Faithful
Isabel’s feet hit the ground, sending a shock from her heels into her knees and all the way to the joints of her hips. The palms of her hands burn as she removes them from the coarse linen sheet and exposes them to the air. A pair of raw patches marks each one, livid red where the skin has peeled away.
She looks back up toward the window. She could have fallen much, much farther. The improvised rope drifts in the afternoon breeze, its end brushing against the street. Berend’s face is framed in cut stone before he moves away from the window and disappears.
From outside, the hospital is shrouded in a heavy, eerie silence. The front door between its columns is shut, standing still as though it’s only closed up for the night.
“Well?” Geray asks at her shoulder. “Hurry up. The priests you were so eager to find are still on their way.”
A dull ache thrums against Isabel’s eyes from the back, more of a warning of the pain that will come when she slows down than actual pain. The street is as empty as it looked from the window, but now she can hear shouting in the distance. The hesitant, muffled toll of a church bell sounds out, followed by a stronger note, and then another. Only echoes reach across the city after that.
“The Temple District,” she says, more to herself than Geray.
He answers anyway. “Yes, things seem to be getting more and more interesting over there. I couldn’t see it, as you were still inside. Will you—”
Glass shatters, interrupting whatever request he was about to make. A bloody fist emerges from a ground-floor window, the sleeve of its white uniform ragged and stained red. Three more arms, too damaged to identify, grasp at the broken glass, tearing it away from the window frame. The body of a young woman, blonde hair sticky with drying blood, lifts itself over the casement and falls in a heap below the window, tearing a gash through its nurse’s apron and into its flesh.
Isabel turns and runs toward the temple district. Her chest aches as she forces her exhausted muscles to carry her away from the hospital and the angry dead. They won’t follow her until they’ve finished bashing themselves against the windows and doors, but it won’t take long.
Where is the watch?
The obvious answer is in the Temple District—where they had posted up to contain the protests, and where the greatest concentration of lifeless bodies and inconsolable ghosts would be—but she’d expect at least a few to be monitoring the gates and the major roads. And where is everyone else?
She passes shuttered windows and closed doors as she runs through the university’s housing district and into the city center, and she hopes the occupants are safe inside. She’s never seen the city this empty, of both the living and the dead, even at night. Only the murmur of distant voices suggests that there are any people here at all. Under the clear autumn sky, it feels like a strange dream, one she’d forget upon waking but would leave her with a sense of isolation well into the next day.
The sound of a musket shot shatters the dream. Isabel turns the next corner and comes to a skidding stop before she runs face-first into an abandoned carriage. She takes a few cautious steps around the obstacle and into the street. City center is strewn with broken wooden barricades, their splintered ends reaching up like the arms of drowning men. A faint smell of rot and gunpowder hovers in the air.
Movement catches Isabel’s eye. At the end of the street, a lone figure dressed in black approaches, picking its way around the debris. A pair of thick glass lenses catches the sunlight with a tiny flash.
“Brother Risoven?” Isabel calls out.
His head comes up, and he extends a hand in a tentative wave. “Sister? Where have you been?”
Something like a clear path lies at the center of the street, but Isabel can feel wood chips under her boots. A discarded rifle lies in the left-hand gutter, beneath a darkened shop window. The barrel has been bent in half.
Risoven reaches out as she comes near, and she takes both his hands. “I’ve just come from the university hospital,” she says. “They need help there. Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
He doesn’t look hurt, though his steps might be a little slower than usual. “I’m only a little shaken. They sent me with Father Reeves, but he—” He looks back over his shoulder. “The watch took him to help hold the barricade a few blocks back. I don’t know what’s become of him.”
A volley of gunfire, several streets away, cracks the air. A faint cloud of gray-brown smoke drifts into the sky.
“The Temple District is overrun,” Risoven continues. “It was just like the chapel. All the dead, even the bones in their graves. Father Pereth moved everyone to a safe house—everyone who was left—and they’re trying another ritual to put them down. I don’t think it will work.”
It won’t, and Isabel doesn’t know how many times Father Pereth will try before he admits it. “We need to try something else,” she says.
Behind his magnifying lenses, Risoven’s eyes are red-rimmed and watery. “What else can we do?”
“I can still see into the nether world.” At least, she’s reasonably certain that hasn’t changed in the past day and a half, but she doesn’t mention it to Risoven. She also doesn’t mention that it won’t be pleasant. “Maybe we can figure something out.”
Risoven’s face falls. If he was hoping for a better plan, Isabel can’t give him one. “We have to try something,” she adds.
He nods and looks back again the way he came. “It won’t be safe here for long.”
The watch’s muskets report again. There are fewer of them than the last volley.
“Help me try these doors,” Isabel says.
The shops are all locked, and no one answers their knocks. Either the occupants have sheltered somewhere else, or they’re quite wisely not answering the door. The dead are clumsy, but Isabel was warned many times during her training not to mistake the smashing of their fists against the lintels for a friendlier caller. Having heard them try to batter down the doors in the hospital, she wonders how anyone could make that error.
She’d rather not do this out in the street, but she doesn’t have much choice. They’ll have to work fast. She drags two partial barricades toward the gutters and clears a place in the center of the road.
“How long do you think this will take?” asks Geray. He’s difficult to see in the bright light, but alas, not difficult to hear, even with the city guards shouting orders and encouragement a short distance away.
Isabel sighs. “I don’t know.”
“If it’s more than a couple of minutes, I’m afraid it won’t be happening. The barricade at the edge of the district has failed. The watch is retreating.”
At the end of the street, where Risoven was standing just a few minutes ago, a figure staggers around the corner. Its clothes are rags, filthy with grave dust, and one of its eyes is a hollow socket. Yellowed bones show through both bare forearms.
It is very dead, and it isn’t alone. Two more follow it, one wearing the remnants of a watchman’s uniform, its sleeves and arms both torn off, and another a dirty gown it might have been buried in, with layers of tattered black silk dragging behind it. The first bumps into a wooden stand still blocking the road and tears into it with both hands, fingers of bone ripping out splinters and tossing them aside.
Isabel looks around. She can run, but Risoven can’t, and there are more dead coming from the hospital and gods know where else. Three more bodies wander around the corner—one was a priest of Alcos in a red robe, and the others decayed for a week or more before they rose up again. Death, as always, makes everyone equal.
They set upon the remnants of the barricade and the nearest shop fronts, gouging holes into the wood and scraping their hands to the bone on stone walls. The only sound is the scratch of their mindless destruction and the irregular, dusty gasps of their breathing.
The empty carriage at the corner might provide some shelter. The dead will tear its wheels off sooner or later, but it’s tall enough that they can’t quite reach the top from the ground. Isabel takes Brother Risoven by the sleeve and runs to it.
“Up here,” she says. “We’ll be safe for a while.”
Risoven puts his hands on the wheel. “They’ll surround us.”
“We’ll have to work quickly. Here, use my shoulder.”
She has to lift him bodily; it’s lucky he’s as light as the bird he resembles. He gets his feet into the spokes of the wheel and steps up onto its rim.
“Not to alarm you, Sentinel, but you could move a little faster,” says Geray.
The dead at the end of the street now number a dozen, and they move closer, their decaying hands reaching out for more things to destroy. One is missing a leg below the knee from what looks like a musket shot. It crawls on its ragged stump, its fingers digging into the gaps between the cobbles and trying to rip them out.
Risoven puts one foot into the carriage window and the other on Isabel’s shoulder and pushes himself halfway onto the roof. His legs dangle in the air until Isabel climbs up beside him and pulls him up the rest of the way.
She tucks her legs underneath her and removes the bell and candle from her pockets. “Do you have any chalk?” she asks.
Risoven presses a crumbling white lump into her hand. She presses it into the carriage roof and draws a wide, dusty circle onto the black lacquer. In equal intervals, she draws sigils for each of the gods: for Alcos and Isra, for Numit and Galaser, for Mella and Aleta, and for Ondir, should he be somewhere out there paying attention.
The old monk kneels beside her, lighting the candle with a flint from his sleeve. He came prepared. “What do we pray?” he asks. “There are so many dead, so many spirits.”
Isabel takes both his hands. Below them, the awakened corpses lurch closer. “We have rites for times like this,” she says.
“But Ondir has left us,” Risoven says. “The dead will not listen.”
“Some of them might. How many did you lose at the temple? Before Father Pereth took everyone out?”
His shoulders shake, and he squeezes his eyes shut. “I’m not sure. Ten or twelve, maybe.”
“Then we’ll ask them to help.” If anyone would be faithful even after death, it would be a priest of the god of the dead. Isabel takes a breath.
The dead woman in the funeral gown reaches the carriage and takes the nearest wheel in both hands.
“In the name of Isra, mother of creation, and of Alcos, king and father,” Isabel chants, “and of Ondir, lord of the gates.”
The carriage shakes, and the candle gutters. With a slam, the armless city guard collides with the door headfirst. More dead pour into the street.
“I call the names of Father Arryn and Brother Tilmund, of Brother Atris and Brother Sarnier,” says Risoven. “And of Father Reeves, if he did not escape, and all the faithful of Ondir.”
As predicted, the dead continue their slow, inexorable advance, heedless of the ritual or anything else but their singleminded drive to destroy. Also as predicted, Isabel can no longer see them. She sits atop a black carriage in a field of impenetrable fog, jostled back and forth as it trundles over uneven terrain under its own power. As the carriage moves towards its unknown destination, the fog becomes a sea of human figures.
Beyond them stands a wall of piled stone, ancient and crumbling. In the gaps between rocks, shining eyes stare out like jewels set into a crown. They see Isabel and her carriage and turn to her as one being, pupils widening like a snake that has spotted its prey.
Transitioning from Zombies to General Weirdness this chapter. Thanks for reading! Also, if you enjoy The Book of the New Moon Door, stop by again tomorrow for an Official Reader Poll.
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