Landscapes
Isabel figures she must be a sight, wearing too-large borrowed clothes and an even larger coat, but she’s warm and her belly is full, so she decides not to worry about it. She’s not much more strange in appearance than anyone else on the road from the Temple District to the university, bypassing the barricaded route through the city’s center. Most of her fellow travelers are ghosts, dressed in the echoes of whatever they were wearing in life, bearing the wounds of their encounter with the reanimated dead—the wrath of their ghostly predecessors.
So many spirits had followed Isabel to the wall, and yet there are more. When she looks over her shoulder, they’re following her, four or five abreast and a dozen deep. Most wear watchmen’s uniforms, the patches on their vests indistinct. One just behind Isabel is a nun, her green habit turned gray, a broken piece of wood clutched in one hand as a weapon.
“Why are you following me?” she asks aloud. Even if she had her magic, if Ondir wasn’t beyond her reach, she doesn’t know a single one of these ghosts’ names. Can they tell she is—she was—a Sentinel, despite the lack of all inward and outward markers?
They don’t give her an answer. The darkened hollows of their eyes gaze straight ahead, unseeing, as they trudge after her.
I can’t help them. If ever there was need of a Sentinel, it would be now, but she can do nothing.
If she can get to Vernay, there might be hope. Even if every member of her order is in the same straits as she is—a possibility that seems more and more likely with each passing day—they have books and scrolls and centuries of experience combating dangers from the nether world. The Inquisition might have been evil, but it was effective, or so Isabel has always been taught even if the greater Church of the Seven might disagree. And the Sentinels remember it even as Ondir’s priests try to forget.
But even in the time of the Inquisition, when innocent people were tried and convicted on suspicion of necromancy, Ondir had not abandoned his Sentinels. Now, Ondir is gone. Isabel is certain he sacrificed himself like Galaser, becoming stones in the crumbling wall. Maybe he made the wall of bone, instead, turning his great gate from an open door to a barrier. Either way, he’s not coming back, and he has no help to offer.
But where else can Isabel go? She can’t keep doing this alone. She has Berend, but he’s no Sentinel, born and raised to confront the uncanny and the unseen. He’s never studied Rainier’s treatises on the structure of the nether world—not that any of those structures are recognizable anymore.
Nonetheless, Isabel finds that she misses him. She wants him to notice the ghosts following her and say something stupid, like they must enjoy her company. It wouldn’t help, not really, but it would interrupt the cold dread growing in her belly. She shouldn’t have suggested they split up. What if something else happens, and the whole district he happens to be in disappears?
Going back would just waste more time. She has to get to the chapel, and then back to Isra’s temple, before the world turns itself inside out again.
She passes a familiar abandoned carriage. Risoven’s body still sits on top, head bowed as if in prayer. His fellow priests aren’t leaving the temple to comfort the living; it will be a long while before they come for the dead.
I’m so sorry. I wish I knew what happened. I wish I hadn’t tried to fix everything. I think I’ve just made it worse.
She has to get to Vernay. There are people there who are better at making these decisions.
The main road out of the University District leads from the hospital, between the two libraries, past the students’ apartments, and out toward the eastern gate. Or, rather it did—now, the road ends at a right angle to the pine forest, which stretches behind the houses on the southern side and all the way to where the city disappears into gray fog in the north. The Orchard District gate lies somewhere behind it, and beyond that, the blue field. Probably.
Night still enshrouds the forest. If the sun rose this morning, and it’s difficult to tell either way, it’s behind the vertical plane and will be until well after noon. The sky is a blanket of clouds, all painted red.
There’s movement among the university apartments, off to her right, and a group of distant figures shout to each other from the top and bottom of the newly formed cliffside separating one block of houses from another. Three ladders have been raised, but none of them reach the second level. The street, however, is empty, and Isabel’s only company is her entourage of ghosts. They’ve started to whisper, in a sound like wind through dry leaves, wordless and omnipresent.
As she approaches the forest, the pines whisper back to the ghosts. It sounds like she’s caught in a storm. It sounds like a warning.
Soon, she’s standing at the tops of the nearest trees, deep in the forest’s shadow. They sway gently, sweeping the street. She reaches out, and long green needles prick at her skin, filling the air with the smell of pine sap. It’s beautiful, in its way—it’s like she’s flying, looking down over the forest. The river sparkles in dull red, flowing into the fog on the north side of the city.
With her ghosts in tow, Isabel shoulders her way between the trees, her feet on the road. The whispering grows louder, and she can’t tell how much is the ghosts and how much is the forest. Branches claw at her coat and tangle in her hair. This might be a waste of time, time she doesn’t have to spare, but she has to see what happens when she reaches the place where the two planes meet.
Then the branches let go of her sleeves, and she’s standing with her nose to the forest floor. She presses her hand against the carpet of pine needles and feels the earth underneath, soft with recent rain but solid as anything. The river sighs and babbles somewhere above her head.
She could walk around it. The forest’s plane ends somewhere just past Mondirra’s southern wall, beyond the breadth of the University District. In order to do that, however, she’d have to navigate blocked streets and collapsed buildings, and possibly scale the cliffside—it would add hours and hours that she already doesn’t have to burn. If she could just walk into this forest, she could bypass everything—she could even follow the river most of the way, sparing herself from having to walk through what looks like old growth. She puts another hand on the forest floor.
Her stomach flips. Suddenly, half her weight is over her hands, and her face hits the dirt, too quick for her to react. Pine needles stab at her brow. She pushes herself up on her elbows and brushes debris from her eyes.
Her feet are still on the cobbled street, but they’re behind her now, not under her. Slowly, she bends one knee, bringing it to the forest floor, and then the other. The dizzying sensation of being pulled between two separate earths dissipates.
If I fall, it won’t be very far, she tells herself, and I’ll be ready.
She gets to her feet. Now, she’s standing in the forest, with Mondirra as the intruding vertical plane. She takes a step, and another, and the ghosts crowd around her, their whispers becoming murmurs, still without a word she can decipher.
Keeping the city street at her back, she walks to the river, and then follows it toward what she still thinks of as south. Hidden in the branches overhead, birds sing without any apparent concern that their home has transplanted itself well outside its usual place. Isabel wonders where the headwaters of the river are—if they spill over a newly formed sheer drop, or if they still empty uninterrupted into this stretch of land, despite the unfathomable miles between them. It would be fascinating if it wasn’t horrifying. Someone, somewhere is elated to begin a treatise, with an accompanying book of maps, unaware of the encroaching devourer beyond the walls. Isabel both envies and pities this imaginary scholar.
The riverbank is soft sand, clear of trees, and she makes good time. Aside from the red tint in the pristine water and the intruding shadows of university buildings in the sky, she could almost convince herself that she’s out for a leisurely walk—that and the ghosts, who fill the bank behind her and fade into the woods. There are more of them now, though it’s difficult to count them.
She’s starting to get used to them. She’s a Sentinel, after all, and the dead don’t frighten her. She’s their guardian and guide, though this is not at all what the role usually looks like.
The forest ends in open sky, with gray clouds stretching out like the sea. Isabel stays several paces away from the edge as she makes her way back down—or up, it’s hard to say—to the city. The southern wall appears at her right, with the gate a stone’s throw overhead. A cobbled street, littered with pine needles, rises up before her.
Her transition from the forest to the city is faster than before, but no more elegant. She stumbles and falls, picking herself up only to strike her head against a branch. The ghosts, for their part, offer no judgment, and she supposes she can be grateful for that. Now that she’s back on the same ground she started with, it should be just a short walk around the wall and the forest plane to the chapel.
With her eyes accustomed to the red-hued dark, it takes a moment for Isabel to adjust to full daylight. She covers her face with one voluminous sleeve and steps out of the forest’s shadow.
Under the smooth gray sky, a field of grass stretches out before her. The city wall is gone, as is the edges of the orchards, which she should have been able to see from here. Instead, a vibrant green hill rises gently where the edge of the city should be, late-summer wildflowers dotting its surface in yellow and violet.
Isabel swallows and takes a deep breath. There’s no need to panic yet. The chapel should be just on the other side of the hill.
So she climbs, each footstep stirring up the smell of rain, the disembodied dead crowding behind her. As she goes, the emerald grass turns gray as the sky, and it crunches under her feet, leaving deep footprints that fail to spring back like well-watered grass.
There is no chapel on the other side of the hill. Instead, there is a village: six small houses, a fenced-in pasture, two shops, and a tiny church of Isra, all the same dull gray. In the field stand two gray cows, stiff and unmoving.
She bends down and plucks a blade of grass. It bends and then breaks, dry and brittle. She rolls it between her fingers and brings it up to her nose. It smells of metal.
She lets it fall and takes a few tentative steps into the village. In the window of the nearest house, shaded by the overhanging roof, a gray face stares out at her. It’s a young woman, her skin, hair, and kerchief all the same dull, metallic gray, frozen with her eyes wide and her mouth slack. There are others behind her, just as still, daylight from the opposite window turning them into shadow puppets.
The whole village has been turned to iron, and Isabel has no idea where the blue field has gone.
One last iteration of Monday’s announcement, in case you missed it: Journey to the Water is on a brief hiatus while I work on New Moon Door rewrites. You can enjoy new chapters of The Book of the New Moon Door every week for the next month or so. Thanks for reading!
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