Vortex
Berend said that he saw only darkness when he broke their connection, and now Isabel knows he was telling the truth. She can feel her breath condensing in the frigid air, but she cannot see it. There is nothing but black.
The illusion is a powerful one. In the ordinary darkness after sunset, it wouldn’t be too complex to cast, especially if one prepared ahead of time, but she is impressed with Geray’s skill. If he had stayed with the church of Alcos, or even with the university, he could have been the most powerful magic user in Gallia, if not the world. Maybe he wouldn’t have become wealthy from the research opportunities, but at least he and Warder would not have to be begging Lady Breckenridge for an investment. Instead, he was doing…this.
What’s the point of all of this? The murders, the summonings. It would be so much easier to do anything else.
She’s distracting herself, Isabel realizes. Panic is setting in, tugging at the periphery of her thoughts like a ringing in her ears, and she is just barely keeping it at bay with these mundanities.
A piercing shriek cuts through the darkness. The misty outline of a human figure ignites with a pale glow, its fingers outstretched like claws and the black hollows of its eyes widened with terrible intent. In an instant, it is gone again.
Berend cries out in surprise and pain. He sounds far away, but his elbow knocks into Isabel’s arm with bruising force. She reaches out before he can disappear into the darkness again and finds the sleeve of his shirt. She clenches her stiff, cold fingers in the silk and hangs on.
The darkness is only an illusion, she reminds herself. The ghosts are real, however, and they are a threat. The rite of the breaking of chains hadn’t worked. If she were being realistic, she shouldn’t have expected it. The Sentinels of today are not the powerful magic-wielders of the past, and there is only one of her.
There’s nothing to be done about that now. Here she is, and she has to do something if she and Berend are going to live to see morning. She aches from the cold, and her hands are all but numb, but she wills her wrist to turn and the bell to ring.
Light at the end of all roads, she prays, don’t let the clapper be frozen.
The bell sounds. It does nothing to dispel the darkness, but it fulfills the purpose for which it was created. The ghosts appear out of the gloom, manifesting clearly, their attention and their hollow eyes turned toward Isabel. There had appeared to be hundreds, while the candle still burned, but now there are maybe a dozen pressing in around her and Berend. It’s too many, still—she tries to list all of Geray’s known victims, and she can count them on one hand, or would if her hands weren’t otherwise occupied and completely without feeling. She doesn’t hear the metallic clang of the bell dropping to the floor, so that is a small blessing.
Berend sheathes his sword with an unmistakable sound, and then there is quiet, the ghosts staring in transfixed silence. Their faces are all agony as they struggle between the bell’s call and the necromancer’s control. The Sentinels of old described the conflict in poetry, but Isabel has no words.
They won’t be still forever. Since the breaking of chains didn’t work, what else does Isabel have? The cold is making her sluggish. She knows all the rituals in her book, but she can’t hold any of them in her mind long enough to come up with a plan.
There is a mechanical click, followed by a spark, and then a blinding brightness. Isabel blinks. When she can see again, Berend is holding his pistol and the now-lit candle. He’s used the firing mechanism to light the wick.
Isabel briefly considers telling him he’s brilliant, but she’s too cold to speak and suspects that it might go to his head. The ghosts shriek and recoil from the light.
“Give me your sword,” Berend says. His breath forms a cloud in the air. To his credit, he only stammers a little with his teeth chattering from the unearthly cold. He places the gun on top of her hand. “I’ll hold them off while you—do what you do, and fast.”
Isabel unclenches her fingers from his shirt, one at a time, and manages to take hold of the pistol without dropping it. It takes a couple of tries, but she finds the opening to her left-side pocket and places it in there. She hears metal hit wood—Geray’s seal, prepared for a spell of binding, is still in her pocket.
She had used it to find this house. Maybe she can use it again. Isabel places the bell in her other pocket—it has a holster, but her hands are too clumsy to use it now—and draws her sword, passing it to Berend.
He takes it and turns away, angling the blade in a guard. The ghosts are no longer staring at Isabel, and they have begun, slowly, to advance once more.
The sword will not harm them. Nothing can harm a spirit—or, rather, almost nothing. It will deter them, and it might force them to dematerialize for a time, while they gather energy. Does Berend know this? Probably not, but there isn’t time to explain.
The bell clatters dully in her pocket as Isabel rummages around for a piece of chalk. With the candle lit, the cold has lessened, but not by much. She bends down, her back against the wall, and her hands shake as she begins to draw sigils on the polished wooden floor.
A ghost screams and lunges for Berend. It passes through the outstretched blade and puts its spectral hands through his chest. He plants his feet and grunts.
Don’t look at him, Isabel tells herself. I need to be quick, or we’re both done for.
She places Geray’s seal at the center of her circle. With a few more strokes of the chalk, she connects her lines to those carved into the wood.
This isn’t safe, she thinks as she looks down at the completed pattern. I should be taking measurements, doing research, checking and checking again. This should take days.
She doesn’t have days. She’ll be lucky if she has a few minutes.
She glances at Berend—there are tears in his clothing now, and scratches where his skin shows through. Frost gathers in his hair and around the cuts. With one more deep breath, Isabel places her hand beside the seal in the center of the circle.
For a second, nothing happens. Then the chalk and the wood fall away, replaced by a network of shadowy shapes and bright, glimmering threads. Here is the house as it exists in the realm of the gods and the spirits: a web of spells hung on a scaffold of dark, angular beams. Isabel can see all of it at once. The effect is dizzying, as though she were peering over a steep cliff.
Beside her is a figure made of light—it’s Berend, and his reflection in the nether world is luminous with vitality. Dimmer are the shapes of the ghosts, darting about with furious intent. Their screams are louder here, and they shake the house and set the spell-threads quivering, tearing at Isabel like a gale-force wind.
Strangely, she does not see the neighboring houses, or the reflection of the street. Space is an odd thing in the nether world, and doesn’t always correspond to equivalent distances in the physical realm, but it appears that Geray’s house is alone in the void, an island in an endless, roiling sea.
It’s not a sea, Isabel realizes, it’s a whirlpool, and she is just outside the center of it. More dim shapes—ghosts, most likely—are caught in it, spiraling toward the house. Light crackles through the vortex. There is a thundering sound that Isabel feels more than she hears, and a great rent opens up in the space beside the north wall. Through it, she can see stars, and dazzling colors, and the silhouette of a ghostly cityscape.
Something isn’t right. She has walked the nether world only once before, under the guidance of her teacher, and it had not looked like this. The small church in Vernay had appeared much as it was in the physical world, and the sky was a brilliant sunset even in the early morning, with Ondir’s bridge arching across it.
Each place is different, she reminds herself. Geray has been doing dark magic here for gods know how long, and it’s bound to have an effect. Still, the vortex is worrying, and the fissures in the nether are like nothing she has ever seen or read about before. It shouldn’t be possible for one man, as skilled as he might be in working magic, to be able to create such things.
She will worry about that later—if and when she lives through this, and can return to Vernay and consult with more experienced minds than hers. Perhaps she’ll be able to question Geray himself, though the prospect seems riskier than it might be worth.
The vortex is centered below the house. That must be where he’s hiding. The sounds on the upper floor, she understands now, were only more illusions. Isabel turns to descend, and the winds grasp at her, threatening to pull her into it like another unfortunate spirit.
In the spirit world, it is imperative to maintain your intent and your identity, her teacher’s voice says. You must keep track of who you are and where you are going.
She pictures herself: tall, plain, and dressed in black, with Ondir’s insignia pinned to her chest. The pull of the whirlwind lessens enough to allow her to control her journey downward.
The center of it is bright, but it’s a sickly, colorless glow, and it thrums with a slow, viscous pulse. From it sprout the threads of magic, like the roots of a plant. If she can break them, she might be able to dispel the rituals Geray worked into the house, and free the spirits trapped within.
She reaches out, setting all her will into grasping one thread and breaking it. It stretches and shivers, straining against her, but it does not snap. She tries another, with no better luck. Geray has had weeks, if not months, to strengthen his spells, and Isabel isn’t strong enough to counter him.
The vortex roars, the sound pressing against her on all sides. It rakes at her with invisible claws, and wisps of light break free from her hazy form. She can feel herself sinking downward toward the bright center, as though the floor beneath her has a slope. She won’t be able to resist it for much longer.
Isabel drifts slowly, inevitably closer to the bottom, and the glow envelops her. The heart of Geray’s magic isn’t so large, after all—she could reach out and hold it in both her spectral hands.
She has an idea. It’s a stupid, arrogant, terrible idea, one that would have her teacher cursing in frustration before leaving her to her well-deserved fate, but she can’t come up with anything else and she is falling into Geray’s magic, the spell-threads pressing down on her.
Who are you, and where are you going?
“My name is Isabel Rainier,” she tells the pulsing light, “and I am a Sentinel of the god of death, and I will put an end to this madness.”
She takes the heart of the vortex in her hands and crushes it into the center of her being. There is a burst of blinding light, the scream of wind and of hundreds of anguished voices, and then everything goes dark.
Forward to Chapter Twenty-Eight
Thanks for reading! I hope this chapter makes up for the long wait for the last one. I’m going back to the every other week schedule, probably until Part One of New Moon Door is done, after which there will be some exciting new things happening.
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