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

Alica Kendeth fell to her knees then, careless of the glass, and set her head to the ebony planks. She swore an oath. I saw it on her lips, but the words eluded me as I stepped down, foot questing for the next rung, and jolted to a halt against the mine floor.

THIRTY-FIVE

The salt mine took me by surprise. I had expected some kind of grubby burrows where men scraped the stuff from the rock. Instead we found ourselves in a space huge as any cathedral, cut entirely into a seam of crystal-white salt, shot through with darker veins to give a marbled effect in places, like the grain of some vast tree, as if they’d cut into Yggdrasil that the Norse say grows in the empty heart of creation with worlds depending from its boughs.

Immediately before us lay a circular plate of silver-steel, thick as a man is tall, ten yards across, and pitted with corrosion though I’d never seen corruption lay a finger on such steel in the few places I’d encountered it.

“This must be ancient.” Kara stepped around it.

“The Builders knew this place before Kelem ever did,” Snorri said.

The floor beneath our feet was crushed salt, but here and there the poured stone of the Builders could be seen, slabs of it, cracked and broken.

“Let’s have a better look.” I took the orichalcum from my pocket and let the light pulse. Huge pillars stood where the salt remained untouched, supporting the roof, each carved all about with a deep spiral pattern so they looked like great ropes.

“A whole sea died here.” Kara breathed the words into the void about us.

“An ocean.” Snorri strode forward into the cavern. The air held a strange taste, not salt, but something from the alchemist’s fumes. And dry, the place ate the moisture from your eyes. Dry as death.

“So how do we reach Kelem’s part of the mine?” Kara looked about her, frowning at the lanterns burning in niches on the distant opposite wall.

“We’re in it,” I said, putting the orichalcum away. “The miners must pass on through to where they dig. They wouldn’t leave this much salt so close to the entrance if this weren’t barred to them . . . also they’d make a profit. And those lanterns . . . who wastes oil like that?”

“We’re being watched.” Hennan pointed to one of the dozen corridors leading off the main chamber. I squinted along the line of his finger. Something twinkled, there in the shadows.

Snorri started to advance in that direction, and as he did the thing that had watched us emerged into the light. A spider, but monstrous in size and made of shining silver. Its legs spanned a diameter of two yards or more, its gleaming body larger than a man’s head, studded with rubies the size of pigeon eggs and clustered like an arachnid’s eyes. It came on swiftly, its limbs a complex ballet of motion, reflecting our light back at us in shards.

“Odin.” Snorri stepped back. The only time I had ever seen something give him pause.

“Why silver, I wonder?” Kara held her blade before her.

“Why a bloody spider? That seems just as good a question.” I stepped behind Snorri. I don’t mind spiders as long as they’re small enough to fit under my heel.

“Iron corrodes.” Kara kept her eyes on the thing. “Clockwork soldiers wouldn’t last long down here. Not unless they were made of silver-steel like our friend here.”

“Friend?” Snorri took another step back and I moved to avoid being trodden on.

The spider stopped short of us and started back toward the darkness it came from, moving with exaggerated slowness.

“It’s a guide,” Kara said.

“To what?” Snorri made no move to follow. “A web?”

“It’s a bit late to worry about walking into a trap now isn’t it?” Kara looked around at him, anger and exasperation mixing on her brow. “You walked us a thousand miles for this, ver Snagason, against all advice. It’s been a trap the whole time. The web had you the moment you laid hands on that key. It should never have left the ice. Kelem sent assassins to take the key from you—now you’ve brought it to him yourself. His mark is on you and he has drawn you to him.” She gestured to his stained shirt, now pierced by the crystalline growths about his wound.

Kara shook her head and set off after the spider, turning up the wick in the last of our lanterns.

For the longest time our journey reduced to the whir and click of the spider’s clockwork, the tick-tick-tick of its metal feet on the stone, and the glimmer of long limbs in motion at the margins of the lantern light. It led us down salt-walled corridors, opening from time to time onto dark and cavernous galleries whose dimensions our light could not reveal. We descended by steps and by gradient, every turn leading down, never up. Twice we passed across broad chambers, the high ceilings lost in gloom and supported on columns of the native rock-salt left in situ. The remainder of the salt had been cut out in slabs long ago and transported to the surface uncomfortably far above us.