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

Fortress

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 Temple of Ondir is full of books. A stack of this year’s mathematical textbooks, the cheap pulp paper already yellowing, sits beside the hallway leading to Father Pereth’s office. Beside it, a nobleman’s collection of encyclopedias, dust filling in the faded, embossed titles on the spines, leans precariously against the wall. There are handwritten manuscripts, unbound account ledgers, popular novels with titles like The Vampire in the Castle and An Ill-Advised Match, and a child’s alphabet primer, etched into a flat wooden block. A case of leaden printing letters, the hinges badly damaged, sits on top of a pile of catalogues of ladies’ fashions, just underneath the painted image of hooded Ondir carrying his lantern. The entire space under the dome is ringed in books, in stacks up to Isabel’s shoulders, and it still isn’t enough.

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

Gone

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Fallen leaves, turned from pale yellow to deep gold in the bizarre evening light, collect around Berend’s feet as he crosses the wide, central thoroughfare. On either side, the buildings loom tall and shadowed, and a thin green-black sliver of the vertical forest in the south cuts a dark line through the red-tinted sky. It’s shorter than it used to be, and something flickers in and out of view at the top, jutting out at different sharp angles whenever it appears. Berend tries not to look at it. His eye still aches from the last time he tried.

It’s quiet here, and all the windows up and down the street are shuttered. So lights, not even a burning scarlet reflection, shine out from amongst the dark wood casements and between climbing vines. If any of the wealthy citizens who live in this district are at home, they’re hiding very well. Berend hopes—because he’s less inclined than usual to pray, given that the gods are either dead or about to be—that Lady Breckenridge is among them.

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

Dust

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It’s only been a few hours since Berend became acquainted with the wall of bone, but it looks like wind and rain have been battering against it for centuries. The bones have turned the color of old parchment. Pores and cracks have opened up all along the lengths of each rib and femur, each dome of a skull, and all the knobbly ends of joints Berend can’t identify, piled up as they are. Under his feet, fragments of bone crack and crumble into dust.

A thick fog blankets the brief stretch of ground between the street and the wall, and it covers Berend’s good eye and muffles his ears. He’s maybe three steps past the temple when it disappears, lost in the morass of gray. The wall runs east to west, as far as he can remember, so he puts it on his left side and places one tired foot in front of the other. Even the eerie red light that made its home on the western horizon doesn’t penetrate the fog anymore.

How much time do we have? he wonders. It’s a foolish question—no one has the answer, not even the gods, and if he thinks about it, he’ll probably stop stark still and not be able to move again until the world finally does end.

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

Knowledge

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Around the ruin of Father Pereth’s office, Isabel has constructed a wall of books.

It’s really more of a low fence, three or four books high, depending on thickness. She stacked them haphazardly at first, but that prompted probing investigations from glowing tendrils and many-jointed fingers. Now, church records, illuminated manuscripts, and typeset prayer books stand in neat rows like bricks in a wall. She adds one more at the edge of the gap, a bound copy of the Kalusandr Scrolls, and winces as the already yellowed pages make contact with the heavy, damp air.

If this works, and this defense holds long enough for someone to find a way to send the thing beyond the wall back to the undreamt-of abyss from whence it came, all these books will be ruined. Centuries of church doctrine and millennia of history are only as durable as paper and ink. How can the church rebuild when all their knowledge is covered in mildew and mud?

It’s more important to save the people, she reminds herself. Knowledge survives when people do. What use are books in an empty city?

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

Knives

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Berend does not want to fight this man. He wants even less to kill him, but he’d rather that than give Hybrook Belisia the satisfaction of prematurely concluding his attempts to keep the world from ending. He’d also like to get back to the Temple District before the city scrambles itself around again.

Scarlet night is falling, but it’s still light enough to see that despite the gunshot, there’s no one else around—or they’re quite wisely hiding indoors. This particular street would have been a quiet one, under normal circumstances, but there isn’t a student in sight. There are no lectures from which to return home, nor philosophical discussions to be had over ale or coffee. Everyone is either crowded around the chasm, arguing over how best to build a bridge, holed up inside, or fled to the Temple of Isra.

Berend had mistaken this man for a student, from a distance, but his mistake is obvious now. The disheveled, hungry look isn’t an aesthetic choice, or the result of late nights peering at mathematical figures by candlelight. It’s only good, old-fashioned poverty. Whether it’s recent, or this would-be assassin spent his childhood cutting purses with a smaller knife, Berend can’t say.

“We can pretend we never saw each other,” Berend offers.

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

Askew

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The sun is a curious blood-orange as it sinks over the university hospital, staining the towering forest a deep brownish black and the river running through it a dull red. Berend makes his way toward the forest’s shadowed underside, where the Orchard District, he hopes, still lies. It should be a short walk, but something’s wrong with the formerly orderly row houses in which the students and a good number of their teachers live several to a room. The neat grid of north-south avenues and east-west streets is all askew, with one line of houses intersecting another in a way that just barely avoids two buildings ending up on top of one another—the occupants of both houses stand outside, hands on hips or scratching at their heads in confusion. The dark wood frame of the farther house touches the red-brick corner of the nearer, and a fringe of splinters coated in reddish dust mark the point where they collided.

Berend crosses a street twice as wide as it should be, and then another that’s about a third too narrow. They intersect at a point far to the south, farther than he estimates the southern wall should be, shrouded in a strange, brown haze that looks like smoke but smells like nothing.

He’s a few blocks east of where the district boundary should lie when the earthquake hits.

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

Books

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The air hums like a taut string. Through the fog, Isabel can see the wall of bone buckle outward, femurs knocking against ribcages in a rhythmless clatter as the mass tries to shift and absorb the force pushing behind it. Mist burns away in curls, and scarlet light scorches through to the floor of Pereth’s office.

Beneath her feet, the ground is shaking. Dust rains from the ceiling. Somewhere nearby, there is the terrible crack of breaking stone, louder than the shattering bones. Is it the temple dome, or is the other wall holding back the many-eyed thing also breaking?

Isabel doesn’t have time to answer these questions. She takes two fast steps toward Father Pereth and grabs him by the arm. He doesn’t resist as she drags him across the room to his heavy oaken desk, still beside the office door, and shoves him underneath. She follows, drawing her knees up to her chest and putting her arms over her head. The desk’s wooden legs scrape against the marble floor as the temple shakes as if with a terrible fever.

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

Abandoned

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She’s not alone here, on what was once the most holy of streets. People have gathered from all around the city, some carrying their belongings stuffed into sacks or tied in rolls of blankets, others empty-handed. A few of the watch’s broken barricades have been cleared away, but the street is still littered with them, and no one has touched the bodies. An old man sits beside a fire on the side of the road, and sharpened points emerge from the embers. Whatever drove him to build the fire has since departed, and he stares with burning light in his eyes, his lips moving without a sound.

Isra’s temple has acquired a huge gathering, pressing up against the main doors, surging around both sides, and smothering the kitchen door as well. They’re common folk, mostly, dressed in plain clothes. If there are any green-clad nuns among them, Isabel can’t see them. Two men support a third between them at the bottom of the stairs; the injured one’s head hangs down to his chest, and a festering wound on his shoulder leaks blood and pus into what’s left of his shirt. The wound still has the shape of the rotting, dead teeth that made it.

Across the street, a priest in a red robe stands on a box in the doorway of the temple of Alcos. He stretches his arms wide, as if he can quell the clamor around him by pressing it down. “Good people,” he calls out, “let us pray. We will seek the Father’s guidance.”

The crowd ripples. A few have taken to their knees, following his instructions. Others wander, restless, as much as the press of people allows. “Have the gods abandoned us?” someone shouts, but even the priest cannot answer.

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

Weathered

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It isn’t until Isabel has passed through the iron village once more that the eerie dirge her following of ghosts is singing begins to form words. “It’s coming,” they chant. “Stone crumbles and bone turns to dust.”

They repeat this in rising and falling cadences, their hollow eyes wide with fear. They’ve abandoned their more or less orderly queue and now crowd around her in a semicircular mass, their mist-colored shoulders overlapping and their feet an indistinguishable mass a few inches above the rutted, metal road.

Isabel wraps her coat tighter around her and puts her hands over her ears. They’ve become so loud, her ghosts, and there are more of them than ever. Somewhere, people are dying, and their spirits are making their way here. Flashes of tortured, twisting motion tell her that a few of them are broken from contact with the thing beyond the wall.

“Why are you following me?” she asks again.

“It’s coming,” is their only answer. “It’s coming.”

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

Thankful

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The upper half of the University District, as Berend has taken to calling it, is more or less intact—surprising, considering the earth beneath it can’t be stable anymore. On the street leading up to Emryn Marner’s red-brick house, the cobbles are loose, sitting in hollows too large for them and shifting under Berend’s feet. He could be imagining things, but each house looks a little farther from its neighbors than he remembers.

A crack splits the steps leading up to the painted door. Berend places one foot on the first stair, lowering his weight slowly. It’s sturdy enough. He won’t have to be here long.

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