Journey to the Water Chapter LXVI: The Crumbling World

Journey to the Water cover image: three evergreen trees stand on a hillside, shrouded in bluish fog. Subtitle reads: the sequel to Beyond the Frost-Cold Sea.

“Flesh,” the sharp-toothed one repeated, a keening whine that made the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

“Hush, Kelast,” the one who looked like Khalim said, soft and placating. “You’ll be all right.”

He sounded like Khalim. I searched his face, looking for some flaw that might give away a shapeshifter, or a detail that would prove that my eyes did not deceive me. There were his dark eyes, untainted by the deceiver’s gold, exactly as I remembered them. There was his smile, warm and guileless.

Khalim had left the citadel where the god Torr had confined him—that I knew. I also knew that he would seek out the lost and wounded, and how else could one describe these strange people gathered around the fire? They showed no visible injuries on the hands and faces that emerged from their robes, but their eyes—the eyes of deer and frogs as well as of men—were hollow and hungry.

But I had been deceived before. I was spared, then, by having witnessed the serpent-god of the desert reach into my memories and put on the image of Khalim. This vision might have been more of the same.

I reached out, and the image of Khalim did the same, but my hand passed through his. I drew it back, startled.

“You really are made of flesh,” he said, awe and wonder on his face.

The sharp-toothed man, Kelast, made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob.

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Journey to the Water Chapter LXV: The Long Walk

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Fearghus waited, ginger brows raised in an unspoken question. He’d always called me impatient, and said that his fiery hair belied which of us was the more hotheaded. I had missed him so—even in the long years when I had thought of nothing and no one but Khalim, I carried Fearghus with me. I dared not reach out to touch him for fear that he would vanish into the salt-heavy air.

“What are you doing here?” I said, finding my voice at last. “You should be upon the summer plains, hunting with the gods of our people. Please, tell me that you haven’t been banished to this desolate place.”

The gray sea broke against the shore in a whisper, lifting my boat and pushing it further into the rocks. I’d have to pull it farther ashore if I ever planned to return to it, but for now, I could not tear my eyes from Fearghus’s face.

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Journey to the Water Interlude Six: The White City

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Khalim’s fist struck the vast marble door and made no sound. The wall of the white city loomed above him, high as the red twilight sky, its perfect flat surface marred only with its faint, gray veins. The seam between the doors let none of the perpetual low sunlight escape. The city was exactly as Khalim had left it: flawless, impenetrable, and silent.

Khalim did not belong here, and he never had. His hand was dark against the great door, the tattered threads of his clothing brighter than even the sky. He had left the dust of the road and the wet earth of the forest behind, but he felt as though he would leave a mark on the marble just by touching it.

He knocked again, scraping his knuckles against the stone but leaving neither dirt nor blood on the surface. The marble only appeared smooth.

“I know you’re there,” Khalim said to the door. “I was in your presence for fifteen years. I could find you again even in this place.”

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Journey to the Water Chapter LXIV: The Gate of Bone

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From the wreckage of a hundred or more ships, I crafted a sturdy canoe, large enough to withstand the crashing waves but small enough that I could hold its sail and its single oar alone. I cut apart the robe that had been given to me at the temple of the dragon, stitching its panels together to craft a sail; the oar was a fortunate find, washed up in a frigid tide pool. Water and weather had split it almost in two, but I tied it together with sinew and rope, and it held well enough. It would get me out to sea.

All the while, the sun rose lower and set more swiftly with each brief, passing day. I worked by firelight. The pilgrims maintained a bonfire of driftwood and animal dung. We ate from our shared stores and from what little we could gather in the tide pools: tiny shrimp and spiny urchins, as well as kelp and seaweed. I harpooned a seal soon after my arrival, and that fed us well for many days and earned me a place among the pilgrims.

How they stared at me, day and night, watching me work. They were a strange, pale lot, with sunken eyes and bodies bent from carrying heavy packs and eating little for months at a time. They had walked, they said, for the better part of a year, almost entirely on foot. When the bitter winter ended, they would make their return journey, carrying with them all that they would need.

Still, when a great squid washed up upon the shore, its dead flesh shining like still water and reeking of the deep, they left it alone. One must not eat the flesh of a god, they said.

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Journey to the Water Interlude Five: A Place Between

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“You’ve been busy,” the moon-faced owl said.

It hovered on silent wings above Khalim’s head, just out of the reach of his arms, the same wind that stirred the golden grass to either side keeping it aloft. Its shadow fell onto the winding path.

“Not really,” Khalim said. “I was in a forest for a while, and then a great beast tried to eat me. Then I was here.”

The owl gave one shake of its shadowy wings. It might have been laughing at him, low and raspy. “That’s all?”

“I don’t know where I am,” Khalim said, mostly to himself. “I’ve been walking for a long time, and I’m not sure where I’m going. But if something else tries to eat me, I can go somewhere else. It’s easy.”

“It’s not easy for everyone,” said the owl.

Khalim lifted his head, squinting against the low, golden sun. The owl’s face was in shadow, the hollows around its eyes like the shadowed places on the moon—at least, the moon in his memory. He hadn’t seen a moon since before the white city. “It’s easy enough for you. Or did you fly all the way here?”

“What do you think I am, child?” the owl asked.

“Not an owl,” said Khalim. “Just like I’m not a child.”

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Two, Chapter Twenty-Six

The Void

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.

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Isabel gets to her knees and grips the back of the driver’s seat. It’s empty, and the carriage jerks and bumps over the fog-shrouded terrain with no apparent guidance. Ghostly figures part like water before it, barely lifting their heads to acknowledge it. Their attention is focused on the crumbling wall, and the seething mass of eyes behind it.

Where are we going? Either the carriage is compelled by a base, inanimate desire to move despite its lack of horses, or it has some destination it seeks out mindlessly like a compass needle finding north. Isabel can’t wait to find out when it will stop. Her body, and Brother Risoven’s, are still sitting on the carriage’s physical counterpart, less than an arm’s length from the horde of undead filling the streets of Mondirra. When the angry corpses pull the wheels off the carriage, which won’t be long given their numbers, both she and Risoven will be torn to bloody shreds in no time at all.

Risoven’s spirit crouches behind her, one arm over his eyes and the other hand gripping the edge of the open window below him. He prays in a breathless, whispered litany: “Watcher on the wall, master of the gate, guardian of the bridge, shepherd of all souls, deliver us, please.”

Ondir isn’t listening, wherever he might be now. Isabel reaches out and shakes Risoven by the shoulder. “We have to hurry.”

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Journey to the Water Interlude Four: The Land of Ghosts

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Khalim took a breath. Cold, wet air, heavy with the scent of rain and decaying vegetation, chilled him from the inside of his chest, where his heart only shivered instead of beating, down to his feet and the tips of his fingers. He took a step back.

The beast rose up out of the underbrush, its forelimbs thick as tree trunks. Thick, black hair covered each arm and the shadowed body, wet and shiny in the scarlet glow of its eyes. A mask of bone, the larger mirror of the one on the creature still clinging to Khalim’s back, reflected an oval of burning red light. Below the mask, two rows of sharp teeth stretched out in a sinister smile.

Khalim had the distinct impression that this was a smile, not just an animal’s threat display in response to the sound of his approach. It could see him, and the sight of him amused it.

“Is this your mother?” Khalim whispered to the creature on his back, “or did you just take me here to be eaten?”

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

Walking Dead

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“You should have predicted this, Sentinel,” Geray muses. He hovers two feet above the floor, as though to emphasize his relative safety and removal from the horde of undead at the door. “Hundreds of thousands of wandering spirits with nowhere to go, and the god of the dead absent. If they were a living mob, they’d have torches and pitchforks. I dare say you’d fare better were that the case.”

Isabel doesn’t have the will to stop herself from putting her hands over her ears. The pressure makes a dull roar that drowns out Geray and the wet, solid blows the walking dead are doing to the whitewashed wooden door. The lock is good iron, and the door itself a single, heavy oak panel, but it won’t hold forever.

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

Locked

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“The geography of the nether world is complicated,” Isabel explains. “It’s governed not by distance and space but by the spiritual and conceptual relationship of one place to another.”

Not one of the words in her second sentence makes any sense to Berend. It must be evident on his face, because she looks at him and continues, “My point is that there are a lot of places in the world beyond that haven’t been discovered, and no one knows what might be lurking there.”

“Like the place with the eyes,” Berend says. He still can’t shake the feeling that the next time he looks out a window, they’ll be there again, filling the sky and staring down at him with malevolent, predatory intentions. “Or was that a thing? A creature as big as the world?”

Isabel shrugs. “There isn’t much of a useful distinction. Ondir is the gate, and the gate is Ondir. He is the realm of the dead and its lord.”

There’s a reason Berend never even entertained the thought of joining the clergy as a young man. He rubs at his own eyes, hoping they don’t look as dry and crusty as they feel. His borrowed coffee is wearing off. “Right. So you’re saying that there’s a place, or a person, or a…thing that eats souls like a fire eats wood. Nobody’s heard of it before, because it just appeared out of nowhere, but that happens sometimes.” He blinks, willing himself to stay awake and coherent a little longer. “Do I have that right?”

He looks at Warder, who glances expectantly up at Isabel.

She holds up two empty hands. “It’s more complicated than that, but yes. More or less.”

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Journey to the Water Interlude Three: The Broken Road

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The creature clung to Khalim’s back, breathing a quick, shallow rhythm against his neck. It was light as a bird, and its fingers ended in tiny, sharp talons, black and shiny as obsidian, that clicked together as it adjusted its hold on his shoulders. It was a meat-eating creature, Khalim guessed, based on the claws and its many pointed teeth—though maybe it didn’t eat anything. He hadn’t been hungry since his still-shaky memories of the world before the citadel, and there wasn’t anything identifiable to eat in this place even if he had been. He was lost, and so very cold, but the world beyond had not been as cruel as he’d feared.

The question remained, then, why someone would lay a trap to catch small creatures in the wood, if not to eat them. Its iron jaws could have easily closed on Khalim, had he been less fortunate. At the very least, he wouldn’t have starved to death before he freed himself.

“So,” he said. His voice was flat and muffled to his own ears, swallowed up by the forest. “Where are we going?”

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