Books
The air hums like a taut string. Through the fog, Isabel can see the wall of bone buckle outward, femurs knocking against ribcages in a rhythmless clatter as the mass tries to shift and absorb the force pushing behind it. Mist burns away in curls, and scarlet light scorches through to the floor of Pereth’s office.
Beneath her feet, the ground is shaking. Dust rains from the ceiling. Somewhere nearby, there is the terrible crack of breaking stone, louder than the shattering bones. Is it the temple dome, or is the other wall holding back the many-eyed thing also breaking?
Isabel doesn’t have time to answer these questions. She takes two fast steps toward Father Pereth and grabs him by the arm. He doesn’t resist as she drags him across the room to his heavy oaken desk, still beside the office door, and shoves him underneath. She follows, drawing her knees up to her chest and putting her arms over her head. The desk’s wooden legs scrape against the marble floor as the temple shakes as if with a terrible fever.
The ghosts take up a wailing, dissonant chorus. They’re drowned out as soon as they start by the screeching of the thing beyond the wall, a piercing cry that makes Isabel’s ears ring and an accompanying subaudible drone that settles into her stomach. She can feel it more than she hears it, but it’s so loud she worries she’ll be struck deaf. She muffles her ears with her sleeves. It doesn’t help.
She’s going to die here. It’s not much of a surprise. She’d thought she would cease to exist on the wall of stone, but managed to live a little longer anyway. If only she hadn’t wasted so much time wandering around outside the city. If only she could have helped the ghosts following her around, or done something to help the living. If only Father Pereth, shivering beside her with one bony elbow digging into her ribs, had listened to her.
She closes her eyes, takes one last breath of dust and damp paper, and waits for the thing beyond the wall to devour her.
But the end doesn’t come—not for her, not yet. The quaking stills, and the cry of the thing quiets, though her bones still feel as though they’re vibrating from its awful drone. Blazing red light presses against her eyelids, and she opens them, blinking back against the sting of whatever mix of bone dust and powdered stone might be in the air. Her breath stirs the haze.
It’s too bright in Pereth’s office, even considering the time of day—it’s not quite sunset. Isabel puts her knees to the floor and crawls out from under the desk.
Half of the left-hand wall has fallen, lying in a heap of broken stone beside the bookshelves. Brilliant red light pours in. Between the shelves—which are still standing, for some reason Isabel can’t deduce, despite the lack of a wall supporting them—a mass of shining, yellow-orange eyes clustered like fish eggs turn their pinprick pupils to her. A few long bones, cracked and soot-stained as if they were left in a fire, lie across what was once the width of Pereth’s office. The length of the wall of bone is more or less intact, stretching away into mist and red glare on either side, but there has been a breach.
Why haven’t we all been eaten? Ghosts are gathering around her once again, and they’re mostly whole, or at least no less so than they were before. She’s starting to remember some of their faces—a young man with long hair and a torn smith’s apron, a middle-aged woman in a mourner’s gown, the terrible, bloody half-skull of someone whose face was torn off by the angry dead. They mutter amongst themselves, with no words Isabel can make out, as though she’s hearing a crowded room from several hallways away.
She tucks her coat around her and approaches the bookshelves. Despite the hellish warm light bathing what’s left of the room, a cold wind blows in through the fallen wall. It scatters stone fragments across the floor and whistles in between the shelves, tugging at loose pages and protruding bookmarks. The mass of eyes follows her, crossing to stare at the point where she stands. A mouth she can’t see—or a series of mouths—chitters faintly in the distance.
Distance is meaningless. There’s nothing stopping the thing from bringing its mouth forward to meet her. She can see muddy, trampled grass on the ground between what’s left of the bone wall. A grayish hand, with seven fingers each bending at four knuckles, creeps forward from under the eyes, tapping with one broken nail against the ground. It comes to the back of Pereth’s bookshelves and stops.
“It’s the books,” Isabel says.
Behind her, Father Pereth has also realized he’s still alive. He takes a shuddering breath and cries out in confusion and terror.
Isabel turns. For the first time, she sees the high priest as he truly is: a frightened old man hiding under a desk. He has no power. Ondir is gone, and whatever his subordinates are doing in the temple proper, he hasn’t been involved in several hours, at least. He’d told her to leave, and here she is, and there’s nothing he can do about it. All his threats have turned up empty.
She leaves him where he is for now. The longer it takes for him to start blaming her for this new disaster, the more time she’ll have to think.
The shelf holds the expected selection of titles: The Cerulean Codex, On the Construction of Mausolea, Ormagh’s treatise on the structure of the sixteen hells, and The Book of the New Moon Door, in a much larger manuscript than a Sentinel’s pocket edition. Most don’t have titles engraved on the spine; a few are bound records of temple business from years past—promotions, convocations, and the like. Records of Mondirra’s dead are kept elsewhere. Yellowing pages and cracked leather suggest that the collection long predates Father Pereth, and a day sitting exposed to the elements hasn’t helped.
The safest thing to do, Isabel reasons, would be to leave everything exactly as it is and run. Anything she does might damage the effect the bookshelves have had on the thing beyond the wall, allowing it to enter the temple and sweep over the city unimpeded. But it’ll do that anyway, she argues. One more concentrated attack, and the wall of bone will break in as many places as the thing desires.
She has to know. In the end, it’s curiosity that compels her to take one book (Planar Esoterica, a slim volume by an anonymous author, bound in badly water-damaged blue leather) from its place. She has to wiggle it a bit where moisture has caused its cover to cling to those of its neighbors. It leaves a narrow, shadowed gap in the center of the top shelf, just above her head.
The mass of eyes stretches up and folds back in on itself. With how the light shifts around it, it’s hard to tell what direction it’s moving in, but it remains behind the shelf. One book among dozens isn’t enough to make a difference.
Isabel turns the book over in her hands, feeling the cracks in the leather. The musty smell is comforting. It reminds her of the library in Vernay and its constant, unending war against the damp that seeped in from the foundations. Maybe that library still exists, and someone there is learning the same things she is. She tries not to think about it.
She could keep taking books from the shelves until the thing can break through, but that’s an unnecessary risk that would probably result in her never being able to report her findings to anyone else. She’ll need a different plan.
Strange, she notices, just this morning, I could still see some of the graveyard.
It’s all gone now. The wall of bone, what’s left of it, encroaches on the temple floor. With Pereth’s office open to the elements, she should be able to see the end of the Temple District’s street from here, where it splits to go north to the harbor and south to the University District. There are only the bones, gray fog tinged red, and behind it, empty blackness.
The West Gate is gone—not only the gate itself, but the entire district bearing its name. Its warehouses have all been swallowed up, and so has what’s left of Arden Geray’s house, and the Warder device left in the rubble. Maybe it’s all been moved elsewhere, a small hopeful voice in Isabel’s mind offers, but it’s not much of a comfort. It doesn’t make any difference, really, whether the district is gone for good or just gone away. She won’t be able to get to it in either case.
It matters to the people there, she reminds herself. What happened to them?
And, surely, there had been books in the West Gate. Not as many as the university, or here in the Temple District, but there were manifests, and shipping records, and a holy book or two in every household.
Isabel looks at the volume in her hands and does the only thing she can think to do. She throws it end-over-end at the cluster of eyes.
It doesn’t hit. The thing warps, bending backward and stretching out to both sides. The book falls with its pages open, red light falling on an illuminated letter E, the spine leaning against a fractured tibia that broke off from the wall.
The chittering grows louder, and the eyes fix themselves on Isabel again, glaring with a base, mindless malice. The many-fingered hand, now accompanied by another with even more fingers, grips the broken edge of the wall of bone. Their skin, if it can be called that, shimmers like oil on water.
Nothing can stop it, not for long, but a book can push it back for just a moment. It’s the best Isabel can do.
She should leave the Planar Esoterica where it lies, but the idea of letting it sit in the mud until the end of the world makes her anxious. She kneels down in front of the shelves and reaches one arm between them, catching the corner of the book between two fingers.
One of the thing’s impossibly jointed hands crawls its way down the broken edge of the wall. As she tugs the open book closer, the hand advances like a spider stalking its prey, one finger stepping forward at a time. It doesn’t have a thumb—or, perhaps, it has three of them. The lengths of its fingers don’t follow any pattern Isabel can discern. It stops as she pulls the book back through the shelves, curved like a claw.
She gets up and places the book on the dusty marble floor, just to the left of the leftmost shelf. She pulls down another, and another, and an armful, laying them end to end until there’s a half-circle of books surrounding the remnants of Pereth’s office. The eyes follow her back and forth, and the hand not still attached to the wall keeps pace with her. In place of a wrist, she can see now, it just has more fingers. She tries not to look at it.
“What are you doing?” Pereth asks, his voice high and strained. He’s come out from under the desk, but he’s still crouched on his hands and knees, his black cassock gray with dust.
“I’m buying us some time,” Isabel says, trying to sound confident. “I’ll need more books.”
Hey, in case you missed it, this book will become a real book on December 15. More information here. Thanks for reading!
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