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

Choices

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.

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

The Void

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

Faithful

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Isabel’s feet hit the ground, sending a shock from her heels into her knees and all the way to the joints of her hips. The palms of her hands burn as she removes them from the coarse linen sheet and exposes them to the air. A pair of raw patches marks each one, livid red where the skin has peeled away.

She looks back up toward the window. She could have fallen much, much farther. The improvised rope drifts in the afternoon breeze, its end brushing against the street. Berend’s face is framed in cut stone before he moves away from the window and disappears.

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

Barricade

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Berend watches the window. He shouldn’t; he should be fortifying the doors, maybe figuring out some way to get Warder out of the direct path of danger. The nurse’s stockinged feet touch the ground, and she takes off running up the street. Isabel’s climb is slower, the soles of her boots scraping against the masonry wall and her arms unsteady. Berend checks the knots again.

The younger nurse approaches the door to the hall, one hand on the pair of shears in her pocket. She puts her ear to the door and listens.

“One of the doors is broken, but they can’t get through yet,” she says.

Her companion, a woman of about thirty with pale yellow curls escaping her cap, pushes past her and turns the latch. “Not yet. Soon, though.”

“Should we barricade the door in here?” asks the first. “What about the other patients?”

“We can’t just leave them,” argues the second.

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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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