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

Friends

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 marches Isabel out of Father Pereth’s office. His grip on her arm is immovable as a rusted iron hinge. Isabel struggles, twisting her elbow and pulling against him, but it’s no use. Fear restricts her vision to the end of the hall, where the dome allows in a few thin beams of sunlight. She expects the chapel will be filled with constables, but she might still be able to get away, to disappear into the back corridors and out into the graveyard—if she could only get herself free of Berend.

She trusted him. She’d thought he cared enough about the state of the world, about protecting the people of Mondirra, that he would help her. He saw the same terrible vision in the nether that she did. She’d even thought he supported her against the high priest’s accusations, until he’d smiled and acquiesced and grabbed her by the elbow.

“I’m not going to the temple of Isra,” she snarls through her teeth. She doesn’t want to hurt him, but if she has to, she’ll drive the heel of her boot straight into the soft leather instep of his. It’ll have to be quick, and then she’ll have to run. He’s still injured. That will slow him down.

Instead, Berend lets go. He holds both hands out, spreading his fingers to show they’re empty. “I know.”

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

Affliction

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The body breathes in dry, rattling sobs, forcing air through collapsed lungs and a desiccated throat. It lurches forward blindly, rather like a garden slug, the sheet tangling its legs and covering its sightless face. The one free arm gropes its way forward, long, bruised fingers grasping at nothing.

Berend draws his pistol, levels the barrel at where he’s pretty sure the back of the corpse’s skull pushes against its shroud, pulls back the hammer, and fires.

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

Trouble

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Dawn breaks over the city by the time they reach the gates. Berend is usually good at keeping track of time, always waking right before his watch is due to start, but the night seems to have passed by in just a few hours. He doesn’t like it.

Isabel is half a step ahead of him. Though she stops once more at the gate to make sure he’s following, she says nothing. She may have been weeping, silent and stone-faced, but it’s too dark still for Berend to tell.

We are in trouble.

Berend doesn’t want to have to be the reasonable one between the pair of them. His hands still itch as he pictures wrapping them around Arden Geray’s ghostly neck. It feels satisfying in his imagination, even though he’s aware that dead spirits don’t work that way. Failing that, he wants to go straight to the university hospital and shake Lucian Warder awake, his injuries be damned. Isabel is supposed to be preventing him from doing that, at least until she’s explained how best to not get himself killed in the process.

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

Fracture

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Berend stands under a sky filled with blinking, staring eyes, surrounded on all sides by the restless dead. A red star shoots overhead like a firework, disappearing below a distant horizon in a blaze of ruby light. The world shakes with a terrible shriek, and Berend falls into it, the sound tearing him apart from within, his vision turning black at the edges and a burning pain spreading from his heart to his fingertips.

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

Revelations II

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Isabel closes her eyes. As she has no physical eyelids at the moment, it doesn’t do anything. Her vision is still filled with ghosts, crowding in around her, blocking all escape routes.

But they’re not coming for her. They’re moving past her, like an unending river of death across the fields. Their incorporeal steps sink into the ground as though they’re trudging through a mire, slowly and doggedly.

“Where am I?” asks the ghost of a young woman, a tattered shawl gathered around her head and trailing misty fibers. Tied around her chest is a sling to hold a young baby, but it is empty, lying flat against her swollen breasts.

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

Revelations I

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Isabel falls quiet. There’s a long walk ahead of her, and a longer night after that. She has to conserve her strength. There have been more sleepless nights in the last week than she ever had to endure as an apprentice, and even then, young as she was, she had not endured them happily.

The wind blows cold, and it carries a smell of frost as it crosses dry, brown fields on its way to the sea. Isabel can just make out the shapes of cut rows on either side of the road. Harvest time is well under way, and winter will follow, bringing with it a slight relief from the walking dead. Spirits are no less angry in winter, but bodies without the breath of life cannot keep their limbs from freezing solid, and their decay slows along with their chance of spreading pestilence. Winter, as the old sayings go, is when Sentinels retreat to their cloisters to study the same dusty tomes they studied the year before, and the year before that, going all the way back to the first Sentinel Rainier.

With a sudden ache like a knife to her ribs, Isabel misses the library in Vernay. Her superiors will learn of her failings in a few short days, when Father Pereth’s request for her replacement reaches them. They will turn her away, or worse, allow her in and follow her through the halls with looks of pity and distrust, as though she’s a vagabond relying on their charity.

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

Theology

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“Well.” Berend shifts, the varnished wood uncomfortable under his still-sore legs, and moves himself closer to Isabel. “It can’t be all bad, can it?”

She gives him a look, her brows furrowed and her mouth twisted into a confused frown.

Try as he might, Berend can’t think of anything to tell her to lift her spirits. “The weather’s lovely,” he tries, but it falls flat even to his own ears.

Isabel folds her hands in her lap and looks over her shoulder. A lone petitioner, dressed in heavy black layers and a mourning veil, enters the cathedral and turns toward the priests’ offices. Her shoes echo a slow, steady rhythm under the dome. They sound expensive.

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

Repent

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Once outside, Isabel takes a full breath for the first time in hours. Reder Angrove’s ghost remains, for the moment, inside the chapel, and the grip of his fear and grief releases. The air is cold, and it scrapes against her throat. Autumn has arrived in Mondirra.

“Did they ritually remove your brain as part of your training, Sentinel?” Geray demands in her ear, voice shaking with suppressed rage. “Take it out and put it back in the wrong way, perhaps?”

Isabel places her hat on her head and pulls the brim down over her eyes. She can still see Geray, trudging half a step behind her with his feet two inches above the ground. “Whatever you have to say, I don’t want to hear it,” she says through her teeth.

“I had an easy solution,” Geray shrieks. “I practically served it to you on a platter!”

“Enough.” Isabel presses herself against the small kitchen’s exterior wall and cranes her neck to see out to the front of the building. Her uniform will hide her in the dark, but only if she’s careful.

Geray floats out in front of her. “Whatever happens in there is on your hands, then.”

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

Never

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Isabel turns to the door. Darkness has fallen over the chapel, and a black abyss stretches between her and where the constable, presumably, is trying to get in. The church is haunted. Maybe the incongruousness of a ghost on holy ground will delay the authorities’ realization of the fact, but the signs are obvious.

The knock of a heavy fist sounds again. Geray gets up and floats through the black, his form disappearing like a breath on a cold day. A howl of agony shakes the chapel.

There’s no way they can’t hear this. Isabel shelters her candle, the only light remaining in the church, with both hands. Her fingers ache with cold.

Geray reappears, accompanied by a chorus of distant screams, both animal and human. “They’re going to knock down your door if you don’t answer,” he says. “They have a battering ram and everything.”

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

Holy Ground

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“There is another ghost in this house.”

Isabel wakes with a start and sees nothing. It’s grown dark, which means she’s slept much longer than she planned, and she’s not entirely sure what day it is now. The translucent form of Arden Geray hovers beside her narrow bed, the sockets of his eyes as dark as the night outside.

For however many blissful, oblivious hours she was asleep, she had forgotten about him. She groans and pushes herself up. “What are you talking about?”

“A spirit,” he says, enunciating carefully as though he is speaking to a child. “It’s just arrived and it’s none too pleased. What are you going to do about it, Sentinel?”

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