Fracture
Berend stands under a sky filled with blinking, staring eyes, surrounded on all sides by the restless dead. A red star shoots overhead like a firework, disappearing below a distant horizon in a blaze of ruby light. The world shakes with a terrible shriek, and Berend falls into it, the sound tearing him apart from within, his vision turning black at the edges and a burning pain spreading from his heart to his fingertips.
Then a hand wraps around his and pulls him out. He gasps and splutters, though he hasn’t been submerged in water. The pain subsides to a cluster of pinpricks at the ends of each of his fingers and toes.
He has no chance to acclimate himself to the real world. Isabel is tugging on his hand, half-dragging him across the fallow garden and toward the road. Something hard knocks against his shin. He’s still carrying the lantern, his other hand clenched around it like a dead man’s. The shock puts out its tiny flame.
Even with his eyes adjusted, the night is all but black. His feet find a dry root his eyes don’t see, and he stumbles, pulling hard on Isabel’s arm. The lantern hits the ground with a clash of metal and the crack of one of its glass panes.
Isabel yanks him to his feet. “Come on,” she says.
“Hold on.” Berend’s ears are still ringing, and his feet are clumsy, moving a second behind his commands, and he can’t see a damn thing.
“There’s no time.” Her voice is high, panicky, and her hand is cold and slick with sweat where it touches him.
Berend stands up and steps over the root. “Where are we going?” he asks. “What about Bessa? Did you see her?”
He can just make out the brim of Isabel’s hat as she pulls on his hand again. “Back to the city. Back to the temple. It might not be safe, but it’s the best we can do right now.” She speaks too quickly, her words stumbling into one another. It takes Berend a few seconds before he can understand what she says.
“Safe from what? The ghosts?” They didn’t seem interested in him, when he was in the other place, but there were so many of them. And then there were the eyes. With no other features, they didn’t exactly glower at him, but he can still feel their looming malevolence.
With a start, he remembers who else was there in the other place. “Where’s Geray?”
Isabel’s grip slackens. “He’s here.”
Berend looks around. There’s nothing but the stars and the dark shapes of the Belisia house and the hill behind it. “Where is he?”
“He’s dead. He can’t hurt anyone now. We have much bigger things to worry about.”
“Like what?” If he has to, Berend will kill Arden Geray a second time. There’s probably someone in the Church of Ondir who knows how. That man should not be allowed to walk the earth, even as a ghost.
Isabel pulls on his hand again. “I’ll explain everything on the way, all right? We shouldn’t be out in the open.”
His heels sink into the soft ground. The wind feels like the press of a ghostly crowd, cold and lifeless. At least his head is clearing. He came here for a particular ghost, and if he doesn’t find her, the man who killed her is going to do the same to him. “Tell me if you saw Bessa Kyne, first.”
“Yes,” Isabel says, “I saw her. She was–she was like Mikhail. She was only there for a moment.”
“Then it’s Warder’s device.” Berend can’t tell if he feels relieved. At least he knows, and he knows where Warder is now. There’s a chance he can still fix this, and do right by Mikhail and Bessa and everyone else whose ghost was tortured by the infernal thing. He remembers watching Warder turn the crank, bringing the machine to life, and doing nothing. His stomach turns. He’s never had any pretensions of being a good man, but he’s always tried not to be an evil one. After so many years since the Sons of Galaser, he thought he’d grown proficient at judging his clients before accepting their contracts, but here he is.
Isabel drops his hand. Without that point of contact, he has only the vaguest idea where she is. “I think so,” she says. “There’s nothing more we can do for her here.”
He holds out the lantern in her direction. “We’ll need light.”
The lantern creaks open, and Isabel strikes a match. Shaky yellow light spills out over them both and onto the ground. She closes the latch and puts her fingers, briefly, against the crack in the glass.
When she lifts the light up to eye level, the circle of illumination spreads out. As if in answer, the sky glows suddenly red. Like a candle being lit, it coalesces into a single point: a ruby star that dives across the night sky and burns out somewhere far beyond the manor.
Berend rubs at his eyes. The shape of a comet, its tail trailing behind it, floats in the center of his vision, covering Isabel’s face. “Did you see that?” he asks.
He blinks again, and he can see Isabel nod.
“I saw it before,” he says, “in the other place. Good to know I’m not going mad.”
Isabel’s face is grim. A line forms between her eyebrows, and her lips have gone pale. “The boundary between our world and the nether world is disintegrating. That’s why we have to get back to the city.” She turns and walks up to the hill in the direction of the road.
Berend peers into the darkness. The bright spot in his vision fades, but he can’t see any more light from where the star disappeared. There’s no fire. One possible disaster has been avoided tonight, and Berend is grateful. He imagines that he won’t have many more blessings to count tonight. He follows Isabel up the hill.
The city is a distant cluster of lights, like fireflies at rest. At the pace Isabel sets, they’ll be there well before dawn. She glances over her shoulder with every few steps, looking past Berend and toward where the red star fell, behind the Belisias’ accursed manor. The sound of the unquiet dead in the barricaded mausoleum follows Berend as he walks.
“What was that?” he asks.
Isabel’s grip on the lantern turns her knuckles white, as though it’s the only thing anchoring her to the world. “I don’t know.”
“It hurt, whatever it was,” says Berend. “Something was screaming.” He can still hear it, like a ringing in his ears after a cannon has gone off nearby. He shuts his eyes, just for a second, and he can see the press of ghosts again. If he ever gets to bed again, he’s going to have a hard time sleeping.
Isabel says nothing.
“You said you’d explain.” Berend quickens his steps to come up beside her. “So, explain. Why is Arden Geray here? Why are there so many ghosts?”
She stops, staring into the wide expanse of darkness between her and Mondirra. “Because the god of the dead is gone,” she says, “and the dead have nowhere to go.”
It’s a simple enough statement, in a language Berend understands, but it might as well be nonsense. She might as well have declared that there was no such thing as death as of this morning, or that the sun had changed directions.
“What do you mean?” he asks. It sounds like a stupid question, even to himself, but he’s so far out of his depth that he can’t even see it. His depth bade him a fond farewell weeks ago, and hasn’t been heard from since.
Isabel gives an exhausted sigh and starts her determined pace toward the city again. “A god isn’t just a powerful being who offers blessings in exchange for prayers,” she says. “A god is an idea, a place, the sum total of everything that makes up their dominion in this world and the next.”
Religious instruction wasn’t exactly a priority in Berend’s upbringing, but sure, that sounds familiar. It’s not as though the Sons of Galaser ever believed they were literally begotten by the god of war. “All right. What makes you think Ondir isn’t gone? And where would he go? Can the gods just…leave?”
That’s a disturbing thought. He’s not a praying man, not since the last time he was under artillery fire, but he’s always known the gods were there. A Sentinel or a healer of the church of Isra wouldn’t have a job otherwise.
“It’s not just you, is it?” he says. “All the Sentinels, all the priests of Ondir, you can’t do your magic. That’s why you think he’s gone.”
Isabel chews on her bottom lip in a way that makes her look much younger than Berend knows she is. She glances up, and there’s fear in her eyes. “Neither Risoven nor I could quiet the ghost in the chapel.”
“Well,” says Berend, in a foolhardy attempt to lighten the mood, “at least you know it’s not just you.”
She takes a shaky breath. “I wish it were.”
You’re not helping, Horst. His hands find his weapons, and their weight provides a little comfort. Berend isn’t afraid, but he thinks he should be, that his ignorance is the only thing keeping him from blind panic and once he figures out what in the hells is going on, he won’t be able to do anything else but panic. He asks his next question anyway. “So where does a god go, when he’s not here?”
“I don’t know,” Isabel says. “Ondir has never not been here. There has always been a gate, and a lord to keep it–they’re really the same, according to the old church scholars–but now they’re both gone.”
Berend looks behind, where the Belisia house has faded into the darkness, and the stars gaze down upon the road with quiet certainty. If not for the fact that he’s out here in the middle of the night, he would think that everything was perfectly normal. It’s cold enough to tell that autumn is a week away, but warm enough to know that it hasn’t come early. All the soldiers of this country and its neighbors will come home, the harvest will occur on time, and bandits will return to their hovels, starting Berend’s lean season off right on schedule. All is as it should be.
“They won’t believe you, you know,” he says. “Not unless they can do that trick and go to the other place, I guess. Is that something people can do, normally?”
As he speaks, Isabel comes to a stop again, and she covers her face with her free hand. “I know. Father Pereth didn’t believe me before, and now? I’m an apostate, Ondir has abandoned me, and everything I say might as well be heresy.” Her voice cracks on the last word, breaking into a desperate, fearful squeak. Her breath comes in a rapid staccato.
Now Berend is afraid. He’s relied on this dour Sentinel to plan ahead for him for how long, now? He can’t think of a time when she showed any distress, other than mild annoyance at his antics. If she falls apart, he’s going to have to figure this out, and he is woefully unprepared. It’s been decades since he’s cracked open a holy text. He can’t do this on his own.
He stands in front of her and takes her wrist, bringing the lantern toward him, and then gently pulls her other hand down. “It’ll be all right,” he says, and he’s not sure if he’s trying to convince Isabel or himself. “Bad things have happened before, and the world is still here. There’s still a church, and a city, and all the people in them, living their lives from day to day just like they’ve always done. It won’t be any different this time, right?”
Hi there. Thanks for reading! I’m about to enter into a brief, unplanned hiatus: we paid to have an unhealthy tree removed from our yard on Monday, and in doing so, the arborists trampled, drove over, and dropped huge logs from a significant height on about 2/3 of our garden and then raked it up. Almost all my herbs and vegetables are gone right before they could be harvested. Dealing with the damage has taken up a lot of my writing time and brain space, so the episode of The Well Below the Valley that was to be posted October 1 has been put off until the following month, and there won’t be a new chapter up on Patreon next week. I should be back on my regular schedule the following week, and the event on October 2 and the release of the first chapter of The Tarot of the Gates will proceed as planned. Thank you so much for your patience.
Space Whales Press 
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