This small community of green-robed women had been constructed around a deep well. The underground spring, they told me, belonged to the goddess Isra herself, and it was her will that the water be given to any who asked for it. It also irrigated an expansive garden of small, hardy vegetables and a date palm on either side of the chapel. No matter how much I stared at the garden, it stubbornly remained, its thin yellow-green leaves trembling in the harsh desert wind. This was no illusion. Already this goddess stood higher in my esteem than the serpent god of Svilsara.
It was in this garden that I labored during my brief stay. I pulled water from the well, one reed basket at a time, and spread it among the neat rows, stepping between spiny stalks and fences of stone that the blowing sand had worn smooth and featureless. While I worked, Fenin and her companions rested in the shady infirmary, drinking clean water and eating real food–though only a thin gruel–for perhaps the first time in their lives. Their teeth were loose and their stomachs shrunken from years of starvation, but after the first day, Fenin’s eyes brightened, and she stood at the infirmary door as three of the nuns put on their traveling coats and filled water skins for their journey to Svilsara.
“Why can’t I go with them?” Fenin asked. “I was chosen to lead Svilsara and keep our covenant with the serpent. I need to go back.”
“You’re too weak, still,” I told her.
She scowled, brushing sparse strands of hair from her brow. “I was strong enough to make it here.”
“We didn’t have a choice then,” I said. “Now you’re safe. You must rest, and heal, and let these women help your countrymen.”
She turned her sharp, dark eyes to me, her face twisted in anger and hatred. “Without me, the serpent will devour them on the road. They’ll never make it to Svilsara.”
I let the basket of shriveled beans in my arms fall to the dusty stone path. The wind caught a few hulls and took them away across the garden. “Your serpent is dead,” I said. “I slew him upon the sacrificial stone. He will never devour anyone, willing or not, again.”
Fenin’s split lips parted, and then pressed into a thin line. “You lie.”
I should have held my tongue. I had already denied her the choice between the terrible truth and the comforting illusion once, and I should not have done so a second time. After a week and a day of harsh wind and unrelenting heat without so much as a word of thanks from those I had risked my life to bring to this refuge, my patience was spent. “Why else would everything in your city change all of a sudden?” I asked. “At the moment of his death, his magics unraveled, and his illusions fell from your eyes. You were never beautiful, Fenin. You never ate a full meal, or bathed in clean water, or sheltered from the sun in a lush, green garden, not until now.”
“You lie,” she said again, this time a faint whisper lost to the blowing dust.
“Believe me or not,” I said. “It makes no difference.”
She slammed the door of the infirmary shut, and did not speak to me again for the remainder of my brief stay. She must have warned her companions away, as well, for they kept to the infirmary and avoided me on the rare occasions they had to step outside. Her authority as priestess, it seemed, had not faded with the illusions of her god.
The green-clad sisters had little reason to converse with me, either, so I labored in silence, drawing water and gathering the harvest. My only companion was Bran, who followed behind me to eat the weeds I pulled from between the garden rows. When I entered the temple to refill the water stores and sweep the steps, the goddess gazed down upon me with an expression of indistinct patience.
Isra was, as I gleaned from the songs the nuns sang, queen and mother among several other deities. She was the goddess of rain and of green, growing things; of mothers and children; of healers and charity. Her figure in white stone possessed only hollows for eyes and the vague suggestion of a beatific smile under the smooth, shallow ridge of her nose. To me, she bore too much of a resemblance to the empress of Phyreios: Shanzia of the shining face and emerald eyes, who could bewitch with a look. Shanzia perished under the rubble along with her divine kin, but this face in the nuns’ temple, bright as a full moon, could have been hers. Shanzia had a stone counterpart, as well, standing beside her carved throne, and it wore a similar vague smile.
It would have been a cruel irony if I had taken Fenin and her companions from the clutches of one hungry god just to leave her in the hands of another. Did the nuns take the blood of travelers, like those who served the Ascended of Phyreios? Would this Isra demand the sacrifice of all who passed beneath her marble gaze?
In the evening, after the nuns had finished their prayers and the lights in the infirmary had gone out, I searched the temple. I placed my hands against the walls and felt for hidden latches, I looked under every bench and table for a drain to carry blood away to some hidden, underground chamber, and I lifted the cloth from the altar, finding only smooth stone.
I lit a torch and wandered the grounds, searching beside the well and behind the infirmary. One by one, I opened the doors to the outbuildings, and found only a sleek gray cat hunting mice in the grain store, and Fenin and her companions sleeping soundly in the infirmary.
At last, in a squat, cubic structure behind the nuns’ quarters, I found something unexpected: a library, lined in shelves that reached from floor to ceiling. Bound books covered two walls, their leather spines inscribed in gold and silver, while scrolls lay in piles on the third. I could read their titles no better than I could that of the book I carried with me.
The nuns, however, could read them. Why else would they have kept such a trove?
In the morning, I took the book from my pack and brought it to the temple. Sister Nasrin, the only nun who had ever given me her name along with my tasks for the day, knelt before the altar, with an offering of wildflowers and sweet grasses placed before her.
She finished her prayer and stood, surprise crossing her weathered face. “Good morning, Eske,” she said. “I trust all is well?”
I bowed–I knew not how to greet these holy women, but an excess of politeness would not go amiss. “All is well,” I said, and it was mostly true. Fenin had seen me from the infirmary window and drawn the curtains closed, but Bran and I had enough to eat, and the well continued to produce water, hour after hour and day after day. “I was hoping to ask your assistance.”
“Of course,” she said.
I handed her the book. “I have traveled west to search for the place where this volume was written,” I explained. “I cannot read it, but I saw your library. You sisters know your letters. Can you tell me where I need to go?”
Sister Nasrin turned the cover open with gentle hands. After weeks at the bottom of my pack, the book had sustained a number of scuffs. At least I had no need to worry about water damaging the thin vellum pages.
“Where did you get this?” she asked.
“On an island far from here,” I said. “A wicked sorcerer had it in his possession, and promised me it would help me in my quest.”
Nasrin frowned, and she closed the book with a snap that echoed under the temple’s peaked ceiling. “You knew the man did not have good intent, and yet you took the book from him. Why?”
“I have communed with gods and men and great beasts,” I said, “and I have found little to help me. I know one book cannot contain all the answers I seek, but if there’s anything you can find about the people who wrote it–“
She held up a hand to silence me. “This is an evil book, Eske of the North. You are fortunate to be unlettered, because no good will come of reading it. It would be best for it to be cast into the fire, to free us all from its presence.”
I seized the book from her before she could do so. “I’m sorry,” I said. “There may come a day when I burn this book myself, but for the time being, I must pursue my course.”
“Then you must leave this place,” Sister Nasrin said. “We will give you supplies for the road, but you cannot linger here with that book in your possession.”
And so, before the sun had set upon Isra’s well a third time, Bran and I walked west once more, our backs laden with water and our steps vanishing into the sand as soon as we made them.
I would find the origin of this terrible book, I swore, even if I were to burn its pages only a moment later. I had to know what the wizards of the West knew. Once I did, I would keep my own council, and make my own judgment.
I would not see Fenin or the people of Svilsara again.
Back to Chapter XXXIX: Across the Sea of Dust
Forward to Chapter XLI: The City on the Cliffs
Now that The Book of the New Moon Door is done, it’s time to finally bring Eske’s story to a close and give him the happily-ever-after he deserves. Of course, we’ve got a long way to go before that happens. Thanks for reading!
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