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

“He saw you.”

I turned to look at the man beside me, a fellow of modest build in the kind of loose, flowing robe that keeps a body cool in places where the heat is even less tolerable than in Umbertide. I gave him a nod. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, I always say, and we had both suffered at the hands of the jumped-up desk clerk. Perhaps we might also share an enemy in Sageous.

“He was depositing gold,” the man said. “Maybe a fee from Kelem. He has spent time in the Crptipa Hills. It makes a body wonder what two such men might work at together.”

“Do you know Sageous?” I tensed, wondering if I were in danger.

“I know of him. We’ve not met, but I doubt there are two such men wandering the world.”

“Ah.” I slumped back in my chair. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Knowing everyone’s business was everyone’s business in Umbertide.

“I know you.” The man watched me with dark eyes. He had the mocha tones of North Afrique, hair black, tight-curled, and tamed with ivory combs that bound it close to his skull.

“Unlikely.” I raised a brow. “But possible. Prince Jalan Kendeth of Red March.” Not knowing the man’s station I omitted any promise of being at his service.

“Yusuf Malendra.” He smiled, revealing jet-black teeth.

“Ah. From the Mathema!” All the mathmagicians of Liba blackened their teeth with some kind of wax. I’d always felt it a peculiarly superstitious practice for a sect otherwise so bound with logic.

“You’ve been to our tower in Hamada, Prince Jalan?”

“Uh. Yes. I spent my eighteenth year studying there. Can’t say I learned much. Numbers and I agree only to a certain point.”

“That will be where I know you from then.” He nodded. “Many things escape me, but faces tend to stay.”

“You’re a teacher there?” He didn’t look old enough to be a teacher, thirty maybe.

“I have a number of roles, my prince. Today I am an accountant, come to audit some of the caliph’s financial affairs in Umbertide. Next week perhaps I’ll find myself wearing a different hat.”

A metallic whir turned our heads from the conversation. A sound halfway between that of a hand rooting in the cutlery drawer and that of a dozen angry flies. A shadow loomed across us, and looking up I saw the towering architecture of what could only be one of the banking clans’ famous clockwork soldiers.

“Remarkable,” I said. Mostly because it was. A man built of cogs and wheels, his motion born of meshing gears and interlocking steel teeth, one thing turning the next turning the next until an arm moved and fingers flexed.

“They are impressive.” Yusuf nodded. “Not Builder-work though. Did you know that? The Mechanists made them over a century after the Day of a Thousand Suns. A marriage of clockwork that descends to scales smaller than your eye can perceive. It wouldn’t have worked before the Builders turned their Wheel of course, but one wheel turns another as they say, and many things become possible.”

“Jalan Kendeth.” The thing’s voice came out higher and more musical than I had been expecting. In truth I hadn’t been expecting it to speak at all, but if I had I would have imagined something deep and final, like lead blocks falling from a height. “Come.”

“Amazing.” I stood to measure myself against the construction and found I didn’t reach to its shoulder. The soldier unsettled me. A mechanism, lifeless and implacable, and yet it walked and spoke my name. Apart from there being something deeply unnatural and wrong about a heap of cogs aping life itself I felt most uncomfortable at the thought of something so dangerous, and so near, that lacked the usual levers by which I manipulated potential opponents, such as flattery, pride, envy, and lust. “And they can bend swords? Punch through shields like the stories tell?”

“I’ve not seen such,” Yusuf said. “But I did see one carry a vault door into a bank being refurbished. The door could not have weighed less than fifty men.”

“Come,” the soldier repeated.

“I’m sure it can ask better than that, can’t it? Or has its spring for manners unwound?” I grinned at Yusuf and rapped my knuckles on the soldier’s breastplate. “Ask me again, properly.” My knuckles stung so I rubbed them with my other hand. “Fifty men, you say? They should build more and take over the world.” I walked around the thing, peering into the occasional chink in the filigreed plates of its armour. “I would.”

“Men are cheaper to make, my prince.” Again the black smile. “And besides, the art is lost. Look at the workmanship on the left arm.” He pointed. The arm was larger than its counterpart, a thing of brass and iron, marvellously worked, but on closer inspection the gears, pulleys, cables and wheels, though ranging from tiny and intricate to large and chunky, never became smaller than something I might just about imagine a very skilled artisan producing.