Beyond the Black Door

by A. M. Strickland

  I couldn’t help but ask, “What would make it break, and what would happen if it does?”

  She held my eyes levelly. “Badness, in answer to both. An extreme violation of the vow would break it, the specifics of which I would rather not go into. That knowledge is kept as secret as possible in case anyone were to get any ideas. As far as what would happen … the earth would be unprotected. Without the king shielding Ranta with his bond and without her blessing upon the earth, she, and the land, would be vulnerable to attack.”

  “From where?” Nikha asked, puzzled. “Across the sea?”

  “We’re talking about a goddess here, Nikha, more the spirit of the earth than the earth itself. There are forces out there, threatening ones, that are difficult for us to comprehend. But,” Lenara added, before I could question her further, “we don’t have to worry about that. Like I said, even if one king were to be assassinated, the bond would remain. It would simply be waiting for another to take it up again, which the Keepers would ensure happened as quickly as possible. And we would not sit idly by and let the Twilight Guild do such a thing without a fight.”

  “Still, why would the Twilighters want to do this?” I asked, scrubbing a hand over my face. “Without the king, his lack of an heir would mean instability for the entire nation.”

  “They likely stand to profit off that instability in some way. Perhaps they are working in the well-paid service of someone who has their sights set on the throne. This is no doubt a plan years in the making.” Her eyes fell on me again. “I know you don’t much care for the king, but we must prevent his assassination at any cost.”

  “I’ll try to talk Razim out of it,” I said, “however I can.”

  “And if you fail?”

  I swallowed. “What would you have me do?”

  For a moment, Lenara looked hard and cold, and I knew what she was thinking. Then she sighed and rubbed her temples. “If you can’t talk him out of it, then it would be best for you to fully enter his soul and try to change his intention there.”

  “You mean literally change it for him?” Nikha asked, aghast. She looked back and forth between me and Lenara.

  “That’s what I mean,” Lenara said.

  “Isn’t that, I don’t know, punishable by death?” Nikha asked.

  Lenara smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “You’re talking to a priestess. I give Kamai my permission. Besides, this is a special circumstance, for a higher purpose—in service of the Keepers, and both Heshara and Ranta. Not to mention the realm.”

  Again, I had to know. “And what if … what if that doesn’t work?”

  “Then, my dear,” Zeniri said, for once without a speck of humor or sarcasm in his tone, as he clasped his hands in front of himself, “we might just need to kill him.”

  A short while ago, I wouldn’t have minded killing Razim myself. Now my lips went numb. All I could think to say was “Some birthday present that would be.”

  * * *

  Nikha and I were silent as we returned to our nearby suite later that night. The rooms themselves were a little bright for our mood and my taste, if not quite as garish and lavish as Zeniri’s. The furniture and curtains were gaily striped yellow and light gray, with gold and silver lamps lighting the air. But at least we had somewhere comfortable to live, and I’d already asked for a few accent pieces in black to be mixed in. It would add some much-needed gravity to all the levity, so the place would no longer be at risk of floating away.

  Or maybe I was growing so accustomed to the darkness behind the black door that a room without black seemed strange.

  Nikha paused at the door to her small bedchamber, which was meant for a manservant or a lady’s maid but which she’d insisted worked equally well for a bodyguard. “Do you think you could do it, if they ask it of you?” Kill Razim, she meant.

  I sighed, in the process of removing one of my earrings. My eyes looked even darker than before in the vanity mirror, and that, plus the earring’s needlessly complex clasp, was filling me with hopeless frustration. Was I following this path, this trail of roses, to its end, or was I being driven toward a cliff, an inevitable fall? I flapped my hand uselessly and ended up tossing the earring halfway across the room. “I’m not sure.” I laughed, desperation audible in my voice. “I’m not even sure I know how.”

  The admission brought out a weary half smile in Nikha. “There’s always poison, but as for other methods … I’ll show you. Tomorrow, we’ll start practicing death blows with the dagger I gave you.” She started for her room again, then stopped. “And Kamai?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you find you can’t do it, for whatever reason … I’m here for you, as always.”

  She wasn’t leaving me alone, not even in this—the possibility of committing murder. It was in defense of a goddess and the realm, but that didn’t make the burden easier to bear. And here was Nikha, offering to carry it for me. She was so loyal, so kind, so … gallant.

  The thought made me smile, despite everything. “Nikha, you’re the best friend one could ever hope for.” My voice threatened to break. “But you’ve fought Razim once for me already. This is my responsibility.”

  She shook her head. “Perhaps it should be mine. If I accept Lenara’s offer, allow her to declare me soul-crossed, and take up a position in the royal guard, it would be my duty to defend the king from Razim—with my blade.”

  “There’s not enough time for that now, and you weren’t ready.” I took a deep breath. “But I am. And I’ll do everything in my power to keep it from coming to that.”

  * * *

  I didn’t even try to enter the black door. As soon as I fell into an exhausted sleep, I was standing before it. I figured Vehyn wished to talk to me, to hear how the evening had gone. To see, firsthand, what the power he’d given me had wrought.

  Maybe it was the thought of killing Razim, or the fact that I was learning dark secrets and skills faster than I could have imagined that gave me a sense of wild recklessness, but my tongue was loose with Vehyn when I saw him. “I think I’m going to win our little game,” I said, marching right past him and into the long dining room I’d seen before, with its stretching black table and gaping windows that showed only darkness.

  “Do you, now?” Vehyn asked, as unconcerned and beautiful as usual. “Need I remind you—”

  I spun and leaned against the back of a chair. “Yes, yes, you’re not human and you’re far more powerful than I. As in, you don’t have a body and you live in a vast fortress that doesn’t really exist. Some power.”

  “Oh, it exists. This place is a bridge,” he said, gesturing around himself, “connecting your world to mine. A doorway, if you will.”

  Like the black door. It was strange, eerie, to think of the fortress as a door in and of itself—an opening to somewhere else. It was the first time he’d talked about it like that.

  I gestured at the windows, still feeling reckless. “So is that it? That’s your world? A bunch of nothing?”

  “What do you know about darkness, Kamai?”

  “Do you mean the dark of night or the Darkness?” I asked, my voice still flippant, but something uncomfortable, something disconcerting, was beginning to scratch at the edges of my consciousness. “That great cosmic evil that the gods fought?”

  “Yes, that. Tell me about it.”

  I made myself smile. I’d heard it as a child, over and over, from my mother, but it was a story that was taken very seriously by Marin and the clergy alike. “Ages ago, beyond human comprehension, the gods, Tain and Heshara, sun and moon, fought back the Darkness that had covered everything before time itself. Once they carved out a safe place, they had a child, Ranta, and circled her to keep the Darkness back. Its assault was unrelenting, because the cerebral spirit of Tain and the deep soul of Heshara had combined in Ranta to create a beautiful body that the Darkness desired above all else. Heshara still fights, her strength waxing and waning, while Tain looks over Ranta with his ever-watchful eye. To help Hes
hara when he couldn’t be there, Tain sent his starry guardians to protect her, and so, behind those constellations and the glow of the sun and moon, the Darkness waits, held at bay.”

  Vehyn nodded. “Nicely told. But you’ve got it a touch wrong, even within your own limited knowledge.” I rolled my eyes at his condescension. “Tain and Heshara never exactly won, nor is it an equally matched battle in the sky between Darkness and the gods’ light … only the illusion of one.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, feeling nervous.

  “The light of your world is like a candle in a small room.” Vehyn cupped his hands as if around a weak, sputtering flame. “You’re able to see so well only for being so close to the candle, in a tiny enough space for its light to fill. But in actuality, Darkness is everywhere else, everything else, pressing in”—he gestured at the windows, the thick inky blackness beyond—“ready to enter … especially now that the door to that room is open.”

  The door … I hoped he didn’t mean …

  I didn’t let myself finish the thought. I couldn’t. “You sound like it wants to come in. Like it’s a living thing.” I repressed a shiver.

  It wants the door to open. My mother’s words rose to mind once again.

  No, I thought. No, no, no.

  His tone grew hungry. “Oh, it does.” He took a breath. “I do.” His eyes were even hungrier, less of the young man in his face than ever before, and I understood.

  “You…” I had to swallow to wet my dry throat. “You’re saying that…?”

  “Yes, Kamai.”

  For a long moment, I just stood there, while my heart pounded in my ears with the raging roar of a flooding river. I couldn’t even focus on Vehyn or anything but the feeling of my feet against the smooth, black floor. I just had to keep my balance, hold on, or else I would be swept away. Lost.

  Hold on, Kamai. Hold on.

  My choked voice, when it eventually came, hardly sounded like mine. “You’re Darkness.” The words formed only half a question. Deep down, in the darkness of my being, I knew the truth. I just hadn’t wanted to admit it. Admit that I’d done something so terrible as open a door for it to the world.

  “More of a small manifestation,” Vehyn clarified. He sounded as if he were talking about a position he held at court, not the stuff of nightmares. “In your bright world, I am like a shadow, but one that belongs to something much greater, deeper … bottomless.” The yawning darkness beyond the windows … the endlessly plummeting spiral staircase … the black pits of Vehyn’s eyes as I met them. “I am merely one night of night unending.”

  It was hard for me to breathe. “Where did you come from?”

  His features smoothed, his voice leveled. “From nowhere you could possibly understand.” He didn’t even sound condescending or arrogant for once.

  “What do you want?” I had to work some moisture into my mouth to ask.

  “To win our game.”

  He wanted me to fail to discover what he was plotting until it was too late, so I couldn’t stop him. “To what end?”

  He only smiled, but feeling seemed to drain from my body all at once, leaving me numb, as if a spirit eater held me in its clutches. It was worse, him telling me something so horrible, and then nothing now. I often withhold the truth from you, but I rarely speak falsehoods. The tingles spread down my throat, frosting over my heart. I hadn’t known it was possible to be so afraid.

  Because he wasn’t lying. And what he was keeping from me must have been even worse than this.

  “So you’re Darkness Incarnate?” My voice came out small, terrified. A whisper.

  “Are you happy now, to know the truth? At the very least, you might appreciate what you’re up against.”

  There were only two reasons he would be telling me this now. Either he thought I was doing too well in our game and he wanted to scare me, throw me off-balance, make me think I had no chance of winning … or else he truly believed I had no chance of winning.

  His hand reached out. Suddenly, he was cupping my face, his thumb caressing my cheekbone, then my bottom lip. He pulled my lip down, parting my mouth, eliciting the little gasp of shock—that mixture of thrill and resistance—that was waiting for him.

  Even now, even frozen, blood rose to my cheeks, and I hated myself for it. It was that sudden burst of self-loathing that gave me the strength for what I knew I had to do. I jerked away from him, nearly knocking over a chair as I did, and I fled the room.

  I still didn’t know what Vehyn was planning, but knowing he had a plan and knowing what he was, there was no question that this was no longer about me or my safety. This was far, far worse—a threat to Ranta, to the entire world.

  I’d opened the door to Darkness. It wasn’t fair that the door had been placed at my fingertips and no one had told me what was behind it. But I’d done it.

  And now I had to undo it. Even if that meant undoing myself.

  23

  NECESSARY SACRIFICES

  I threw myself awake. Dawn was beginning to creep up behind the yellow-and-gray-striped curtains, but we’d stayed up so late the night before, with the soiree and our meeting afterward, that I had only slept for an hour or two.

  Tiredness didn’t touch me. I could rest when I was dead. And, with any luck, death would come soon. There was nothing else for it. If I was somehow the door to Darkness, I had to close it. I had to cut myself off from the waking world, if I couldn’t shut out Vehyn.

  My mother had always told me that spirits, when untethered from their bodies, would find their way into one of the three gods’ presences—or to one of the three hells, but I wanted to think less about that. I always imagined she’d followed Heshara’s cool, soothing light into her embrace. I wasn’t sure if I could do the same. Those people in the spirit eater’s clutches had evidently failed. And, with Vehyn’s darkness already weighing me so heavily, would Heshara welcome me into her arms even if I could find her, or would she turn me away?

  Whatever might happen, so be it. I had sealed my fate when I’d opened the door.

  My mother’s knife and Nikha’s dagger were both on the bedside table. I chose Nikha’s in the end, out of practicality’s sake. It was bigger, more recently sharpened. I snatched it up, feeling a wave of resolve, terror, and nausea. The trail of roses did indeed lead to a cliff, but at least I didn’t have to drag everyone else down with me.

  But I couldn’t let Nikha find me … afterward. That would be the cruelest possible way to repay her for being my friend. Especially using her dagger. Gods, and this was after she had said she would teach me death blows. The timing was grotesque, but I couldn’t do anything about that.

  I tugged on a robe over my nightgown and slid into slippers as quietly as possible. I drew aside the curtains, cracked the window in my bedchamber, and looked out. It was no longer raining. Our suite was on the ground level, and the window opened onto a peaceful garden flourishing between several palace wings, interwoven with secluded paths and golden with dew. Wrapping my robe tightly around my waist, I tossed my legs over the sill and lowered myself down into a flower bed. Water immediately soaked through my thin slippers.

  Staying on the nearest path for only as long as necessary to reach a silent grove of fruit trees, I ducked and ran, the dagger clutched in my fingers. Once under the cover of trunks and foliage, I stopped, panting, and made sure I was alone. And then I unsheathed the slim, short blade. It glinted in the early-morning light.

  Pretend this isn’t real. Just do it. You have to.

  I touched the sharp point to the inside of my wrist and held my breath. Before I could think twice, I drew it, firmly and quickly, down the path of my veins. Warmth spread through my arm. I gasped.

  But instead of blood, blackness blossomed. Spiraling patterns, like miniature bottomless staircases, swirled wherever the blade touched my flesh, refusing to let it break the skin. I tried again with a horrible groan, and again, stabbing viciously at my arm, and then at my heart.

  I didn’t ev
en get a bruise.

  My knees buckled, and I sat down hard on the damp, leaf-covered ground, shaking. The dagger fell from slack fingers. While a part of me was consumed with hopeless desperation, another part of me was giddy with relief.

  My relief didn’t last long before I tamped it down with a burst of shame. I had to stop this. Stop him. And sacrificing myself to close the door still seemed like the quickest, simplest solution. I couldn’t hurt myself, but maybe someone else could. Or, at the very least, they could imprison me, and Vehyn as a result, keeping him from affecting the world through me.

  I knew one type of person who would gladly help me.

  I dragged myself upright, snatched the dagger, and started off through the garden. The white spires and black dome of the temple gleamed in the morning sun through the trees. Even in my sodden slippers, it would be a quick walk across the palace grounds.

  Vehyn must have guessed what I was up to. There was the familiar nudge in my head, but I shoved it away. At first, I was almost grateful for it; if he wanted to stop me, it meant I was on the right track. But he was so strong. My eyelids grew heavy, and I stumbled. I forced them back open, kept my legs moving, ignoring waves of dizziness and exhaustion. He tried to seize control of my feet, but I marched right through the attempt.

  I had once forced the door closed; maybe I could hold him back. Or maybe he only wanted me to think that. With my thumb, I pressed into my arm again, hard enough to bruise, and saw the black lines curl out from my fingertip, protecting me. His influence over me was still there, hovering just beneath the surface.

  And yet, perhaps it was because of the power he’d given me that I could now hold him at bay. Hopefully, for long enough to do what I had to do.

  Kamai … His voice broke into my head, like a gust of wind from an open window, warning in his tone.

  I shut out his voice like everything else, slamming the window closed.