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

Transformation

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.

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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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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Journey to the Water Chapter XXXVIII: Svilsara, As It Always Was

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The midday sun burned like a forge overhead, and the heat bore down on me with searing claws. I had the presence of mind to gather my belongings and move them to the narrow band of shade beside the sacrificial stone, where the wind took up the frayed ends of the rope that had bound me.

At the foot of the stone was a black scar, a smear of soot barely a hand’s breadth wide on the burning rock where the god of Svilsara had lain. It was a small, inconsequential thing—in a few hours, a day at most, the wind would scour the surface clean, and nothing would remain of him but a memory. Gods, I knew well, could die. They did not die easily. If I had indeed slain him, and I had no reason to believe I hadn’t, the consequences to myself and the hostile land on which I stood were far beyond my foresight.

I tried to hold in my mind’s eye the image of Svilsara as it would have been without the illusion: emaciated people, streets of ruined buildings filled with desert dust, and cramped, smoky corridors.

The only thing I could see was Khalim, lying upon the stone, hands clutching the harpoon in his belly and his face contorted in pain.

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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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Journey to the Water Chapter XXXVII: Within the Illusion

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I had been warned of this. At the temple of the dragon, the warrior Jin had told me of the devious spirits that haunted the world beyond death, luring the unwary into certain doom. He had described them as less than gods, but what was a god to a man who lived in the shadow of an ancient dragon who refused all those who would worship her? A god, to Jin, would have been something beyond imagining. The thing calling itself Svilsara’s god was far beneath his acknowledgement.

And what was a god to one such as me? The Ascended, hungry for blood and willing to destroy their thousand-year reign to obtain it? Their master, who could not prevent the destruction of the city, and yet thought it right to rule over it afterward? The gods of my people were hunters and wanderers, warriors and magic-workers, and the great beasts that roamed the vast icy plains of the world beyond. I could not imagine any of them here in the desert, so far from the place of my birth.

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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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Journey to the Water Chapter XXXVI: The Sacrificial Stone

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I had been tied to the iron ring in the stone more securely than Fenin had been. Though Svilsara’s priests had accepted my repentance all too easily, having never encountered an outsider with no faith in their serpent, some suspicion as to my motives remained. In a way, I was grateful for the rope chafing my wrists. The people of Svilsara were like children, naive, trusting, and unable to imagine that another person might not share their belief in the benevolence of their god. If they could doubt me, then perhaps they had within them the capacity to break free of the serpent’s hold.

That, however, was a concern for later. The blinding desert sun bore down upon my head, its heat like a burning iron weighing down on my face and the exposed skin of my arms. My thin traveler’s robe did little to protect me, and I could feel my flesh redden and burn.

“Come on, you foul creature,” I shouted into the burning expanse. “I’m waiting.”

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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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