Abandoned
She’s not alone here, on what was once the most holy of streets. People have gathered from all around the city, some carrying their belongings stuffed into sacks or tied in rolls of blankets, others empty-handed. A few of the watch’s broken barricades have been cleared away, but the street is still littered with them, and no one has touched the bodies. An old man sits beside a fire on the side of the road, and sharpened points emerge from the embers. Whatever drove him to build the fire has since departed, and he stares with burning light in his eyes, his lips moving without a sound.
Isra’s temple has acquired a huge gathering, pressing up against the main doors, surging around both sides, and smothering the kitchen door as well. They’re common folk, mostly, dressed in plain clothes. If there are any green-clad nuns among them, Isabel can’t see them. Two men support a third between them at the bottom of the stairs; the injured one’s head hangs down to his chest, and a festering wound on his shoulder leaks blood and pus into what’s left of his shirt. The wound still has the shape of the rotting, dead teeth that made it.
Across the street, a priest in a red robe stands on a box in the doorway of the temple of Alcos. He stretches his arms wide, as if he can quell the clamor around him by pressing it down. “Good people,” he calls out, “let us pray. We will seek the Father’s guidance.”
The crowd ripples. A few have taken to their knees, following his instructions. Others wander, restless, as much as the press of people allows. “Have the gods abandoned us?” someone shouts, but even the priest cannot answer.
This is nothing like the protests against the Resurrection Act. There’s no purpose, no motivation, no clear opponent in the form of the city council and their guards. The watch is absent—they’ve all retreated to the city center. Even in the best of circumstances, there aren’t enough priests and nuns to direct a crowd of this size. They could easily overwhelm the temples, set fire to the district—Isabel wouldn’t blame them, really, but it certainly wouldn’t help.
Despite the small fire in the gutter and the intermittent cries of despair and confusion that cut through the crowd’s low murmur, the impulse toward violence is apparently absent. The people are listless, their eyes hollow and unseeing, their movements slow and aimless. There are so many injured, so many dead—for a few, lying on the steps of the temple of Mella, Isabel can’t tell the difference.
The priests of Ondir should be tending to the dead. There should be two dozen men in black carrying stretchers, drawing warding circles, and chanting prayers to keep their ghosts quiet and prevent the spread of disease. The smell of putrescence, sickly sweet and heavy, hangs over the district, mixing with the odor of so many unwashed bodies, living and dead. The doors of Ondir’s temple remain shut, not even discharging a novice with a censer to chase away the miasma.
Which will claim these people first—the thing beyond the wall, or corpse-fever? Isabel wants to scream, to tell them they’re only endangering themselves, but no one will hear her. She’s already learned that lesson.
“It’s coming, it’s coming,” chant the ghosts gathered behind her. They’ve attracted a few stares as they mingle with the living. A girl of no more than twelve, dirt on her face and three equally dirty children gathered around her, shivers and runs for the other side of the street, her charges in tow.
Isabel herself merits no more than a glance. She’s just another refugee, displaced from her home and wearing borrowed clothing, standing in the middle of the road with a bewildered look on her face, waiting for the gods to do something.
Her plan to check each temple for the presence of the divine has died upon arrival. She can’t get near any of the doors. Even at Ondir’s temple, where no one visits unless it’s time for a funeral, people crowd around with the bodies of their loved ones, too exhausted to keep begging for their last rites. The ones closest to the door must have arrived shortly after Isabel left, and have been there most of the day.
She needs to get the ghosts away from the bodies. Much like the crowd of the living, they mill about slowly and aimlessly, pressing around Isabel like she’s the door to a church, but she knows the risks. The sun will set soon. In the world that was, darkness made the dead stronger and more volatile. Now, Isabel can’t be sure, but she doesn’t want to find out.
Someone needs to bury the dead. The priests of Ondir can’t hide in their temple forever, and it so happens that Isabel knows another way in. A part of her tells her it’s pointless, that as quick as corpse-fever is, it’s not nearly as fast as the wall of stone is closing in on the city, but she’s out of ideas.
Besides, if her ghosts—the ghosts following her around, she corrects herself with an internal flinch—stir up the dead, they might as well do it where Father Pereth can witness it. Maybe that will force him to do something useful.
The crowd has closed in behind her, but they’re avoiding the ghosts, leaving her an opening to make her way back down the hill. If she had her Sentinel’s blacks, all she would have to do is walk quickly, and people would get out of her way—or, they’d be gathered around her, demanding that she explain why the dead started walking and whether they’re going to do it again, questions she can’t answer.
I don’t have time to waste thinking about what might be. There’s only what is.
As she pushes through the ghosts, the temperature drops. She gasps, drawing frigid air into her lungs and freezing the inside of her nose. Her fingers ache, and she shoves her hands into her pockets, ducking her head so that her collar covers a little of her face. Her breath clouds in front of her, and icy droplets cling to her face. After a few paces, the ghosts rearrange themselves behind her, and what little warmth lingers on this strange autumn evening returns.
It flees again when Isabel enters the fog gathered at the back of Ondir’s temple. The wall of bones emerges from the mist, yellowed and marked by webs of hairline fractures. It won’t last. None of this will.
For now, at least, it holds, and so do the walls of the temple of Ondir. Even the bookshelves in what’s left of Father Pereth’s office are exactly where Isabel last saw them, forming a wall of their own. She slips past them, her feet finding the hard edge of the tiled floor. Inside, it’s dark, the only illumination coming from the setting sun through the fog, mingling with the faint remnants of the strange red glow accompanying it in the western sky.
Father Pereth is still here. Maybe he left, judging by the footprints left in the remaining chalk dust of Isabel’s ritual circle, but he’s back, kneeling in the center of his office, his brow pressed to the floor. His hands are slack, lying palms-up in front of him.
He doesn’t move. Isabel thinks he’s dead, but his back rises and falls, and a few grains of dust stir around his face. Maybe he’s asleep.
Whatever he’s doing, it isn’t keeping order, like he said he would. Corpses litter the street outside, sick and hungry people have gathered just outside his door, praying and screaming for help until they grew too exhausted to continue. There’s no order here.
“Father Pereth.” Isabel’s voice sounds flat. The air is still and heavy, and it smells faintly of wet paper and sweat.
Because she can’t help herself, she adds, “What are you doing?”
It’s as though he’s a corpse, and a lingering spirit has given him will and motion. He draws his hands inward, bending his arms stiffly at the elbows, and his head lifts slowly. There’s chalk dust on his forehead, only a shade lighter than his bloodless skin. He draws up to a kneeling position, his back unfolding in starts, before he drops his hands to his lap and turns to look at Isabel. Purple shadows encircle his eyes, and the lines around his mouth are deep. “Praying,” he says in a hoarse whisper. “You might consider doing the same.”
“Ondir isn’t listening,” Isabel says, as gently as she can.
Pereth’s pale lips twist in suppressed rage. “I told you to leave. It’s barely been a day, and you’ve returned.”
“I won’t be here long,” Isabel promises.
“Get out.”
Isabel’s exhaustion has been sated just enough for her to be angry. Her fists clench in her pockets, and pain shoots into her ears as she clenches her jaw. With deliberate effort, she separates her teeth. “The dead are rotting in the streets,” she says. “They’re quiet, for now, but I don’t know how long it will last. More will die right outside your door. What are you doing?“
Pereth stands in the same jerking rhythm. He must be in a lot of pain. “I am doing what no one else, least of all you, is willing to. I am humbling myself before the gods. I am begging their forgiveness for this city’s sins. Perhaps if you had tried it, instead of spreading your blasphemy about their deaths, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“You think that’s why this is happening?” Isabel asks. “Because of me?”
He folds his hands inside his sleeves and turns toward the door, putting his back to her. “Your arrogance, Miss Rainier, knows no bounds. The council is to blame, for their barbaric decision to allow the dead to be cut apart and sewn back together instead of resting peacefully. One faithless Sentinel did nothing but leave us without someone who could quiet the ghosts.”
Isabel swallows, and her jaw clenches again.
“Vernay could have sent someone better,” Pereth continues, “and perhaps there wouldn’t be bodies in the street, but only the gods can know that for sure. We here will do what we can to turn Ondir’s countenance back upon the city. That is all that matters.”
He turns on one heel to face her again. “You can do as you like—you’re no longer a Sentinel. I suggest you go elsewhere to do it, before I have you thrown out.”
“What about your duties to the people?” Isabel asks. “They’re out there begging for your help. The church has a responsibility—”
Pereth cuts her off. “Our responsibility is to the gods. A Sentinel, of all people, should know that.”
But she isn’t a Sentinel. Not anymore. Ondir is gone, and with him all the holy magic either she or Pereth ever possessed. Praying won’t help. If the council met right now to repeal the Resurrection Act, and made a hefty donation to the Church of the Seven besides, it wouldn’t stop the thing beyond the wall. It wouldn’t keep the dead down. It wouldn’t save the people gathered on the stairs.
“It’s coming,” the ghosts chant. They’ve filled up the spaces between the bookshelves and the remaining walls, rolling in with the mist from outside. They crowd together, surging forward and receding like waves, coming farther into Pereth’s office with each shift. He can see them—Isabel notices how his eyes dart back and forth—but he won’t acknowledge them.
“If you’re not going to help them,” Isabel says, “then I will.” She’s not sure how, yet, but it’ll start with shelter and finding a safe place to burn the dead.
“Do as you wish,” Pereth says.
In unison, the ghosts cry out: a piercing, keening cry that isn’t quite human but still is nothing like the screech of the many-eyed thing. Isabel puts her hands over her ears.
The temple shakes. Under the din, the distinct sound of dry bones shattering cuts through the heavy air.
The rewrites continue! I’ll make an announcement on Friday in regards to a release date and preorders. It’s not going to be next month, but this book is coming out this year even if I have to hand-deliver every copy. Thanks for reading!
Space Whales Press 
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