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

The boy stood at my side now. I could see him reflected in the silver-steel of the soldier’s armour, warped and distorted, but still Hennan. He’d tried to drag me back, tried to stop my advance, and found he couldn’t. Strange, when this was what he’d been demanding all along. We’re like that. Give us everything we ask for and suddenly it’s too much.

The soldier’s breastplate gleamed, bearing few scratches despite its age, but in one place, low in the side, a puncture wound spoiled the perfection, a dark, angular hole, driven through the thickness of the silver-steel, a gauge no man could support and a metal no smith could work. “You can be hurt then . . .” I turned and took the boy by the shoulder. “Go to the door, Hennan.” I angled him and thrust him toward it.

“State the nature of your request.” The soldier flexed its fingers, articulated in many places and each as long as my forearm. It put me in mind of the unborn monster built from the graves in Taproot’s campsite. It had taken an elephant to put that down, and the soldier looked like an elephant might just bounce off it.

“I just came to see what the boy is doing,” I said. “It looks as if he’s breaking in.”

The soldier pivoted about its spine, the upper half of it rotating toward the door behind it. A clockwork soldier doesn’t worry about presenting its back to a potential enemy. All that slamming a battle-axe between its shoulders would do is ruin a good axe and remove any doubt concerning whether you were an enemy or not.

I had one hand in my pocket. It closed now about the key. Loki’s key. The thing felt cold against my fingers, slick, as if it would slip from them at the first chance for treachery. I pulled it clear and a dark pulse of joy rang up my arm.

High above me, between silver shoulder plates, a circular depression edged with intricate teeth glittered in the light. Up close I could see not just one ring of teeth but a second set further back and narrower, then a third and fourth, and more, forming a cone-shaped indentation maybe two inches across. The key held the shape of the one whose shadow Racso set upon it, a crude and heavy thing, a notched rectangular plate on a thick shaft some six inches long.

Olaaf Rikeson had held this key before Snorri had. It had been taken from his frozen corpse, and before he died Rikeson had raised an army with it. An army that thought it could march on the gates of Jotenheim and face down the giants that even the gods feared. Olaaf had opened more than doors with this key—he had opened hearts, he had opened minds.

Reaching as high as I could, I lunged forward and slammed the key into the soldier’s winding lock. The obsidian flowed beneath my grip, colder than ice, searing my skin, but I kept hold and in the moment it met the lock the key became a thick black rod ending in a cone pitted with an infinity of notches.

There’s a rule for doing and undoing, a rule older than empires, even a word to go with it, clockwise, and the opposite, anti-clockwise. One direction to wind up, the opposite to wind down. In the heat of the moment, in the cold terror of the moment, I just guessed. I set every part of my strength behind the task. For three pulses of my heart, each seeming to boom out slower than the most solemn funeral beat, the bastard thing wouldn’t move. Time congealed all about me. The soldier halted its own rotation with a shuddering clunk and began to turn back toward me, starting to drag the key from my hand. One arm reached for me, articulating against the elbow joint in a way that gave the lie to any pretence of humanity. Long metal fingers stretched wide to encircle my waist, each ending in talons razored to slice flesh from bone.

Maybe the additional fear lent me strength, or Loki had had his joke by that point, but without warning the lock surrendered and the key turned. It gave with a sharp jerk accompanied by a sound like something expensive breaking. A resonating metallic twang followed, and a multi-tonal whirring as a thousand wheels, flywheels, cogs and escapements spun free. The soldier ground to a halt just as the key wrenched from my grip and that metal face turned my way. The whole thing slumped, the strange light dying from those copper eyes, and within the span of a single second the entirety of that great steel behemoth stood inert before me, no hint of sound, and without rumour of motion.

The fingers of the soldier’s hand nearly met around my chest, the point of the claw on the longest finger having sliced a three-inch tear into my shirt, a small crimson stain just beginning to spread through the fabric at the far end.

“Shit!” I took hold of the finger and tried to pry it back. Hennan rushed to help, glancing nervously at the soldier as he tugged. Despite the mechanism’s apparently relaxed slump there wasn’t any give in the thing, I might as well be caged in iron bars.