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

Trouble

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.

Dawn breaks over the city by the time they reach the gates. Berend is usually good at keeping track of time, always waking right before his watch is due to start, but the night seems to have passed by in just a few hours. He doesn’t like it.

Isabel is half a step ahead of him. Though she stops once more at the gate to make sure he’s following, she says nothing. She may have been weeping, silent and stone-faced, but it’s too dark still for Berend to tell.

We are in trouble.

Berend doesn’t want to have to be the reasonable one between the pair of them. His hands still itch as he pictures wrapping them around Arden Geray’s ghostly neck. It feels satisfying in his imagination, even though he’s aware that dead spirits don’t work that way. Failing that, he wants to go straight to the university hospital and shake Lucian Warder awake, his injuries be damned. Isabel is supposed to be preventing him from doing that, at least until she’s explained how best to not get himself killed in the process.

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

Fracture

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Berend stands under a sky filled with blinking, staring eyes, surrounded on all sides by the restless dead. A red star shoots overhead like a firework, disappearing below a distant horizon in a blaze of ruby light. The world shakes with a terrible shriek, and Berend falls into it, the sound tearing him apart from within, his vision turning black at the edges and a burning pain spreading from his heart to his fingertips.

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

Revelations II

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Isabel closes her eyes. As she has no physical eyelids at the moment, it doesn’t do anything. Her vision is still filled with ghosts, crowding in around her, blocking all escape routes.

But they’re not coming for her. They’re moving past her, like an unending river of death across the fields. Their incorporeal steps sink into the ground as though they’re trudging through a mire, slowly and doggedly.

“Where am I?” asks the ghost of a young woman, a tattered shawl gathered around her head and trailing misty fibers. Tied around her chest is a sling to hold a young baby, but it is empty, lying flat against her swollen breasts.

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

Revelations I

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Isabel falls quiet. There’s a long walk ahead of her, and a longer night after that. She has to conserve her strength. There have been more sleepless nights in the last week than she ever had to endure as an apprentice, and even then, young as she was, she had not endured them happily.

The wind blows cold, and it carries a smell of frost as it crosses dry, brown fields on its way to the sea. Isabel can just make out the shapes of cut rows on either side of the road. Harvest time is well under way, and winter will follow, bringing with it a slight relief from the walking dead. Spirits are no less angry in winter, but bodies without the breath of life cannot keep their limbs from freezing solid, and their decay slows along with their chance of spreading pestilence. Winter, as the old sayings go, is when Sentinels retreat to their cloisters to study the same dusty tomes they studied the year before, and the year before that, going all the way back to the first Sentinel Rainier.

With a sudden ache like a knife to her ribs, Isabel misses the library in Vernay. Her superiors will learn of her failings in a few short days, when Father Pereth’s request for her replacement reaches them. They will turn her away, or worse, allow her in and follow her through the halls with looks of pity and distrust, as though she’s a vagabond relying on their charity.

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Journey to the Water Interlude Two: The Spirit Wilds

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.

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Khalim was lost.

The sky was dark, and glittering with stars he did not recognize. A forest of huge trees, older than the earth itself, encircled him with darkness and the smell of green things growing.

He felt neither hunger nor thirst. That was a small mercy. Though he knew it must be an illusion, his feet pressed into the rich soil, and a cold, damp wind tugged at his clothes. He had acquired, in the center of his tunic, a ragged, burnt hole, through which the chill cut at his skin. It was the memory of the conjured lance of Malang, the war god of Phyreios, who had recognized the god inside Khalim and sought to slay him. Khalim remembered how the lance had burned, and the force of it had taken him off his feet. The cold was far preferable.

Voices filled the wood, chattering in languages he did not understand, mingling with the calls of birds and the low, threatening growls of unseen beasts. The undergrowth shifted and moved, and shadowy shapes darted in and out of sight like small, quick animals. Khalim thought he had heard someone call his name, some time ago, but he had not heard it again.

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Journey to the Water Chapter XI: Ashinya Waters

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“What will you do now?” Luana asked me.

Though the morning was bright, and the sky over the mountain shone in sapphire blue, a dark cloud had passed over me. I had done what I had intended upon traveling to the island; I had gazed into the Dreaming Eye, and through the help of its creator goddess I had caught the briefest glimpse of my beloved. True to the word of the first hero, the god of Phyreios, Khalim was unharmed, but he no longer remained in the place in the realm of the dead where I thought I would one day find him. He had set off, alone, across a strange, unknown country.

How foolish I was, to think that he would simply stay and await rescue. My Khalim was many things, but patient was not one of them. He must have hated that pale, dead city. It had nothing that he loved in its meager confines; no living beings, no open sky, no growing things. Once, he had told me that he had never been alone. Torr’s realm must have been terrifying in its stark loneliness.

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Journey to the Water Interlude One: Citadel Gate

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“I’ve remembered my name,” Khalim said. “Will you help me?”

The moon-faced owl preened the crook of one wing with its beak. “And why should I do that, little one?”

Khalim walked to the base of the arch on which the owl perched, beside the stair that led to the temple he could never open. “Why do you call me that? I’m larger than you.”

“Is that what you see?”

He nodded. He was half as tall as the arch, and though the owl’s wings were broad, he guessed he could hold its body in his arms.

The owl lowered its wing and studied him with one eye. “Interesting. And what do you look like?”

It was a strange question, seeing as the owl was looking him in the face, but Khalim would play along. The last thing he wished to do was offend the only being he had seen in such a long time—perhaps forever. He wasn’t sure. He looked down at his hands.

For a brief flash, he saw what he expected to see—brown skin, calluses, the frayed hem of a sleeve. Then his flesh turned to white marble, with two black veins twining up each of his wrists. His clothing became ridges of stone, exquisitely carved of the same material that formed the walls of the citadel.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Twenty-Seven

Vortex

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Berend said that he saw only darkness when he broke their connection, and now Isabel knows he was telling the truth. She can feel her breath condensing in the frigid air, but she cannot see it. There is nothing but black.

The illusion is a powerful one. In the ordinary darkness after sunset, it wouldn’t be too complex to cast, especially if one prepared ahead of time, but she is impressed with Geray’s skill. If he had stayed with the church of Alcos, or even with the university, he could have been the most powerful magic user in Gallia, if not the world. Maybe he wouldn’t have become wealthy from the research opportunities, but at least he and Warder would not have to be begging Lady Breckenridge for an investment. Instead, he was doing…this.

What’s the point of all of this? The murders, the summonings. It would be so much easier to do anything else.

She’s distracting herself, Isabel realizes. Panic is setting in, tugging at the periphery of her thoughts like a ringing in her ears, and she is just barely keeping it at bay with these mundanities.

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