The Door Before

by N. D. Wilson

  Hyacinth was tired and hungry and frightened, but she almost laughed as the air on her face grew cold and fast. It was like watching a boy spin cotton candy with the wind.

  The dust around them blew away, revealing crumbling cobblestone streets, stones so weak that they cracked softly under the weight of her bare feet.

  And then Mordecai bowled the spinning wind down into the city, swallowing every building in a cloud of dust, erasing the tracks left by four pairs of feet.

  “Lovely,” Caleb said. “I feel much better. Kibs, take us where you will.”

  —

  NIMIANE SLEPT IN THE rocking chair with Bast on her lap. While her hunters hunted and her ravens searched through worlds and Hyacinth plodded barefoot through dust in the city of death, the witch’s head lolled forward as she rested, as her strength slowly returned.

  “Majesty.”

  The cat opened her eyes and looked up at the young witch-dog who had touched her earlier. But Nimiane did not move.

  “They fled through old faeren roads,” the man said. “We’re on their heels. The sons of the dead green blood and the girl.”

  “The grower,” the witch whispered. “The girl who opened ways.”

  “The same,” the man said. “It will not be long now.”

  “Into what land?” the queen hissed. “In what world?”

  The question made the man nervous. The cat twitched her ears, watching him sniff and shift his weight from foot to foot.

  “Into Endor, Queen,” he finally said. “Old Endor. They have entered the city.”

  “What?” Nimiane raised her head. “Why? How?”

  “I do not know why, Queen,” the man said. “But they entered through the old arch of the faeren. A raven was sent.”

  “Where in the city?” she asked. “Where? To the upper tombs? Those fools. Do they go to strike at my father?”

  No, she thought. They would not attack him. They would free him. Did they think Nimroth would be an ally? He would absorb them like raindrops. And then he would turn his ravening thoughts to her.

  Nimiane tried to rise to her feet, but she failed. The man stepped forward and offered her a hand.

  She took it. She clasped it. And she fed.

  When her hand was empty and his dust swirled around her feet, she stood with strength, and her appearance changed.

  No longer the hag, Nimiane of Endor turned, facing the doorway in the wall that she had first entered, the door that led to her gardens that led to her city that led to the wasteland outside the walls that led to the old city and the prison tomb where she had robbed and entrapped her father, Nimroth the undying Blackstar.

  Nimiane, witch-queen of Endor, entered her garden and stood in the moonlight.

  Through the doorway behind her, in the strange world of California, even the sea sighed with relief.

  —

  WANDERING THE NARROW HALLS of countless prison wings, climbing stairs and descending stairs, Hyacinth hung back behind the group with her heart pounding in her ears.

  There were voices here, muttering behind heavy doors in long-forgotten tongues.

  Mordecai and Caleb discussed every room that appeared to be empty. When they slowly opened a room that wasn’t empty, the jack-in-the-box screams of laughter stopped all their hearts. Caleb slammed the door with a boom like thunder, and now Kibs checked the doors with his nose and his ears before any were opened.

  The empty rooms had thick stone walls devoid of life. All had heavy doors of lifeless iron. There were rags and occasionally ashen bones, but nothing else. Mordecai felt a cage could be made that would hold the witch. There was only one problem.

  “No exits,” Mordecai said. “We need a cell with two doors. One for her to enter, and one for our escape. If we’re going to live.”

  “Living isn’t the only option,” Caleb whispered. He and his brother stepped around a corner, leaving Kibs and Hyacinth alone.

  “Fools,” Kibs muttered, but Hyacinth wasn’t listening to him. She’d sent her hearing around the corner with the brothers.

  “Yes,” Mordecai said. “It is. You and I can choose to die, but I will not try this with no chance at life for her.”

  “Then send her away,” Caleb said. “Send her with the faerie. He could get her clear if anyone could.”

  There was a long pause.

  “You want her here,” Caleb said. “But that’s for you. Not her. Send them away. If this goes wrong, you and I can die together. We started this. The risk is all ours.”

  “She can’t live with faeren.”

  “Then send her home. If we draw the witch here, her home may be fine.”

  Kibs looked up and down the dim and dark hallway, with moonlight trickling in through occasional iron grates. “Madness,” he said. “This place is madness. I never thought I’d miss the smell of raggants.”

  Hyacinth walked past him, and then past the corner where the brothers were having their whisper. Someone had to keep looking. Descending a short stair and then climbing back up another, she went straight on again.

  She paused at the first doors she came to. The tiny iron grate windows were too high for her to see through, so she simply jerked the heavy bolts and tugged the door open. A woman thinner than a skeleton was dancing in the center on a pile of rags.

  Hyacinth slammed the door again and threw the bolt.

  “What are you doing?” Mordecai hissed. Both brothers and the faerie were staring at her from the top of the stairs behind her.

  Hyacinth smiled and jerked the next door open. Nothing and no one. She slammed it and moved on.

  Three more doors, none occupied. Four. Five. All emptiness.

  “Hyacinth, stop,” Mordecai said.

  “You’re not sending me away,” she said. “And Caleb, thank you, but Kibs and I aren’t best friends yet. I’m not traveling alone with him.” She looked at Mordecai. “You need me. At least if you’d like to survive your own plan. And the risk isn’t all yours, Caleb. You attacked the witch and then ran to my house. If you haven’t forgotten, that changed a few things for me and my family. Since you went on your little quest, I think the Smiths have risked and lost a lot more than you have.”

  “Hyacinth,” Caleb said.

  “Stop.” Hyacinth assessed the next door. It had no iron grate at all. And there were two dead bolts instead of one.

  “Just listen,” Caleb said.

  Hyacinth didn’t. She jerked the locks open and then put her foot against the wall and pulled. The iron hinges woke slowly, but they obeyed. Hyacinth stared into darkness with no windows at all, and she saw absolutely nothing.

  The smell told her that someone was inside. So did the breathing. And the sound of scratching.

  “Light, please,” she said, and Mordecai stepped in beside her, raising his glowing palm.

  A man and a woman were inside the room. The woman was scratching at a large slab of something in the floor, and the man was hunched over, perfectly still.

  “Shut it,” Mordecai said.

  Hyacinth stopped his hand. Behind the two shapes, she’d found what she wanted.

  “Everybody out!” Hyacinth said. “It’s your lucky day. Free at last.”

  The man’s head turned slowly toward her. The woman kept scratching.

  Hyacinth looked at Mordecai. “This is the one,” she said. “Get them out.”

  While Mordecai stepped inside and herded the two undying prisoners to their feet, Hyacinth slipped around the edge of the room and focused on the back wall. There was a shelf. And on the shelf, there was a box. And shelf and box were both made of wood.

  Fearful, worried that they might be as drained of life as the great doorway they used to enter the city, Hyacinth gently touched them both.

  The shelf was cedar. The box was ebony. The shelf was almost as dry as the dust on the floor, but the box still held…itself. A grain. Time and the stories of a thousand different days—stories shared by wood in other faraway places, hopefully less horrible than thi
s one—were still present enough for Hyacinth to feel them, even if she couldn’t read them.

  But the door was tiny, no more than a cupboard.

  “Kibs,” Hyacinth said, “I’m going to need some faerie help, I think.”

  The faerie hopped into the room as the two shapes shuffled away.

  “Not permitted,” Kibs said. “Assisting a human in the creation of ways is…is…”

  “I’m sure,” Hyacinth said. “But you’re already an outlaw. And I won’t be creating anything. This wood is already connected to wood like it all over the worlds. I just need one of those connections to work.”

  “Who taught you this?” the faerie asked.

  “I figured it out,” said Hyacinth. “But only through big holes and hollows and cracks and doorways. Can it work with something tiny?”

  The faerie chewed his lip silently.

  “That’s why we’re using this room?” Caleb asked. “Because of that box? We could carry it anywhere.”

  “No.” Hyacinth shook her head. “We won’t touch it or disturb it. I don’t want it disrupted any more than it will be. And it will be disrupted a lot.” She focused on the faerie. “Well? Will you show me how?”

  “Two pies,” the faerie said. “Every Christmas.”

  Hyacinth smiled. “Deal.”

  “One meat,” he added.

  “No way,” Hyacinth said. “Fruit only.”

  The faerie frowned, disappointed. Hyacinth burst out laughing.

  “Of course meat,” she said. “Whatever the outlaw is weird enough to want. Now show me.”

  A distant door banged shut. Voices. They all heard them and froze.

  Hyacinth glanced at Mordecai. “I’d get to work on your vine thing. Fast.”

  —

  NIMIANE WALKED QUICKLY THROUGH her garden, past the metal trees and over the false grass made of feathers. She twisted around and between her maze walls until she stood in front of a doorway of cold stone, unlike anything else around it. Nimiane paused, stroking Bast. She could summon slaves and a coach and another army. But there was no point. And there was reason to hurry. If the fools were able to free her father, it would require a great deal of pain and effort and possible destruction to return him to his cage.

  She already had men in the field giving chase. And from the center of her garden labyrinth, old Endor and her mad ancestors were only one step away.

  Nimiane hated the old city and its dust, its death, and its wandering mad. It stood as a monument to her father’s failure. A monument to her own eventual failure…her doom.

  She stepped into the door and out into a moonlit square crowded with blade slaves and hunters and witch-dogs. A tower of ravens spun slowly in the moonlit air.

  Nimiane looked for a commander. A tall blade with broad shoulders and a black pointed beard stood nearest, hands on his hips, assessing the structure of the tomb halls.

  “Mordred,” the witch said. “Where are they?”

  The man spun around, surprised, and then bowed his head.

  “Queen!”

  On all sides, men turned and bowed.

  “We tracked them here, Queen, although we were ambushed by faeren along the way. Hunters are searching the tomb halls now. Why they came here, I don’t know.”

  “Because Nimroth is here,” Nimiane said, and she walked up beside her warrior as Bast eyed the crumbling stone facade.

  “I don’t understand, Queen,” Mordred said. “What would they want with him?”

  “Imagine the Blackstar free,” Nimiane said, “and understand. Send blades to his tomb immediately.”

  Even as she said it, a man carrying two curved swords emerged from the building in a hurry.

  “Hunters back!” he yelled. “Witch-dogs front!” Seeing the queen, he ran through the crowd toward her, dropping to one knee and rising again when he arrived.

  “We have them trapped, Queen,” the man said. “But the green man has thrown up vines of fire we cannot cut. When the wizards—”

  “The wizards will fail. In whose tomb is he trapped?”

  “I do not know the tombs, Queen.”

  Nimiane moved past him toward the arched entrance. She stroked Bast’s head as she went, and her soldiers and hunters parted around her.

  —

  HYACINTH SAT WITH HER back against the stone wall and watched Mordecai work. It was possible that she was going to wake up and find that none of this was happening, that she was actually sleeping in the trailer, wedged uncomfortably between her two sisters. Just the thought made her ache with desire. She wanted to smell her sisters. To laugh at them. To know them more deeply than she ever had.

  She knew that was unlikely now.

  Kibs sat beside her, also watching. Mordecai moved his body like a painter, like a conductor of music that only he could hear, brushing his palm over every stone in the walls, over every chink and every crack, ghosting green and gold and purple over the surface and deep into the stone.

  Outside the room, the hall was full of shouting and snarling.

  “Hunters back!” a voice bellowed.

  “Aye, get back!” Caleb yelled. “Run!”

  “Witch-dogs front!” the voice shouted, and then Caleb ducked quickly into the room as an arrow streaked past and a spear clattered onto the floor.

  Caleb looked at his brother. “Ready?” he asked.

  “Mmm,” Mordecai answered. “Nearly.”

  “Could wizards get me through your net out there?” Caleb asked. “Because it’s their turn to try.”

  “Yes,” Mordecai said. “I threw that one up quickly. They’ll get it down. This is the one that matters.”

  Hyacinth looked at the little box on the shelf for the hundredth time, and Kibs saw her look. And he saw Hyacinth’s knee begin to bounce.

  “It will work,” Kibs said. “It will. We’ll get through.”

  “Are you sure?” Hyacinth asked.

  The faerie shrugged. “May as well be. If we all die, at least we can die without having to worry about it first. Just one fleeting moment of disappointment, and then poof.”

  Hyacinth let both of her knees begin to bounce.

  A blast of fire and wind washed down the hall and into the room.

  “Mordecai,” Caleb said. “Now or never.”

  “Almost,” Mordecai said. Sweat was dripping off of him when he finally moved to the door, his hand gliding continuously. “Just double-checking,” he said. “If she’s in here forever, I know she will. It all has to…connect…and feed….”

  Smoke filled the hallway and trickled in the doorway. A moment later, the stone floor shivered and a mass of vines flew past down the hall.

  “Mordecai!” Caleb yelled, and two large wizards stepped into view.

  Mordecai stood motionless, only two feet away from them. They looked at his glowing flat hand, and then at his face.

  “Well,” the first one said, “that was easy.”

  The second one grinned and reached across the threshold.

  Mordecai closed his fist, and a portcullis of gold and green fire, dotted with purple, slammed shut, severing the man’s arm at the elbow.

  Screaming, the wizard hurled a curse at Mordecai. It didn’t touch him, but the ghost vines woven through the stones glowed dimly.

  Mordecai backed into the center of the room and watched, curious, as flames and wind and ice tore at his wall of vine fire. None of it managed to enter the room.

  “It’s working,” Caleb said.

  Mordecai nodded. He backed across the room and sat down beside Hyacinth. Caleb followed.

  While all four of them sat and watched, wizards worked and wizards cursed, and the stones glowed strong on every side—in the ceiling, through the air, across the floor, and around a little box, sitting on a shelf.

  “How much longer until they give up and she comes?” Caleb asked. “One day? Two? Should we try to sleep?”

  Hyacinth laughed. “You’re crazy,” she said. “There’s a severed arm on the floor a
nd however many wizards are out there trying to kill us while we’ve locked ourselves into some kind of tomb. I could stay awake for a week in here.”

  “I brought cheese,” Kibs offered. “But not much.”

  “Way!” a voice shouted. “Way for the witch-queen!”

  The curses and fire and wind all stopped. The wizards, sweaty and panting, stepped back.

  Mordecai and Caleb jumped to their feet. Hyacinth started to slide toward the box, but Kibs grabbed her.

  Nimiane stepped into the doorway. Her face was beautiful but hard, and her hair gleamed in the light from Mordecai’s fire vines. Her eyes were empty, but her hands were full. Bast, with his white fur patchy with scabs, looked at Hyacinth and hissed.

  Nimiane stretched out her hand but stopped short of touching the flickering vine.

  “Strange,” she said. “To what end, green blood? You cannot stop me.”

  And the witch-queen hit the cage with all the strength she had. The light surged and then dimmed.

  “Why this tomb?” she asked. “Why any of this? You could rise above all the witch-dogs in my armies.”

  “You’re afraid,” Mordecai said quietly. “You think that I will die here? That I am trapped? I am not. I will do what I came here to do, and then I will walk away.”

  Nimiane lifted her blind face toward the ceiling, but the cat stared at Mordecai, unblinking, lashing its tail.

  “And what, green blood, did you come here to do?”

  Mordecai bent his knees, meeting eyes with the cat at her level.

  “I cannot kill you,” he said. “But I will see you thrown down.” He straightened and took a step back. “Hyacinth, it’s time to leave.”

  Hyacinth slid to her knees and crouched in front of the box.

  “No!” Nimiane snarled, and her real attack came. She hit the cage with the force of lightning, and Hyacinth’s ears screamed with the blow. Mordecai slipped and fell.

  “Remember, the box isn’t there,” Kibs whispered in Hyacinth’s ear. “Your eyes are liars. We’ve helped the grain find somewhere else. Something else. It’s waiting already.”