Impossible
One by one, the dead fall still and drop to the tiled floor. Silence falls over the hospital wing.
Berend stands on legs shaky with exhaustion, adrenaline the only thing keeping him upright, his empty pistol gripped in one hand as stiff as a corpse’s. A slow fire that reeks of disinfectant and rotting flesh eats at what’s left of his barricade.
Is it over?
He breathes in smoke and foul miasma three times before he can think to cover his face with one arm. His eyes ache, and he’s sure he can feel particles of dead flesh settling in them. Does he have to worry about an infection? He hadn’t thought he would live long enough for it to be a problem. With deliberate effort, he avoids rubbing at his eyes.
Three bodies lie strewn across the broken bedframes that had been pushed against the door, dislocated shoulders and broken limbs sticking out at painful angles. They’ve spread the fire to the remains of the bed linens, the door with its broken latch and splintered boards, and their erstwhile companions, lying in the stairwell and reeking of embalming fluid. They look like a whole traveling circus’s supply of marionettes had suddenly been cut from their strings to drop in a pile on the stage floor. The longer Berend looks at them, the harder it is for him to believe that they were just now animate and after his flesh. With the angry spirits gone, they’re dead as dead again.
“She did it,” he says aloud. “Gods love you, you crazy death cultist. You did it.”
Berend isn’t even going to think about how. That’s Isabel’s problem to deal with, and deal with it she did, with or without Ondir. She saved his life, and the lives of everyone else still breathing in the city. He’s not going to question it.
The crackle of the fire breaks the corridor’s silence. He’s not saved quite yet.
Pain shoots through his fingers as he uncurls them from the barrel of the gun and sets it down, carefully, by the wall and out of the way. He expects his back and his legs will hurt later, when he has time to think about them. Depending on how long he manages to stay alive after this, he’ll be paying for his efforts today for weeks, if not months.
I should retire, he tells himself, not for the first time. Take a ship to someplace warm, find a nice job at a desk there, and hang my saber up on the wall.
He’d left said saber at Emryn Marner’s apartment, to better hide his identity from House Belisia. He’ll have to find a way to get back there without another hired murderer noticing. Or, if the gods are handing out favors, the Belisias and their hired men have all been torn limb from limb by the animated dead, and Berend can pick up his things and stroll unhindered down to Lady Breckenridge’s apartments and continue his very important task of recuperating in her feather bed.
Right. The fire. Without the immediate threat of the grasping hands and preternatural strength of dozens of walking corpses to keep him going, exhaustion is catching up to him. He’ll be useless before long.
Berend finds a sheet that’s more or less unburnt and spreads it out over the broken frames. Smoke curls up from underneath, stinging his eyes further, but the seething red embers at the ends of the boards and edges of the bedding go out. He throws another three blankets over the smoldering bodies in the stairwell. In the confined space, the smell of rot barely covered over with disinfectant is unbearable. He backs out, coughing and trying not to touch his burning eyes.
He’s sure he’s seen worse, that there have been days he’s been as tired and sore as he is now. He just can’t call an example to mind at the moment.
When he can see again, he remembers the nurses—Amalia and Margot, brave and resourceful as any who fought for the Sons of Galaser. They’re sitting against their own barricade at the end of the hall, their faces gray and their eyes staring. Only their upright posture distinguishes them from the dead, fallen mid-reach through the jagged hole battered through the door.
The nurses lift their heads as Berend approaches. Their starched white uniforms are streaked in yellow and gray; Margot has an entire handprint on her shoulder, and her skin shows blue and purple underneath where the cloth tore in the corpse’s grip.
“Is it over?” Amalia asks, echoing Berend’s earlier thought.
He takes a breath and lets it out in a rush. “I think so. At least for now.”
Margot gets to her feet, dragging herself up by the bed posts as if her body has become heavy as lead. “What happened?”
Berend doesn’t rightly know himself, but he’s got to tell them something. Both women look at him expectantly. “My friend’s a Sentinel,” he offers. “She figured it out.” He could tell them that Isabel’s status as a Sentinel is questionable, at best, between the loss of Ondir and the response of the high priest, but he decides that isn’t relevant. He’s told the truth, and the dead aren’t getting back up yet. That’s all anyone needs to know, including Berend. Especially Berend. His head already hurts from the unmentionable fumes.
“A Sentinel?” Margot asks. She blinks, and her face twists into an expression that might indicate confusion or a headache to rival Berend’s, maybe both. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
Amalia nudges her with an elbow. “He helped us,” she whispers. “It doesn’t matter.”
“But you had a gun,” Margot insists. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be here.”
“No, probably not,” Berend concedes. He’d come here under false pretenses, which might be a bigger worry than his pistol. A less scrupulous intruder—a Belisia hire, for instance—might have used the visit to do away with Lucian Warder rather than just asking some questions and lightly threatening him. “Listen, as soon as it’s safe, I’ll be on my way, and you can forget you ever saw me.”
“I should go home,” Amalia says. “My mother will be sick with worry.”
Margot favors Berend with one more second of her suspicious stare before breaking it off and putting an arm around Amalia’s shoulders. Amalia is still holding a pair of shears, her fist clenched below the handle as though it’s an armor-piercing dagger. Congealed blood and flecks of grayish flesh coat the blades and stick to her fingers. Right through a skull, Berend guesses. Good for her.
“Do you think people know what happened?” Margot asks. “People outside?”
Berend can only shrug. “I think outside had its own problems.” The watch didn’t come for them, and judging by the yawning, empty quiet coming from the hospital’s lower floors, they’re still not coming. The implications are more than Berend can comprehend at the moment, but they’re not good. Gods, he’s tired. The corpse-stained, broken bed against the door is starting to look comfortable.
Amalia’s face goes just a shade grayer. “I should go home,” she says again, and this time there’s a note of fear in her voice.
“I think we should stay here,” says Margot. “At least until we’re sure they’re all gone.”
“A Sentinel would take care of them, right? And the priests of Ondir—” Amalia trails off, leaving the thought unfinished. She’s young, but she works in a hospital. Sometimes the dead are restless. She’d have seen a Sentinel’s rituals before.
Berend opens his mouth to say something, to tell them the truth that no one associated with Ondir has been able to do a ritual for several days now, but he stops himself. He’ll ask Isabel later, when he catches up to her, and when they’ve both slept a full night and eaten a proper meal. Until then, he’s not going to think about it. The dead are quiet, and that’s all he needs to know.
Margot lets go of Amalia, straightens her stained apron, and squares her shoulders. “We’ve got patients to look after. We’ll start with this floor, and then we’ll work our way down, and then I’ll walk you home. All right?”
“All right,” Amalia echoes. Her grip on the shears loosens just a little as the pair of them walk to the first room.
Berend figures he’d might as well help, so he goes into Warder’s room. Everything is as he left it: the bed pushed toward the window, a length of knotted sheets stretching from the nearest post, and an indignant Warder still tucked in, surrounded by wrinkled and water-damaged diagrams.
“All clear, at least for the moment,” Berend announces with forced cheerfulness. “You’re welcome.”
Warder holds up his notebook. He’s prepared a message for this moment, written in block capitals: WHAT’S GOING ON??
“Where should I start?” Berend walks over to the bed and starts untying the knot securing the improvised rope to the frame. His fingers feel as though they’ve been run over by a carriage, and the weight of two people has pulled the knot tighter. “Had a bit of a walking corpse problem, held them off with some gunpowder and a barricade, but that’s all fine now, no thanks to you.”
Warder doesn’t have to write his response; he frowns and twists one bloodless lip into something between indignation at the accusation and disgust at Berend’s presence.
“I haven’t forgotten about you and Geray and that infernal device,” Berend continues, taking some small, perverse delight in how his pretended nonchalance further aggravates Warder. “I look forward to telling the high priest of Ondir all about you.” It’s mostly an empty threat—he has more pressing matters to attend to, like finding a safe place in this godsforsaken city to sleep. Maybe if he still has a smidgen of goodwill with the nurses, they’ll let him use one of the beds that wasn’t used to barricade the doors.
I told you, Warder scratches in the notebook. The device has nothing to do with all this.
As an afterthought, he adds, Your Sentinel agrees with me.
“Well, I still don’t agree. And I can’t say anything about the high priest either way.” The knot comes loose, and the weight of the other linens pulls it straight out the window. Berend stares at his empty hands until he can register what’s just happened. If the dead wake up again, he’ll be in real trouble.
IMPOSSIBLE, Warder writes, again in block capitals.
“I’ve been through six impossible things already this week,” Berend estimates. “I think I have room for a few more.”
LOOK OUT THE WINDOW.
“If you’re trying to distract me, you can do better,” says Berend, but he turns to look anyway, because Warder can barely hold his head up and because Berend doesn’t have the will to argue with him.
The carnage in the hallway notwithstanding, it’s a beautiful day. A pleasant breeze drifts in from the window, chasing out some of the smell of smoke and rot. The sun still shines upon the living and the dead, neither of which Berend can see in the street from his vantage point, but the light is dimmer, slanting downward at a diagonal as though it’s obstructed by something.
Berend lifts his eyes to the end of the street leading away from the hospital, and now he can see why: half a mile away, the ground suddenly curves upward at a right angle, blocking out the sky as far as Berend can stretch his neck to look. His window looks down upon a thick forest of old-growth pine, split down the middle by a winding river that appears to be flowing unaware of the fact that it’s perpendicular to the earth. To his left, Mondirra lies undisturbed, though unnaturally quiet; to his right, the university district has been split in half like a sheet of sea ice. The farther stretch, the row houses where the students live, sits some two stories higher than the rest, stretched out over the trees.
He steps back, vertigo making his head spin.
“Sixteen hells.“
Back to Part Two, Chapter Twenty-Six
We’re off to the weirdness races! According to my outline, Part Three will have twenty-seven chapters. Please stay tuned for updates! And, as always, thanks for reading.
Space Whales Press 
2 thoughts on “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter One”