“Let them try and get it,” I said, old bravado sneaking into my voice.
“Just because you wear our mark does not make you invincible to the pain we can cause.”
The Nameless stepped out of the shadows right next to Vikram. One fluid movement. In. Out. Inevitable from the very second I caught the metallic sheen winking in the dark.
“No!” screamed Aasha.
Beside me, I heard a grunt of pain. Vikram’s hand tightened on mine to the point where I lost feeling in my fingers. I turned, catching him before he crumpled to the ground. I clutched his shoulders, trying to raise him up. Ice cut my thoughts. He … he wasn’t supposed to fall. They were supposed to aim at me. Not him. Never him. His eyes went wide, lips paling. A hilt sunk into his back caught the light. My hand came away red. A thick stain … something dark … something that my mind refused to comprehend as blood spread across his shirt. I felt yanked open, hollowed in the space of a blink. Screams and fury and night rushed in to fill me. I fell to my knees.
“We don’t need to touch you to harm you, girl.”
38
DARK AS DUSK
GAURI
I always thought of silence as the absence of sound. But kneeling there—watching Vikram crumple to the ground, blood forming a red shadow beneath him—I thought I felt the world slump, begging silently for reprieve. Or maybe it was just me. This sight couldn’t fit inside me. My heart refused to hold it. It unlocked. Broke. The sound of it made the silence scream.
Sharp gasps and murmurs crawled within reach of my hearing, but I shut out the sounds. The only thing I wanted to hear was Vikram’s voice. Aasha crouched to his side, her fingers hovering over his hair and the growing bloodstain across his back. Tears slid down her cheeks. But she wouldn’t touch him. Couldn’t. Around us, the people of Alaka moved closer. I whirled on them, my dagger raised.
“Help him,” I hissed. Then louder:
“Help him! What are you doing?”
A thousand glittering eyes met mine. No one moved. This was not their game.
The Nameless circled me.
The first sneered. “We tried to appeal to your heart, but you have none.”
The second laughed. “We tried to appeal to your mind, but you have none.”
The third smiled. “So we will take what is ours by force. The venom was our trade first. Our prize first. It is our legacy. Every hundred years, we fight for it. For the years between we sink into the ground, sleeping and waiting, our legacy growing. Did you really think you could take it from us?”
Aasha called my name. I looked over to see her holding the dagger that Vikram had dropped. She wielded it awkwardly, as if it might bite her at any turn. I thought she was going to throw it to me, but instead she walked to my side, her face grim.
The Nameless hissed. “This is the last Tournament, girl. If we don’t take the venom, the poison will fade. You will fight your own? You will take this vengeance from your sisters?”
“No sister of mine would ever do this,” said Aasha quietly. “My sisters don’t call it vengeance. They call it a Blessing.”
“So be it,” said the Nameless as one.
They lunged, slashing the air. I clutched the poison in one hand, jumping out of the way. Aasha was a tiny wind beside me, a whirling living barrier. The crowd of Alaka formed a black crust around us, silent eyes tracking our every movement. Everywhere I turned, the Nameless unraveled from the shadows. I couldn’t tell them apart. Even when my eyes cut away from one face to the next, no detail lingered. This was the price of vengeance, a slow obliteration of self until you were nothing but your hate. I roared, charging forward, swinging my arm to slice and cut. But the blade passed through them as if the knife didn’t exist. They grinned.
One blink later, and the Nameless vanished. Catching my breath, I turned in a slow circle. Alaka stared back. Kubera and Kauveri floated above the crowd. Waiting. Aasha caught my eye, confusion spreading across her features. And then I realized what the Nameless had done. Pushed us to the shadows. They weren’t trading spar for spar or punch for punch; they were trading light for dark.
I saw the shadow on my feet. I leapt out of the way, but a hand darted out, closing around my ankle. In that moment, I thought I could taste death on my tongue, all funerary ash and burning marigolds. I reached down, hacking violently—uselessly—at the wrist. The Nameless rolled out of the shadows. I lifted my blade. But it didn’t matter. The smile on the Nameless was death. A pressure sank into my stomach. A blade. It didn’t feel sharp. Just dull. They slid a hand across my waist.
“Ours now,” they said, tugging the vial of the Serpent King’s poison.
I sank to my knees, black edging my vision. In one fluid movement, the Nameless pulled the stopper from the vial of poison and drank it. Light fizzed across their skin. The blue ribbon each of them wore in tribute to their dead sister glowed and tightened into a knot at the hollow of each throat. My eyes sought Vikram. Someone had moved toward him. A beautiful woman wearing a crown of snow crouched beside his body. I was so cold. So empty. I looked back to the Nameless. The ribbons had transformed. A blue star unraveled at the hollow of each of their throats.
“Finally,” they whispered.
I was weightless and empty.
I was gone.
*
When I opened my eyes, I was thrown over the back of some beast. It smelled of death. Not of rot and blood, but of closed doors and shuttered eyes. The beast whipped its tail, huffed and turned to look at me. A white horse. Almost beautiful, if not for the manic gleam in its eyes. I looked around me, but the landscape cut in and out, as if someone had taken a knife to this world and started hacking. Panic bit into my heart. Where did everyone go? Where was Vikram? And then a terrible thought wrenched through me.
“Am I alive?”
The horse laughed, and I nearly fell off in shock.
“What is alive anyway, but one shape telling another shape that it is there? By that logic, I am alive! And I do not think that I am. But I do think, so therefore … therefore something. Hm…”
The horse kept running.
“What’s happening? Where am I?” I demanded. “Take me back to Alaka this instant!”
“A mortal thing making demands? Hmpf. The nerve. Must run in the blood.” The horse grumbled. “It is most inconvenient that you are inedible. I do like to play with food.”
The horse, if it could even be called that, stopped running before an ivory door that appeared in the middle of a wasteland. It tossed me off its back and nudged open the door with its nose.
“Where am I?” I said, digging my heels into the ground. I refused to move.
“Everywhere!” laughed the horse. “You’re in the shadow of sleep. You’re at the beginning and the end. You’re treading the spit, sinew and gristle that makes a tale worth telling, girl thing.”
“Who are you?”
The horse snorted. “Selfhood is a pesky thing. I left it ages ago.”