Arden Geray
Half an hour later, the constables pull Isabel out of the ruins of Arden Geray’s house. They take Berend and the professor away—to a hospital, she hopes, but her ears still ring and she can’t make out what they’re saying. Beside her, the earth churns and settles as the dead writhe in mindless rage. She can do nothing to quiet them.
The constables don’t notice the subterranean movement in the dark. They place Isabel in an uncovered carriage to take her back to the chapel on the blue field. Geray’s ghost follows.
She can see him as long as he doesn’t get too close to the street lamps. His translucent, misty form wears the tattered remains of his starched shirt and trousers, and a ragged hole passes through the center of his chest. He walks with slow, dragging steps, though he remains just behind the wagon, barely out of arm’s reach as it lurches down the cobbled street. As long as he stays close to her, he can’t wake the bodies under the house, including his own. It’s a small blessing.
“Ondir has abandoned you, Sentinel,” he says, his voice a rattling, rasping whisper. “This is what your lack of faith deserves. You should have listened to me.”
“Shut up,” she whispers back.
The young constable across from her looks up. He’s pushed his sleeves to his elbows, and his hands and forearms are filthy. A patch on the left side of his vest shows a row of fence posts and a blocky letter W, the symbol of the West Gate district. “What did you say?” he asks.
“Nothing,” Isabel says. It appears she’s the only one who can see and hear Geray. “I’m sorry.”
The carriage turns south, away from the Temple District. Faint, strained shouts drift through the streets. The church folk are still gathered, protesting the council’s latest decision. It’s a distant problem, now. Another block, and she can’t hear them anymore.
“What happened back there?” the constable asks.
“Tell him, Sentinel,” Geray hisses. “Tell him how you failed, and the god of death no longer hears your prayers. Those bodies will rise again, and you won’t be able to put them down. Soon, the whole city will know.”
Isabel’s head drops to her chest, too heavy to hold up. She managed, at some point while the constables were digging her out, to recover her hat. It sits on her lap, covered in earth. More dirt stiffens her clothes. Small stones press into the soles of her feet from inside her boots. “A spell gone wrong,” she says. “I was too late to stop it.”
Geray sneers. “Lying by omission does not become an agent of the Church.”
Isabel bites her tongue. The inside of her mouth tastes of dust and blood.
“We’ll be digging it out for weeks.” The constable rolls his shoulders and brushes dirt from his hands. “Are you sure we got everyone out?”
“Everyone living,” says Isabel. “I’m sure.”
Her sword is missing. With a cold stab of panic, she picks up the hat and checks her belt. There’s nothing there but an empty scabbard. The ritual objects of her station—bell, book, and candle—are also gone, buried under the wreck of that terrible house. The south gate shudders open; it’s too late to tell the constables to turn the carriage around. Even if she could, Geray is content to follow her around, and he would bring the corpses beneath the rubble to a deranged imitation of life if he were to go near again.
She could not banish him. There was no gate for him to pass through.
A void surrounded the house, churning in waves of darkness, with rifts tearing open to reveal a field of stars before sealing shut again. By some unknown means, the house’s echo in the nether world had been torn away from the rest of the city. Even so, Ondir’s bridge should still have been there. She had done the ritual hundreds of times, and each time, the path had opened. The gate was never far. Not once before had she called up a ghost and been unable to send it on.
There was one time, she corrects herself. When she tried to communicate with Mikhail Ranseberg, the ex-mercenary Geray had cut into pieces, there was only screaming. His soul had been damaged, something she had thought impossible.
A lot of impossible things have happened recently.
Gerays’ magic—with the help of Professor Warder and his device—did that to Mikhail. Warder might be dead, and his device is under the house, and Geray is being less than helpful.
The carriage stops in front of Brother Risoven’s chapel. Isabel picks up her hat and climbs down. The constables don’t offer her a hand or even get up from their seats, and with a flick of the reins from the driver, their scruffy brown horse turns around and takes them back into the city.
An eerie half-light creeps over the hills to the east. It’s almost morning. In the chapel’s front window, a single lamp flickers and sputters with the last of its oil, waiting for her.
Geray hovers just behind, and she can feel his arrogant dissatisfaction with his surroundings without looking at him. Isabel’s hope that the sanctified grounds will keep him away dies as soon as she enters the chapel and puts out the light. He follows her up the stairs and into the spare room where she’s been staying, and back down again when she goes to fetch water for a bath. The cot beneath the window is as inviting as a huge feather bed, but it isn’t as though she can grow more tired than she already is, and the idea of crawling into bed as filthy as she is makes her skin crawl.
The pump is rusty, and it creaks. Isabel’s horse, an elderly gray mare left tied to a post near the door with a long rope lead, opens one eye. She sees Geray and snorts in agitation, walking to the end of her tether to put distance between them and flicking her tail.
“Your order has fallen far since the Inquisition,” Geray says, surveying the chapel and the blue field with a haughty look in his hollow, dark eyes. “It’s well deserved.”
Isabel sighs. “It’s a temporary arrangement. Surely you have something better to do with your time.”
“I could go back to my laboratory and wake up the dead. Or perhaps you’d prefer I go to the Temple District? There are fresh bodies there I could set to walking and preying on the pilgrims. The priests would all call for you, and you’d be forced to admit that you can do nothing.”
She tells herself that she isn’t hiding anything. She’s only waiting for Brother Risoven to wake before she asks for his counsel, and then she’ll be on her way to the Temple District to speak with the high priest. First, she’ll have a bath, and think of what to say and how to keep Geray from following her to Ondir’s mausoleum and causing more trouble.
The graves in the blue field remain still, at least for the moment. Every corpse buried here is cleansed and warded, and those spells appear to be holding. That, or Geray is turning all his energy toward tormenting Isabel rather than affecting the surrounding area.
With a bucket in each hand, she goes back into the chapel. The floor creaks under the added weight, but Risoven sleeps on. It’s for the best; Isabel isn’t sure what to say to him yet. He left her dinner—a modest serving of potatoes with herbs and shreds of hard white cheese—in the tiny kitchen at the back, and it’s turned cold and greasy. Distantly, she’s aware that she’s hungry, but she’ll deal with that later.
She lights the stove and pours the water into Risoven’s largest pot. Geray trails after her as she goes back outside for more. In the darkness outside the city, his misty form is clearer, but there’s no mistaking him for anything but a ghost. He walks, though his feet hover over and sink into the ground by turns, and when he bumps into the doorway on the way back in, his shoulder passes through. He was pale and thin in life, but now he is skeletal, his eyes sunken and his mouth a black void. The gunshot wound in his chest oozes darkness. He puts one spectral hand into it and scowls.
“I should be in Alcos’s realm now,” he says. “I died a martyr.”
Isabel puts the buckets on the floor and wipes at her brow. She’s acquired an unpleasant stickiness, and though she can’t smell anything, she can imagine the odor she gives off. “You didn’t. You’re a murderer, Arden Geray, and a heretic. The gods wouldn’t take you, even if you hadn’t torn a rift in the nether world with your necromancy.” She unties the end of her braid and combs through her hair with her fingers. It’s stiff with dirt and what she thinks might be dried blood.
“I did no such thing,” Geray snarls. “This is your doing.”
Isabel doesn’t think so. At least, she hopes it isn’t. “I’m not the one who was performing forbidden magic,” she says aloud. She had done everything according to protocol, except—
Except when she broke Geray’s web of spells by consuming its glowing heart. She forgets her hunger; her stomach feels as though she’s swallowed a stone. It was a stupid, hasty thing to do, but she had to break the illusion over the house and release the angry ghosts Geray had bound there before they tore her and Berend to shreds. The gods would forgive her.
“Everything I did, I did for the gods,” Geray says. His voice holds the faintest note of uncertainty.
Steam rises from the pot of water. Isabel drags the metal tub out from underneath a cabinet and sets her coat and hat beside it. She’ll have to wash her clothes, as well, but she has to do one thing at a time or the colossal weight of everything she has to fix will overwhelm her. A bath first, and then clean clothes, and then when she’s presentable she’ll ask any priest of Ondir she can find in the city what in the sixteen hells she should do.
She bends down to unlace her boots. Their original color is lost under a crust of earth. A stiff brush and some oil might restore them, but that’s another task for later. She can hear rather than see the shower of dirt that falls onto the kitchen floor when she pulls them off.
Geray is still standing in the kitchen, hovering beside the two buckets of cold water. Isabel picks them up and pours them into the tub, followed by the boiling pot. He still doesn’t move. His skull-like face glowers at her.
“It’s impolite to watch a woman undress,” she says. “You were a monk, once, weren’t you?”
The ghost scoffs. “As if your figure could tempt me.” He holds his arms out and makes a show of looking around the kitchen. “I’m dead, remember? Where shall I go? Out to the blue field? I’m sure the priest of this chapel would appreciate me rousing the graves.”
“I don’t much care where you go,” Isabel says, knowing that she’ll probably regret it later. “Just leave me alone for a moment.”
Geray grumbles to himself, but he walks through the kitchen wall into the room where Risoven prepares bodies for burial. Isabel listens, expecting an animated corpse to come tearing out of the room, but there is only blessed silence.
She strips out of her filthy clothes and sinks into the water. In an instant, it darkens, and a layer of dirt rises to the surface. She’ll have to bathe again to truly be clean, but this will at least be an improvement. There is soap on the shelf behind her, and a clean rag—the skin of her arm and shoulder prickles in the cold air as she turns and reaches for them.
When she turns back, Geray is standing at the edge of the tub.
Isabel gasps and tries to back away in surprise, but succeeds only in sloshing dirty water over the sides. She covers her chest with both arms and feels her heart pound.
“I thought I told you to leave,” she says. In the small kitchen, her voice is flat, hiding her panic.
“I tried.” Geray’s blackened eyes are wide, and bony fingers dressed in skin of mist grip the rim of the tub. “Do you think I want to be stuck with you, Sentinel? I went out to the chapel and into the field, and then I was back here. What did you do to me?”
Back to Part One, Chapter Twenty-Nine
Thanks for reading! The plan is to alternate The Book of the New Moon Door with Journey to the Water, with chapters going up first on Patreon and then here.
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