"Let's move." I strode on. Hunting dogs work together: half a dozen can bring down any opponent. And there would be men following. "It can't be much further now." I needed it not to be much further but what I need and what the world gives are often at odds.

"We should split up." The baying sounded closer by the moment and, as always when things come to the sharp end, my thoughts turned to how I could win free. Hennan was slowing us down, no doubt about that. The fear wasn't so deep in me that I was ready to leave the boy, but going our separate ways seemed a good alternative. He wouldn't be slowing me down any more, and yet I wouldn't be abandoning him-there was an equal or better chance the pursuit would follow me, and that, with the benefit of the doubt, could even be construed as saving him! "If we split up they can't follow us all . . ."

"What's that?" Kara ignored me and instead pointed ahead.

The land had risen beneath us, becoming barren and drier as we climbed into the hills. With little more than a general direction to head in, and a blurred memory of some maps I'd perused in the House Gold archives, it had seemed that our chances of finding the particular hole in the ground we sought depended upon meeting some local to guide us. Unfortunately the Romero Hills appeared to be entirely devoid of locals, probably because the place was rather less hospitable than the surface of the moon.

"A trail." Snorri lowered his hand from shielding his eyes, the grim line of his mouth twitching toward something less sombre, just for a moment.

"And there's only one place to go out here!" I started forward with renewed energy, wetting cracked and dry lips and wishing I'd managed to drink a little more of the Umber while struggling through it.

Something about the acoustics of the valley made it seem as if the hounds were on our heels at each moment, though by the time the trail had taken us to the far side there were still no signs of pursuit on the slopes down which we'd come.

"Not much of a trail." Snorri grunted and pushed Hennan up the incline. "Shouldn't we have met some traffic?"

"Umbertide imports most of its salt up the Umber River, you would have followed its banks to the city after you docked at Port Tresto."

Kara turned around at that. "I heard the Crptipa Mine is one of the largest-"

"It's huge-it just doesn't produce any salt worth a d.a.m.n," I said. "It's got Kelem in residence. Apparently he doesn't like company, and since the place preserves him, he's not likely to be going any time soon."

We carried on another few paces before Snorri commented again. "But these tracks would be washed away in a few years if they weren't used."

"There's a small operation, working around the entrance chambers." I lifted my head and pointed. "There, look!" The rise revealed a scattering of shacks, storage sheds, stables and several carts, all cl.u.s.tered around a black and yawning hole in the base of a rock-face where the valley became suddenly steep.

We picked up the pace and jogged up the dusty road, burdened by exhaustion. Falling behind, I turned and saw, emerging from the dry gullies on the far side of the valley, the foremost of the hounds, tiny in the distance but fearsome even so.

I'd moved from last to first by the time we stumbled gasping into the clearing ringed by the buildings before the mine entrance. I stood there, hands on knees, hauling in a dry breath, my shirt sticking to my ribs. I heard rather than saw Snorri unlimber his axe behind me. A moment later the ringing of an alarm went up, someone spinning a stick against the inside of one of those iron bars bent into a triangle that they use to call men to sup.

"E-easy." I straightened up, reaching out to lay a hand on the thickness of Snorri's arm. He didn't look up to a battle in any case, dark lines beneath his eyes, sweat on his face, still bent around the agony of the salt-edged slash in his side. Miners from the night shift began to stumble out of one of the dormitory huts, rubbing the sleep from their eyes, yawns cracking their jaws. A couple more awake than the rest took hold of long-handled hammers from a stack beside the door.

Kara stepped forward. "We just need to visit Kelem. There's no need for trouble."

The miners stared at her as if she were some strange creature unearthed from the salt. The men might be paler than typical Florentines, labouring all day deep in the salt caves, but Kara's skin was like snow, preserved from the sun by one of the witch's unguents.

The foreman among them found his wits at last, just as I was about to chivvy him along. It could only be a matter of minutes before the hounds caught up and barks turned into bites. "Can't do that ma'am. Kelem's got his own ways. No one goes down less he sends his servant for them." He watched us with eyes narrowed against the brightness, a shrewd look on his gaunt face, tight-fleshed as though the salt had sucked all but the last drops of moisture from him.

"We could pay." Kara glanced my way, over-tired and leaning on her spear.

"Ain't enough in your pocket, ma'am, no matter how deep it is." He shook his grizzled head. "Kelem's rules aren't to be broken. Play by them and he's fair. Break them and you'll think the Inquisition kind."

"And you're going to stop us?" Snorri frowned. I knew it would be reluctance to hurt them that worried him, not their numbers.

The miners stiffened at the challenge in his tone, straightening up, awake now, some taking up crowbars, the last few emerging from the long hut to bring their strength up to fifteen. Their numbers worried me plenty, and Snorri looked done in.

"Wait! Wait . . ." I raised a hand above my head and threw what princely authority I could into my voice. "By the rules you say?" I reached into my jacket and riffled through the papers still packed into the inner pockets, the deeds and t.i.tles of various acquisitions so minor I hadn't had either time nor inclination to cash in when ama.s.sing the gold that Ta-Nam had taken from me. Of late they had served as nothing more than insulation from the night chill in the dungeons. I found the one I wanted and carefully unwadded it from the others. Thankfully it looked as though the ink hadn't run too badly after my dip in the Umber. "Here!" I drew it forth with a flourish. "Notarized by House Gold." I ran my finger along the scrolled t.i.tle and wax seal. "I own thirteen twenty-fourth shares in Crptipa Mining Corporation. A grand name for this G.o.dforsaken collection of shacks and the trickle of salt you fellows manage to send to the city. So whilst . . ." I searched the doc.u.ment. "Antonio Garraro . . . is your paymaster and manages the running of this operation from his desk in the city, it's actually me, Prince Jalan Kendeth, heir decimal to the throne of Red March and her protectorates, who owns the controlling interest in this hole in the ground." I paused to let that sink in. "So, I'd like to take a tour of my holdings, and I can't think that such an action would break any rules set by Kelem. Rules which, after all, allow my employees to do exactly that, seven days a week."

The foreman came over, keeping a wary eye on the axe in Snorri's hand. He glanced at the faded and water-blotched ink work on the parchment and reached out to tap a nail against the wax seal. He let his gaze fall to the dirty rags adhering to my body. "You don't look like you own a mine, Prince . . ."

"Prince Jalan Kendeth, heir to the Red Queen, and don't try to pretend you've not heard of her." I raised my voice to the near-shout that works best when commanding menials. "And I look like exactly the sort of man who would own a played-out, worthless hole like Crptipa, which hasn't made a profit in six years."

The foreman paused, teeth against his wizened lower lip. I watched him weighing up various odds behind his eyes, the sums evident in the furrowing of his brow.

"Right you are, yer majesty. I'll take you down presently. The night shift will be up within the hour and then-"

"We'll go now, no guide required." I started walking toward the cavern mouth. The others joined me. The distant baying had started to grow rapidly louder.

"But . . . but you'll get lost!" the foreman called at my back.

"I doubt it! It's my mine after all, a man should know the way around his own mine!" A guide would only try to keep us in the company-controlled areas and wouldn't know how to navigate Kelem's caverns any more than we did.

"You're not even taking lanterns?"

"I . . ." Swallowing your pride is always difficult, especially if it's as indigestible as mine, but fear of the dark won over, and executing a sharp about turn I marched back to collect three gla.s.s-cowled lanterns from the hooks beneath the hut's eaves. I stalked across to the others, my dignity demanding I take my time. A dog's howl, the kind they give when sighting prey, chased away all traces of dignity and I sprinted toward the mine entrance, lanterns clattering together in my hands.

Rickety wooden ladders, lashed together with salt-crusted rope, vanished down the rocky gullet that opened in the cavern floor fifty yards back from the entrance. Directly above the shaft an ancient hole of similar diameter pierced the roof, a blue and dazzling circle. I shoved a lantern at Snorri, another at Kara. "No time to light them! Down!" And fear of the hounds had me leading the way, pulling Hennan along behind. Not even the ominous creaking of the ladder beneath my weight gave me pause. I climbed down in a fever and let the darkness rise to swallow me. Up above I caught the sound of snarls, of claws on stone, and Snorri's roar, as fearsome as any beast's. Something plummeted past me. A dog I hoped. I felt the wind of its pa.s.sage. A touch closer and it would have plucked me from the rungs.

An age later, hands raw and unbearably parched from the salty rungs, I jolted down onto solid ground.

"Are you coming?" My words lost in the void overhead, its darkness pierced by a single patch of sky impossibly high above me.

"Yes." Hennan, high above me.

"Yes." Kara's voice. Closer to hand. "Do you have the orichalc.u.m?"

I backed from the ladder to give her s.p.a.ce and fished for the metal cone. I stepped into foul smelling mud, slippery under foot, and almost lost my balance. The orichalc.u.m eluded me and I became convinced I'd lost it in the river, until my fingers brushed against the metal sparking such a response I half blinded myself. The pulsing illumination revealed several facts: firstly, the curves of Kara's behind as she descended the last few rungs, secondly, the splattered remains of a large dark-furred hound, and thirdly, that what I'd taken to be mud was actually the innards of the aforementioned dog, the beast having burst on impact. The fourth and least welcome fact proved to be that this wasn't the end of our climb, rather a narrow ledge from which a new set of ladders descended, the whole thing being less than six square yards and mostly coated in mushed dog. My heels rested perhaps an inch from the dark and endless fall behind me, and the shock of realizing it set me slipping once again. Both feet shot out from under me and skittered over the edge. The orichalc.u.m flew from my grip. My chest hit the stone with a rib-crunching thud, arms reached out, driven by their own instinct, fingers scrabbled for grip and for a trouser-wetting moment I hung, with the corner of the ledge under my armpits, body tight to the cliff, feet seeking any hold on offer.

"Got you!" Kara threw herself forward, hand encircling the wrist of my right arm in the heartbeats before the orichalc.u.m glow died.

We hung like that for what seemed an age, me too winded to undermine any claim to heroism with cries for help or pleading with whatever G.o.ds might be watching. Eventually, as air started to seep in past bruised ribs, I heard the sound of flint on steel and a lantern flicker into life. Snorri and Hennan stood by the ladder, Kara lay stretched out through the dog's wreckage, one foot hooked around the bottom rung, the only connection keeping us both from a fatal plunge.

It took a while for Snorri to haul me up-he seemed to lack his usual strength and groaned with the effort of raising me, his shirt stained dark on his injured side. Kara was still cleaning off the larger chunks of dog meat when I finally got up. I discovered I also had a few pieces of my own to pick off. Hennan recovered the orichalc.u.m and I pocketed it. Kara and I had lost our lanterns over the edge and soon enough I might need my own source of light. Whatever the dog handlers were up to I could see no signs of them against the patch of brightness overhead. I wiped my mouth and found it b.l.o.o.d.y. I must have bitten my tongue when I slammed into the edge of the drop.

"Let's go." This time Snorri led off.

I followed after Kara, making my descent gingerly, boots still slippery and my chest one large ache from top to bottom.

The second leg of the climb proved longer than the first and the circle of sky seemed to grow as small and distant as the moon. A weight settled about me-an echo of the unimaginable tonnage of rock around us. I'd come from the frozen mountains of the north to bury myself beneath the baked hills of Florence, and whatever waited for us down there it seemed that our journey must be coming to its close. All those miles, all those months, and Loki's key accompanying us every step, the sole reason for our long migration. I wondered if the trickster G.o.d watched us from the wilds of Asgard, laughing at the joke which only he truly understood.

The visions came at the worst possible moment, when my arms ached from too many fathoms of climbing, my hands ran slippery with sweat, and the darkness folded around me on every side. A vast thickness of rock stretched above my head, and an unknown fall beneath me. The taste of my own blood brought the memories rushing in. It shouldn't have been a surprise. The remnants of Kara's spell still plagued me, burning with whatever magic I held in my veins, amplifying her simple casting into something that threatened to unravel the whole history of my line into my dreaming. The suspicion that the volva had planned this outcome still lingered. Certainly plunging me into weeks of dream-sleep had given her far more opportunity to work on Snorri and to steal the key if he wouldn't relinquish it.

The vision drew my thoughts from present suspicions to past ventures. We had been chasing the Lady Blue, Alica and myself, chasing her through the palace into the private quarters of the elder Gholloth, he whom legend had it was the true heir of the last emperor Adam the Third, albeit a b.a.s.t.a.r.d nephew. We never spoke that story too loud, indeed it hadn't been told to me until my twenty-first birthday, little more than a year ago. There's nothing more likely to unite the enemies of any kingdom than a legitimate claim on the Empire throne.

Memory painted my grandmother's pursuit on the darkness as I descended, so vivid that it overwrote my sight and I sought the rungs utterly blind, all the while with corridors flashing through my mind, felled guards, broken doors, Alica Kendeth sprinting ahead of me, fearless and swift.

We wove past the carnage, speed our only goal, and still we came too late, past the wreckage of Gholloth the First's elite bodyguard stationed at the doors of the old man's bedchambers. The Lady Blue had felled three men in plate armour. G.o.d knows what magics she used and what it cost her. These would have been swift warriors, seasoned, loyal beyond question, deadly with sword and knife. They lay shattered as if each had been turned to gla.s.s and struck with a hammer, the sharp edges of their injuries softened by what leaked from them.

In the old man's bedchamber, its wall hung with paintings of the sea, we found the king, the emperor if not for lies, treachery, and war. He lay at peace among his linens, clutching the red flower of his lifeblood to his chest. If you had lived somewhere where the emperors' statues haunt every turn you would know at a glance that their blood ran from him. I saw it in the line of his jaw, the angle of his nose, the broadness of his shoulders, even slumped in death.

Alica's cry held more rage than grief, but both were present. Then she saw it, and I followed her gaze. In the corner of the room a tall mirror stood. Silvered gla.s.s within an ebony frame. Such a thing would cost you a hundred in crown gold should you seek it in Vermillion today. But instead of reflecting the room it stood like a narrow window into some other place. A place where a figure ran, marked by the sapphires twinkling across her hair as she crossed a dreamland where crystal shards longer than lances and thicker than men jutted from the bedrock like the spines of a hedgehog.

My grandmother reached the mirror, and I swear she would have run headlong into it, but it shattered before her, a thousand glittering pieces of it filling the air, sliding down one across the other against the ebony board behind.

Alica Kendeth fell to her knees then, careless of the gla.s.s, 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 sc.r.a.ped the stuff from the rock. Instead we found ourselves in a s.p.a.ce 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 orichalc.u.m 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 orichalc.u.m away. "The miners must pa.s.s 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 a.s.sa.s.sins 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 pa.s.sed 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.

In one of these pillared chambers salt miners, now long dead, had carved a church and set it about with saints. Paul the Apostle stood before the arched entrance one white and glittering arm raised before him, fingers half-spread as if pointing out an important truth, the bible clasped to his chest, the expression on his face hard to see in white on white.

Once we travelled a corridor of Builder-stone, smooth and perfect for a hundred yards before crumbing away and returning us to the caverns. It seemed as if they had made some complex here, not valuing the mineral wealth around them, just digging into it to hide themselves away, only for later men to excavate around them.

The deeper the corridors took us the stronger the alchemy in the air, stinging my eyes, scouring my lungs. After what must have been a mile or more of corridors and galleries we started to see doorways, carved into the salt, the arches elaborately worked but lacking any door, instead just filled with a crystalline wall of the native salt, as if a new chamber were to be excavated but plans had changed.

The air grew thicker by degrees, and warmer, as if with Hel's promise, for surely the infernal fires could not lie much further below us. The salts changed too-from tasting like the salt of the sea to something sour that burned the tongue. The colours changed, the white adopting a taint of deepest blue that seemed to lend depth to every surface. The air lost its dryness, becoming humid as our path led deeper, so that where earlier on the sweat had been sucked from my skin before it had a chance to even show, now the air refused to take it and left it running down my limbs in trickles that did nothing to cool me.

At last the spider brought us by a long flight of steps and a short corridor into a natural cavern where rock occasionally showed through the salt-clad walls and everything had a rounded, lumpen look to it. Another turn revealed a bleached wooden bridge crossing a fast-running rill that carved down through the salt, hot and steaming as it ran. Beyond the bridge lay a chamber of wonder.

"Holy Hel!" Kara invoked the heathen G.o.ddess that rules the Norse in their afterlife should death not take them to Valhalla. A cold b.i.t.c.h by all accounts, split nose to crotch by a line dividing a left side of pure jet from a right side of alabaster.

"f.u.c.k me." I feel Christendom provides the more apt responses in such situations. The cavern ran before us in a wide and writhing tunnel, as if some great wyrm had burrowed here, and on every side the salts lay in vast crystals, forests of them, some a yard long, hexagonal in cross-section and so thick I might not get my hands to meet around them. Others were ten yards long and thicker than I stood tall, each face flatter than anything man can make, the angles sharp and perfect.

I knew this place. I had seen it in the visions Kara's magic gave me. I had seen it in a mirror in my grandmother's memories. The Lady Blue fled to these caverns after she murdered the elder Gholloth, first of my line. That bound them, Kelem and the Blue Lady. But which had been the hand behind the move I didn't know-only that both had played the game and played it against my family. However I turned it this placed Kelem's hand on Edris Dean's shoulder on the day he came to Vermillion.

The spider moved between, beneath, and over the crystals without interrupting its pace, flowing around each obstacle in a whirring interplay of legs. We moved more slowly, struggling to extract any use from each lungful of scalding, over-moist air, and sweating water faster than a man could p.i.s.s it away. A lethargy wrapped me, like a hot wet blanket, and I found myself paused halfway across a ma.s.sive crystal shard that Snorri had just struggled over. The crystal plane beneath me returned the light of Kara's lantern, tinting it deepest indigo. The whole shard seemed to glow with some inner fire, burning at its core impossibly far beneath me. It felt for a moment that I sat upon the surface of a calm sea, fathoms deep, with only the thinnest sheet of some brittle substance to hold me up, to keep me from sinking down to where that fire burned . . . Exhaustion bowed me, a great weight, dragging my head down toward the crystal's surface. Loki's key slipped from my wet shirt, dangling on its thong, the blackest I had ever seen it, its tip just a finger's breadth above the surface that supported me . . .

"Jal!" Kara barked the word from behind me, her voice seeming to scratch like fingernails on a slate, filling me with irritation. "Jal!"

I turned my head to her, reluctant, and met her stare.

"Don't," she said. "The world is broken here." She frowned, sweat running down her brow, plastering her blond hair to her forehead. Her eyes seemed defocused . . . witchy I'll call it for lack of a better word. She tasted the air. "This is a place of doors."

"Well . . . so they say." I waved a hand around us. "I haven't seen one d.a.m.n door since we left the surface."

She glanced at the crystal beneath me. "There's a portal here. An almost-door . . . to let that key touch it would be a mistake. I don't know where or when it might take you."

"When?"

But she didn't answer, just looped her hands so Hennan could scramble over the shard. The boy had wrapped rags about his hands. A good move. Mine were cut from sharp edges and already stinging with the salts.

The spider led us away from the crystal gallery, past a steaming pool of cobalt blue water, and into a hall equal to any we had yet seen but hewn from the bedrock. Along each side stood ma.s.sive salt crystals, vast octagonal columns retrieved from some deep place by an artistry unknown to men, or at least to any since the Builders. Each would barely fit along the pa.s.sage that brought us here and would take a hundred elephants to haul.

What salt had formed the columns I couldn't say but each held a limpid light that sprang from no source I could see and illuminated the clear depths of them where webs and veils of ghostly white fault lines suggested shapes, hints of horrors and of angels, held forever within the heart of the crystal.