by Kerstin Hall
Fanieq grasped his shirt and threw him off the throne. He fell down the stairs.
“The Compass, or I kill your whore,” she said.
The guards parted, allowing Eris to pass.
“No.” His voice came out thick. He scrambled away from her. “Eris, she wants to use your soul for the God Sword.”
I know. She dropped down beside him. When you get to Ahri, run. The Ageless are breaking through the shadowline and my wards won’t hold.
“She’ll kill you.” Vasethe grabbed her hand. “Don’t do this.”
I’m sorry that I was so blind. She pressed her other hand to his chest and smiled, even as tears welled up in her eyes.
“Eris!”
I missed you, Yett.
The throne room vanished.
Chapter Twenty-One
VASETHE EMERGED FROM SLEEP like a drowning man, gasping and desperate. The edges of objects flickered; he caught glimpses of the throne room through the walls of the house. Eris’s hand slipped off his chest.
“No!” He put his arms around her shoulders and forced her to sit upright. “Come on, wake up!”
Her forehead was creased in a faint frown, as if she were thinking hard about a problem. She did not react to him. Her head lolled backwards.
“Please, not for me,” he said, under his breath. “I never asked for this.”
Beyond the house, a sandstorm raged. The air was filled with growling and crunching; he heard the windows in the front room crack. Wind rushed through the bedroom, tasting of salt.
One death in Mkalis, one in Ahri, and her dual soul would not matter.
Vasethe laid Eris down gently, straightening her hair. He gazed at her face. A part of him expected her to wake, but she was still.
“I won’t run,” he said.
He found his boots and put them on. Every move he made was precise, controlled. Outside the house, something produced a metallic screech. He stood.
There was a knife block in the kitchen, a hunk of heavy blackwood with six slots. He pulled out the blades—paring knives, a boning knife, a cleaver—and tucked them into his belt.
I missed you, Yett.
He shook his head. A god would have been able to protect her. She was mistaken, and if she wasn’t, the knowledge was of no use to him now.
Outside, it was difficult to see more than a few steps ahead. Vasethe pushed through the howling wind, shielding his face with one arm. Sand whipped his skin.
All eight Ageless surrounded the yard. The creatures were circling, hovering just above the ground. Their breath rattled. Wards snapped off the fence.
“‘Eris’ was your mother’s name, wasn’t it?” he shouted. His voice was torn from his mouth and devoured by the storm. “That’s why you came back.”
They did not pause in their slow rotation. Their eyes looked through Vasethe, through the walls, straight at Eris.
“She never meant to hurt you!”
A string of coloured beads shattered. Fine glass peppered Vasethe’s legs and the wind surged, almost knocking him off his feet.
The Ageless drew to a halt. A pained shriek cut through the uproar, and the lock on the gate bent backwards like soft clay. The metal snapped and the latch jumped open. The Ageless at the gate—one-legged, skull stripped of flesh, the first—raised its arm and gestured. Vasethe knew that movement; Eris twisted her wrist the same way.
The gate clanged to the ground.
He threw the boning knife. The blade thwacked into the creature’s sternum, cracking bone.
The Ageless glided through the gap in the fence, its blank eyes unblinking.
Vasethe pulled another knife, threw it, reached for the next, threw. The blades sank deep into the creature’s flesh, but it didn’t seem to notice. Its movements remained unhurried. Relentless. It would not be stopped.
Vasethe swore and retreated through the front door, slamming it shut. He dragged his table over to the entrance, flipped it on its side, and wedged it beneath the handle. Through the window he saw the creature approach. It was alone, its brothers waiting beyond the yard.
He backed away to the entrance of the bedroom, fists clenched around the handles of the paring knives. With glacial slowness, the door handle turned, stuck, rose again. Vasethe held his breath.
With a crack, the table split as the door exploded inwards. Pieces of wood flew across the room, and part of the table slammed into the wall. The Ageless drifted past it. The wood warped, carvings distorting into depraved, impossible curves.
Vasethe threw his knives. One missed; the other drove straight into the space where the creature’s heart should have been.
He shot a glance over his shoulder. Eris had not moved; still trapped in Mkalis. Her chest rose and fell.
He raised his last knife. The cleaver. The blade was chipped and its edge blunted by centuries of use. Holding it in front of his body with both hands, Vasethe blocked the entrance to the bedroom.
The Ageless’s head brushed the lantern and it shattered, the beautiful filigree catches breaking into hundreds of tiny shards, the rose glass evaporating into splinters.
But when the creature reached Vasethe, it paused. Its eyes moved, focusing on the living obstruction before it. There was no curiosity in its gaze, nothing human, no feeling, just pure intent.
He spat at it.
An invisible force drove through his gut. Vasethe hit the wardrobe and slumped to the floor, blood spraying from his lips. He looked down. A wound gaped across his abdomen.
The Ageless entered the room.
“Wait!” Blood gushed from Vasethe’s mouth. He reached for something, anything; his hand closed on a soft object and he threw it at the creature.
The Ageless paused again and stared at the stuffed rabbit on the ground beside it. Then it turned back to Eris.
“Stop,” Vasethe murmured.
He was not in pain, and fear was receding from his mind. He only felt cold. The world had grown quieter now, the storm subsiding.
If he had been a god, he would have known how to protect her. He could see a forest in autumn, a waterfall; he could hear far-off music. And her voice. Not her voice. His voice. Midan. Memories he should not have. Eris. Border Keeper, Custodian of the First Realm. The First, who had claimed the realm beyond the shadowline. Why was that important? He was cold, so close. The First, now gone.
Eris.
Vasethe spoke through blood. “I claim Ahri.”
Colour and light shot through his mind. The world beyond his body expanded and filled him: the sandstorm and the shadowline, the saltpan, the desert, Raisha’s grave, the wetlands, the mountains, forests, cities, ice, oceans, skies, lives, so many lives, a great starscape of souls spreading around him.
He breathed again, blood sharp on his tongue.
“Kol,” he whispered. “Die.”
The Ageless screamed once, an awful inhuman shriek. Beyond the house, its brothers joined in. Their voices rang out over the desert and merged into a single cry.
Vasethe’s eyes shut. His blood spread warm across the floor.
“Heal,” he rasped.
His heart stopped.
* * *
The sun rose above the desert. All was still and quiet and bright.
The storm had vanished. It left behind a small, wrecked house at the end of the tracks, on the Ahri side of the shadowline.
Fragments of broken wards punctuated the yard. Discarded dolls’ legs, glossy black feathers. A torn awning hung from the post above the door, hanging on by a few strands of thread.
The front room glittered as the light broke through the windows and the hole where the door had been. Everything was covered by a carpet of glass. Wood splinters littered the floor; the remains of a once-beautiful table lay in pieces. A knife was buried to the hilt in the soft sandstone wall beside the window.
In the bedroom lay two bodies and a battered stuffed rabbit with blood smeared across its ears. The painting on the wall tilted at a dangerous angle, the waterfall ca
scading sideways.
Vasethe’s boots grew warm in the rising heat of the day. He groaned and stirred. The floor beneath him was sticky; his tongue was thick in his mouth. Turning sideways, he retched, then shakily raised his head.
“Eris?” he croaked.
She did not answer.
He dragged himself to the bed, crawling on his hands and knees. His wound had closed, although his clothes were still covered in gore. A perfectly circular scar remained just above his navel.
Eris had not moved, but her frown had faded. Vasethe rested his head on the side of the bed. His gaze travelled to the devastation around him.
It took time. He cleaned the bedroom around Eris first, then swept the front room. The kitchen had escaped largely unscathed; he cleared the mess left by the cracked windows and moved to the yard. He hummed while he worked. In the storeroom, he found a new lock for the gate. When he set it back in its hinges, the latch still stuck.
The sun beat down. Vasethe sighed and pushed back his hair where it fell in front of his eyes. He found his gaze drawn to the saltpan. Beyond the shadowline he could see nothing but white.
He unscrewed the hinges of the gate. The latch would bother him until he fixed it.
Inside the house, a baby started crying.
“Sethe?”
He turned.
Eris stood beneath the ruined awning. Her expression was cautious, her hand half-raised, reaching towards him as if to confirm that he was really there. They stared at one another.
A slow smile spread over Vasethe’s face.
The rain fell from the cloudless sky, darkening the sand, cool on her skin.
Acknowledgments
I have been immensely fortunate to work with Tor.com Publishing on The Border Keeper. It has been a privilege to collaborate with all of you.
Thank you to Irene Gallo, creative director and publisher, and to Lauren Hougen, production editor. The beautiful cover of this book was the work of Kathleen Jennings and Christine Foltzer.
Thanks to Mordicai Knode, not only for your marketing efforts, but also for producing my first ever fan art. Thanks to Amanda Melfi for your work in pushing this novella on social media. And thanks to Caro Perny for publicity schemes and shouting about crab children.
On the prose side, I am indebted to copyeditor Richard Shealy and proofreader Ingrid Powell.
Thank you to Ruoxi Chen. Ever since you selected this novella from the slush pile, you have buoyed me up with your passion, insight, and enthusiasm. Your edits pushed me to make The Border Keeper a better book. I am deeply grateful for everything that you have done for me, and it has been an honor to work with you.
Closer to home, I’d like to thank the Mandela Rhodes Foundation for the faith that they have shown in me.
Scott H. Andrews, thank you for letting me join the Beneath Ceaseless Skies team, and for being so consistently kind and thoughtful. This industry is made better by your quiet dedication and your steadfast adherence to the principle of treating writers with respect.
Thank you to my friends, past and present, specifically to Kaitlin Cunningham and Ruby Parker. Thanks and love, always, to Sabina Stefan.
Emma Kate Laubscher, you are wonderful. Thank you for always making me laugh, and for being the most forcefully enthusiastic proponent of my writing career.
Thank you to my dad for all your support and for regularly asking how the writing is going.
Thank you to Sylvia Hall, my mom and editor, for staying up until the early hours of the morning proofreading this manuscript before the submissions deadline. Without your help, The Border Keeper would not exist. I hope to make you proud.
And lastly, thank you to Tessa Hall. My first reader, my genius sister, this one is for you.
About the Author
Photograph by Sylvia Hall
KERSTIN HALL is a writer and editor based in Cape Town, South Africa. She completed her undergraduate studies in journalism at Rhodes University and, as a Mandela Rhodes Scholar, continued with a master’s degree at the University of Cape Town. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, and she is a first reader for Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She also enjoys photography and is inspired by the landscapes of South Africa and Namibia.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE BORDER KEEPER
Copyright © 2019 by Kerstin Hall
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Kathleen Jennings
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Ruoxi Chen
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
120 Broadway
New York, NY 10271
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-20942-9 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-20941-2 (trade paperback)
First Edition: July 2019
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