The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Eleven

Shell District

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.

“Well, the evening is still young,” Berend says, rising from the table. “Shall we?”

The sun has set out of the range of the narrow window, but the sky is still light, a soft blue-gray tinged with fiery orange. Sailors and dockworkers are filling the bar, encroaching on the space around the corner table. They have a somber demeanor about them, besides the normal heaviness of a long day’s work, and their eyes dart warily across the room; word of the lighthouse keeper’s murder must have spread.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Ten

River District

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There are, Berend knows, two establishments in the River District appropriate for the hushed exchange of information. One is a tavern, poorly lit and more poorly maintained, but adequately supplied with good liquor; the other could generously be called a coffeehouse though the substance it served was only tangentially related to coffee. He chooses the former, and leads Isabel through the growing crowds of returning sailors.

The money from the Belisia job is heavy in his pocket. He’s done well for himself. Still, he trusts Lord Edwan about as far as he can throw the man, and he can’t shake the feeling that he’s just been paid to cover up the murder of the poor girl he saw in the light of Lucian Warder’s device.

He tells himself he’s done what he can. He almost believes it.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Nine

Belisia, Again

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Berend wakes close to noon in his room at the Fox and Dove. He slept, and soundly, but it feels as though he hasn’t. His back aches and his eyes are heavy.

The carriage ride back from the Belisia estate had been tensely silent on Berend’s part, but Lucian Warder had given no indication that he noticed. He made notes in his book for the first hour and then had slept, leaning on the case that contained his strange device.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Eight

Wryght

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“I found this, under the bed,” says Isabel, concluding her retelling of the previous evening’s events to Brother Risoven. She hands him the lacquered bead before standing to gather the breakfast dishes.

Risoven holds up the bead and moves his lenses in and out from his face with the other hand. His owlish eyes squint and blink. Finally, he lowers both hands, turning the small object between his fingers.

“It’s a prayer bead,” he says, with equal measures of confidence and confusion.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Seven

The Old Ghost

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She’s starting to think of it as real, this demon of legend, like a living thing she’s searching for in the dark corners of the city. Isabel sits back on the heels of her well-worn travel boots, letting her skirts fall around her and bringing the arm not holding the lantern in toward her chest. It’s cold, and the wind blows freely through the open aperture of the lighthouse. On the positive side, however, the temperature keeps the body from reeking after what looks like a couple of hours since death.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Six

The Lighthouse

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Lucian Warder.

Isabel examines the record. The date beside Warder’s name is today’s, the twenty-first of Isra’s Moon. He must have gone to the library this morning, after word of the murder in the Shell District spread. Nothing unusual about that. Anyone would be curious—Isabel was, after all.

Still, it’s strange that she’s run into him twice in such a short time, and stranger still that he sought her out after everything that had happened last night. What did he say his device did? Banish restless spirits, rather like she does? What she does isn’t banishment, but that’s only the first of many problems she has with the concept of Warder’s device.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Five

The Device

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Berend breathes in the stale, dusty air, ignoring the pervasive scent of decay. His neck aches. He’s a big man, and a proficient fighter; there’s never been an occasion when someone has managed to get their hands around his throat, but he is certain that’s what he felt in that blasted room. If he recalls it, he can still feel the individual fingers squeezing, pressing into his windpipe. He hopes he’ll never have to experience that again.

There is his pistol, his trusty friend through more fights than he can count, lying in the dust on the parlor floor. Berend doesn’t want to leave it behind, for its sentimental value and the fear of what new absurdities might lie upstairs.

That means he must reenter the parlor.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Four

The House

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“Did you see that?”

Lucian is already frantically scribbling in his book, a rough approximation of the young woman taking form under his pen. He balances the lantern on the top of his case and rummages in his satchel, producing a glass thermometer wrapped in a handkerchief.

“Was that the ghost?” asks Berend. With one last look around the stable, and no movement apparent in the body of the horse, he shuts both doors and places the wooden plank across the metal brackets on the outside.

“Not sure.” Lucian gives the thermometer a shake and frowns at it in the dim lamplight before wrapping it back up and returning it to his bag. “I’ll have to take a few more readings. What did you find in there?”

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Three

Belisia

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To place the box in which Mikhail’s corpse currently resides into the temple’s extensive graveyard, Berend will have to pay one hundred silver pennies.

He is informed of this by Father Reeves, the priest in charge of funerary services, a tall man with a shaved head and an aquiline nose. He is paternally comforting and coldly distant, often at the same time, and it’s an unsettling effect. Long brown fingers make notes with a quill in a yellowing ledger.

We all end up as numbers. Berend hands over the money. It’s most of what he has. He’ll need more if he’s going to continue sleeping in a bed until his next job.

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Two

Warder

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Isabel sits at the small table across from Brother Risoven, her tea growing cold and a piece of bloody-colored fungus lying on a scrap of paper beside it. It’s stained the paper a wet reddish brown, and it’s shriveled a bit, but otherwise it hasn’t changed noticeably from when she pulled it off the side of a shack in the Shell District last night. In the thin early morning light from the high, narrow windows of the chapel’s living quarters, it looks rather like a severed finger, dark and twisted from putrefaction.

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