Queer Fantasy and Weird Tales for the People
Barnes & Noble (paperback & ebook)
A very special thanks to everyone who preordered, and to everyone who reads it now! I’m so excited for you to finally get your hands on this book.
If you haven’t read the back-of-the-book blurb, it’s right here for you below the cut:
Continue reading “Today’s the Day! The Book of the New Moon Door is now available!”Empty Road
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.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Three, Chapter Four”Trade Secret
Berend retreats to a stiff wooden chair, the upholstered seat little more than a suggestion of padding, placed in the hallway. Isabel slumps heavily into its companion a few feet away and on the opposite wall and stares, her expression blank and her eyes hollow, at nothing. He’s going to have to find a place for her to sleep, and soon, before she falls off the chair and knocks her head against either the wall or the floor.
For himself, he figures he has about two hours before the coffee he borrowed from Emryn Marner wears off. The young man was too soundly asleep to be asked, so it might be more accurate to say that Berend stole the coffee, but either way, it was a justifiable acquisition. He should have stolen some for Isabel.
As it turns out, Lucian Warder is alive. Berend had worried that wouldn’t be the case by the time they got here, though he didn’t breathe a word of his fears to Isabel. Warder’s alive, and that means that his entire plan hasn’t gone to hell. Yet.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Two, Chapter Twenty-One”Warning
The young man stands slowly, rolling his shoulders, as though the somber temple of Ondir is a country park and he’s contemplating concluding his picnic and heading home. He walks unhurried to the end of the row and starts up the center aisle, his hands in the pockets of his fine trousers and his polished riding boots sending a slow rhythm to echo against the dome.
Berend stands, dragging Isabel up with him. His free hand goes first to his pistol—it’s empty, Isabel remembers, because he shot the animated corpse in the morgue and hasn’t had a chance to reload—and then to the hilt of his sword. His cloak hangs over his elbow, hiding the weapons from view.
She twists her wrist out of Berend’s grasp. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she whispers.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Two, Chapter Seventeen”Fracture
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.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Two, Chapter Thirteen”Revelations II
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.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Two, Chapter Twelve”Revelations I
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.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Two, Chapter Eleven”Theology
“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.
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Two, Chapter Ten”Repent
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.”
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Two, Chapter Seven”Never
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.”
Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Two, Chapter Six”
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