Maybe it was the way Snorri didn’t even argue his case but just stood there like the huge over-loyal idiot he was, having the gall to expect the same foolishness from me.
“Thirty-two thousand, the cure, and the idiot gets his door open.”
“No.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake! How much to open that damned door?”
“That door shouldn’t ever be opened. Even if you took no gold, only offered me the key to show you death’s door, I would hesitate. There’s a reason the ghosts of my youth are scattered across Hell. It wasn’t just chance that one stepped out to oppose you when you approached Eridruin’s door. Opening that door is dangerous. Passing through still more so.” Kelem’s jaw moved as the voice issued from his neck. In his mouth something glittered, silver across the black thing that had been his tongue.
“Why? Why would a dead thing like you care?” I didn’t even want that door open-why I was arguing rather than wondering how to carry my gold back to Red March I didn’t know.
“I’m not dead.” Kelem tilted his head. “Merely. . well preserved.”
I stood, the key tight in my hand, watched by the witch, the warrior, the boy, and the old bones in the chair. Something in the quality of the light from the crystals changed, as subtle as a slight shift in the wind, but I felt it.
“What would you do with this key, Master Kelem?” I asked him, starting to pace from one column to the next.
“I have a palace of doors. It’s only natural that I should want one key that could unlock any of them.” Kelem’s throne rotated to allow him to track me. “Without a key the opening and closing of such doors is a complex and tedious business, dangerous even, and one that can exhaust an old man like me. These thirteen before me. These are difficult, but over the years I’ve managed all but three. The doors to darkness and light still defy me. Those on the far side hear me trying though, oh yes.” A scratching sound that might be laughter. “They fear me, hate me, and hold the doors tight against my efforts. The dark knows that if I control the door, I own them. The light knows it too.
“Long ago I was told that one of these doors would never open for me, that my doom lay beyond it. Loki himself told me this, the father of lies. And I believed him because he is always honest. He takes pride in it-knowing that a partial truth cuts deeper than a lie.” Kelem waved a desiccated hand in my direction. “The key will unlock the doors, and the last one-that will be the one I will leave closed. That one I will lock again, and lock so well that it will never open, not in the lives of men.”
It’s unnerving when the person you’re bargaining with lets you know how valuable what you have is to them. In the market we pretend not to care, we insult the thing we desire, denigrate it. Kelem’s honesty told me two things. That I could trust his offer, and that I would be a fool to refuse it because one way or another he would own the key.
“That black one.” I pointed to it. “It’s death’s door? The gate to Hell?”
“No, that is one of the three that defy me still. The gate to Hell is opened easily enough, the Day of a Thousand Suns left it hanging off its hinges-it’s the first of the thirteen that I learned.”
I stared at the black crystal. “It’s the night gate then.” Even as I said them the words felt wrong.
“Do you think so, Prince Jalan? Has your connection to the dark grown so weak?”
“No.” I shook my head. “It’s not that one. .” I passed another pillar, trailing my fingers across it.
“That door is Osheim, Prince Jalan. The door is the Wheel, the Wheel is a door. It’s the door I need to own.”
“The Lady Blue would open them all,” I said. “She thinks the time for doors is passing and soon all worlds will bleed one into the other. She wants to open the ways and marshal the destruction to ensure her place in whatever hell results.”
“I’ve been misinformed about educational standards in Red March,” Kelem said, two spiders the size of silver eyeballs tugging at the dry corners of his mouth to make a smile. “You’ve been well taught, Prince Jalan. But the Lady Blue really only wants to turn the Wheel. She could do that by opening the black door, but the black door is opening by itself. It has been for centuries. Ever so slowly, but speeding up. Each door that is opened, each thing that passes through from one world to another. . it weakens the walls between those places, and as the walls start to crack, the door of Osheim opens, the Wheel turns. With Loki’s key the Lady Blue could end the world today by opening that door before us. Without it she must rely on the Dead King opening death’s door wide enough to fracture the walls around it. . and, by doing so, turn the Wheel and herald the end of all things.”
“And where do you stand, Master Kelem?” The conversation had grown too big for me. I just wanted to escape with my money and enough years to spend it in.
“I’m a financier, a man of trade, Prince Jalan. Everything has its price. I buy, I sell. There’s no harm in this surely? Buying what can be bought, selling it to those with the need and the means to pay. The rich must have what they crave-surely you agree with that?
“On this point my position should be clear enough. I’m refusing to open one door, just briefly, to save myself tens of thousands in gold. That hardly paints me as a man who would be overly keen to set them all open wide, now does it? I might want to own the darkness and the light and the creatures therein, but ending creation? What good would my wealth do me then? True, the Lady Blue and I have interests in common, but I am not her ally in this ambition.”
You were her ally in another ambition, equally bloody, and long ago. The words twitched behind my lips. He had been part of the plot that killed the first Gholloth. Maybe the second had died by his command also. Had he directed the Lady Blue, or she him? Either way both of them had stained their hands with the blood of Kendeths. Snorri’s family too counted among their crimes, his whole clan, the Undoreth, gone, just one man remaining now that Tuttugu had died beneath Edris Dean’s blade. And Edris was the Lady Blue’s creature, my mother’s death her plan, my unborn sister just something broken in the process. I saw again the vision of the lady vanishing into the mirror, the Red Queen kneeling there among the shards, her grandfather slain, the linens of his bed crimson. Perhaps it was Alica Kendeth’s legendary anger that infected my blood, perhaps my own, a pale flame to be sure, but feed any such spark enough fuel and it will blaze.
I heard the knocking again, that knocking I’d been hearing every once in a while since the debtors’ prison. It sounded louder here, reverberating among the columns. None of the others looked up.
“Do you-” I broke off, the knocking came from my left. I turned and walked back toward Kelem and the others. Kelem, master of doors. Kelem, sender of assassins.
Knock. Knock. Knock. Steady, rhythmic, louder by the moment. I’d heard it every day of late. Was it sunset a mile above us. . had I heard this sound every sunset since I took the key? Had Snorri heard it when he held the key, sounding each dawn since the wrong-mages’ door had closed Aslaug and Baraqel off from us? Knock. Knock. Knocking had woken me from my dreaming that spring morning back in Trond. Knock. Some doors are better left unopened.
Kelem turned his head to watch my progress. I saw his dry hands drip with my mother’s blood. I saw the Red Queen, a child, kneeling before the ruin of her grandfather. I felt the pain that cored me when I woke from the blood-dream that showed me Mother dying and returned her to my memories.
“You carry something I have bought and sold, Prince Jalan.” Perhaps Kelem could see the wheels turning in my head. Perhaps he knew he was losing me.
“I do?” I continued to hunt the sound, moving between the pillars.