“The sword at your hip. I recognize its taint. I procured it from a necromancer named Chella decades ago. It didn’t come cheap, but the Blue Lady paid me ten times that price and more.”
I paused, hand on the hilt of the weapon, glancing back at Kelem. “This? This was yours?”
“The Lady Blue had allies aplenty among the necromancers, long before there was a Dead King or any hint of him. She has been building their strength for years, seeding the unborn with such toys as that which you bear.”
“If I have a price, Kelem, this is not lowering it.” I cast about, straining for direction, willing the knocking to sound again. “Edris Dean tried to kill me with this blade.”
“You were not his target, though,” Kelem said. “Neither was your mother.”
I stopped and faced him.
“Your sister.” The spiders moved his jaws. “The planets aligned for that one. The stars held their breath to see her born. The Silent Sister thought the child would grow to replace her, to exceed her, to make this empire whole. And more. .”
“To heal the world,” I breathed. Grandmother thought I might be the one to undo the doom the Builders had laid upon us, but it wasn’t me: our salvation had never been born.
“The sword you carry put your sister in Hell. Unborn. Sell the key to me and the author of her death will be thwarted in her ambition. With Loki’s key I will own creation, and what I own I do not allow to come to harm.”
My fingers flinched from the hilt as if it had grown too hot to touch. Edris’s blade hadn’t just cursed Snorri’s son as it slew him in the womb, marking him to be unborn. . it had done the same to my sister.
“What do you think the unborn were doing in Vermillion, Prince Jalan?” Kelem asked, silver legs stretching the leathery skin across his skull’s grin. “The Dead King’s captain, and the Unborn Prince, both of them in the same place, practically in the shadow of the palace walls? Both daring the Silent Sister’s magics. .”
“They were bringing an unborn into the world. .” Even now the memory of the Unborn Prince made me shudder-just his eyes upon me through the slit of that mask.
“All that for a single unborn?” Kelem’s head tilted with the question. “Haven’t the Dead King’s servants brought forth unborn in all manner of scattered spots, none of them half as dangerous as Vermillion?”
I recalled a grave horror rising in the cemetery where Taproot’s circus had camped.
Kelem spoke again. “The older the unborn, the longer it has spent in Hell, the more powerful it is. . the harder to return. And this one. . this one needed a hole torn in the world, a hole so large a city might fall through. This one needed the strength of the two most powerful unborn this side of death’s veil. This one. . she needed the death of blood relatives to open her path. The death of a close relative best of all. A brother perhaps. .”
“My. . my sis-” The horror of it took me in its grasp, my feet rooted.
“Your sister was to be the Red Queen’s champion. The Lady Blue took that piece and made it hers. As the Unborn Queen she might be the Dead King’s bride, she might be his fist in the living world, the unknowing servant of Lady Blue, heralding the end of all things. That is who is waiting for death’s door to open. That is why you should sell me the key and leave it closed. She needs your life, Prince Jalan. If she destroys you in the deadlands it will tear a hole through which she can be born at last into this world. If she comes through by some other path then killing you will cement her place here and stop her being cast back by the enchantments that might otherwise banish her.” Kelem’s chair moved closer, legs clicking beneath it. “You’ve no real choice here, Jalan. A sensible man like you. A pragmatist. Take the gold.”
“I-” Kelem made sense. He made sense and offered a pile of gold so large a man could roll about in it. I could see it in my mind’s eye, heaped and gleaming. But. . the old bastard’s hands were dripping with my mother’s blood.
The knocking sounded again, close by. None of them could hear it but me. I came closer to the source of the noise. BANG. BANG. BANG. Almost deafening. Kara said something but I couldn’t hear her. A flicker of motion drew my eye, a black fist pounding against the surface of the crystal pillar closest to me, from the inside, the arm lost in a darkness that had polluted the column’s clarity like ink drops in water.
“Every man has his price.” Somehow Kelem’s voice reached me through the din. I wondered what Snorri’s price was, what my grandmother’s price might be. Even Garyus, the third Gholloth, with his love of gold, his mastery of commerce. . even he wouldn’t sell a friend for as little as money. I didn’t think it of Garyus-I both did and did not want to think it of me.
Sixty-four thousand. . Kelem wouldn’t show Snorri the door even if I sacrificed all those thousands. And even if he did Snorri would just march in to die-horrors would spill into the world, my unborn sister among them. Snorri would die and I’d own nothing but my rags, a tiny worthless corner of a salt mine, and a few other dribs and drabs that would be lucky to sell for fifty florins in total. There wasn’t a choice to make here. Always take the-
Blood. It seemed the whole floor swam with it, ankle deep and rising. I saw it drip from Gholloth’s bed. I saw Garyus twist in the crimson swirls as the Silent Sister took his strength. It ran red from Tuttugu’s opened neck. I saw it drip scarlet from Edris’s blade as Mother slid from the steel. And I saw the hands behind each act, the blue and the grey, each stained with what I held precious, sacred.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
This whole nightmare had started with Astrid pounding on my door, dragging me from a good dream. Every part of my return had been about the opening of one door or another. It had been a mistake to open that first door too. I should have stayed in bed.
And yet. . somehow my hand found itself reaching out to the crystal column towering above us. Somehow I found myself drawing forth Loki’s key.
“No!” Kelem’s shout.
The clatter of metal limbs as his spiders raced toward me. The roar as Snorri threw himself into their path, heedless of his injury and pain, swinging his father’s axe.
Against all reason I found myself pressing the jet-black key to that impossibly flat surface, driving it into the neat dark eye of the keyhole that appeared beneath it. . turning it as the voices rose behind me amid the din of combat.
The door blasted open with a force that sent me skidding across the floor. Midnight boiled out of it, imps of ebony, all horns and hooves and curling tails, huger and more terrible shapes rising behind them, wings canopied, bat-like creatures, serpents, shades of men, and in the midst of it all, surging forward, Aslaug, wrought in night-stained bone, her lower carriage a frenzy of arachnid legs that made Kelem’s toys seem delicate and wholesome.
“Take him through!” I screamed, pointing at Kelem, compelling the forces of night with whatever magic and potential lay in me, calling on the bond I had been sworn to. The horde, sighting their tormentor and would-be lord, surged through the narrow portal, borne on a wave of liquid night. Aslaug fell upon Kelem in an instant, a howling, tearing fury as if my own rage had infected her. The rest followed and in their frenzy the creatures of darkness flooded over the ancient mage, black imps sinking fangs into each wizened limb, inky tentacles reaching from the portal to whip around him. They hated him anyway, for presuming to rule them, for his endless attempts to open and own the night door, and for so nearly succeeding.
The dark-throng dragged Kelem away, a riptide of horror, his throne and platform scraping through the face of the column, a mess of stained and twisted silver-steel legs left twitching in his wake. In the silent moment that followed a faint laughter echoed, not in my ears, through my bones-a laugh both merry and wicked, the kind that infects the listener and makes them smile. It came from the key. A god laughing at his own joke.