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.
The mass of people under the dome turns to Isabel, and by extension to Berend, leaning on her shoulder. They’re packed in side by side, with barely enough room to rotate in place. There’s no room to sit. An old man leans on a younger relative, exhaustion and pain written in the lines of his face.
The little boy with the grubby face shoves his way out of the foyer. He stops short, pigeon-toed feet in too-large shoes skidding on the smooth marble, and stares at the sky.
“It’s all right, Jemmy,” Isabel says, but there’s no weight behind her words. It’s not all right. It’s probably never going to be all right again.
Jemmy’s eyes go wide, and he breathes in short gasps. A thin, terrified whine escapes his throat.
“Are we still safe?” someone asks from inside the foyer.
Isabel can only stare at him. “You’re bleeding out,” she says, uselessly. “I don’t think you can stand.”
Berend takes another breath, thin and shaky. “Sure I can,” he says.
“Why? Where do you want to go?” She’s got to find some way to stop the bleeding—and keep him where he is before he wanders off, numb from shock. She pushes his left arm aside and puts both hands to the spreading dark stain on his coat. The fabric squelches under her weight.
“Don’t know. Just would rather die on my feet.” He stops, breathes for a moment, and adds, “If I can help at all, more the better.”
“Well, hello,” Berend says through his teeth, wincing from the renewed pain in his side as Isabel’s weight falls on his chest. “Fancy meeting you here.”
As far as grateful embraces after harrowing journeys go, he’s had better. Isabel’s sharp elbows dig into his shoulders, and she smells like mold, soot, old paper, and something that reminds him of lightning storms out at sea. He puts his arms around her anyway, despite the strain it puts on the wound in his side, and breathes in the terrible smell and feels like maybe things aren’t so bad, really.
In an instant, the sky full of eyes turns to her, stretching the loose flesh of each socket. Though the eyes are bright and alert, the skin is gray and soft with advanced decay. Rot has settled in to the wall of books, as well, and the pages swell and blacken as white mold creeps over the covers. Isabel can only guess what happens once they disintegrate entirely. A cold, damp wind whistles between the moldering bookcases and across the office floor, tugging at stacks of wet, sticky paper and the lines of the ritual circle.
She takes one cautious step into the room and weighs a quick escape over the impending panic that will surge through the temple if the people there can see what’s happened. She closes the door and turns the lock.
The diagram on the floor is one she doesn’t recognize. Three concentric circles enclose the office from the line of books to a foot before the door; the outermost circle is solid and thick, while the inner two are thinner, with deliberate gaps of thirty degrees or so that don’t overlap. In each gap is a sigil. Isabel can recognize Ondir’s, Alcos’s, and the symbol for protection. Inside the innermost ring is the sigil for sacrifice. In front of it sits Father Pereth.
Hybrook Belisia tosses the pistol aside and draws the rapier from his hip. He’s light on his feet, one polished toe pointed, his fingers loose around the hilt. “After all this,” he says with a sneer, “you still don’t have the good sense to lie down and die.”
In contrast, Berend grips his saber like he’s hanging from a cliff. It was a glancing blow, the pistol shot, otherwise his guts would be several feet behind him, but he’s still losing blood at an alarming rate. His shirt is already soaked through, and a thick, red stain spreads down one leg and into the heavy fabric of his borrowed coat. He presses his free hand onto the wound, hoping the pressure will keep him upright a little longer. He’ll worry about infection later, if he lives that long.
The Temple of Ondir is full of books. A stack of this year’s mathematical textbooks, the cheap pulp paper already yellowing, sits beside the hallway leading to Father Pereth’s office. Beside it, a nobleman’s collection of encyclopedias, dust filling in the faded, embossed titles on the spines, leans precariously against the wall. There are handwritten manuscripts, unbound account ledgers, popular novels with titles like The Vampire in the Castle and An Ill-Advised Match, and a child’s alphabet primer, etched into a flat wooden block. A case of leaden printing letters, the hinges badly damaged, sits on top of a pile of catalogues of ladies’ fashions, just underneath the painted image of hooded Ondir carrying his lantern. The entire space under the dome is ringed in books, in stacks up to Isabel’s shoulders, and it still isn’t enough.
Fallen leaves, turned from pale yellow to deep gold in the bizarre evening light, collect around Berend’s feet as he crosses the wide, central thoroughfare. On either side, the buildings loom tall and shadowed, and a thin green-black sliver of the vertical forest in the south cuts a dark line through the red-tinted sky. It’s shorter than it used to be, and something flickers in and out of view at the top, jutting out at different sharp angles whenever it appears. Berend tries not to look at it. His eye still aches from the last time he tried.
It’s quiet here, and all the windows up and down the street are shuttered. So lights, not even a burning scarlet reflection, shine out from amongst the dark wood casements and between climbing vines. If any of the wealthy citizens who live in this district are at home, they’re hiding very well. Berend hopes—because he’s less inclined than usual to pray, given that the gods are either dead or about to be—that Lady Breckenridge is among them.
It’s only been a few hours since Berend became acquainted with the wall of bone, but it looks like wind and rain have been battering against it for centuries. The bones have turned the color of old parchment. Pores and cracks have opened up all along the lengths of each rib and femur, each dome of a skull, and all the knobbly ends of joints Berend can’t identify, piled up as they are. Under his feet, fragments of bone crack and crumble into dust.
A thick fog blankets the brief stretch of ground between the street and the wall, and it covers Berend’s good eye and muffles his ears. He’s maybe three steps past the temple when it disappears, lost in the morass of gray. The wall runs east to west, as far as he can remember, so he puts it on his left side and places one tired foot in front of the other. Even the eerie red light that made its home on the western horizon doesn’t penetrate the fog anymore.
How much time do we have? he wonders. It’s a foolish question—no one has the answer, not even the gods, and if he thinks about it, he’ll probably stop stark still and not be able to move again until the world finally does end.
Around the ruin of Father Pereth’s office, Isabel has constructed a wall of books.
It’s really more of a low fence, three or four books high, depending on thickness. She stacked them haphazardly at first, but that prompted probing investigations from glowing tendrils and many-jointed fingers. Now, church records, illuminated manuscripts, and typeset prayer books stand in neat rows like bricks in a wall. She adds one more at the edge of the gap, a bound copy of the Kalusandr Scrolls, and winces as the already yellowed pages make contact with the heavy, damp air.
If this works, and this defense holds long enough for someone to find a way to send the thing beyond the wall back to the undreamt-of abyss from whence it came, all these books will be ruined. Centuries of church doctrine and millennia of history are only as durable as paper and ink. How can the church rebuild when all their knowledge is covered in mildew and mud?
It’s more important to save the people, she reminds herself. Knowledge survives when people do. What use are books in an empty city?
Space Whales Press 