Circles
Father Pereth is, in fact, still alive. The novice with the smudged face escorts Isabel through the sanctum, where the priests in prayer don’t look up to acknowledge her, and down the narrow hallway to the high priest’s office. The door is closed, and someone has carved the sigils of the seven gods into the wood with a pocketknife, in an attempt to ward the room against the dead, should they have breached the outer doors. There had only been one body in the morgue, and the rest seem to have been repelled by other means. It’s fortunate that this warding wasn’t put to the test. Isabel doesn’t know what might have happened.
The novice knocks, and the sound of furniture being moved and the lock disengaging follows. The door swings open to reveal Father Pereth, his cassock dusty and his hair disheveled, but otherwise unhurt.
He takes one look at Isabel and says, “You.”
The novice bows and scurries off, leaving Isabel alone. “I’m…I’m glad to see you well,” she offers. There is absolutely no chance that he’s forgotten her punishment and subsequent disobedience in the chaos that followed, but maybe his experience has put him in a more forgiving mood.
He gives her a flat look. The window behind him has been boarded up, and the flickering candlelight from his deck puts the hollows under his eyes into deep shadow. Isabel slept sometime in the last twenty-four hours, she’s pretty sure, but Pereth hasn’t.
“What do you want, Miss Rainier?”
Miss Rainier. Not Sentinel. She should have expected it, but it stings. “Could I speak to you in private?” she asks.
Pereth’s eyes narrow, and he opens the door a little wider. “You may speak to me now.” He’s not inviting her in.
His office is empty. The desk has been pushed up closer to the door, hollowing out the room. Isabel had thought, based on the sigils, that there would be more people hiding here, away from the main doors and with a long hall and a sanctum full of monks between them and the threats outside.
“Have you seen into the other world?” she asks. “Recently?”
“No. I’ve been preoccupied with other concerns, as you might expect.”
Of course he has—though Isabel can’t help but think that there must have been an hour or so, at least, where he was barricaded in his office alone while others held the doors and negotiated with the city watch. “Will you look now? I don’t think I can explain.”
“You’re not in any position to be making demands of me, Miss Rainier,” Pereth says.
“I know. And I know I haven’t earned your goodwill over the past couple of days, but I need to show you what’s happening here. The gods are dying.”
Pereth’s bloodless mouth draws itself into a tighter, paler line. “Heresy,” is all he says. He reaches for the door.
“I know,” Isabel says again. She takes a step forward, placing one of her battered boots into the door frame to prevent it from closing. “I wouldn’t dare say anything if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Ondir has been gone for days now—that’s why the dead were walking and we couldn’t put them down. And now Galaser—”
“You will not speak like this in the house of the divine,” Pereth says, and his voice echoes down the corridor. So much for privacy.
Isabel holds her hands up uselessly, as though to defend from an incoming blow. “I understand how it sounds,” she says through her teeth, whispering to encourage Pereth to keep his voice down. She’s having a hard enough time with one priest; she doesn’t want half a dozen more coming to investigate. “Please, Father. I was trained in Vernay. My teacher was Sentinel Corday. You know I’ve been faithful to Ondir my entire life.” And where has that gotten you? a voice in the back of her head sneers.
It sounds like Geray. She hasn’t seen him since she woke up. Good riddance, she thinks, but the question of what happened to him looms large. Geray was a fanatic, but he was also the most arrogant man Isabel had ever had the misfortune of meeting, living or dead. Would he have sacrificed himself willingly?
And how willing, really, were the ghosts that followed you into the wall?
“You’re mad,” Pereth says, quiet and cold. “It happens to all Sentinels, in the end. That’s why the Inquisition happened, all those centuries ago. Madness, seeing necromancers around every corner, and a lack of faith in the gods. They thought they had to enforce Ondir’s will themselves. Did they teach you that in Vernay?”
This isn’t working. She’d thought, after everything, that he’d finally be willing to listen. “You’re the high priest of the third-largest temple on the continent,” Isabel says. “You couldn’t quiet the dead, could you? If anyone in the city had Ondir’s favor, it would be you, and the angry ghosts paid no more attention to you than they did the rest of us.”
Pereth’s icy glare, accentuated by his strange, pale eyes, confirms what Isabel already knows. He’s just as powerless as she is.
“Ondir is gone,” Isabel continues. “I need your help. This city—the world needs your help. And I’m not asking you to believe me. I’m just asking you to look.”
She can’t hold his gaze anymore. Like most priests of Ondir, and a good number of Sentinels, he’s perfected the art of staring directly into one’s soul, and his pale complexion and paler eyes don’t help. She’d almost rather stare down the thing beyond the wall—almost, but not quite. The sense of being weighed and measured is just slightly preferable to the multifaceted gaze of incomprehensible hunger.
“Will it work?” Pereth asks. “Nothing else has worked.”
“It worked for Risoven and me, but that was hours ago. Things are changing fast.” She considers mentioning the vertical landscape, but he’ll see it soon enough. It’s hard to miss.
Pereth opens the door wide enough to allow her in. “Come inside. Draw your circles. We will see.”
He shuts it behind her and turns the lock, but he doesn’t move the desk again. That particular danger has passed—or at least, Isabel thinks so. She doesn’t know for certain if the world will be here in the next few hours, much less if the dead will get up again.
Isabel finds a soft lump of chalk in her pocket. It’s Risoven’s. She closes her fingers around it, and it leaves a gritty white shadow on her palm. There’s just enough to complete the ritual.
She gets down on her hands and knees, feeling cold stone through her thin trousers. Pereth watches her as she draws, standing by the door with his arms crossed, saying nothing. She’s put in mind of her teacher, looking down from atop a desk or a chair, nudging her with a broom and scolding her when her circles weren’t perfect. She feels very small.
Leaving one’s body to enter the nether world used to be something Isabel didn’t do lightly. A few days ago—it feels like years and years—she’d have been surprised and offended that Father Pereth expected her to do in a few minutes what should have taken hours if not days to complete safely. But the veil is thin now, and they don’t have time for safety.
Pereth steps into her circle, and she joins it closed with Ondir’s sigil, grinding the last of the chalk into the stone with her thumb. She meets Pereth in the center, and places her hand into the center of the diagram.
Her ears pop, and the already quiet temple goes a little bit quieter. The candles sputter.
Nothing happens.
Pereth raises one brow. He doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t have to. His thoughts are perfectly clear.
“I did this a few hours ago,” Isabel says. That isn’t quite true; with Risoven’s help, she had done the ritual to call up a spirit, and it had shunted them both into the nether world anyway. The magic she’s done since her apprenticeship is failing her, one ritual after another.
She has to do something. She has to make him see, or everything she has done and will do to try to hold the world together will mean nothing. She can’t do this alone.
The stone floor of Pereth’s office shimmers and turns red. From the chalk circle, bubbles form and bloom into scarlet fungus, bursting into shimmering spores and drying up in the space of a few seconds, leaving behind a familiar dried-blood stain. Isabel puts a sleeve over her mouth and nose. There’s no telling what might happen if she breathes the stuff in.
Father Pereth’s eyes have gone wide, and he’s turned a shade paler. He looks around at the ritual diagram, now bloody red instead of white, disgust and horror on his face.
He looks up, lifting his eyes from the floor to a point over Isabel’s shoulder. She’s afraid to turn around. She has to do it anyway.
The wall of Pereth’s office is gone, turned to thin gray mist. Only the bookshelves remain, standing unsupported like the lone remaining wall in a burned-out house, fog breathing in and out between them.
Beyond them, where the temple’s vast cemetery should be if Isabel has her directions right, is a wall of bones: femurs laid end to end, spines anchored like fence posts in the ground, skulls and broken ribs filling in the gaps. Isabel recoils, instinctive panic at the sight of so many unsecured, unsanctified remains overwhelming her. She stops herself before she backs away and disturbs her circle.
The bones are still and quiet. Light flickers around them, tongues of flame licking the gaps and over the top of the wall. As Isabel watches, familiar waving tendrils form out of the fire. The thing beyond the wall is here. Is it following her? Distance means little in the world beyond, but she can’t see the stone wall made of the souls of gods and mortals alike. As far as she can tell, she’s in a different location. She’s never seen a wall of bones before.
She gets to her feet. The soles of her boots scrape against the solid stone floor, and there’s chalk dust between her fingers, making them itch.
Isabel isn’t in the nether world. She’s still in her body.
The nether world has come to her, and with it has come the thing beyond the wall.
It shouldn’t be possible—but how many times has she said that over the past few days? What’s possible has very little bearing on what is anymore. She has to undo it.
Isabel scuffs at the red crust on the floor with her boots, trying to erase her circle, to force the ritual to end. She leaves filthy, scabby footprints behind as she moves around the diagram.
The floor gets dirtier, but nothing else changes. Tendrils lap at the bones, mist curls around the bookshelves, and the temple remains open to a landscape that isn’t quite physical and isn’t quite the nether.
Pereth stands up. “Get out,” he says.
“Look, there.” Isabel points to the bones and the thing held back beyond them. “I’ve seen it before. The gods are dying to keep it back.”
“Get out.” He’s staring at the scene that has materialized in his office, not looking at her.
He’s also standing between her and the door. She moves to go around him, but he shakes his head and points to the misty landscape. “Leave this temple at once. You will not be permitted to return.”
“But I need your help,” she says.
Finally, Pereth looks her in the eyes. “And I need to maintain order. You are a direct threat to the sanctity of this temple and the safety of the people here. I won’t ask you again.”
It’s no use. Even with the unraveling world split open before him, Pereth places the blame once again on Isabel.
She leaves the remains of her circle, going around the bookshelves and stepping off the edge of the temple floor and into the shroud of mist.
The ground is soft beneath her feet, like mud and grass. She can feel the hard, unseen shapes of loose bones sinking down as she puts her weight on them. Behind her, the temple recedes, and before her the wall of bone looms stark and white, stretching from the blood-red western horizon to the place where the forest rises from the east.
Things are looking grim for our heroes. Tune in next time to check in on Berend, who is having only a slightly better day. Thanks for reading!
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