Repent
Once outside, Isabel takes a full breath for the first time in hours. Reder Angrove’s ghost remains, for the moment, inside the chapel, and the grip of his fear and grief releases. The air is cold, and it scrapes against her throat. Autumn has arrived in Mondirra.
“Did they ritually remove your brain as part of your training, Sentinel?” Geray demands in her ear, voice shaking with suppressed rage. “Take it out and put it back in the wrong way, perhaps?”
Isabel places her hat on her head and pulls the brim down over her eyes. She can still see Geray, trudging half a step behind her with his feet two inches above the ground. “Whatever you have to say, I don’t want to hear it,” she says through her teeth.
“I had an easy solution,” Geray shrieks. “I practically served it to you on a platter!”
“Enough.” Isabel presses herself against the small kitchen’s exterior wall and cranes her neck to see out to the front of the building. Her uniform will hide her in the dark, but only if she’s careful.
Geray floats out in front of her. “Whatever happens in there is on your hands, then.”
“I know. I’m still not doing your necromancy.” Her hands are shaking. She shoves them into the pockets of her coat. “Will you move, please? I need to see what’s going on.”
He slinks off to the side, a vaguely man-shaped column of churning mist. In front of the chapel door, a stone’s throw away, sits the constables’ carriage. The spiral emblem of the Shell District is stenciled on the door in peeling white paint. Two men stand beside it, one holding a club and the other nervously adjusting and readjusting his grip on a musket. Inside sits a third man—his stooped posture and the glint of faint moonlight on his thick lenses identify him as Brother Risoven.
He’s safe; he’s alive. Isabel breathes a silent sigh of relief. It catches in her throat as she realizes: they’ve arrested him. She takes a step forward, out of the shadow of the building. How dare they chain up an old man, a venerable servant of Ondir? What crime could he have possibly committed? The Church would have them all sacked and denied their rites until a lengthy period of repentance and reflection was completed.
Her boots sink into the wet earth, and she stops before entering the constables’ line of sight. She has already been arrested once—and released without charges, but her Sentinel’s blacks hadn’t saved her from a night in a crowded cell beneath Mondirra’s guardhouse. Isabel couldn’t afford that kind of delay then, and she certainly can’t now.
I’m going to get help. Risoven can’t hear her thoughts, but she hopes he trusts her.
The gray mare, roused from her slumber by the commotion at the door, turns one dark eye to Isabel.
She would need to be harnessed and saddled. Isabel hasn’t ridden bareback in more than ten years. Even if she could, the attention she would draw to herself in the attempt would prevent her escape anyway.
A sickly, greenish light flashes in the chapel’s windows. The sound of a screaming animal follows, like thunder after lightning. The horse snorts and tosses her head, shaking the rope that fastens her to the post outside the door.
The constables raise their weapons, but they don’t move from their place beside the carriage. There’s no sign of their fellows inside.
“It’s all right,” Isabel murmurs to the mare. She slips around the corner and unties the knotted rope. Before the constables can see her, she goes around the back of the chapel and makes for the city wall.
Geray gives a grunt of discomfort as the invisible line tugs him after her. “What are you going to do now?” he asks.
“I’m going to the Temple District,” Isabel says. “The high priest will know what to do.” Mondirra’s southernmost gate looms dark and foreboding a short distance away, but she won’t go in by that route. It’s too close to the Shell District, and the constables there likely know to look for her. She’ll go to the eastern gate, the Orchard District, just over a mile from here.
“I hope you’re right, for once.” Geray has reconstituted himself, and his tone is sneering arrogance again, rather than anger. “I tire of this.”
“You’re not the only one.”
Aside from a few lanterns atop the wall, the city is dark. A cold wind stirs the distant orchard. The waxing moon dips below the horizon, and dawn is still hours away. Isabel keeps her eyes to the ground, willing them to adjust. Her sight isn’t as keen at night as it was during her apprenticeship. Her teacher had warned her—there were few young Sentinels then, and even fewer exist now.
I should have gone to Father Pereth to start with. The fate of her order, and of the Church of Ondir itself, hangs in the balance, and all she did was sleep for more than twelve hours. He’ll know what to do, and he’ll set things to rights.
Ondir hasn’t abandoned us.
***
The guards at the eastern gate recognize Isabel as a Sentinel and let her in. From there, it’s a quiet walk to the Temple District. The evening’s demonstrations are over, leaving a scattering of pamphlets like fallen leaves in their wake. Inked skulls stare up at Isabel from beneath her feet, their baleful black eyes accusing. The Church of the Seven opposes the Resurrection Act! reads the message written in red underneath the drawing.
“Godlessness,” Geray mutters. “I tried to warn them, but did they listen? And now where has it led us?”
A middle-aged monk in a black robe gathers up the papers from where the wind has collected them against the temple steps. He stacks them into a neat pile, tapping the edges to align them.
The sound of Isabel’s boots on the pavement makes him look up. “Good evening, Sister,” he says. “Or good morning, I suppose. What are you doing out and about at this hour?”
Isabel takes off her hat and returns the monk’s respectful nod. “I need to see Father Pereth. It’s urgent.”
“He is within.” The monk won’t meet her eyes as he picks up his stack of pamphlets. “Many of our number were arrested tonight. The council no longer respects the authority of the Church.”
Geray’s smirk is especially insufferable. “I told you,” he says, redundantly.
Isabel has nothing to say, so she heads up the stairs and into the Temple of Ondir.
It is only when Geray follows her over the threshold that she realizes she has been holding onto the faint hope that the wards here are still working. His ghostly footsteps don’t even stutter.
She tries to ignore the wave of despair washing over her. It’s not necessarily a sign that all Ondir’s power has broken—perhaps the tether, something Isabel hasn’t even read about in all her years of training, also protects a ghost from the magic meant to keep out the undead. As far as ghosts go, Geray is an unusually well-behaved one, at least for the moment. She can deal with him later. He eyes the carved skeletons, and his smug look falters.
The dome is a humble one, especially when compared to those of the grander temples of Alcos and Isra, but it swallows up Pereth’s whispery voice. Isabel makes her way around the gathering of black-robed priests.
“Go now and rest, my brothers,” Pereth’s speech concludes. “We have a long fight ahead of us.”
The monks disperse in a flutter of cloth, leaving Isabel alone with the high priest at the center of the dome. Geray glowers beside her shoulder.
Father Pereth can’t see him. He nods to Isabel and turns away, moving toward the high altar.
“I need to speak with you,” Isabel says. The dome catches her voice and echoes it back to her. Quietly, she adds, “It’s important.”
Pereth turns to her. “I am glad to see you well, Sentinel Rainier. I trust you’ve made some progress on the matter you brought to me earlier?”
Geray’s sharp bark of laughter doesn’t echo.
“I have,” Isabel cuts in before the ghost can say anything. “But there’s something else. Brother Risoven is in danger.”
“We are all in danger,” Father Pereth intones.
“I know. This is…more immediate. There is a ghost in the chapel on the blue field, and I can’t put it down. Constables from the Shell District arrested Brother Risoven, and I fear they are also at risk from the haunting. I need your help.”
The high priest’s dark brows furrow over his strange, pale eyes. “What do you mean, you can’t put it down?” He takes a step closer, his vestment trailing on the stone floor. “If there is a haunting, it is your duty to dispel it. What are you doing here?”
“I can’t,” Isabel says. Her eyes burn, and she swallows the catch in her throat. “Something is wrong. It has been since the house.”
“Come with me.” With a sweep of black silk, Pereth crosses the space beneath the dome and leads her to his office in the northern wing.
Facing the door is a wall of books, some leather-bound with titles inked in gold and silver, and others rolled into translucent scrolls. Pereth sits down behind a desk of lacquered dark wood. An inkwell, a quill in an iron stand, and a sheaf of clean, white paper lie on its surface between him and Isabel.
She takes the straight-backed chair across from him and places her hat in her lap. “I wouldn’t have left if it wasn’t urgent.”
Geray passes through the desk to examine the titles on the shelf. His passage doesn’t even stir the loose paper.
“Explain,” is all Pereth says.
So she does: from the ghosts trapped inside Geray’s house, and the nexus of magical threads she consumed in order to break it and free the spirits, to the absence of the gate as the house collapsed. She tells him of the poacher, Reder Angrove, and the constables that followed him to the chapel on the blue field, and how Reder responded to the sound of the bell but would not follow her commands.
She does not mention that Geray’s ghost is here in the room with them, nor anything of the tether that keeps him with her. That’s a problem for later, she tells herself again. If I can find the gate again, I won’t need anything but my bell to get rid of him.
Pereth rests his hands on the tabletop, fixing Isabel with an unblinking, ice-blue stare. His long, skeletal fingers tap out a slow rhythm. “You are telling the truth,” he says. It isn’t exactly a question.
Isabel would never lie, not to a high priest of Ondir. “On my word as a Sentinel,” she says, returning his gaze.
“By the sound of it,” Pereth says, breaking eye contact, “you aren’t a Sentinel anymore.”
It’s like a musket shot to the abdomen. The room disappears, Isabel’s focus constricting to the stopper on the inkwell. “I—” She swallows, takes a breath, tries again. “I still have my training. I’m trying to correct what went wrong. I’m sure that if I can just—”
He holds up a hand to silence her. “The answer is obvious, isn’t it?”
Isabel can only shake her head.
“When you interacted with the necromantic ritual in the house, even if your intentions were just, you committed the sin of necromancy.” Pereth’s fingers interlace, and he looks at her with something that might be pity and might be disgust. “Ondir has withdrawn his favor from you. His rites must never be used to harm a soul.”
“I didn’t harm anyone.” Her voice sounds high and thin, like a child’s. She can feel the sickening lurch of the ghosts pulling against her grasp, in that horrible split second before she let them go. “And Risoven couldn’t quiet him either.”
“Risoven is well advanced in years. Perhaps it is time his position is filled by another.” Father Pereth stands. “Pray, Miss Rainier, and repent, and perhaps your link to Ondir may be restored. I will send to Vernay for another Sentinel.”
Thanks for reading! We’ll get back to Berend and his problems next chapter, and then it’s on to figuring out what actually happened under Arden Geray’s house.
Support your local bisexual cryptid this Pride month! I have a Patreon and a Ko-fi, and if you haven’t bought my book yet (or even if you have, I won’t tell anyone), all the links you need are right here.
I appreciate you!
Space Whales Press 
2 thoughts on “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Two, Chapter Seven”