Beyond the Black Door

by A. M. Strickland

  Even so, making it up the white and black temple stairs was an act of sheer willpower, with Vehyn fighting me every step of the way. I was moving like someone having a fit by the time I got to the top, gasping and wild-eyed, clutching at my thighs, my head bent. I lifted my gaze enough to find the guards.

  One of them, his ceremonial armor blinding with reflected sunlight, looked down at me warily, at the dagger clenched in my fist like a talisman. “Are you all right?”

  “I need … to see … a priest,” I panted.

  I must have been a sight in my damp and disheveled robe, but even so, he recognized me from my previous visits. “Priestess Lenara?”

  “No.” I didn’t doubt Lenara’s commitment to Heshara and the Keepers, but she might not believe me. And if Vehyn regained control of me in her presence, who knew what he might make me do? The thought of my hands hurting Lenara made me sick. “I need to see Priest Agrir. It’s a matter of dire urgency.”

  Jidras had said Agrir was the personal adviser to the king in matters of the soul. If anyone would take this threat seriously, it was him.

  The guards heard whatever was in my tone. One of them hurried ahead into the temple, while the other walked me inside to wait in the cool shade of the entrance hall—but not before relieving me of my dagger. It didn’t take long for the first guard to reappear and guide me deeper.

  The black-and-white-checkered tile passed in a hazy blur beneath my slippers. I couldn’t look around, only focus on putting one foot in front of the other. Now it was like Vehyn was pounding on the door in my head. It was hard to think, much less move.

  The guard brought me farther into the temple than I had ever been, through the cavernous space underneath the black dome and into another wing, cloaked in heavy shadows. At the very end of the hall, we arrived at a pair of thick double doors covered in intricate scrollwork.

  I understood how powerful Agrir was when the guard said, “The high priest will see you now.”

  Agrir was the head of the royal temple. I supposed that made sense, if he was the king’s holy adviser. If I’d had the energy to be nervous, I probably would have been. As it was, all I could manage was to hold myself upright as the guard rapped on the doors once and then drew them open.

  The room was circular, high-ceilinged, underneath one of the spires that rose at the end of each wing. Silver lamps were spaced at regular intervals around the white walls. A circular black rug, dense and lush, took up most of the white floor, looking like a lunar eclipse. A massive black desk and twin white couches were centered over it. Everything was perfectly polished and gleaming, cool and impressive rather than warm and comfortable.

  A man stood before the desk, with a balding head and a long salt-and-pepper beard that dropped starkly from his creased face. He was nearly as pale as Vehyn. His dark eyes were like a bird’s—unblinking and utterly focused.

  The high priest nodded at the guard. “Leave us.”

  “But sir, if she’s … unbalanced…” He glanced at me uncertainly.

  “There’s no need to fear for me. I know her.”

  I blinked. He does?

  He smiled slightly. “And besides, I am not yet so old and feeble that I can’t hold my own against a young girl.”

  Little did he know. But the guard bowed his head and backed out of the room, closing the double doors behind him. I turned to the high priest, the words on my tongue, ready to come pouring out, despite Vehyn’s resistance.

  But Agrir’s expression changed as soon as the door closed. His smile fell, and his eyes latched on to mine. “Why have you come? It is risky for you to appear in my presence. We have many eyes in this temple that are not ours.”

  My mouth fell open, no sound coming out. Lenara had said nearly the same thing to me. Was the high priest a Keeper? I was about to ask when his next words stopped me cold.

  “Are you here on our master’s business? I’m not sure how much he has shared with you, but let none of Heshara’s servants see you here like this. They are not sympathetic to our cause.” And then he made a symbol that more than chilled me; my blood turned to ice. He held one hand up, flat as a blade, against his breastbone. It was the signal the Twilighters used to let another member know that you were one of them.

  The high priest was a member of the Twilight Guild. And somehow, he thought that I was too, or that I was at least “sympathetic.” The only connection between us—aside from my mother, who had never mentioned him—was this “master” we supposedly shared.

  “Master?” I said carefully.

  His eyes narrowed a fraction. “The dark one who guards the doorway.”

  I could think of only one person—one creature—he could mean.

  Vehyn.

  “If he’s concerned, know that the necessary sacrifices will be made soon,” Agrir added, sounding uncertain now. He was looking at me as if trying to read my soul like a book, as I had Razim’s. “Does he have a message for me?”

  I had no idea what to say. I was gaping at him like an idiot.

  So perhaps it was a good thing that my legs chose that moment to give out. The room went black.

  * * *

  When I awoke, I was in my own bed in my too-bright suite in the palace, blankets heaped upon me even though I was hot, feverish almost. As soon as my eyes focused, I saw Nikha and Zeniri standing over me in the late-afternoon light, along with a servant, who replaced the damp cloth on my brow with a fresh, cool one.

  “Ugh,” I said, moistening my tongue. “What happened?”

  “We were going to ask you that,” Zeniri said, his arms folded.

  “You collapsed at the temple,” Nikha said, glancing at the servant, who tossed the old cloth into a basin, topped off the glass of water on my bedside table, and left the room. “You must have been going to see Lenara,” she clarified when the servant had shut the door. “When she found you, several guards were carrying you down the hall. You don’t remember?”

  I shook my head. Maybe I should have confessed it all then, but something held my tongue—and it wasn’t Vehyn. Not that he would have wanted me to speak.

  Horror washed over me. Vehyn. He could communicate with people other than me. And he was apparently connected to the Twilight Guild. For how long? My two greatest fears, lurking in the shadows of the sleeping realm and the waking world, had just reached out and joined hands through Agrir. I’d imagined Vehyn to be restricted by the black door, even with it open, but was that true? Could he leave his dark fortress? Would I bump into him, somehow, in the waking world?

  And if I did, would I turn and run? Or would I stand and fight? A thrill of anticipation shot through my horror. I knew my answer.

  Because Vehyn wasn’t only Darkness. It should have been impossible to be anything worse than that, but to me, being connected to the Twilight Guild came close. I needed to confront him. To find out if he was responsible for my mother’s death.

  In any case, telling the truth right now to Zeniri and Nikha would only cause panic and likely my imprisonment, if Vehyn even allowed me to tell them. I would lose my chance to do anything.

  Gods, why did Agrir think that Vehyn was my master too? Did he know I’d opened the door? And how could I tell the Keepers about Agrir? In my muddled state, I couldn’t think of an immediate reason for me to know he was a member of the Twilight Guild that wouldn’t raise too many questions I couldn’t answer. I would have a hard time explaining even to Nikha, who knew about the black door, why I’d been trying to see Agrir in the first place. And for all I knew, the Keepers were already aware of him.

  “Lenara made certain all was well with you”—Zeniri’s voice dropped—“and that no one else had seen you, and then had you carried back here to get bed rest. Are you sure you don’t remember why you went to her?”

  I glanced at Nikha. She would understand that my “illness” might have something to do with Vehyn and the black door, but Zeniri wouldn’t.

  “Sometimes she sleepwalks,” Nikha said quickly, covering f
or me once again. “Especially when she’s ill. She would end up out in the courtyard of the town house.”

  Zeniri’s lips pursed. “With a dagger?” He glanced at the bedside table, where Nikha’s dagger once again lay.

  “I often wake up holding it,” I said. “Habit.”

  Zeniri looked doubtful, but at least he dropped it. “Sleepwalking is a dangerous tendency, especially here. Even armed. Anyone could get their hands on you. We’ll have to start locking your door from the outside as well as in.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking. He shot a look at Nikha. “And where were you, bodyguard? Isn’t this your job? How did you not notice her leaving?”

  Maybe because I had sneaked out the window. Nikha obviously hadn’t shared that fact with Zeniri.

  She flushed. “I was tired. Perhaps I’ll sleep in here, on a cot, in case it happens again.” She shot me a look herself. She was angry with me. She would be much, much angrier if she knew what I had been about.

  Had been? Shouldn’t I still be trying to keep Vehyn from the waking world by killing myself? But now that I knew he, Darkness Incarnate, had a connection to the Twilight Guild, which was guiding Razim, who was trying to kill the king out of revenge … all this had just become much more complicated and sinister.

  Darkness, apparently, wanted the king dead. Razim thought he was avenging his father for the Twilighters, but he was actually obeying the will of the cosmic force that had long sought to destroy the gods and seize our world. I still didn’t know quite how he was serving Darkness’s purpose, since the sacred bond protecting Ranta would remain intact even if the king died, but even so, all this was so big that suddenly I was unsure ending my life would be enough to stop it.

  Or that I could end my life without Vehyn’s assistance. Which I somehow doubted he would give me.

  I realized I had a few things I wanted to say to him. As horrifying as his connection to the Twilight Guild was, this new understanding of him somehow made him easier to face. It was an evil, a darkness, I could comprehend.

  And maybe attack. At least I knew where to start, in an otherwise complicated, overwhelming, and deeply frightening situation.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Nikha and Zeniri, who were still standing expectantly at my bedside while my thoughts galloped far and away. “I won’t do it again, if I can help it.” That much was true, even if I wasn’t referring to sleepwalking. I pulled the covers up to my chin and rolled over. “But right now, I need to sleep.”

  24

  SMALL VICTORIES

  Of course, because I actually wanted to see Vehyn, he wasn’t standing in the doorway when I popped up in my clearing. He was going to make me look for him.

  The black door didn’t appear any different as I faced it in the strange half-light. But knowing what it was now—not just a doorway to a dark, strange fortress and a dark, strange being, but a gateway to the primordial Darkness—it was more intimidating than it ever had been before. Closed, it had intrigued and frightened me as a child. And since then, somehow, I had grown nearly comfortable with it. But not anymore.

  I still didn’t entirely understand what the door hid, but now it was more immeasurable. Bottomless. An abyss that could rise up and swallow the world.

  And I had to head into that abyss.

  I reached the threshold and saw that the black door opened up on the same long hallway as when I’d entered it for the first time.

  There was a trail of roses leading into the darkness. This time, they struck me as mocking rather than enticing. Perhaps they should have seemed that way to begin with.

  I stepped into the hallway, my footsteps loud in the heavy silence. The door didn’t slam behind me. It didn’t have to. It knew there was no escape for me. I walked the trail, the lamp-like, floating globes overhead casting no friendly patterns, only enough light to see by. Everything else was cloaked in inky blackness.

  Following the roses, I soon came to the great entry hall. Cascading staircases along the length of it arched up to gaping hallways that stared like empty eye sockets. Vehyn and I had explored some of these, but not all—all probably would have been impossible. And never the grand spiral staircase that both rose and dropped endlessly through the center of the vast space.

  I jumped when I realized Vehyn stood between me and the spiral staircase, in the center of the most wide-open part of the immense hall. He should have been obvious, but he was as dark and unmoving as everything else, his back to me, only his black hair and robe visible, a rose at his feet.

  For a split second, I was wildly afraid he would whip around and his beautiful features would be gone, replaced by a skull or simply nothing, a bottomless pit where eyes, nose, and mouth should have been—the true face of the void. But when he turned, it was him. Vehyn.

  He was still everything else infuriating and frightening that being Vehyn entailed, but I couldn’t help the flare of relief that he hadn’t turned into something unfamiliar and horrific.

  “How long have you been communicating with people outside?” I demanded.

  “Hello to you too, Kamai,” he said with a slight smile, almost like he was genuinely happy to see me. Something in my chest twisted painfully. Maybe I was still a hopeful, naive idiot. “Are you jealous?”

  “How long?” I repeated. “And how, for that matter?”

  “Maybe I’ll tell you if you’re polite. So far, you haven’t even said hello.”

  I made my voice steel. “You’re behind the Twilight Guild, aren’t you?”

  He didn’t seem bothered by the accusation in the slightest. “It’s more that they think I’m behind them, those among them who even know what purpose they’re truly serving. Most don’t. They’re a relatively ignorant, ineffectual bunch when it comes right down to it.”

  “Are you or aren’t you their ‘master’?”

  He knew where this was headed. “I didn’t kill your mother, Kamai, or give the order to do so. In fact…” He paused and then didn’t say whatever he’d been about to.

  “Then who did?” My voice rose to a shout, echoing in the cavernous blackness.

  “Probably best for you not to know at the moment, because you’d likely do something rash and stupid to endanger yourself, as you already have. You’re not allowed to kill or otherwise incapacitate yourself, by the way.”

  I ignored that. “Did someone in the Twilight Guild give the order to have Marin and Hallan killed?”

  He didn’t respond, only bent to pick up the rose at his feet. I assumed that meant yes. His feet were bare, pale against the black floor. They always had been, but now the detail seemed out of place. Specific. Alive. Vehyn has bare feet. Does that mean Darkness has bare feet too, or just him? Are they one and the same? What about his sharp black eyes, that twisty smile?

  I shook my head, bringing my attention back to the matter at hand. “Why guide me to Lenara, when Jidras first brought me to the temple to be tested? It doesn’t make sense, not if you’re”—I hesitated over the word and then forced myself to say it—“Darkness. Not if you’re behind the Twilight Guild. You led me straight to her.”

  He didn’t seem to see the conflict, twisting the rose stem in his fingers as he strolled closer until he stood before me, forcing me to look up to meet his eyes. “You asked for help. There were other ways for me to handle the situation, but then you would either be dead or you would have had to marry, and there would be no time for our game.”

  He only wanted me alive and unbound by a torturous marriage for the sake of his game. I wanted to spit in his eye.

  “But why clue in the Keepers?” I asked. “You’re Darkness, and they are sworn to protect the earth from you. Why not guide me to the Twilighters and Agrir, have them train me?”

  He gestured with the rose, as if waving away something minor. “If you won’t have the Twilight Guild, it won’t have you, and you’re too stubborn to ever join. Agrir doesn’t know that you’re a soulwalker, only that I’ve claimed you. You’d be a threat to them if they knew the full trut
h about your abilities, even with my favor, because they can’t control you. You need somewhere to be free.” He reached out with the rose and brushed my cheek with the fragrant, silky petals. “Beholden only to me.”

  I batted it away. “I’m doing the Keepers’ bidding now, not yours. And our business is contrary to yours.”

  “Is it?” he murmured, the corner of his mouth curving up.

  “Of course it is. They want to stop this—you and the Twilighters, whatever it is you’re doing.”

  “But do you?”

  I didn’t dignify that with an answer. “This still doesn’t make sense. You’ve helped me from the beginning. You woke me in the wagon, when Razim and what’s-his-name, Nyaren, from the Twilight Guild, abducted me after my mother’s death. Why, if Razim is just your tool? He already had me, and if I hadn’t come awake at that moment, I might never have escaped.”

  “And you might have fought so hard the Twilighters decided to put an end to your whining.”

  That sounded more like him. I snatched the rose out of his hand and hurled it as far as I could. It vanished into the inky shadows. “It seems to me like you have some sort of, I don’t know, immense influence over them. Agrir called you master! Couldn’t you have just dropped the hint that you didn’t want me killed?”

  Vehyn folded his arms, now that he no longer had the rose to play with. “You hadn’t opened the door yet, so I couldn’t be clear with my intentions. Once you did, giving me access to the rest of the sleeping realm, I could speak directly to Agrir in his dreams. Before that, they wouldn’t have killed you, but they may have locked you in a cell for a few years to keep you out of their way. They might still, if you give them no choice, even now that my will is clear.” He paused, frowning as if he didn’t like what he was admitting. “And also…”

  Knowing he could communicate in dreams was bad, very bad, but at least I wasn’t going to bump into him in the palace hallway. He did seem to be contained to the sleeping realm. Not that he couldn’t do plenty of damage from here.