Endings
Isabel can only stare at him. “You’re bleeding out,” she says, uselessly. “I don’t think you can stand.”
Berend takes another breath, thin and shaky. “Sure I can,” he says.
“Why? Where do you want to go?” She’s got to find some way to stop the bleeding—and keep him where he is before he wanders off, numb from shock. She pushes his left arm aside and puts both hands to the spreading dark stain on his coat. The fabric squelches under her weight.
“Don’t know. Just would rather die on my feet.” He stops, breathes for a moment, and adds, “If I can help at all, more the better.”
Isabel presses down on his wound. She’s starting to panic, a faint buzzing like a swarm of bees overwhelming her senses and drowning out her thoughts. Berend is going to die, and she’ll be left all alone, and she can’t even think of something to say to him. Will his ghost stay near? Even if it does, she doesn’t want to see him as a hollow, shadowy thing, murmuring nonsense about the impending end of the world. She doesn’t want to lose him.
There has to be something she can do. She’s stacked books, hundreds and thousands of them, five feet high around the interior of Ondir’s temple. She’s kept people safe, even if it’s only temporary. Surely, she can find a way to keep one man alive a little longer.
“The gods are in Pereth’s office,” she says. Only when Berend’s bloodless lips drop open in surprise does she realize that she’s spoken aloud.
“What are you talking about?” he asks. His voice is a rasp barely above a whisper.
At least he’s not trying to stand. Isabel lifts her hands, doing her best to ignore how sticky they’ve become, and takes the fraying hem of her shirt in both hands. She leaves bloody fingerprints as she tears a long strip from the bottom. An investigation into her coat pocket finds a cloth covered in breadcrumbs. Nothing is clean.
She peels back layer upon layer of bloody cloth from his torso. “Father Pereth tried to summon them,” she says quickly, ahead of whatever awful quip Berend’s about to waste his breath making. “It was old magic. Blood magic. And something with seven faces appeared in his circle.” The wound is a ragged hole, so bloody she can’t see anything. It’s just as well—this isn’t the time for stitches, even if she had a needle and thread and a liter of disinfectant. She has to stop the bleeding first.
“You could have mentioned this before,” says Berend.
She shakes crumbs from the cloth and folds it in quarters, and then in half again. She presses it over the wound and tucks one end of the fabric strip under her thumb. “A lot has happened,” she says. “Can you lift your back, here?”
Grimacing, he drags his legs up and lifts from his heels. He manages barely an inch, but it’s enough. Isabel passes the cloth underneath him and ties it tightly around his chest, cinching the bandage down.
“Sixteen hells, woman,” Berend growls through gritted teeth. “Your bedside manner hasn’t gotten any better.”
She takes off her coat and searches her ragged shirt for another spot to tear. “Can you breathe?”
Berend closes his eyes and takes two slow breaths. “I think so.”
“Good.” She tears off another strip of cloth and ties that around him, too. There’s a strip of bare skin below the remaining hem of her shirt and above the waistband of her trousers, prickling in the cold, but modesty is the least of her concerns. “I still think you should stay put. Lying down.”
“And miss a chance to meet the gods in person?” says Berend. “Especially after I thought they all were dead? I’ve got some things to say to them.”
Isabel shakes her head. “They’re not like you’re imagining. They’re like the ghosts, fragmented and in pain. Or, just as likely, they’re not the gods at all. They might be something else—just more dead souls, tortured and broken and forced into some kind of mass.”
“I’m dying, aren’t I?” Berend says with forced, shaking confidence. “You could let me hope for a moment.”
“I’m sorry. It was grotesque. I was afraid of frightening the people in the temple.” She won’t say anything about the dying part. She can’t.
Berend closes his eyes, clenches his jaw, and lifts himself up onto his elbows. “Do you have another idea? I’d love to hear it,” he says between shallow breaths.
“Other than what?” asks Isabel.
“Going to see the gods. Asking them to fix all this.” He sits up with a groan. “You said the high priest used blood to get their attention. I happen to have a lot of it on the outside already.”
Isabel rocks back onto her heels and rubs her palms together. Congealed blood falls to the cobbles in flakes and rolls. “Pereth’s office isn’t safe,” she says. “I had a line of books, but it’s all rotted away.”
Berend puts his hands on the pavement. His eyes go wide and his fingernails scratch against the stones as he tries to grip them. “Well,” he says, drawing another shaky breath, “since you don’t have any better ideas, you might as well come with me. I’m going to see what’s hiding in that office. If nothing else, there’s probably no better an end for someone like me than putting myself on that bone wall, like Galaser did.”
“Berend,” Isabel says. “If you stand up you’ll just bleed out faster.”
“I know.” He gets up on his knees and presses one hand over his bandages. The other he holds out to her, palm up and fingers spread. “Are you going to help me or not?”
When she takes his hand, the world shatters.
It starts with a triumphant, high-pitched shriek, shattering the heavy stillness of the scarlet sky and knifing into Isabel’s ears. Over the temple, the slippery, wet eyes roll back in their sockets, their putrefying flesh quivering, and rows and rows of teeth snap and chatter between them. Then there is a terrible crack, and the street beneath her feet bucks like a startled horse, throwing her onto her backside. Berend’s hand slips out of her grip.
She pushes against the shaking ground with both arms and pulls her legs underneath her, managing a kneeling position for half a second before the earth throws her onto her face. Her chest hits the pavement, forcing the breath from her lungs. One fortunately misplaced forearm keeps her from cracking her teeth, but her forehead cracks against the bones of her arm—she’ll have bruises, later, if her physical body lasts that long. Darkness falls over the street. She breathes in dust and a strange smell like gunpowder and metal, and drags herself on her belly to reach out to Berend.
Isabel’s grasping hand finds a stretch of thick, coarse wool and holds on. Under her knuckles, Berend still breathes in short, ragged gasps.
This is the end, isn’t it? She doesn’t have the breath to say it aloud. I’ve spent too much time talking, and now I’ve run out.
A gun fires somewhere in the distance, followed by a thin, human scream. Everything is dark; even the sky has lost its dim red luster. Much closer, stone cracks and wood splinters in a roar of unholy destruction. The Temple District is crumbling.
Then there is silence, heavy as a winter cloak and thick as evening fog. Isabel’s pulse thumps against her ears. Keeping her hand on Berend’s coat, she pulls herself closer, pulling her knees underneath her. She catches her breath, but the air is filled with dust—stone dust, fine and sticky in her throat. She coughs and rubs at her eyes with her free hand.
There is still some world left, but it isn’t much. A faint, greenish glow blooms over the street, as though the moon was rising behind a pane of cheap bottle glass. But there is no moon, and all the windows around her have shattered. The sky is a lattice of decaying, gray muscle fibers, shining wet in the green light as they quiver and flex. Behind them, soft flesh opens and closes, flashing chattering teeth and rolling eyes.
Where’s the light coming from? Isabel can’t find a source, even as her eyes adjust to the darkness, but it doesn’t matter. The sky of flesh forms a tight dome overhead, from the edge of the street a stone’s throw away from the doorway of the Temple of Ondir, to the top of the hill, where the temples of Alcos and Isra have been reduced to rubble. Isra’s temple is a low foundation wall, white marble standing broken and crooked like a mouth full of damaged teeth. On the other side, all that remains of the temple of Alcos is the lower half of the grand staircase.
A small, dark patch sits on the bottom step. Isabel stares at it until it becomes a single shoe—a monk’s plain, leather-soled slipper, the stitching worn and fraying. Its mate and their owner are nowhere to be seen. There is nothing but the terrible sky and barely a city block’s worth of land suspended in the center.
The Temple of Ondir still stands. The handful of townsfolk seated by the door have fled inside, crowding in the foyer; three young men are seated near the street, staring up at the sky with their jaws slack and their eyes open so wide that tears well up in the corners, glinting green in the strange light.
“I should have known,” Berend mutters, his voice thick with dust. “I should have known that once I found you again, some new hell would appear. I can’t believe I didn’t see it coming.”
Isabel lets go of his coat. “I didn’t do anything,” she says, though even as the words come out she isn’t sure. Did she do something? Is this because she interrupted Pereth’s ritual and disturbed his circle?
“I know,” says Berend. He sits back on his heels, pressing his left hand to his side. Blood has already bloomed like a red flower through his new bandages. “Well. I don’t think we’re going to last through another one of those. Shall we?”
He holds out his hand again. He’s right—he’s going to die one way or another, and Isabel isn’t going to leave him out here. She takes his hand and draws it across her shoulders.
He’s heavier than she thought he would be. Even with his legs underneath him, he leans most of his weight on her. She half-carries him one step, and then another, crossing the street to the temple and leaving dragging footprints in its newly acquired layer of masonry dust that was once the grandest temples in Mondirra.
The gathered crowd of ghosts, thinned out to a couple dozen, follows behind them. All but four of them are cracked and flickering, their faces fragmented and their movements like marionettes with half their strings cut, lurching and jerking in the air a few inches above the pavement.
One of them stops in front of Berend. She’s a young woman in a rumpled dress, empty air showing between its pleats, with half a face beneath a waterfall of dark hair spilling from her fraying cap. She holds up an arm, and her hand flickers into view as she gives a slight, trembling wave.
She turns and walks off the end of the street, into the quivering flesh of the sky. White light flashes behind her.
Berend watches her go. “Good luck,” he says, too quietly for anyone but Isabel to hear.
“Who was that?” Isabel asks.
“Bessa Kyne,” he answers. “If anyone can make it out of here, she can. She killed the man who murdered her.”
Isabel watches the end of the street, fighting down the nausea that comes in waves each time the mass of teeth and eyes flexes. The ghost of the young woman is gone.
“Do you really think there’s something out there?” Berend asks. “There’s something else on the other side of…all that?”
There has to be, right? This tiny island of solid ground within the inchoate manifestation of chaos can’t be everything that is. The cosmos is—or was?—vast, with sixteen hells and a hundred and fifty-four paradises, with vast stretches of wilds and empty space in between. Surely, something else exists.
But she doesn’t know. Maybe something of Bessa Kyne, determined and vengeful, can make it through the sky and come out on the other side, but Isabel is certain that she herself wouldn’t get far. She still has a body, to start with, one that can be killed, leaving her ghost at the mercy of chattering teeth and wandering tendrils.
“Sentinel!” Jemmy’s high voice cuts through the heavy air as Berend and Isabel make their way up the steps. He’s pushing his way through the crowd in the foyer, squeezing between a woman holding a young child and a man in the gray robe of a priest of Mella. “Sentinel, what happened? What do we do?”
Forward to Chapters Twenty-Five and Twenty-Six
Almost at the end! Chapter Twenty-Six (the last one) is pretty short, so I’ll post both Twenty-Five and Twenty-Six next week.
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