Choices
“I’m sorry,” Isabel mutters, her eyes sliding from his face down to the mist-shrouded earth between her feet. “I’m glad you’re alive.”
It looks bad, Berend admits—a whole swathe of the city is gone, swallowed up in dense gray fog streaked bloody with the strange red sunlight. The sun should have set by now, he’s fairly certain, but the light lingers dim and cold over the wet landscape. He can just make out the sharp, flickering shapes of broken ghosts, gathered at the edge of what’s left of the cemetery. The solid, heavy shape of the Temple of Ondir stands firm and untouched at his back, but it doesn’t offer much reassurance. It doesn’t have Isabel in it. She’s out here, instead, which means she has already been inside. It’s the first place she would go—church folk are predictable like that, and Isabel is a particularly churchy sort of church folk. And she’s not still inside where it’s safe and dry and relatively warm, and where there are a few people nominally devoted to the safety of the city and the maintenance of the terribly abused order of the world, so something must have made her leave.
Whatever it was, it doesn’t bode well for Berend’s immediate future. As bad as things look, here at the edge of the familiar world, he’s sure they’re actually much worse.
“I’m glad you’re alive too,” he says. “And you put the dead back down. Good work, that.”
Isabel nods, her expression vacant. She’s not really listening.
Berend gestures at the ghosts, the fog, and the distant white shape snaking across what used to be the division between here and the Harbor District, as much to get her attention as it is to make a point. “So. When did this happen?”
“Not long. Fifteen, twenty minutes,” Isabel says.
“And the rest?” Berend asks. “The sun, and the shift in the University District, and that?” He points to where the forest looms overhead, its greenery turned black in the red light.
Absently, Isabel follows his arm with her eyes. “Since I woke up. Maybe an hour.”
He needs her to focus. “So, should I expect the sea to swallow us up in the next thirty minutes?”
“I don’t know.”
Berend swallows what he’s about to say next—an incoherent, frustrated tirade about how Isabel should know what’s going to happen, she’s the only one who can know, and what does she want from him?—and takes a steadying breath. “Right,” he begins. “Everything’s a mess. What can you tell me?”
Now she looks at him. “I should show you,” she says. “Come with me.”
He follows her into the mist. Moisture clings to his borrowed clothing and his skin, and he suppresses a shiver, tucking his hands under his arms. He misses his good cloak. Mud sucks at his boots, and he can smell rotting vegetation. After the hospital, he almost welcomes it.
The white shape grows larger as they approach, and after only a minute or two it towers above them, its blurry mass resolved into thousands upon thousands of bones—mostly human, as far as Berend can tell. At the level of his eyes sits a skull, staring at him with empty sockets. A pair of tibia form a low arch over its crown, bending under the weight of the bones above them.
In the spaces at the skull’s either side, where its ears might have been, a slitted, reptilian eye narrows as it catches sight of Berend.
He takes a startled step back. With this wider view, he can see more eyes, human and animal and others, unrecognizable, and a fringe of glowing tendrils poking at the gaps in the wall of bone and reaching over its distant upper edge.
His hands reach for his sword, but all he has is an empty pistol in his pocket. “That,” he says, but the rest of his thought is lost in the panic that rushes over him. He takes a breath of fog, cold and damp, and backs away another three steps. His pulse hammers at his ears, and he doesn’t feel any better the more he can see, but now he can think.
The eyes—he’s seen them before, but that was in the other world, where a tide of restless ghosts wandered aimless and lost without Ondir to guide them. Then, the eyes filled the sky like a hoard of spilled marbles, rolling about and staring at nothing. Berend had been a spirit then, his physical form standing in the remains of the Belisias’ garden.
Is he dead now? Did he leave his body behind in the real Mondirra, where the streets run east to west without entire landmasses to interrupt them? Is that why he can see the tormented ghosts, and this inchoate mass of eyes, and this wall of bones that he’s certain never existed in the city before? Are they all dead, Berend and Isabel and the nurses at the university hospital and the priests in the temple, and everyone else in the city?
“What happened?” he whispers.
Isabel comes up beside him, placing a hand on his elbow. Her fingers are cold as death, but solid—Berend can feel the coarse weave of his shirt pressing against his skin. He’s not dead; not yet.
“The veil is gone,” Isabel says. “The world is breaking apart. This barrier, and another like it, one made of stone, are all that’s keeping that thing from devouring everything that is. I saw Galaser die to fortify the barrier. I saw hundreds of souls follow him. I tried—” She stops and falls silent, her mouth pressing into a bloodless line.
Berend has questions—hundreds of them, maybe thousands, and if every one was answered to his satisfaction, he’s sure he still wouldn’t understand what’s happening here, and he doesn’t know where to start.
First: Galaser is gone. That hurts, more than Berend expected it would. He hasn’t honored the gods in years, and he never thought of Galaser as anything more than a symbol even when he fought in his name and under his banner, but it’s like he’s learned of the death of another old comrade.
Godspeed, old friend, he says silently, fully aware of the irony.
Second: there’s a way to keep the horror at bay, at least for now. There are walls, or the idea of walls—that’s how things work with spirits, right? And if those walls can stay up, there might be time to come up with a way to kill the thing on the other side.
Berend has sat out a siege before. With the right logistics, and the willingness to make the right sacrifices, the people inside can outlast the ones outside.
“So, what now?” he asks. “We just keep putting people’s souls on the walls until we figure out something better?”
It sounds horrible when he says it aloud, but Isabel looks at him with something more like grim acceptance. “No,” she says, “we don’t do that. If they choose to, they might sacrifice themselves. We can’t make the decision for them.”
“And if they choose not to?”
Isabel doesn’t answer.
Berend takes another look at the wall of bone, from where it disappears into the fog on his left to the equally murky expanse on his right. It’s holding, at least for now. The quivering tendrils neither advance nor retreat. Reassured that the patch of ground he’s standing on isn’t going to be eaten in the next few minutes, he tears his eyes from the baleful, multitudinous gaze of the horror and turns back to the city. Isabel’s hand drops from his arm.
The temple of Ondir isn’t as solid as it looked from the front. A whole wall is missing, revealing four tall, rectangular shapes that Berend eventually realizes are bookshelves seen from behind. Beneath them, the stone floor crumbles away into mud, but they remain upright and level. The silhouettes of black-robed priests, obscured by fog, move about in the corridor leading away from the gap. Beside the open door sits a heavy wooden desk—the high priest’s, Berend realizes. The absent wall was the back wall of his office.
“The city isn’t going to last, is it?” Berend asks the fog.
Isabel answers, helpful as always, “I don’t know.”
Berend can’t help but feel a little resentful. He held off the angry dead, left the hospital, and came all the way here in the hope that she would know what to do. Since she doesn’t, what hope is there for someone like him?
Think, Horst. This is a siege, and as far as he can tell, the enemy hasn’t surrounded the city on all sides yet. There’s time to evacuate.
“We should leave, then,” he says. “Get as many people as we can out of Mondirra. If we can buy a little time, maybe we can figure out a better plan.”
Something will come to me. It has to. I didn’t survive Braeden Hill just to lose the whole world seven years later.
Even as he thinks it, he knows it isn’t true. This is a problem for theologians, nether-world researchers, and the high church fathers in their southern palaces, not some washed-up mercenary and a disgraced, low-ranking Sentinel. He’d much rather let more qualified minds handle it, and wait out the apocalypse in Lady Breckenridge’s feather bed. He’d be happy no matter which way the end of the world turns out, and that seems to be the best outcome he can hope for.
But Isabel isn’t going to find a warm place and a warmer friend to share it with, because she’s not just church folk but something much worse, and she’s going to keep trying until she gets eaten by the thing or dies of exhaustion, whichever comes first. As much as he would like to, Berend can’t let her do it alone.
“Come on,” he says. “We’ll tell the watch, the priests, whoever will listen, and then we’ll grab some supplies, get the hell out of the city, and find someone smarter than the two of us to help. All right?”
Isabel rubs at her eyes and sighs. As much as Berend would have liked to add sleep for a full night to his list, he doesn’t think they have time, not at the rate the city is falling apart.
“We could go to Vernay,” says Isabel. “There’s a church there. They have archives. I sent a letter, what was it, a week ago now? Two weeks? I’m not sure.”
“Vernay it is,” Berend says, trying for confidence but achieving only resignation. He’s never been there, himself, but it’s several hours away by horse and on the way to the King’s Road, so it’s perfect. If they have a nice, dry place he can sleep while Isabel pores over some dusty tomes, it’ll be better than perfect.
Everything will be all right, he tells himself. Unless it won’t, in which case, I won’t have to worry about it.
The cluster of ghosts beside the temple shakes and emits a sudden flash, like lightning. Fragments of faces, twisted in pain, and grasping, spectral hands pierce through the fog, bright white against the gray. They make no sound, but Berend can see they’re screaming, just like Mikhail was.
He can’t leave yet. He has obligations to the living and the dead.
“You saw them, too,” Isabel says. “There’s so many.”
“Why? What happened to them?” There had only been two, before: Mikhail and Bessa Kyne. With Geray dead and Warder still indisposed, Berend had thought the infernal device was out of use.
“They were consumed,” Isabel says. “Before, it took Warder’s device to send them far enough away for the thing beyond the wall to get ahold of them.”
Now it’s here, barely a stone’s throw away, and it’s eating all the wandering dead it can get in its wriggling appendages—and the dead are wandering, now, with no place to go.
Berend’s empty stomach turns, and his frozen hands clench into fists. He knew—from the beginning, from the moment Mikhail’s shattered ghost screamed at him in the chapel, he knew—this was more than he could comprehend, but he had sworn to put it right anyway.
He’s in this, isn’t he? Not just waiting it out while Isabel or someone else finds a way to put the world right, but in it. After all, a mercenary is only as good as his word.
I’ve mentioned before that this is the story where I was making it up as I went the most, but things are starting to come together. Thanks for reading!
Space Whales Press 
2 thoughts on “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Five”