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“Not a part to dwell on, according to the Keepers of Light. It’s a culture they’ve worked hard to instill throughout Elarith—and one they’ve been aiming to spread throughout the rest of the empire as well.”

“But they used to be the ones in charge of sanctioning visits to this realm, didn’t they?”

He nodded.

“…I always wondered why they stopped allowing them.”

He looked to the torches held by those three statues near the gate. His brow furrowed, and the reflection of fire within his golden gaze danced with a particular violence; I wondered what he was truly thinking about those Keepers, now that he knew they had placed an imposter on his throne.

“Several reasons, I’ve been told,” he said. “It was too dangerous, for example—opening the path between the realms risked deadly energy bleeding through, much like what has apparently happened at your old home. And then you had the ones who didn’t want to come back after their allotted time visiting the dead.”

“I can’t imagine staying here in this darkness, indefinitely,” I said, suppressing a shiver at the thought.

He considered this for a long moment before answering. “People deal with loss in different ways,” he finally said, turning away and starting to make his way toward Thalia and the others. “I suspect it wouldn’t seem all that dark to someone who had lost what felt like everything to them.”

Something in his tone drew me even closer to his side. A question danced at the tip of my tongue—how dark does it seem to you?

I didn’t find the courage to ask. The contemplative peace between us was too enjoyable to disturb. And we were nearly to Thalia, now—close enough that I noticed she held her staff at the ready, and my attention shifted fully to her, wondering what she was about to attempt.

There was an odd pattern of different-colored bricks in the wall some distance away from the grand, main gate; she had stopped before it and, as we reached her, she lifted her staff and began to draw ribbons of some sort of foggy substance out from those bricks. Their color faded as she wound more and more ribbons around the tip of her weapon, until, eventually, there were no bricks at all.

A window had appeared.

Thalia took several steps back—nearly colliding with me—as a man slowly stepped up to this newly revealed window, rolling his shoulders and cracking his neck as though he’d been sitting stiffly for the past several hours. Even after shaking his muscles lose, his movements still seemed unnaturally stiff and twitchy. He looked as solid as us, but his skin was a pallid shade of grey. His eyes were oddly wide and blinked far too little, as though they’d adjusted poorly to the dim lighting of this realm.

“Gatemaster Atros—just our luck,” Thalia said under her breath. “Let me do all the talking to this bastard, please.”

Chapter Fifteen

Nova

Atros fixedhis unblinking gaze on Thalia as she approached.

He worked his jaw a few times—as though loosening it up along with the rest of his body—before saying something to her in a low grumble of a voice, and in a language I didn’t understand; it sounded like the same language Thalia had used when we first met.

She replied in the same language, jerking her head toward me and the rest of my party.

The gatemaster studied us for several long, uncomfortable moments before he licked his lips and continued speaking—this time in a heavily-accented version of my empire’s common tongue.

“Thalia, my love,” he said, his gaze sweeping between her and us, “you have five extra souls—and a couple extra, nasty-looking beasts for good measure.”

Phantom protested the designation with a snarl.

The gatemaster ignored him, his strange eyes widening even further, as if resisting the urge to flutter shut for even an instant.“Surely you realize we can’t simply allow you all to waltz in here and upset the balance of things.”

“Spare me the show and just name your price, Atros. I know you can make things happen when you really want to.”

His mouth split into an unpleasant smile, revealing unexpectedly perfect, white teeth that didn’t otherwise fit his ugly appearance. “You’ve figured me out, haven’t you?” He chuckled. “Takes a bit of the fun out of it, honestly, but all right, then—we can skip the foreplay and you can just give me what I need, I s’pose.”

The glare she fixed on him was lethal, but she reached into the satchel at her hip without comment, retrieving a small bag of what sounded like coins and flinging it viciously at his face.

He snatched it easily from the air. His hand was disfigured, I noticed; several of his fingers were abnormally long and bent at crooked, painful-looking angles. He hooked the bag around one of these bent fingers and gave it a shake, listening closely to the coins clinking inside. “A nice start.”

Thalia bristled. “Start?”

“Indeed.”

“That’s five times the price I paid you for my last solo passage,withsomeextra thrown in for the mutt and the horse.”