The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Five

Choices

The Book of the New Moon Door cover image: A book with yellowing, wrinkled pages lies open on an old wooden desk, with a sprig of lavender lying in the center.

“I’m sorry,” Isabel mutters, her eyes sliding from his face down to the mist-shrouded earth between her feet. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

It looks bad, Berend admits—a whole swathe of the city is gone, swallowed up in dense gray fog streaked bloody with the strange red sunlight. The sun should have set by now, he’s fairly certain, but the light lingers dim and cold over the wet landscape. He can just make out the sharp, flickering shapes of broken ghosts, gathered at the edge of what’s left of the cemetery. The solid, heavy shape of the Temple of Ondir stands firm and untouched at his back, but it doesn’t offer much reassurance. It doesn’t have Isabel in it. She’s out here, instead, which means she has already been inside. It’s the first place she would go—church folk are predictable like that, and Isabel is a particularly churchy sort of church folk. And she’s not still inside where it’s safe and dry and relatively warm, and where there are a few people nominally devoted to the safety of the city and the maintenance of the terribly abused order of the world, so something must have made her leave.

Whatever it was, it doesn’t bode well for Berend’s immediate future. As bad as things look, here at the edge of the familiar world, he’s sure they’re actually much worse.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Four

Empty Road

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Berend leaves Warder in the nurses’ capable hands. He’ll be back later, when he’s found his things and a safe place to sleep, and maybe something resembling a meal. It’s not like Warder is going anywhere.

Bodies in varying states of decay clog the stairwells, lying piled against the doors and draped over the edge of the stairs. Some are fresh, their wounds raw and crimson, dressed in bloodstained nurses’ uniforms or fresh bandages. Berend steps over a gray-skinned body, naked except for the torn remains of a shroud clinging to its shoulders, its arms broken off above the elbows. He finds the missing limbs a few steps later, clutched in the hands of a fresher corpse, the back of its skull smashed in from a fall. Blood slicks the steps, sticking to Berend’s boots.

They were tearing each other apart. Behind the sleeve he put up to shield his nose from the haze of disinfectant and decay—so thick he can almost see it—Berend grimaces. A horde of undead isn’t an army; there’s no loyalty or camaraderie. They’re a haunting by another name, a manifestation of the pain and rage of a spirit who can’t accept that it’s dead. Losing limbs doesn’t stop them, nor does smashing their faces against a stone wall. A little collateral damage wouldn’t make a difference.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Three

Circles

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Father Pereth is, in fact, still alive. The novice with the smudged face escorts Isabel through the sanctum, where the priests in prayer don’t look up to acknowledge her, and down the narrow hallway to the high priest’s office. The door is closed, and someone has carved the sigils of the seven gods into the wood with a pocketknife, in an attempt to ward the room against the dead, should they have breached the outer doors. There had only been one body in the morgue, and the rest seem to have been repelled by other means. It’s fortunate that this warding wasn’t put to the test. Isabel doesn’t know what might have happened.

The novice knocks, and the sound of furniture being moved and the lock disengaging follows. The door swings open to reveal Father Pereth, his cassock dusty and his hair disheveled, but otherwise unhurt.

He takes one look at Isabel and says, “You.”

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Two

Chaos

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At the head of a column of ghosts, with Risoven and the dead priests of Ondir at her side, Isabel approaches the crumbling wall. It buckles outward, looming toward her, holding back the weight of the thing behind it by faith and force of will. The many eyes, clustered together like sprouting fungus, roll in unseen sockets to appraise her, pupils contracting to pinpricks.

It’s foolish, what she’s doing. At best, it will stave off the destruction of the world for only a little while longer. She hopes it will be enough time for someone wiser than she to find a more permanent solution.

Another step, and an ear-splitting whine shakes the shattered sky. Isabel puts her hands over her ears, but it doesn’t help—neither the sound nor her hands have a physical presence here in the world beyond. Ripples form in the mud beneath her feet as the high-pitched note goes on and on, stabbing through her spirit form like a hot knife. Stones fall loose from the wall and dissipate upon hitting the ground.

There is triumph in this horrible song, and a warning, and something else Isabel can’t name, a sort of mad, painful delight at causing the world itself to tear apart at the seams, as it screams with both love and hate of the task. If ever this thing possessed the power of reason, the ability is long gone. It is a creature—a structure, an all-pervasive thought—of pure chaos.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter One

Impossible

Table of Contents

One by one, the dead fall still and drop to the tiled floor. Silence falls over the hospital wing.

Berend stands on legs shaky with exhaustion, adrenaline the only thing keeping him upright, his empty pistol gripped in one hand as stiff as a corpse’s. A slow fire that reeks of disinfectant and rotting flesh eats at what’s left of his barricade.

Is it over?

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