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

Knives

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 does not want to fight this man. He wants even less to kill him, but he’d rather that than give Hybrook Belisia the satisfaction of prematurely concluding his attempts to keep the world from ending. He’d also like to get back to the Temple District before the city scrambles itself around again.

Scarlet night is falling, but it’s still light enough to see that despite the gunshot, there’s no one else around—or they’re quite wisely hiding indoors. This particular street would have been a quiet one, under normal circumstances, but there isn’t a student in sight. There are no lectures from which to return home, nor philosophical discussions to be had over ale or coffee. Everyone is either crowded around the chasm, arguing over how best to build a bridge, holed up inside, or fled to the Temple of Isra.

Berend had mistaken this man for a student, from a distance, but his mistake is obvious now. The disheveled, hungry look isn’t an aesthetic choice, or the result of late nights peering at mathematical figures by candlelight. It’s only good, old-fashioned poverty. Whether it’s recent, or this would-be assassin spent his childhood cutting purses with a smaller knife, Berend can’t say.

“We can pretend we never saw each other,” Berend offers.

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

Askew

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The sun is a curious blood-orange as it sinks over the university hospital, staining the towering forest a deep brownish black and the river running through it a dull red. Berend makes his way toward the forest’s shadowed underside, where the Orchard District, he hopes, still lies. It should be a short walk, but something’s wrong with the formerly orderly row houses in which the students and a good number of their teachers live several to a room. The neat grid of north-south avenues and east-west streets is all askew, with one line of houses intersecting another in a way that just barely avoids two buildings ending up on top of one another—the occupants of both houses stand outside, hands on hips or scratching at their heads in confusion. The dark wood frame of the farther house touches the red-brick corner of the nearer, and a fringe of splinters coated in reddish dust mark the point where they collided.

Berend crosses a street twice as wide as it should be, and then another that’s about a third too narrow. They intersect at a point far to the south, farther than he estimates the southern wall should be, shrouded in a strange, brown haze that looks like smoke but smells like nothing.

He’s a few blocks east of where the district boundary should lie when the earthquake hits.

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

Books

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The air hums like a taut string. Through the fog, Isabel can see the wall of bone buckle outward, femurs knocking against ribcages in a rhythmless clatter as the mass tries to shift and absorb the force pushing behind it. Mist burns away in curls, and scarlet light scorches through to the floor of Pereth’s office.

Beneath her feet, the ground is shaking. Dust rains from the ceiling. Somewhere nearby, there is the terrible crack of breaking stone, louder than the shattering bones. Is it the temple dome, or is the other wall holding back the many-eyed thing also breaking?

Isabel doesn’t have time to answer these questions. She takes two fast steps toward Father Pereth and grabs him by the arm. He doesn’t resist as she drags him across the room to his heavy oaken desk, still beside the office door, and shoves him underneath. She follows, drawing her knees up to her chest and putting her arms over her head. The desk’s wooden legs scrape against the marble floor as the temple shakes as if with a terrible fever.

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

Abandoned

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She’s not alone here, on what was once the most holy of streets. People have gathered from all around the city, some carrying their belongings stuffed into sacks or tied in rolls of blankets, others empty-handed. A few of the watch’s broken barricades have been cleared away, but the street is still littered with them, and no one has touched the bodies. An old man sits beside a fire on the side of the road, and sharpened points emerge from the embers. Whatever drove him to build the fire has since departed, and he stares with burning light in his eyes, his lips moving without a sound.

Isra’s temple has acquired a huge gathering, pressing up against the main doors, surging around both sides, and smothering the kitchen door as well. They’re common folk, mostly, dressed in plain clothes. If there are any green-clad nuns among them, Isabel can’t see them. Two men support a third between them at the bottom of the stairs; the injured one’s head hangs down to his chest, and a festering wound on his shoulder leaks blood and pus into what’s left of his shirt. The wound still has the shape of the rotting, dead teeth that made it.

Across the street, a priest in a red robe stands on a box in the doorway of the temple of Alcos. He stretches his arms wide, as if he can quell the clamor around him by pressing it down. “Good people,” he calls out, “let us pray. We will seek the Father’s guidance.”

The crowd ripples. A few have taken to their knees, following his instructions. Others wander, restless, as much as the press of people allows. “Have the gods abandoned us?” someone shouts, but even the priest cannot answer.

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

Weathered

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It isn’t until Isabel has passed through the iron village once more that the eerie dirge her following of ghosts is singing begins to form words. “It’s coming,” they chant. “Stone crumbles and bone turns to dust.”

They repeat this in rising and falling cadences, their hollow eyes wide with fear. They’ve abandoned their more or less orderly queue and now crowd around her in a semicircular mass, their mist-colored shoulders overlapping and their feet an indistinguishable mass a few inches above the rutted, metal road.

Isabel wraps her coat tighter around her and puts her hands over her ears. They’ve become so loud, her ghosts, and there are more of them than ever. Somewhere, people are dying, and their spirits are making their way here. Flashes of tortured, twisting motion tell her that a few of them are broken from contact with the thing beyond the wall.

“Why are you following me?” she asks again.

“It’s coming,” is their only answer. “It’s coming.”

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

Thankful

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The upper half of the University District, as Berend has taken to calling it, is more or less intact—surprising, considering the earth beneath it can’t be stable anymore. On the street leading up to Emryn Marner’s red-brick house, the cobbles are loose, sitting in hollows too large for them and shifting under Berend’s feet. He could be imagining things, but each house looks a little farther from its neighbors than he remembers.

A crack splits the steps leading up to the painted door. Berend places one foot on the first stair, lowering his weight slowly. It’s sturdy enough. He won’t have to be here long.

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

Bridges

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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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Journey to the Water Chapter XXXIX: Across the Sea of Dust

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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Two others stood up with Fenin: young men, one in the tattered remnants of an attendant’s white robe, and the other carrying a pitted, splintery staff that might have been enchanted to look like a spear. Had I met either of them before the illusion broke? I could not imagine a connection between their gaunt cheeks, thin hair, and missing teeth and the bright, bronze faces I had seen yesterday. Except for Fenin, everyone here was a stranger.

The elders remained where they were, kneeling on the dusty ground. They bowed their heads, turning their faces away from me. They would not look at me, or their three defecting subjects, again. In a rasping, wavering voice, they sang a hymn to their dead god, and we left the barren garden in search of enough provisions to survive in the desert.

We would not take everything. Though part of me wished to punish them for their treatment of me, and reasoned that if they were going to do nothing, they deserved whatever fate the sun and wind had in store for them, I could not leave them to starve. I found a little dried meat, caked with dust, some handfuls of grain, and another few days’ worth of water, murky and tasting of mud. The rest I left where it was, hoping that the people of Svilsara would recover it before the rats did. I could hear movement in the walls and the scratching of many tiny claws.

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