The blood that drenched me had belonged to Edris, burning me with its necromancy. I remained on my knees, blood dripping from my hair and hands, still anchored by Tuttugu’s grip.
Despite his second mortal wound Edris took a quick step toward Kara, sword questing before him.
“Better run, Edris Dean, or I’ll finish the job. Skilfar always told me how it would please her to drink from your skull and toast the Lady Blue.” Kara swatted at his blade, the two swords clashing.
Edris made some reply but the words he gargled from his throat came too broken to interpret.
Kara laughed. A cold sound. “You think dead things scare me, Dean?” And as she spoke the lantern grew dim, every shadow thickening and reaching, the darkness writhing in each corner as if the blackest of monsters stirred from slumber there. Edris feinted to the right, threw the short sword at her, then staggered, ungainly, toward the doorway. Kara made to follow, her own blade ready to thrust into his back but she stopped short, fixated by something on the wall opposite. Another mirror, identical to the first. Quite how I’d missed it I didn’t know. She seemed fascinated by her reflection. Glancing at Edris I saw him slowing, starting to turn. A third mirror hung above the doorway, I caught a glimpse of something blue, darkly reflected, a swirl of robes?
“Jalan.” Kara spoke between gritted teeth, adding nothing to her declaration of my name.
“What?” Looking to the left I saw more mirrors I hadn’t noticed, two of them hung at head height. Edris completed his turn. He would have been facing Kara if she hadn’t been staring at the mirror that first caught her attention. Edris grinned, black blood welling over his jaw. He started to draw the knife at his belt, a wicked bit of Turkman iron, nine dark inches of it, thin and notched.
“Break. The. Mirror.” Kara forced each word past her teeth as if it were a struggle she was barely equal to.
“Which mirror?” There must have been a dozen and it made no sense. I couldn’t have missed them. “And with what?” I caught sight of blue robes again, fleeting reflections, here, then there, and eyes, eyes in the shadowed infinity behind the glass, just a gleam, but watching.
“Now!” All she could manage.
Edris had the blade out, arm awkward from the large hole I’d put through his pectoral muscle.
With a lunge, still held by my jerkin in Tuttugu’s dead hand, I caught hold of the broken jug on the floor, and spun to throw it at the mirror I first saw. At least six mirrors hung there now, clustered together. Their reflections showed nothing of the cell but instead revealed some other dark space where candles burned, as if each mirror were some small window onto a chamber beyond. Those half-seen eyes found me, made me their focus, robbing the strength from my arm, fogging my mind with a blueness deeper than sea, brighter than sky. I threw anyway, blind, guessing my target. The sound of shattering glass came loud enough to knock me down if I’d not been on my knees already. I threw my arms up, expecting to be drowned beneath a deluge of shards. But nothing came.
I looked around and found Kara halfway across the cell still looking dazed.
Edris stumbled out through the doorway.
“Hennan’s out there!” I shouted, intending it for Kara but realizing as I said it that I’d just reminded the necromancer too. Without pause, Kara went after him-decent of her since the last thing the boy did for her was slug her around the back of the head with a sock full of florins.
Her exit left me on my knees in a pool of my own distress, belly on display to the world with my tunic hitched up under my armpits, a handful of it still gripped by the dead thing secured on the table. I glanced around wildly, looking for the black shape of Loki’s key, lost amid the filth on a floor cast into deep shadow. By luck, sharp eyes, or some trick of the key itself, I saw it, tantalizingly close but out of reach. I strained, stretching my arm until the joints threatened to pop, waggling my fingertips as if that would close the six-inch gap.
“Let go, damn you!”
It might have been coincidence but in the moment I made my demand something gave and I lunged forward, almost flattening my broken nose on the flagstones. I rose with the key in hand and hid it in my waistband as Kara returned, lantern held before her, guiding an unsteady Hennan at her side.
“Edris?” I asked.
“Got away,” she said. “There’s a pair of clockwork soldiers fighting two levels down. He didn’t look fast enough to get past them.” She shrugged.
“Shouldn’t you be chasing him? Doesn’t your grandmother want to drink her nightcap from his skull?”
A grim smile. “I made that up.”
She sat Hennan against the wall. “Stay there.” And crossed to the table. I managed to stand as she reached it. She stretched out an arm above Tuttugu’s face and he strained to bite her.
“Don’t-”
She turned her head toward me, a sharp motion. “Don’t what?”
“I-” I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that he’d been my friend and I’d not saved him. “You’re dark-sworn!” The best accusation I could find.
“We’re all sworn to something.” She reached out with care and set a finger to Tuttugu’s forehead. His corpse went limp, and when she drew back her finger it revealed one of her small iron rune tablets, remaining where she touched. “He is beyond their use now.” She straightened, eyes bright. “Tuttugu was a good man. He deserved better.”
“Will he go to Valhalla?” Hennan asked, still sitting hunched on the floor. He looked as though his head had yet to clear from its collision with the wall.
“He will,” said Kara. “He died fighting his enemies and didn’t give them what they wanted.”
I looked down at the mess they had made of him. My eyes prickled unaccountably. He must have been beaten every day. The soles of his feet were raw, toes broken. “Why?” It made no sense. “Why didn’t he just tell them where the key was?” The bank had no interest in killing the Norsemen. If Tuttugu had given up the key early on they might have been banished and sent off on the north road before Edris Dean even knew they’d been captured.
“Snorri,” Kara said. “If he gave up the key he would have been giving up Snorri’s children. Or at least he knew that’s how Snorri would see it.”
“For God’s sake! He couldn’t have been that scared of Snorri.”
“Not scared.” Kara shook her head. “Loyal. He couldn’t do that to his friend.”
I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes and tried to clear my thoughts. As I took them away I became aware once more of the muffled bellowing from down the corridor. It hadn’t stopped-I’d just blocked it out. “Snorri!”
The others followed me as I ran to cell ten and unlocked the door. They had Snorri chained to heavy iron rings set into the wall, his mouth bound by a leather gag. He showed no signs of torture but the wound he’d borne with him from the north, the cut from the assassin’s blade, was now a strip of raw flesh an inch wide, a foot and a half in length, crusted with salt that grew in needle-like crystals, some as long as a fingernail.
Snorri strained at the restraints, wrists bleeding where the manacles bit them. Kara crossed the room, taking a small knife from her belt and reaching up for the northman’s gag.
“Wait!” I ran forward to catch her arm. “I’ll do it.”
She met my gaze with furious eyes. “You think I’m going to cut his throat?”
“You wanted to leave him here!” I shouted, wrestling the blade from her hand.
“So did you!” she spat back.
“I didn’t want to- I just- Anyway, you wanted to take the key to that witch up north!”
“So did you. Just to a different witch and not so far north.”
I didn’t have an answer for that so I sawed away at the strap binding Snorri’s gag in place. Tough leather gave easily before the keen edge. That’s how Tuttugu should have given. The idiot should have saved himself. I pulled the gag away and Snorri slumped forward, choking.