Fortress
The Temple of Ondir is full of books. A stack of this year’s mathematical textbooks, the cheap pulp paper already yellowing, sits beside the hallway leading to Father Pereth’s office. Beside it, a nobleman’s collection of encyclopedias, dust filling in the faded, embossed titles on the spines, leans precariously against the wall. There are handwritten manuscripts, unbound account ledgers, popular novels with titles like The Vampire in the Castle and An Ill-Advised Match, and a child’s alphabet primer, etched into a flat wooden block. A case of leaden printing letters, the hinges badly damaged, sits on top of a pile of catalogues of ladies’ fashions, just underneath the painted image of hooded Ondir carrying his lantern. The entire space under the dome is ringed in books, in stacks up to Isabel’s shoulders, and it still isn’t enough.
She squeezes herself between a stack of hand-stitched volumes bound in red leather and the cluster of four priests of Alcos who donated them. The monks sit in a cramped circle on the floor, prayer beads clacking between their fingers as they pray. They started as soon as they arrived, and haven’t even looked up since. Behind them, a young woman gathers her two tiny children into her lap to make room for Isabel to walk. The elder of the pair, a towheaded boy of about three, wriggles and kicks his legs, but his mother holds him fast. He whines, a tired, high-pitched note that trails off into silence almost as soon as it begins. Isabel gives him a half-smile that she hopes is comforting. She’s never been any good with children.
She picks her way between sleeping laborers and a familiar-looking elderly couple. She’d spoken to them, when they arrived, and they’d said their children were on the way here. They haven’t arrived yet.
“Sentinel!” a piercing voice calls from the doorway.
It belongs to a boy of ten by the name of Jemmy, whose too-large shirt doesn’t quite conceal the purse-cutting knife tucked into his belt. Contrary to his usual profession, he has deputized himself as Isabel’s doorman. She isn’t sure she needs a doorman, nor that she should be the one to whom said doorman answers, but Jemmy has his mind made up.
She makes her way to the doors. They’re open, letting in the sky’s bloody red glow and framing a collection of shadowy figures standing on the steps. One of them is Jemmy, his skinny arms outstretched to prevent the others’ entry. He doesn’t reach the span of the doorway, but the message is clear. In front of him, a dark mass resolves into a couple and four children, each carrying two heavy bags. Three more lie on the ground by their feet.
Isabel finds a bare patch of floor behind Jemmy’s arm. “What is it?” she asks.
“You’re the Sentinel?” the man at the top of the steps asks.
“I told them you said they can’t bring all this stuff,” Jemmy says before she can answer. “I told them you said don’t bring nothing but books. I told them.”
Isabel sighs. “Yes, thank you, Jemmy. You’ve done just fine.”
Jemmy sticks out his chest and beams.
“I was told that there was a safe place here,” the man says over Jemmy’s head. “I was told that there would be room for me and my family.”
“Yes, sir, but as you can see, we’re running out of space,” Isabel says. She gestures to the foyer behind her, already packed with people, all huddled with their knees drawn up to their chests and their backs against stacks of books. It’s just as bad under the dome. There’s a heavy, fleshy smell about the place, not yet unpleasant. The Temple of Ondir has never been so populated.
“Well, what am I supposed to do now?” the man demands.
I don’t know. Why are you asking me? “I’ll try to find a place for you,” she says, “but you’ll have to leave all your things. I’m sorry.”
The man’s brows shoot up in an exaggerated look of shock that Isabel assumes isn’t sincere. He can see it, can’t he? There’s barely ten square feet in total not occupied by either a book or a human body in the whole temple, except for Father Pereth’s office, where she hasn’t ventured in several hours.
Have I actually done anything to help? Or are all these people just going to die at once, with nowhere to run?
“Leave everything?” the man says. “And let the rioters and the looters claim everything I own?”
At that, his wife gives him a sidelong glance, but she says nothing. She adjusts the heavy bag slung over her shoulder and shifts the one in her hands so she can tug her youngest daughter closer to her.
“We don’t have a choice,” Isabel says. “There just isn’t room.” Maybe, if the young man she sent to the university for more books comes back with his promised wagon, she can expand her defenses and fit another dozen people. But there isn’t a world in which there will be room for this much luggage. The world is ending, she wants to scream in the man’s face, none of it matters.
“Oy, quit holding up the line,” someone shouts from the steps below.
The man’s face creases like a piece of crumpled paper, but he stalks off a few steps and tosses his bags onto the far end of the temple stairs. His family follows, forming a quiet line behind him as he tears open the first suitcase and yanks out several articles of clothing.
Two young men, each carrying a stack of books, come up the stairs next. “You should have just let them in,” the first one says. “I bet everyone packed in there would tell him what for.”
Isabel recognizes him more by his voice than his face. “Emryn Marner?”
He smiles brightly and with more than a hint of irony. It reminds her of Berend. “In the flesh. Another fellow told us you were building a fortress out of books, and we figured we’d help.”
Jemmy narrows his eyes and gives Marner and his companion a once-over. He drops his arms to his sides. “You can come in.”
“Thank you, sir,” says Marner. To Isabel, he continues, “We just came from the university. Half the district is gone, all covered in fog, and there’s a crumbling stone wall that materialized beside that vertical plane.”
“Which is also halfway gone,” adds his companion.
“This is Herard, by the way,” Marner says.
Where has she heard that name before? “Good to meet you,” she says, even though the circumstances can’t by any stretch of the imagination be described as good. “Let me take some of those.”
Marner hands her half of his books. Some of them are familiar, and stacked in the same order they were on the floor of his apartment. “I see you’re still wearing my clothes. Did you not see your friend? He stopped by this morning to pick up your things.”
Isabel looks down at herself. She’d forgotten what she was wearing. She’d abandoned the heavy wool coat some time ago, as the interior of the temple grew too warm from the press of bodies, but she can’t remember where she left it. “No, I haven’t seen Mr. Horst all day,” she says.
It’s well after dark now, though it’s impossible to tell how late. A thick blanket of clouds covers the sky, lit up red from below. She was supposed to meet Berend at the Temple of Isra some time ago, and she never managed to get there. Surely he would have known to come here by now. It isn’t exactly a secret where she is.
And now half the University District is gone. Berend must be gone, too—the only friend she had. Sentinels are, as a rule, unsociable, and she is—she was—no exception. She’s not a Sentinel anymore, despite what Jemmy may call her.
What’s left of the world stops still. Isabel can’t hear the buzz of a hundred conversations in the temple behind her, the intermittent crack of rifle fire from the city center, or the voices of the men right in front of her. Her awareness contracts to the bare inches around her body, where she is utterly alone. For a second, she’s unaware of anything else.
She’s not alone, she remembers. There is a temple full of people who are relying on her to keep them safe, and a stack of books in her hands that she needs to expand her fortifications. She closes her eyes and shakes her head, as if clearing water from her ears.
“You all right, there?” Marner asks, coming back into her awareness.
“Fine,” she says. “Come inside. I can put these in the hallway, maybe give us a little more space.”
She leaves Jemmy at his chosen post. Marner and Herard follow her on her winding, narrow path across the temple, past a pair of Mella’s lay brothers sitting back to back, a West Gate watchman curled up on the floor with the patch on his vest half torn off, and a girl of maybe fourteen gripping the hands of two young children. Each looks up for only an instant before trying to move out of the way and returning their eyes to the dusty floor.
“I sent someone to the university for more books,” Isabel remembers. What was his name? Alard? Arner? “Albyn, I think it was. Did you see him? He was wearing a red hat.”
Marner shrugs, shakes his head, and looks at Herard, who does the same. “The fog ate up whole blocks, in a matter of minutes,” Marner says. “I’m sorry.”
He’s gone, then, and it’s Isabel’s fault, just like it’s going to be Isabel’s fault when that rude man and his innocent children don’t make it inside in time, and just like when she let Berend go wandering the city without her. She almost wishes the thing beyond the wall would break through her defenses now, and save her the days—hours, maybe—of guilt and regret and time in the tracked dirt and crowded human bodies to think about all of it.
She pushes that thought aside. She’s putting all her efforts into buying a little more time, and she’s not going to tempt fate by wishing for the end.
“Right here, then?” Herard asks. He holds up his stack of books next to the leaning tower of mathematical textbooks.
“I think it will really tie the room together,” Marner says with another smile. It drops from his face when Isabel doesn’t laugh.
“Along this hallway,” she says. “I have some in the office at the end of the hall, so if I can close the gaps, maybe I can start moving people back.”
She sets her portion of the books on the floor and pushes them up against the wall. It occurs to her that she hasn’t been in Pereth’s office in hours. She doesn’t know if it still exists. The door remains closed, keeping the end of the corridor in shadow. That’s probably a good sign, right?
Isabel brushes dust from her hands and straightens up. Her back hurts from standing and bending all day, but the only place available to sit down is this unprotected corridor.
Marner’s voice follows her down the hall. “Right, we’ll just…sit here, then.”
She knocks when she reaches the door, habitual politeness winning out over her exhaustion. No one answers.
The latch opens when she gives it a try, and the door swings open on well-oiled hinges. A cold wind strikes her face, carrying with it the smell of damp earth, woodsmoke, and…blood?
A vast ritual circle covers the floor of Pereth’s office, dark marks staining the floorboards. A dozen hunched figures in black huddle around it like numbers on a clock face. And beyond them, past the low ring of books that still stands in front of the open walls, lies a sky of wet, pale flesh, studded with thousands upon thousands of clustered eyes.
Thanks for reading! Some brief programming notes: in this serial version, Part Three has twenty-six chapters, and I’ll keep posting them until they’re done. However, as I’m rewriting and editing, Part Three is undergoing some structural changes, which will result in the ending being different in the published version. I hope you enjoy both versions.
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