“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.
“Slip through,” Hennan said.
“What?” The most emaciated corpse behind the debtors’ prison couldn’t slip through the gap between the fingers.
Hennan raised his arms above his head by way of answer and wriggled down onto his haunches.
“Ah.” Undignified, but what the hell? I followed his example and a moment later was crawling out from beneath the soldier’s hand with no additional injuries save for the brocaded epaulette torn from my shoulder.
“You stopped it!” Hennan stood gazing up at the soldier, showing a degree of awe now that he was close up that had proved lacking when we’d watched from the corner and he’d urged me to storm the place with nothing but my bare fists to defeat the guards.
“If I can’t do better than that we’re in trouble.” Some large part of my mind had set itself screaming at me to run. But Edris Dean’s face floated over that noise, not as he’d been on Beerentoppen this spring, but as he’d looked when Mother slipped bloody from his sword. The scarlet stain from the soldier’s claw spread like a memory of the wound Edris’s blade gave me that day. It grew slowly, blossoming from the site of the old injury that had nearly taken my life. For a moment the sight hypnotized me.
“Jal!” Hennan, urgent, tugging at my sleeve.
“Prince Jalan,” I said. “Unhand me.” I shook him off, recovered the key, and walked around to face the soldier head on. The street lay empty left and right. A messenger clattered through the cross-roads fifty yards further on, intent on his business. I reached up and took hold of the soldier’s shoulder, stepping onto its knee and hauling myself up.
“Jal-Prince-we should. .” Hennan gestured at the door.
“It’s locked and there are men with swords on the other side,” I said, staring at the soldier’s gleaming metal skull.
On the smooth forehead where my face distorted in hideous reflection a small metal disc lay raised a hair above the surrounding. I banged the side of it with the base of the key and slid it aside to reveal a small circular hole no wider than the pupil of an eye. I pressed the cone-shaped point of the key to the hole and willed Loki’s piece of trickery into action. It took a moment’s concentration before the obsidian started to flow again, liquid night reforming beneath my fingers, cold with possibility, draining into the narrowness of the hole until all I held was the end of a thin black rod.
“You’re mine.” I whispered it, remembering Yusuf waiting with me in the House Gold, the blackness of his smile as he told me how the Mechanists’ machine coded a rod to each new owner and that rod, inserted into the specified clockwork soldier’s head, would transfer its loyalty to the person who had purchased it. I felt the rod change, felt it lock, and then, with a twist, I drew it slowly out, six obsidian inches of it. “Mine!” Louder now.
“But. .” Hennan, frowning as I jumped down beside him. “You broke it. .”
“I unwound it,” I said. “There’s a difference. And it was pretty much unwound in any case.” I moved back around to the winding port. The key changed to fit the indentation as I reached toward it. “Let’s. .” I started to turn the key in the opposite direction to my first attempt. “See. .” I put some muscle into it. “What. .” Throughout the soldier’s torso cogs began to whisper and whirr. “We. .” I kept turning. “Can. . Do.”
I’m no scholar or artificer but I seem to recall that the physic of things is much like that of life. You don’t get anything for nothing, and if you want a lot out you’ve got to put a lot in. I wanted a lot out of my newest possession and I didn’t want to put a lot in. By rights I should have stood there winding for an hour just to get the thing to take a single step forward, but the key I held had its own rules. The key had been crafted to unlock, to remove obstacles, to allow the user to get where they wanted to. I wanted to get to a fully wound soldier. Its failure to work was the obstacle before me. I remembered how when I’d held the orichalcum I could, with enough focus and will, direct the wild pulsing of its illumination into a single brilliant beam and steer it forward until my concentration failed and it fell apart. I summoned that same focus and tried to will whatever potential I had in me into a single beam driven through the black rod in my hand and into the metal mass of the soldier.
With each turn of the key the noise from within the soldier grew, wheels rotating, springs groaning, cogs buzzing in a fury of motion, creaks and twangs as things deep within grew tighter, tighter, and tighter still. I thought of Edris Dean and turned the key though it resisted me and threatened to tear the very skin from my palm rather than rotate another degree. The soldier groaned, its armour flexed as deep inside the reservoirs of its power clenched into potent cores that might drive it on for another seven centuries. The great head above me turned on a neck of silver-steel collars, gears meshing, cricks giving with high pitched retorts. And the eyes that found me blazed even in the light of the new day.
“Jalan Kendeth,” it said in a voice sharp with angles and twanging like lute strings wound too tight.
“Prince Jalan,” I corrected it. “See this child.” I pointed and waited for the head to swivel and fix upon Hennan. “Hennan Vale. We’re going into this jail to extract two prisoners. You are to precede us and protect us from anyone trying to stop us.”
The soldier’s head rotated back toward me, a smooth and sudden motion, far more rapid than its movements prior to rewinding. “This will contravene numerous laws applying in the city of Umbertide.”
“Duly noted. Let’s go.” And I waved it toward the formidable door that gave access into the Frauds’ Tower.
The soldier strode smartly to the door and rapped four times. I heard rattling, someone mutter, and the door began to open. The soldier jerked it wide and the guardsman behind came sprawling out into the street, dragged by the door handle. He landed face first a short distance before me. I kicked him in the head as he got to all fours.
“Son of a bitch!” I’d been about to apologize for kicking the man while he was down but it hurt me more than him. I hobbled around his senseless form muttering more explicit curses under my breath, pausing only to slide his short sword from its scabbard.
The clockwork soldier had vanished inside by the time I reached the entrance. I managed to grab Hennan’s shoulder and haul him back. “Fools rush in. And granted this whole exercise is deeply stupid, but let’s not make it worse.” I pushed him behind me and peered into the foyer. The soldier stood there with a guardsman in one metal hand and a clerk, plucked from behind the counter, in the other. Maybe they were gripped too tightly to holler for help or they were too scared of being ground to pulp, but either way they both held quiet.
“Well, done. . erm. . do you have a name?” I looked up at the soldier.
“Guardian.”
“Well done, Guardian. Best not to kill anyone you don’t have to. We can put these two in a cell if they behave themselves.” I should be terrified. I should be four blocks away and still sprinting, but when I tried to reach for my fear all I found was Edris’s face as it had been fifteen years ago, and Mother sliding off his sword for the thousandth time, with that same look of surprise. “You, clerk.” I pointed unnecessarily at the balding man, his pot belly bulging through the gaps between Guardian’s many-knuckled fingers, his face purpling. “What cell are the northmen in and how do we get there?”
The man gasped something, his eyes bulging, shot through with burst veins.
“Put him down so he can answer my question, Guardian.”
The soldier opened his hand and the man fell with all the grace of a grain sack.
I came a few steps closer. Close enough to smell that the man had soiled himself. “Tell me again. And make sure you get it right or Guardian here will come back and pull your arms off.”