The Liar’s Key

Snorri led again, Tuttugu in his wake sniffing. ‘I can smell something. It’s trolls. I knew it.’ He fumbled for his axe. ‘Bloody trolls! I should have stayed with Jal—’

‘It’s not trolls.’ Snorri could smell it too. Something powerful, animal, the kind of rankness that only a predator can afford. He shrugged the axe from across his shoulders, and took it in two hands, his father’s axe, recovered from the Broke-Oar on the Bitter Ice. Slow steps took him closer to the cave mouth, the dark interior yielding secrets as it grew to encompass his vision.

‘Hel’s teats!’ Snorri breathed the oath out before closing his jaw, which had fallen open. In the shadows a monster slumbered. A hound that might stand taller than a shire horse, and wide as the elephant in Taproot’s circus. It had that blunt yet wrinkled face of dogs bred for fighting rather than the hunt. One canine, of similar size to Snorri’s fingers and thumb all funnelled up together, protruded from the lower jaw, escaping slobbery jowls to point toward a wet nose.

‘It’s asleep.’ A hoarse whisper at his shoulder. ‘If we’re very quiet we can get away.’

‘This is her cave, Tutt. There aren’t going to be two. And this must be her guardian. It’s not here by chance.’

‘We could…’ Tuttugu rubbed furiously at his beard as if hoping to dislodge an answer. ‘You could lure it out and I could drop a rock on it from up there!’ He pointed to the cliff top.

‘I think that might … irritate her. I’ve met this woman, Tutt. She’s not someone you want to irritate.’

‘What then? We can’t very well walk up and pat the puppy.’

Snorri took a hand from his axe and dug beneath his furs to touch Loki’s key. Immediately he felt them, Emy, Egil, Karl, Freja, as if it were their skin beneath his fingers not the slickness of obsidian. ‘That’s exactly what we’ll do.’

With the need to run trembling in every limb, Snorri advanced into the cave, axe lowered, quiet but not creeping. A few yards in and he sensed he was alone. Turning, he beckoned Tuttugu. The other half of the Undoreth stood no further forward than when they last spoke, huddled in his leathers and quilted jacket, arms so tight about himself he almost squeezed his bulk thin. Snorri beckoned again, with more urgency. Tuttugu offered a despairing look at the heavens and hurried into the cave.

In close file the pair of them trod a silent path toward a tunnel leading from the back of the cave, some yards past the vastness of the dog. The size of the beast overwhelmed Snorri’s senses, the powerful dog-stink, the warmth of its breath as he passed within feet of that great muzzle. His back scraped the cave wall with each step. And at the closest point one huge eye rolled open amid the folded topology of the dog’s face, regarding Snorri with an unreadable look. For a moment he froze, hand tight on his axe, raising the weapon an inch or two before remembering how poorly it would serve him. With his gaze fixed on the tunnel mouth Snorri moved on, Tuttugu wheezing behind him as if terror had taken hold of his throat.

Twenty paces later they stood out of the hound’s sight in a tunnel too small for any pursuit. Snorri felt his body unclench. When the Fenris wolf came for him he had been able to attack, channelling his energy into the battle. Holding back all those instincts had wound every fibre of him to within a hair of snapping.

‘Come.’ He nodded ahead to the glow reflecting on the tunnel walls.

Another convolution of the passage brought them to a cavern, lit from above by fissures running through the thickness of the mountainside to a distant sky. A small pool lay beneath these vents, glowing with the light. The chamber, large as any jarl’s hall, lay strewn with the business of living. A pallet heaped with bed furs, a blackened hearth by some natural chimney in the rock, a cauldron before it, other pots stacked to one side, here and there sea-chests, some closed, others open to display clothes, or sacks of stores. Two women sat close together in oak chairs carved in the Thurtan style. Between them they held a scroll, the younger woman tracing a finger along some line of it while the elder watched and nodded.

‘Come in if you must.’ Skilfar raised an arm. Her flesh lay as white as it had when she held audience amid the conjunction of Builders’ tracks, guarded by Hemrod’s plasteek army, but it no longer smoked with coldness. Her eyes held that same wintry blue but they were the eyes of an old woman now, not some frost-sworn demon.

Snorri took a few paces into the chamber.

‘Ah, the warrior. But no prince this time? Not unless he filled out … a little.’ Skilfar cocked her head, looking past Snorri to Tuttugu, trying unsuccessfully to hide in his shadow. The younger woman with the braided hair put down her scroll, unsmiling.

Snorri took another step then realized he still had his axe in hand. ‘Sorry.’ He secured it across his back. ‘That beast of yours scared the hell out of me! Not that an axe would have helped much.’

A thin smile. ‘So you braved my little Bobo did you?’ Her glance flitted to the entrance behind him. Snorri turned. A small dog, stubby-legged, wrinkle-faced, and broad-chested had followed Tuttugu. It sat now, looking up at the fat man with sad eyes, one tooth protruding from its lower jaw above the folds of its muzzle.

‘How—’

‘Everything in this world depends upon how you look at it, warrior. Everything is a matter of perspective – a matter of where you stand.’

‘And where do I stand, völva?’ Snorri kept his voice respectful, and in truth he had always respected the wisdom of the völvas, the rune-sisters as some called them. Witches of the north as Jal had it. Though they stood at odds with the priests of Odin and of Thor the rune-sisters always gave advice that seemed at its core more honest, darker, filled with doubt in place of hubris. Of course the völvas Snorri had dealt with in the past were neither so famed nor so unsettling as Skilfar. Some said she was mother to them all.

Skilfar looked to the woman beside her, ‘Kara?’

The woman, a northerner with maybe thirty summers on her, frowned. She fixed Snorri with a disconcerting stare and ran the iron runes at the ends of her braids through her fingers. They marked her as wise beyond her years.

‘He stands in shadow,’ she said. ‘And in light.’ Her frown deepened. ‘Past death and loss. He sees the world … through a keyhole?’ She shook her head, runes clattering.

Skilfar pursed her lips. ‘He’s a difficult one, I grant you.’ She took another scroll from the pile beside her, tight-wrapped and ending in caps of carved whale tooth. ‘First dark-sworn and clinging to a lost hope. Now light-sworn and holding to a worse one. And carrying something.’ She set a bony hand to her narrow and withered chest. ‘An omen. A legend. Something made of belief.’

‘I’m looking for the door, völva.’ Snorri found his own hand at his chest, resting above the key. ‘But I don’t know where it lies.’

‘Show me what you have, warrior.’ Skilfar tapped her breastbone.

Snorri watched her a moment. Hardly a kindly grandmother, but far more human than the creature he and Jal had found amid her army of plasteek warriors the previous year. Which was her true face? he wondered. Maybe neither of them. Maybe her dog was neither the monster he’d first seen nor the toy that seemed to sit now by the tunnel mouth. When a man can’t trust his eyes what does he fall back on … and what does the choice he makes reveal about him? Lacking answers, Snorri drew forth the key on the thong that hung about his neck. It made slow rotations in the space before his eyes, from some angles reflecting the world, from others dark and consuming. Did Loki really fashion this? Had the hands of a god touched what he had touched? And if so, what lies had the trickster left there, and what truths?

Three slow claps, sounding to the tempo of the key’s revolutions. ‘Extraordinary.’ Skilfar shook her head. ‘I underestimated our Silent Sister. You actually did it. And tweaked the nose of this upstart “king of the dead”.’

‘Do you know where the door is?’ Snorri almost saw their faces in the flashes between reflection and absorption, Emy’s eye glimpsed in the moment, as if through a closing crack. The fire of Freja’s hair. ‘I need to know.’ He could taste the wrongness. He knew the trap, and that he reached to close it around himself. But he saw them, felt them … his children. No man could step away. ‘I need to know.’ His voice rough with the need.

‘That is a door that should not be opened.’ Skilfar watched him, neither kind nor cruel. ‘Nothing good will come of it.’

‘It’s my choice,’ he said, not sure if it was or not.

‘The Silent Sister cracked the world to fill you and that foolish prince with magic. Magic enough to thwart even the unborn. Time was when you put a crack in the world it would heal quickly, like a scratch on skin. Now such wounds fester. Any crack is apt to grow. To spread. The world has become thin. Pressed on too many sides. The wise can feel it. The wise fear it.

‘Given time enough, and peace, the wound you bear will heal. Time still heals all wounds, for now. And the scars left behind are our legacy of remembrance. But pick at it and it will fester and consume you. This is true both of the crack the Sister ran through your marrow, and of the hurt the Dead King gave.’

Snorri noted she didn’t speak of the assassin’s cut. He didn’t trust her enough to volunteer the information, and instead set his teeth against the growing ache of it and the southward tug that seemed to pull on him by each rib.

‘Give me the key and I will set it beyond men. The spirits you have borne, both the dark and the light, are of a piece. Like fire and ice they are no friends of our kind. They exist at the extremes, where madness dwells. Man treads the centre line and when he wanders from it, he falls. You carry an avatar of light now but he lies as sweetly as the darkness.’

‘Baraqel told me to destroy the key. To give it to you. To do anything but use it.’ Snorri had endured the same speech dawn after dawn.

‘The dark then, whatever face it took to persuade you, you must not believe it.’

‘Aslaug cautioned me against the key. She said Loki bled lies, breathed them, and his tricks would lay creation in ruins given but an inch. Her father would feed all darkness to the wyrm just as soon as break the light. Anything to upset the balance and drown the world in chaos.’

‘This is truly your will, warrior? Yours alone?’ Skilfar leaned forward in her chair now, her gaze a shiver that travelled the length of him. ‘Tell me – I will know the truth of it.’ The age of her wavered in her voice, a frightening weight of years that sounded little different from pain. ‘Tell me.’

Snorri set the key back against his chest. ‘I am Snorri ver Snagason, warrior of the Undoreth. I have lived a Viking’s life, raw and simple, on the shore of the Uulisk. Battle and clan. Farm and family. I was as brave as it was in me to be. As good as I knew. I have been a pawn to powers greater than myself, launched as a weapon, manipu-lated, lied to. I cannot say that no hand rests on my shoulder even now – but on the sea, in the wild of the evening storm and the calm of morning, I have looked inside, and if this is not true then I know no true thing. I will take this key that I won through battle and blood and loss. I will open death’s door and I will save my children. And if the Dead King or his minions come against me I will sow their ruin with the axe of my fathers.’

Tuttugu came to stand at Snorri’s shoulder, saying nothing, his message clear.

‘You have a friend here, Snorri of the Undoreth.’ Skilfar appraised Tuttugu, her fingers moving as if playing a thread through her hands. ‘Such things are rare. The world is sweetness and pain – the north knows this. And we die knowing there is a final battle to come, greater than any before. Leave your dead to lie, Snorri. Sail for new horizons. Set the key aside. The Dead King is beyond you. Any of the hidden hands could take this thing from you. I could freeze the marrow in your bones and take it here and now.’

‘And yet you won’t.’ Snorri didn’t know if Skilfar’s magics could overwhelm him, but he knew that having sought his motivations and intent with such dedication the völva would not simply take the key.

‘No.’ She released a sigh, the coldness of it pluming in the air. ‘The world is better shaped by freedom. Even if it means giving foolish men their head. At the heart of all things, nestled among Yggdrasil’s roots, is the trick of creation that puts to shame all of Loki’s deceptions. What saves us all are the deeds of fools as often as the acts of the wise.

‘Go if you must. I tell you plain, though – whatever you find, it will not be what you sought.’

‘And the door?’ Snorri spoke the words low, his resolve never weaker.

‘Kara.’ Skilfar turned to her companion. ‘The man seeks death’s door. Where will he find it?’

Kara looked up from the study of her fingers, frowning in surprise. ‘I don’t know, Mother. Such truths are beyond me.’

‘Nonsense.’ Skilfar clicked her fingers. ‘Answer the man.’

The frown deepened, hands rose, fingers knotted among the rune-hung braids, an unconscious gesture. ‘The door to death … I…’

‘Where should it be?’ Skilfar demanded.

‘Well…’ Kara tossed her head. ‘Why should it be anywhere? Why should death’s door be any place? If it were in Trond how would that be right? What of the desert men in Hamada? Should they be so far from—’

‘And the world is fair?’ Skilfar asked, a smile twitching on thin lips.

‘It – No. But it has a beauty and a balance to it. A rightness.’

‘So if there is a door but it isn’t anywhere – what then?’ A pale finger spinning to hurry the young woman along.

‘It must be everywhere.’

‘Yes.’ Skilfar turned her winter-blue eyes upon Snorri once more. ‘The door is everywhere. You just have to know how to see it.’

‘And how do I see it?’ Snorri looked about the cavern as if he might find the door had been standing in some shadowed nook all this time.

‘I don’t know.’ Skilfar raised a hand to stop his protest. ‘Must I know everything?’ She sniffed the air, peering curiously at Snorri. ‘You’re wounded. Show me.’

Without complaint Snorri opened his jacket and drew up his shirt to show the red and encrusted line of the assassin’s knife. The two völvas rose from their seats for a closer inspection.

‘Old Gróa in Trond said the venom on the blade was beyond her art.’ Snorri winced as Skilfar jabbed a cold finger at his ribs.

‘Warts are beyond Gróa’s art.’ Skilfar snorted. ‘Useless girl. I could teach her nothing.’ She pinched the wound and Snorri gasped at the salt sting of it. ‘This is rock-sworn work. A summons. Kelem is calling you.’

‘Kelem?’

‘Kelem the Tinker. Kelem master of the emperor’s coin. Kelem the Gate-keeper. Kelem! You’ve heard of him!’ An irritable snap.

‘I have now.’ Snorri shrugged. The name did ring a bell. Stories told to children around the fire in the long winter nights. Snorri thought of the assassins’ Florentine gold, remembering for a moment the fearsome swiftness of the men. Each coin stamped with the drowned bell of Venice. The ache of his wound built, along with his anger. ‘Tell me more about him … please.’ A growl.

‘Old Kelem stays salted in his mine, hiding from the southern sun. He’s buried deep but little escapes him. He knows ancient secrets. Some call him the last Mechanist, a child of the Builders. So old he makes me look young.’

‘Where—’

‘Florence. The banking clans are his patrons. Or he is theirs. That relationship is harder to unravel than any knot Gordion ever tied. Perhaps the clans sprang from his loins back along the centuries when he quickened. Like many children though they are eager to inherit – of late the banks of Florence have been flexing their muscles, testing the old man’s strength … and his patience.’ Skilfar’s gaze flitted to Kara, then back to Snorri. ‘Kelem knows every coin in this Broken Empire of ours and holds the beating heart of its commerce in his claw. A different type of power to imperial might or the Hundred’s thrones, but power none the less.’ In her palm lay a golden coin, a double florin, minted by the southern banks. ‘A different power but in its way more mighty than armies, more insidious than dancing in the dreams of crowned heads. A double-edged sword perhaps, but Kelem has lived for centuries and has yet to cut himself.’

‘I thought him a story. A children’s tale.’

‘They call him the Gate-keeper too. He finds and opens doors. It’s clear enough why he’s called you to him. Clear enough why you need to be rid of this key and soon.’

‘Gate-keeper?’ Snorri said. ‘Do they call him a door-mage as well?’ He felt his hands tighten into fists and saw for a moment a demon wearing Einmyria’s form, leaping at him, released by the mage in Eridruin’s Cave.

‘Once upon a time he called himself that, back in the long ago.’

‘And he is rock-sworn, you say?’

Skilfar tilted her head to study Snorri from a new angle. ‘To live so long a man must swear to many masters, but gold is of the earth and it was always his first love.’

‘I’ve met him … or a shadow of him. He barred the way to Hel against me, said I would bring the key to him.’ Snorri paused, remembering the demon and how his heart had leapt when he thought it his little girl. He forced his hands to unclench. ‘And I will.’

‘That’s madness. After the Dead King there is no one worse to give the key to.’

‘He knows where death’s door is though. Can you show it to me? Is there another choice? A better choice? One Kelem cannot deny me?’ Snorri tucked the key away and closed his jacket. ‘Get a codfish on the line and you have dinner. Get a whale on the line and you might be the dinner.’ He set a hand against the blade of his axe. ‘Let him reel me in, and we shall see.’

‘At least it saves me trying to ease his hook out of you without killing you,’ Skilfar said, her lips pursed. ‘Kara will go with you.’

‘What?’ Kara looked up at that, head turning sharp enough to fan out her hair.

‘No. I—’ Snorri couldn’t think of an objection other than it felt wrong. The sharp challenge in the woman’s regard had sparked an instant attraction in him. She reminded him of Freja. And that felt like betrayal. A foolish notion but an honest one, deep as bones.

‘But—’ Kara shook her head. ‘A warrior? What’s to be learned watching him swing his axe?’

‘You’ll go with him, Kara.’ Skilfar became stern. ‘A warrior? Today he is a warrior. Tomorrow, who knows? A man casts a million shadows, and yet you trap him within such a singular opinion. You travelled here seeking wisdom, girl, but all that I have here on these scrolls is information. The wise come into their majority out in the world, amid the muck and pain of living. It’s not all the dropping of runes and the wrapping of old platitudes in gravitas. Get out there. Go south. Burn in the sun. Sweat. Bleed. Learn. Come to me older, tempered, hardened.’ She tapped a finger to the scroll case on her lap. ‘These words have waited here an age already – they will wait on you a little longer. Read them with eyes that have seen the wideness of the world and they will mean more to you. There is a singular benefit in Snorri’s choosing of Kelem to show him the door. A thousand-mile benefit. On such a journey a man might grow, and change, and find himself a new opinion. Perhaps you can help him.’

Snorri stretched beside me. ‘And that was that.’ He stood, the boat shifting beneath his weight, and glanced at Kara. ‘Skilfar shooed us out and her little dog followed to see that we left. Kara followed on minutes later. She said there were men hunting us on the mountain and that we’d find you near the crater on the west face.’

I looked between them, Snorri, Tuttugu, Kara – the madman, the faithful hound, the baby witch. Three of them against the Dead King, and if he didn’t take them then Kelem waited at the end of their journey. And the prize if they won was to open death’s door and let hell out…

‘Florence, eh? The best path to Florence leads through Red March. You can drop me off there.’

10

Perhaps Kara had a magic about her that permeated her boat, or maybe I had found my sea legs at long last – either way, the voyage south from the Beerentoppen proved less horrendous than the many days with Snorri in the Sea-Troll. Kara had named her boat Errensa, after the valkyrie that swim beneath the waves to gather the war dead for Ragnarok. She knew the winds and kept her sails full, driving us south faster than a man can run.

‘She’s a fine looking woman,’ I told Snorri when he came to join me, huddled in the prow. The boat wasn’t large but the wind gave us privacy, overwriting our conversation and snatching the words away.

‘That she is. She’s got a strength about her. Didn’t think she’d be your type, Jal. And haven’t you been mooning over this Lisa of yours ever since we left Trond?’

‘Well, yes, I mean Lisa’s a lovely girl… I’m sure I’ll climb her balcony once or twice when I get back but…’ But a man has to think about the here and now, and right there and right then, Kara had all my attention.

Life aboard a small sailboat is not to be recommended, however attractive the company, and even when you don’t have to spend most of each day emptying yourself over the side. The food proved cold, monotonous, and in short supply. The nights continued to try to reinstate winter. My fever continued to keep me weak and shivering. And any hopes I had of exercising my charms on Kara died early on. For one thing it’s hard to play the enigmatic prince of romance when the object of your affections gets to watch you shit into the sea twice a day. For another, the very first time my hand wandered her way Kara took a long knife from out beneath the many pleats of her skirt and explained with unnecessary volume how she would use it to pin that hand to my groin should it wander again. Snorri and Tuttugu just watched me and rolled their eyes as if it were my fault! I cursed the lot of them for miserable peasants and retreated to nibble on our diminishing store of dry oatcakes – revolting things.

At sunset Aslaug came, rising through the boards of the hull as if the inky depths had kept her safe while day scoured the world. Tuttugu glanced my way, shuddered and busied himself with a net that needed repairs. Snorri stared hard at the spot from which Aslaug rose, his gaze unreadable. Did he miss her company? He hadn’t the look of a man who saw her clearly though, his eyes sliding past her as she moved toward me. I hope her words slid past his ears just as well.

‘Jalan Kendeth. Still huddled among northmen? Yours is the palace of Red March, not some creaking tub.’

‘You have a faster means of getting there?’ I asked, my mood still soured.

Aslaug made no reply but turned slowly as if hunting a scent, until she faced the stern where Kara stood beside the tiller. The völva saw Aslaug in the moment the avatar’s gaze fell upon her. I could tell it in an instant. Kara made no attempt to conceal that recognition, or her anger. Without taking her gaze from the spirit she tied off the tiller and stepped forward. She compensated for the swell, advancing as if the boat were set in rock.

‘Out!’ Loud enough to startle Snorri and Tuttugu, and to have me jump half out of my seat. ‘Out, night-spawn. Out, lie-born. Out, daughter of Loki! Out, child of Arrakni!’ Kara’s eyes blazed with the sunset. She advanced, one hand held before her, clutching something that looked rather like a human bone.

‘Well she’s a pretty thing!’ Aslaug said. ‘Snorri will take her from you. You know that don’t you, Jalan?’

‘Out!’ Kara roared. ‘This boat is mine!’ She struck the bone to the mast and all about the hull runes lit, burning with a wintery light. In that instant Aslaug seemed to collapse, flowing into some smaller shape, the size of a large dog, so wreathed in darkness it was hard to see any detail … other than it had too many legs. In a quick thrashing of long dry limbs Aslaug scurried over the side and was gone without a splash. I shuddered and looked up at Kara who returned my gaze, her lips set in a thin line. I opted to say nothing. The völva held like that, still with the bone to the mast, for another minute, then another, and then, with the sun gone behind the world, she relaxed.