breaking my nose. “Throw it higher? That’s the wisdom of the völvas speaking is it? All those years of arcane study . . .”

I threw it higher on the third attempt and snagged the wall. Climbing a thin and unknotted rope turned out to be a lot harder than I had imagined and I spent the best part of five minutes jumping, lunging, and straining, without getting more than a yard off the ground. Finally I got the hang of it, at least partially. Driven mostly by embarrassment I managed to shin up the rope to the top of the wall as two toothless elders and a growing crowd of local urchins watched on. Kara and the boy followed with no discernible effort, Kara with the spear, Gungnir, strapped to her back. Snorri brought up the rear, his wound making his climb an awkward one, though only once, when he slipped, did he snarl out in pain. I found getting down the other side proved both easier and faster. Also it hurt more at the bottom.

Once gathered outside at the base of the walls we hurried away across the dusty and hard-baked earth toward the margins of the nearest olive grove and lost ourselves among the trees.

“Well?” Kara spoke first. We’d followed the gradient down through the dappled shade to come in sight of the Umber, the river without which the city behind us would be nothing more than badlands flecked with mesquite bushes and picked over by scrawny goats.

“Well what?” I asked, swatting at the flies, already too hot and too sweaty.

“Do you know the way?”

“Hennan knows the backpaths. I came by the Roma Road.” Before long much of the Umbertide guard would be fanning out around the northern stretch of the Roma Road. It wouldn’t matter to Snorri. He was heading south, to the sour lands where Kelem made his home in a salty gash in the earth known as the Crptipa Mine.

“Do you know the way to the mine?”

“To Kelem’s mine? Why the hell would I? I’m in Umbertide because my uncle sent me to attend to some banking affairs not to find some wizened magus and . . . and beg him to let me do something incredibly stupid.” I actually did know the way, at least roughly, but given I’d no interest in going there I kept the fact to myself.

“Snorri?” Hennan looked up from his own misery at the Norseman in his. Seeing such a sombre look on so young a face reminded me that Tuttugu lay dead—a fact I’d been trying to push to the back of my mind into the place where things get forgotten.