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

Bridges

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.

Berend wanders back the way he came, down the hill past the temple of Ondir. The doors are shut, and the low dome sits like the carcass of an enormous beetle, hollow and still. Presumably, there are still people inside, but they don’t show their faces.

Maybe all of Ondir’s holy men are hiding. The ghosts lingering around the Temple District followed Isabel when she left, but Berend is sure there are more—there certainly will be, if the world shifts again and the district falls into a chasm, or if either of the walls holding back the many-eyed thing (or is it a place? Berend can’t keep it straight) finally fall.

He’d feel better if there were four walls, but at this point, he’s taking what he can get. It probably doesn’t matter, either way, because the walls are just ideas. Or something.

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

Transformation

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The grass beneath Isabel’s feet is metal wire, brittle and sharp. As she enters the silent village, the crowd of ghosts at her heels, she checks her hands and the hems of her sleeves for any sign that she’s undergoing the same transformation. Her fingers remain flesh; her coat is still wool. Whatever happened here is over now. All that remains is a village made of iron.

What had Emryn Marner said? Something about the red star, and a town half a day away—and the story a traveler had told about it, passed from alehouse to inn until it reached the University District. Isabel had dismissed it then. She’d had more pressing concerns.

A scraping, rattling sound that makes Isabel’s teeth hurt sweeps through the village as the wind rustles the grass underfoot and the thatching on the roofs. Flat surfaces—walls, fence posts, and the sides of the unfortunate cattle—shine dully in the midmorning light. She avoids looking in any more windows, but that doesn’t spare her the sight of a stablehand, no older than ten, cowering by the fence with iron arms covering his head. His hair is fine wire, coiled tightly, and the ends crumble as the wind passes through it. Iron dust falls to the iron earth.

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

Landscapes

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Isabel figures she must be a sight, wearing too-large borrowed clothes and an even larger coat, but she’s warm and her belly is full, so she decides not to worry about it. She’s not much more strange in appearance than anyone else on the road from the Temple District to the university, bypassing the barricaded route through the city’s center. Most of her fellow travelers are ghosts, dressed in the echoes of whatever they were wearing in life, bearing the wounds of their encounter with the reanimated dead—the wrath of their ghostly predecessors.

So many spirits had followed Isabel to the wall, and yet there are more. When she looks over her shoulder, they’re following her, four or five abreast and a dozen deep. Most wear watchmen’s uniforms, the patches on their vests indistinct. One just behind Isabel is a nun, her green habit turned gray, a broken piece of wood clutched in one hand as a weapon.

“Why are you following me?” she asks aloud. Even if she had her magic, if Ondir wasn’t beyond her reach, she doesn’t know a single one of these ghosts’ names. Can they tell she is—she was—a Sentinel, despite the lack of all inward and outward markers?

They don’t give her an answer. The darkened hollows of their eyes gaze straight ahead, unseeing, as they trudge after her.

I can’t help them. If ever there was need of a Sentinel, it would be now, but she can do nothing.

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

Screams

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Berend props himself up, his back against the dais and his head resting at the base of Isra’s altar. A smiling goddess, her arms cradling sheaves of wheat balanced on her wide hips like a pair of infants, gazes down at him beatifically. He’s always liked Isra; her green-clad nuns have gentle hands and a collection of excellent painkilling drugs, and they listen to his war stories, even pretending to be interested. The goddess herself hasn’t done much of anything, in his experience, but that’s how these things go. You pray to the gods, and maybe some people show up to do what needs to be done, and everyone gives the gods all the credit and moves on with their lives.

That is, until Berend learned that Galaser had given up his whole godly person to hold back the thing with all the eyes. He still doesn’t quite believe it. Maybe he didn’t really believe in the gods, not really. They were more like concepts than divine beings, weren’t they? Maybe someone like Isabel believed in Ondir as a person, the keeper of the gates or what have you, but most people didn’t.

Isabel would tell him that it doesn’t matter. Ondir is the gate, and also the idea of death. And so Galaser, the idea of a warrior, can stand on the idea of a fortress wall and give his life defending it. Berend might ask her for clarification, but she’s asleep, or close enough that he doesn’t want to disturb her.

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

Red

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Isabel had never received a reply to her letter asking the Sentinels of Vernay to weigh in on the conundrum of the broken spirit of Mikhail Ranseberg—or, maybe, an answer was waiting for her at the temple, never to be reclaimed. She wasn’t going to risk the high priest’s wrath by setting foot in there now. She’d answered her own questions in the weeks that followed, anyway, and now here she was, with the thing that had torn Mikhail’s soul apart grasping at her through the gaps in a wall of bone.

Still, she’d like to see something familiar. If she had a home, it would be Vernay, in the church where she’d spent her childhood sweeping between the headstones and her adolescence poring over dusty tomes in the library. She’d been trying to return there ever since arriving in Mondirra, the city’s bustle and noise straining her faculties even when she had time to eat and sleep, which hasn’t been often, of late. Vernay is quiet, as a rule, and the dead do not wake there. The turning of its ancient mill has continued uninterrupted since the time of the Inquisition. It’s hard to imagine the cataclysmic changes that have come to Mondirra visiting Vernay’s ancient, packed-earth streets.

The dying red sun refuses to set as the evening grows late, and long after nightfall should have arrived, it burns like a stubborn ember on the horizon. Perhaps, Isabel muses as she strains her eyes over the as-yet-untouched West Gate district, the light there isn’t the sun at all, but rather some alien fire that was transferred here from the nether when the world was torn apart and stitched back together.

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

Choices

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“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

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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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