Time
“Well, hello,” Berend says through his teeth, wincing from the renewed pain in his side as Isabel’s weight falls on his chest. “Fancy meeting you here.”
As far as grateful embraces after harrowing journeys go, he’s had better. Isabel’s sharp elbows dig into his shoulders, and she smells like mold, soot, old paper, and something that reminds him of lightning storms out at sea. He puts his arms around her anyway, despite the strain it puts on the wound in his side, and breathes in the terrible smell and feels like maybe things aren’t so bad, really.
She pulls back, her eyes darting back and forth to look at anywhere but his face. “Sorry,” she mumbles. She puts her hands in the pockets of her oversized coat. Berend had meant to bring back her own things.
He shrugs with only one shoulder, because moving the one on his injured side hurts like one of the nastier of the hells. Now that he’s standing apart from her, terrible reality sets in. He’s wounded, badly, and even if he doesn’t bleed out, infection will set in sooner or later—but all that doesn’t matter, because the world isn’t going to last much longer than he will. The Temple of Ondir, built centuries ago on solid ground, now juts out into emptiness. Clumps of earth cling to its foundations and crumble into the thick fog. Piles of bones, dry and yellow and one strong breeze away from turning to dust, lie against the exterior walls of its northern wing. Above Berend’s head, the sky is deep crimson, with clouds painting slight shadows in streaks running north to south; above the temple dome, it’s a mottled purple-and-gray stretch of diseased flesh, all full of holes, some of which hold bulging, wet eyes.
“You’re bleeding,” Isabel says.
Berend looks down at himself. His coat has a dark spot the size of a dinner plate under his left arm, stiff and cold and sticky. “Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed,” he says. At Isabel’s alarmed look, he adds, “I had a bit of a run-in with Hybrook Belisia. He won’t be troubling us anymore.”
The nun in green, his intrepid escort, holds up her stack of books. “I brought these.”
“Right,” says Berend. “I heard you were building some kind of fortress here, and I thought I’d stop by. Brought some living folks—and some ghosts.”
He’s lost a few in the walk over here. A couple dozen, by his quick count, linger at arm’s distance behind him. He thinks he can see Bessa Kyne at the edge of the group, her one shoulder bent to hide her half a face, flickering and shaking.
“Come in,” Isabel says, taking a step to clear the doorway. “We’ll find you a space.”
Berend’s immediate thought is how? The temple is packed to the gills, with people pressed up against the walls of the foyer and filling the dome. Most are standing, leaning on each other or on the nearest stack of books. Heat wafts from the doorway. There’s no room to breathe, much less move around, rest, or relieve oneself. Pretty soon, there won’t be any room outside, either. A few people sit on the steps around him, where there are no books, staring listlessly into the red sky. Berend guesses they must have stepped out for some air, and given up on getting back in.
“Go on ahead,” he says to his brave companions, who walked with him all the way from the city center. “Sentinel, a word?”
Isabel’s brows go up. She brushes tangled wisps of hair from her forehead with an impatient hand and glances over her shoulder at the mass of bodies in the temple. “All right. Will this take long?”
“Not long,” he says. They don’t have long. Rifle fire crackles in the distance, back toward the city center, and the stretch of flesh covering the northern sky shivers. His stomach flips. When’s the last time he’s eaten something? Is that something that’s going to matter an hour from now, or tomorrow morning, if the sun does indeed rise? He doesn’t even know what time it is. The clock tower in the city center has been silent for more than a day.
Berend puts his hand to his side again, grimacing at the sensation of hardened blood and congealed fibers against his fingers, and makes his way down the steps. His knees shake as he bends them. He’s losing strength fast.
“Do you need a bandage?” Isabel asks as she comes down behind him. “Stitches?”
Both, and a hot meal, a bath, and a large mug of mulled wine, he doesn’t say aloud. “I’m fine, for the moment,” he tells her, a statement that might be approaching shouting distance of the truth.
They reach a patch of pavement mostly clear of rubble across the street from the temple’s doors. It’s quiet enough, if he ignores the sound of the crowd at the top of the hill and the wet, squelching sounds coming from the sky. A few ghosts drift over to stand among the fallen stones of a broken shrine.
“What’s your plan, then?” Berend asks.
Isabel glances back at the temple and takes a shaky breath. “The books slow it down,” she says, “the more the better. If I can buy some time—”
“How much time?” Berend raises his voice, which makes a few ghosts and most of the people on the stairs lift their heads to listen. It also makes his side hurt more, which he is unhappy to learn is possible. More quietly, he continues, “Because if it’s more than an hour, you’ll have other problems. The only place people can go is outside, and there isn’t going to be a lot of outside left. What are you going to do when you have two hundred people packed shoulder-to-shoulder in a closed room? They’ll die of the crush, or they’ll suffocate, and if they manage to survive for a day you’ll have filth and disease. And then you’ll have a room full of ghosts.”
She squeezes her eyes shut and rubs at her forehead. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to find more answers, but there’s so little left.” She drops her hand and looks up. Her eyes are rimmed red. “Maybe I’m just trying to save their ghosts.”
It sounds callous, heartless, without a single care for the living—just like a Sentinel. She isn’t wrong, though, in her own sideways manner, Berend has to admit. He’s seen more ghosts in the past day than in all his life up until that point, and while they’re not quite people, they’re something close. They remember what it’s like to be alive. They desire peace, closure, safety, or revenge. If they remain whole, they can speak or even sing. Can a ghost compose poetry? Berend doesn’t know, not that he’s ever been any good at poetry, himself. Maybe if a few of them set their minds to it.
The sum total of everything that has ever been Mondirra, and all the surviving places outside of it that could possibly exist out there in the void, might end up being a handful of ghosts. It’s more likely that nothing will remain, not even a memory. Wouldn’t the ghosts be the better choice?
Bessa Kyne is somewhere nearby, though Berend can’t see her. Ghosts crowd around him, filling the street with white fog, drifting back and forth like grass in an aimless, anxious wind. Maybe that flickering half figure at the base of the temple steps is Mikhail, or maybe he’s up the hill, where the soft glow of so many spirits stutters and flashes.
After all this, Berend asks no one, I’m not going to find a way to help them, am I?
He’d thought that surely someone would know what to do. Now he’s running out of people to ask and time in which to do it. I’m so sorry.
At least Hybrook Belisia is dead. Arden Geray is gone, partially devoured just like Mikhail and Bessa, and well on his way to being eaten entirely. Berend hopes it hurts. Lucian Warder, just as guilty, will vanish as soon as the university hospital does. It won’t be long now.
That’s all we get, isn’t it? Vengeance in life, and nothing afterward but the same pain.
If only he had more time.
“Your books are holding, though?” he asks Isabel.
She shrugs, thin shoulders bunching the fabric of her coat up around her ears. “For now.”
“So, are you going to explain that whole thing to me, or is it better if I don’t know?”
Isabel looks back toward the temple. “I don’t know for sure. As best I can tell, the thing beyond the wall is chaos; knowledge and organization keep it at bay. Books are the easiest way to build a wall out of knowledge.”
“That’s a bit of clever thinking,” Berend says. “You don’t think it will last?”
“I know it won’t. Books are just paper and leather. Everything that is will eventually succumb to decay.”
Berend’s head feels light, as if he’s stepped out over a ledge into empty air. As terrible a plan as the enclosed wall of books was, he’d been counting on it more than he’d realized. “Not even your ghosts are going to be safe, then,” he says. His voice sounds small and far away.
“No. I suppose not,” says Isabel.
“So what do we do?” It’s getting harder to breathe, and speaking takes a substantial effort. Pull yourself together, Horst. He tries a deep inhale, but it sends pain shooting down his side and makes his vision swim.
Isabel’s eyes close. Exhaustion lines her face. “I don’t know,” she says. “Build up our defenses, try to make more room. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to decide whether to offer ourselves up to buy a little more time, or try to find a way out.”
“There’s an out?” asks Berend.
“There could be. Or everything could be chaos forever. I don’t know,” she says again.
Berend nods, says, “I guess there’s only one way to find out,” and then his knees buckle and he finds himself laid out on the pavement, gently folding up and out like a dropped cloak. Isabel and four ghostly faces he doesn’t recognize look down at him.
Isabel drops down at his side. Her hands flutter across his face like a nervous, heavy insect. “What happened? Are you all right?”
He wants to say Nothing, I’m fine, but he knows that’s not true. His heart hammers against his ribs like it’s demanding to be let out. He breathes in shallow gasps, his chest aching.
Isabel’s hand finds his, her fingers wrapping around his thumb. “You’re so cold,” she says. “You need a doctor.”
“I don’t,” he begins, but he’s out of breath. He tries again. “I don’t think we have time.”
It occurs to him to look at the gunshot wound in his side. He regrets the thought as soon as he has it. Blood has soaked through all his bandages and his coat, drenching his shirt and spreading down into his trousers. The dark, wet patch on his coat reaches from his elbow to his knees. He only has the vaguest idea of how much blood a human body is supposed to hold, but it looks like most of it is seeping out onto the cobblestones of the Temple District.
He’s afraid. He didn’t think he would be, after so many near misses. Death always waited for him like an old friend. Now, at the end of the line, he finds himself reciting desperate prayers in the back of his mind, fragments of pleas and half-remembered verses, to gods he knows aren’t listening. Not like this. I still have so much more I have to do. I need more time.
No one answers. Isabel shouts for help, but there’s no one to hear, only the ghosts. Either Berend is going to bleed out here on the street, or he’s going to end up devoured by the thing beyond the wall. If he’s especially unlucky, one will follow the other in quick succession, and all evidence points to a palpable lack of good fortune in his recent experience.
How much longer does he have? Five minutes? An hour, if he stays still and waits?
Maybe with five minutes, he can help buy Isabel a little more time. He takes a slow breath. “Help me up, would you?”
Forward to Chapter Twenty-Four
Today was my pie-making day, and I almost forgot to post this chapter. If you’re enjoying this version of The Book of the New Moon Door, why not preorder an autographed copy of the published version?
Space Whales Press 
2 thoughts on “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Twenty-Three”