Nothing, not even my mother’s dire warnings, could smother the curiosity that burned within me. Only it held the answers to its dark mystery.
Nevertheless, I was careful as I searched the nehym, following my mother’s rules: I didn’t shout or run, so as not to disturb the sleeper’s peace. I didn’t touch or move anything. I was never to do that if I could help it. Small adjustments would soon return to the way they had been, but if you moved too much, a soul could be irreparably changed … and thus, so could the person. Meddling like that, my mother said, was what had gotten soulwalkers branded as witches in the old days and burned alive. Priests or priestesses of Heshara, who had years of training built upon centuries of knowledge and wisdom, were the only ones openly sanctioned by the king to affect another’s soul—or even to walk in one.
And of course I still planned on following the most important rule of all: to never open the door. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t touch it.
I found it upstairs. I froze at first, and then stood, arms folded, frowning at it in challenge across the rough floorboards of a hallway. It was like a massive, fine-cut gem nestled in the crude stone. The black surface flickered in the dim candlelight, but the door itself gleamed, large, dark, and oppressive. It was like the glint of a glaring eye, a ruthless, crystalline, intelligent stare.
The impressiveness of it distantly reminded me of something, and it took me a moment to figure out what.
In human form, the god Tain was depicted as a towering, imperious man with dark skin and hair of bright orange flame, or simply portrayed as a giant eye of fire glaring out of the center of the burning sun. The goddess Heshara, when she wasn’t the white-pale woman with her face half-shadowed, her midnight hair speckled with stars and her smile an untold secret, appeared as one of the phases of the moon, usually the quarter moon, equal parts dark and light. Less often she was the full moon, and even less the new moon, completely dark. But the darkness that stood before me was different even from that: Tain’s opposite, as if an unseen eye were peering from the deepest part of the night sky.
I should have been afraid. But I wasn’t.
I rubbed my fingers together, took a breath, and darted across the hallway. The merest brush of my fingertips was all I allowed. I expected the door to be hot, or even cold. Anything but what it was.
It was as warm as flesh and felt alive, even though it was the texture of glass. It thrummed like blood under skin. Clutching my hand to my chest as if burned, I fled back to my body, where I awoke with a gasp.
2
HARD LESSOΝS
I was twelve when I put my ear to the door.
Guests were staying at the villa again. Dinner had been long and lovely, with multiple courses of succulent seafood, coconut shrimp and spicy squid steaks with avocado, followed by a dessert of papaya pudding and cashew cake, all of it basking in abundant candlelight. My mother and Hallan laughed and drank deeply, their eyes and pearly teeth shining. They were equally beautiful: my mother with her creamy coloring and tumble of curly brown hair, and Hallan with his bronze skin and muscle tone, his black hair cropped short and sleek. When they smiled at each other, it was easy to imagine them married and in love. I was jealous of the picture they painted.
But Razim had been right. In the simplest form, they were courtiers, entertaining the upper classes to gain favor. Less simply, to my mind, they used their bodies to do so, elevating pleasure to an art. It didn’t bother me, but I also didn’t understand it, as if my mother were off upstairs speaking a language I couldn’t comprehend and didn’t care to learn. What I did care to learn was more about souls, and my mother had said we would practice our secret talent on our guests tonight.
When everyone retired, the couples split—my mother with the woman, Hallan with the man. My mother got the better end of that deal, I thought. The woman was at least a little pretty, with her tan skin and long, dark hair, but the lines in her face were deeper than in my mother’s, and her nose was too sharp. The man, however, was sickly pale and balding. Hallan didn’t seem bothered, putting a strong arm around him before they slipped out of the dining room.
Razim made a face of distaste behind their backs. I had been suppressing one a moment before, rinsing my sticky hands in a ceramic bowl floating with water lilies, but his reaction left me nervous. Two years older than me at fourteen, he had a much better idea of what was happening between our parents and the guests, and if he didn’t find it appealing … how would I ever?
“Gods, I hope I never have to do that,” he muttered, and then he became aware of my attention and his face went still. Focused.
“How are you progressing on the lyre?” I asked with false sweetness. I knew he practiced playing so that, when he debuted in court, he would have a different means of entertaining people from his father. He acted determined to follow in Hallan’s footsteps, but despite his eagerness those few years ago to brag about what our parents did with their guests, I could tell he wasn’t too excited to do the same.
And neither was I. But while Razim seemed unenthusiastic about the particular people at hand, I was uninterested in … any of it. With anyone.
“The lyre’s going well enough,” Razim said, his voice deepening, trying to sound more adult as servants began to clear the table. “Enough that I don’t need to practice this evening. So, Kamai, what should we do?”
I had some time before my mother needed me, so I grinned and said, “We could play Gods and Kings, if you’re ready to be beaten again.” It was the one card game everyone played, the game of royalty and peasants alike, but it was especially prized by courtiers competing for status and recognition. It took strategy, wit, and storytelling, and I didn’t find any other activity as much fun. Even at twelve, I was already a deft player, better than Razim.
“Or we could play a different game.” Razim’s dark eyes held me like hands around a moth. I couldn’t move.
Somewhere in the past year, this had started happening. Before then, I was someone underfoot, someone taking the last honey fritter at dinner, someone who left a puddle of water in Razim’s chair, someone who told on him when he pulled my hair in retaliation. Someone, like my mother, who occasionally stole Hallan’s attention. I was all the annoyance of a little sister without actually being one. It didn’t help that my mother seemed to dislike Razim. She wasn’t cruel to him—I didn’t think my mother could be cruel—just cool, distant, when she was rarely anything but warm with everyone else.
But now it seemed to mean something different to Razim that I lived in the same house and yet wasn’t his sister. Something tempting, even forbidden. He looked at me in the waking hours like I tried not to look at the door while asleep. As if something enticing lay underneath my outer layers. Like I held answers to questions he didn’t even know yet.
Before I could reply, one of the serving women, Zadhi, gently put a hand on my shoulder. “The young lady must study tonight and then go to bed early, Madam Nuala said.”
That was often how it was, if both my mother and Hallan were occupied and left Razim and me alone without a tutor. Zadhi became our minder, or at least mine, at my mother’s direction. And my mother seemed to want me directed away from Razim.
Razim looked at Zadhi darkly. “Madam Nuala isn’t here right now.”
“Hey,” I snapped. It was no secret in the household that our parents weren’t married, but everyone usually kept up the pretense. I didn’t appreciate his disrespectful tone besides.
Zadhi glared at him, her hands on her hips. “Watch yourself, young man, or else I’ll speak with Mr. Lizier. Last I checked, it was still your father’s house.”
Razim stood abruptly and stalked away from the table. “Not always, it won’t be. Someday it will be mine, so maybe you should watch yourself.”
Zadhi pursed her lips at his back as he left. “That boy has darkness in him. You’d better get to studying, hm?”
I didn’t know if Razim had darkness in him. I hadn’t walked in his nehym yet, because my mo
ther had expressly forbidden it. I was not to intrude upon the souls of anyone in the house. I wasn’t sure if that was out of respect for their privacy, or because she didn’t want me discovering something I wasn’t supposed to know. There were a lot of secrets under this roof. And the more I tried to discover them, the more secrets I found.
My mother had also made it clear that she didn’t want Razim and me sleeping anywhere near each other. Our rooms were at opposite ends of the villa, where we both headed after he shot me one last look in the turquoise-tiled hall outside the dining room. Candlelight glowed on his bronze skin, and his eyes were liquid pools. He still looked hungry, even though we had just eaten. Growing up, I’d thought our living arrangement meant my mother didn’t want me to wander into Razim’s soul, but now, with the way Razim was acting, I understood there might be other reasons. I was oddly grateful for her precautions—oddly because maybe I should have wanted more than just to walk Razim’s soul. I was getting older, after all, when I was supposed to begin wanting other things … things that Razim seemed to want at least some of the time from me.
“Good night, Kamai,” he murmured.
“Good night.” I stared after him, mostly at his shoulders, broader and higher by the day. I frowned, caught between wanting to say something more adult and to childishly stick my tongue out at his back. As always, I dragged my feet in the other direction, upstairs to my room.
This night, my mother had given me strict instructions to wait three hours before sneaking into the guest bedroom and slipping under the bed. This trick only worked with guests who wished her to sleep beside them. If I got caught inside the room, or if Razim or one of the servants spotted me going in, I could use the excuse that I needed my mother.
Like hiding under bedroom windows, this ploy wouldn’t work forever. At twelve, it was already a stretch. But I was willing to take the risk, because tonight, she said, she had something important to tell me. So important we needed to meet in the sleeping realm for me to hear it, which I hoped meant it was going to be a critical lesson in soulwalking.
I studied to pass the time, as Zadhi had suggested, lying on my bed behind the gauzy swath of mosquito netting with my chin perched in my palm, reading history and poring over an atlas of Eopia. My room was my haven, the intricately tiled floor covered in an even more intricate rug of teal and black spirals, my dark-posted bed with its embroidered silk sheets and cushions like a cradling hand at the center of it all. Heavy wooden shutters kept out the night, though I could hear insects singing in the dark. On my bedside stand stood a small statue of pale Heshara with her secret smile and cloak-like black hair, watching over me, alongside a bronze censer burning spicy incense to keep the air smelling pleasant. I felt safe here.
I never minded studying. When my hands weren’t holding a spread of Gods and Kings cards, they were turning the pages of a book. Myths, histories, maps—it was all a type of magic, transporting me somewhere else, even if it was only to other places in Eopia. Books were doors I was allowed to open with the flick of my wrist … unlike the black door. Tracing the jagged contours of our sandy island continent and the rocky volcanoes crisscrossing it always made me feel small with how little I knew of them and breathless with the potential they held. The land was made up of familiar pieces—sandy deserts and dense forests, palm-lined beaches and sunbaked, rocky peaks—but they were used to build something bigger, just like the halls and rooms of a nehym.
I was so engrossed I lost track of time, glancing up to realize the candle had already burned past the mark my mother had made for me. I leapt up.
My slippers were silent over the tile of the upstairs hallways, and I knew every obstacle to avoid tripping over in the darkness. And my mother and Hallan kept every knob and hinge well-oiled, so the door to this particular guest bedroom didn’t make a sound as I cracked it open and slid inside.
The orange light of dying candles made my mother’s pale skin glow like coals. She lay on her stomach, her back bare above the covers of the bed. The woman, more careful of her nudity, wore a satin robe, her arm draped comfortably across my mother’s shoulders as they slept. The sight didn’t bother me or inspire me … until I tried imagining myself in my mother’s place. That made me want to run.
Shaking my head, I refocused on the task at hand. I tiptoed inside and quietly laid myself out on my mother’s side, under the bed, a thick rug keeping me cushioned from the tile. She’d be the only one to accidentally step on a stray arm of mine then, and she could warn me if her patron awoke.
I used to be unable to fall asleep like this. Just in case, my mother always made sure I had a couple of vials of sleeping tonic, distilled from the herb mohol, to knock me out in a hurry. But it was late enough, and I’d been staring at the atlas for long enough, I didn’t need one.
I was standing in the familiar dark glade almost immediately. This was where my spirit usually ended up if I stopped halfway between wakefulness and dreams to soulwalk—where my own nehym should have perhaps been, but wasn’t. There wasn’t much to explore in the clearing. The edges faded away into blackness, like a line of trees that I couldn’t distinctly make out. Whenever I tried to step into it, I couldn’t. If this was the only place I could have gone, being a soulwalker would have been dreadfully dull. Fortunately, it wasn’t.
If there was someone nearby when I fell asleep, I would often end up directly inside their soul. This time, I had a choice. Two doors stood before me—only the doors, free of walls—one of rich, warm wood that I recognized as my mother’s, and a high, narrow, stately one. My mother had told me to meet her in our guest’s, so I turned its knob, slowly out of habit from the waking world, trying not to make a noise.
Where one might have expected to see the clearing on the other side, a hallway as high and narrow as the door greeted me, made of the same dark wood. The place wasn’t what I would have called bright or cozy—the air was stuffy, smelling slightly of must, the lighting dim. It could have been unpleasantly oppressive, but the silent hallways felt heavy with potential, filled with mysteries and secrets, leaning claustrophobically in on me as if to murmur them in my ear.
“Kamai.” I heard my mother’s soft voice. I followed it into a sitting room that was as stuffy as the hallway. Even the chairs seemed stretched thin, with high backs and narrow seats. My mother was seated in one, her beaded silk gown in airy blue contrast to the walls around her, and she patted the cushion of the chair next to her. “Sit, dearest. It’s time we spoke on a certain matter.”
Despite her seeming casualness, I knew this was important. She’d said so herself. I sat, alert, without leaning back.
My mother laughed. “This isn’t a test, I promise.” She pursed her lips. “More of an interview, in a sense.”
My eyebrows furrowed. “We’re not going to explore?”
“Not right now.” She sat back in her chair, studying me. “What do I do for a living, Kamai?”
“You’re a courtesan,” I answered promptly. It was easy enough to say. A pretty word for a confusing thing.
“That’s a position at court, yes, but how do I make my living?”
I swallowed. “You sleep with people.”
She smiled at my inevitable blush. “Close, but not quite. Hallan and I, we are pleasure artists. Much like actors, we use certain masks: our smiles, our words, and yes, our bodies to please others. But we are different from common pleasure workers, and not just because of the particular mask of our marriage. The distinction is silly, but to maintain our reputation—and our patrons’ misplaced sense of pride—we receive no money in return for our art. We can accept gifts, of course, and favors, and influence, but…”
“But that’s not how you make your living,” I finished slowly, realizing the puzzle for the first time, one that had been right under my nose for my entire life. I was embarrassed I’d never thought to question it.
But my mother beamed, satisfied I’d figured it out now, at least. “Precisely. And while Hallan and I are considered members
of the upper class—some might even call us famous—we are not nobility. We don’t have extensive lands or holdings beyond Hallan’s villa, or income from investments. Patron gifts would not pay our taxes to the king, or keep us in fine clothes and jewels, able to host lavish dinners such as tonight’s. With that alone, we would not be able to maintain an appearance worthy of the court and its nobility—our very important patrons.”
Razim had been hinting at some other purpose behind their actions for some time, but I’d never realized that while their supposed marriage was a mask for their art, their art might be another mask for something else entirely. “So what do you do?”
She leaned forward, her eyes intense. “We deal in secrets, Kamai. The intimacy we share with others affords us a certain vantage. It exposes vulnerabilities. People let slip things they wouldn’t otherwise. And because these people are often powerful, their secrets are worth the most.”
My heart was thundering in my chest—not from fear or nervousness, but excitement. “Who do you sell them to?”
Her face grew oddly still. “A secret organization called the Twilight Guild. They’re a broker of secrets, in a sense, and they pay their members well. They resell the information to interested parties who will pay even more for it.”
Maybe it was her tone, but my mouth suddenly felt dry. “Are they good people or … are they bad?”
My mother didn’t brush the question aside; instead she considered it for a moment. “They are neither. The information they sell could be used to do good things: to expose lies, to reveal who paid an assassin to murder someone at court, or to uncover a plot to steal money from, say, one of Tain’s temples.” I shuddered at the thought of the sun god’s fiery eyes narrowed in displeasure under the burning pyre of his hair. Who would want to steal from him? “Or it could be used for what we might call evil. The secrets we sell might engender lies, or lead to someone’s assassination, or betray how best to steal from a temple. We don’t decide what people do with the secrets. We merely sell them to the guild, and they sell them to the highest bidder. It’s the same as a crafter of swords. Steel in someone’s hand can be used for good or ill; it is not for the blacksmith to decide. He creates the weapon, not what is done with it.”
Beyond the Black Door Page 2