Shadows of the Moon Grove
Ben Williams
Ben Williams lives in Los Angeles, where he can frequently be found outside, observing the ravens in his neighborhood. You can find him online at https://benthewriter.neocities.org.
Yovi and Subin moved through the midnight dark of Ash Alley, their hoods up, as they passed clusters of huddled men. They spied the faded sign of the Red Saiga and entered the inn, pushing past a group of burly men by the entrance. Candles burned low in lead glass holders, casting the tavern in red dimness. The two dodged teamsters and toughs, thieves and thugs, and myriad drunks as they made their way to the inn’s cramped stairwell.
They ascended the steps to a hallway lined with guestrooms; a single candle burned at each end. They went to the last door on the right and Subin knocked. “Go away,” Narsa’s voice called from behind the door. Subin knocked again, louder. They heard Narsa get up, mutter expletives, and stomp toward them. She opened the door and stood in the doorway, wrapped in a blanket. Behind her, Armik the Singer lounged shirtless in bed. “Oh, it’s you. Why are you here? I’m busy.”
Subin glanced down the hallway, making certain no one was within earshot. “We bring news from the Undermarket.”
“What, you got robbed?”
“No. A pair of traveling vendors is there who claim to have a page from the Necrologer’s Codex,” Subin said.
Narsa craned her neck and peered down the hallway. Seeing it was empty, she stepped out and pulled the door to. “Really? Did you see it?”
“No, but we would not know an authentic page even if we did,” Yovi said.
“True. Are the vendors there now?” Narsa asked.
“They were when we left and we came straight here,” Subin said.
“Good. We should go.” Narsa slipped into her room and shut the door. After what seemed an impossibly short time, she reemerged, fully clothed, her hair neatened and satchel slung about her body. She led them downstairs, where the crowd parted before her, hushing and glancing away as she passed. She joined her sisters in putting her hood up as they exited the inn.
Three traversed the shadows of Ash Alley, out onto Omen Street. Here, the space was wider and better lit. Qandar was as lively by night as by day. Countless traders and their teams arrived in the city everyday, and as night fell, these men of the Carnelian Road flooded the streets in search of libation, entertainment, and mischief. The witches avoided interacting as they ventured to Dragonsmaw Tavern on Crescent Alley, their preferred point of Undermarket ingress.
The Dragonsmaw was aswim in the redolence of sweat and spicewine. Men sat at tables awash in the flickering orange glow of torch lamps, playing games of chance, crowded around by onlookers. The witches proceeded quietly through the tavern, to a darkened alcove where a man with a kilij sheathed at his side stood beside a door carved with a dragon scale pattern. A tattooed spiral of 17 black dots adorned the wrist of his sword arm, showing he was a man of the Dread Company with 17 dead to his blade. Subin removed her hood as the witches approached, revealing her face.
“Back already?”
Subin nodded. The man rapped thrice upon the door. They heard a bolt unlatch, and the door swung open. Another man stood within, his wrist adorned with 13 dots.
“Stay out of trouble, please,” the second man said upon seeing the witches.
Narsa pulled back her hood and grinned at him. “Us? Trouble?” The man sighed and waved them through.
The scent of stagnant water, mold, and arcane admixtures hung in the subterranean air of the Undermarket’s torch-lit tunnels, which widened to a series of rough-dug chambers. Here, traders hawked rarities from beyond steppe and mountain. Poisons and potions, totems and tomes, powders and poultices, and other miscellany of wonderment.
“This way,” Yovi said. She and Subin led Narsa to a remote section of the Undermarket where a man and a woman stood in the corner, a trunk behind them, and a small table in front of them. Both had long braids and wore bearskin vests. Amulets of spinel and garnet hung about their necks on leather cords.
The man smiled at Yovi and Subin. “Did you still wish that page?”
Narsa stepped forward between her sisters. “I must verify its legitimacy first.” The braided woman eyed Narsa, then spoke an incantation, and the trunk unlocked. She pulled a vellum page from within, tattered and dirt-stained. She presented it to Narsa. Narsa had, for some years, collected pages from the Necrologer’s Codex, and recognized the sharp strokes of the Necrologer’s pen. As with the pages she had acquired, it was inked in the Necrologer’s own blood. It contained instructions for the forbidden incantation of the Death Touch, capable of laying a warrior low with the mere touch of a finger. “It is real,” she spoke.
“Of course it is,” the man said. “We do not ship junk.”
“What price do you ask?” Narsa inquired.
“We will not accept coin for this. Anyone capable of using it can offer better,” the man said.
“What bargain do you propose?” Narsa asked.
“We require the services of someone skilled enough to brave the Blighted Steppe,” the man said.
“It is a place of ruin and death. What business could you have there?” Narsa asked.
“Dead men leave treasures,” the woman said as she placed the page back in the trunk, which locked of its own accord as she closed the lid.
“What treasure do you wish?” Narsa asked.
“The Silver Blade of Senna,” the man answered. “A treasure seeker swore he saw it at the Moon Grove.”
“If he is a treasure seeker, why did he not take it?” Subin asked.
The man shrugged.
Subin crossed her arms. “I see. And if we journey there and find the blade he allegedly saw, but it is not the Silver Blade of Senna, what then?”
The man turned and looked at his colleague. “Bring us the blade from the grove and the page is yours,” the woman stated. “We remain in Qandar for six days, then we travel to the Dusk Market of Bukira.”
“What will it be, sisters?” Narsa asked.
“Let us find this blade,” Yovi said. Subin assented.
*
Three exited Dawn Gate onto the Eastern Road, where pink-silver morning rose above grass, hill, and river. They saw ahead Stonesong Bridge, named for the dissonant melodies that arose when wind passed beneath its great arches. It spanned the River Zaf, crossing to the Blighted Steppe. Guards stood atop the bridge’s gatehouse on the near bank, and another group stood by the gatehouse’s entryway. There was no traffic upon the bridge, nor in the steppe beyond, and as the witches drew closer, they saw the gatehouse’s ironshod cedar doors were closed and barred. A guard by the entrance came forward as the three approached. He held up his hand and waved them off.
“We wish to cross,” Subin said.
The guard looked them over. “No.” A second guard sauntered over to join the first.
“Why not?” Subin asked.
“Go back to the city,” the second said.
Narsa glared dread into the two guardsmen. They shrank beneath her gaze as she approached. “You will open the doors and let us through. No more of this obstruction,” she commanded.
A third guard rapped hurriedly on a smaller door set into the side of the gatehouse and the sound of footsteps preceded two more men who emerged from the door, both bearing symbols of The Theocracy upon their armor. The first was a holy partizan, and the second was a templar, the commander of the gatehouse. Narsa knew they would be unmoved by her attempts to intimidate them and did not try.
“We would like passage,” Subin said to the templar.
He scoffed in response, turned around, and went back through the door.
Subin turned to the partizan. “We would like passage.”
The partizan eyed the witches. “Three women, unaccompanied? No.”
“We can take care of ourselves,” Yovi said, brandishing her cudgel.
The partizan laughed. “Find fighting men to accompany you. You see we have barred the doors, even by day.” He motioned to the great doors behind him. “Packs of ghouls roam the steppe. More than usual. It is a bad time to travel to Kashien. Return home.”
“Come, sisters, this lot is incapable of reason. We will find crossing upriver,” Narsa said. They traveled a dirt path that continued along the south bank of the Zaf, hoping to encounter a boatman who might ferry them across. Within an hour, they found a fisher in a flat-bottomed boat. They called him over, and while he did not understand their words, as he was a tribesman from the hills, he understood silver. For one piece, he rowed them to the north bank, where three ventured into the illimitable grasses of the steppe.
Yovi led now, for among the three, she knew the wilds best. She listened to the wind, and upon it the distant song of a skylark. She ran her hand atop the high grass and felt its undulations. They traveled north. The trickle of the Zaf faded behind them, and soon it was just Narsa, Yovi, Subin, wind, and grass beneath a dome of cloudless blue. The sun climbed and lowered as the hours passed. But the terrain, with its broad slopes and unending grass, remained unchanging. To Narsa and Subin, it was a trackless expanse. To Yovi, it was the lanes of unseen migration. The byways of saigas and eagles, wolves and tigers, rhinoceroses and cobras. Spiders and scorpions uncountable. But no people, for the ghouls, leftovers from the Pestilence wrought by the Necrologer and his lieutenants, scoured the steppe hungrily for people.
Dusk approached, and a silhouette appeared in the distance. It ambled slowly at first, then sped its pace toward the three travelers. “Yovi, please dispense with that,” Narsa said. Yovi held her palm downward, and with her other hand readied her cudgel. She drew upon the power of life present in each blade of grass, and her cudgel glowed with an emerald hue. The creature growled as it closed, and the witches saw its elongated claws and mottled skin stretched tight over sinew. Yovi moved forward, breaking into a jog, matching the creature’s pace. She slid sideward as it swiped a claw, then swung her cudgel straight into its chest. Green light surged within it, and the creature’s chest exploded in a flash. Its fragmented body fell to the ground.
“Perhaps we would be wise to stop here for the night,” Subin suggested as the sun sank in the west.
“Yes. More will rove as night deepens. They will scent us and swarm,” Narsa said. Subin took a small carving of a hut from her case. She hurled it onto the ground and spoke a word of command. The carving grew into a full-sized hut. They entered, and the door locked shut behind them. They were safe in the hut, since the ghouls could not see or smell them, and were too unintelligent to deduce there could be quarry within.
It was warm inside. The hearth burned, but emitted no smoke into the air outside. A fine rug sat in the center of the space, green and black, patterned with honeysuckle blossoms. Three sleeping mats lay about the rug. Subin’s cat, Nora, was curled up near the fire.
Subin went to the hearth, where a pot of tea was brewing. She poured herself and her sisters each a serving in ceramic piyolas glazed with hawthorn leaf designs. Yovi took a roundbread and some strawberries from her pack, and the witches sat upon the rug, ate, and had tea. Yovi and Subin slept soon after. Narsa sat up studying the handful of pages from the Necrologer’s Codex she had already collected, then joined her sisters in slumber.
*
Three stood in the dewy grass under morning’s pale. Subin spoke a word of command, and the witchhut shrank again to a small carving. She stowed it in her case, and Yovi led Narsa and Subin further into the Blighted Steppe. As they traversed the grassy expanse midmorning, they heard snarling upon the wind, but saw no ghouls. Clouds gathered as the day wore, and by noon the sky was gray. They glimpsed the willows of the Moon Grove in the distance, down a broad slope. The willows were gnarled and blackened, their drooping leaves ashen. A creek trickled from the grove and snaked into the grasslands. As they drew near, they observed that grass did not grow in the grove’s vicinity.
Yovi spied footprints. She stooped and studied the bare earth. Directionless tracks made by mangled feet. “Ghouls,” she said.
“How many?” Subin asked.
“Dozens.”
“Where do they lead?” Subin asked.
“Nowhere. In and out of the grove. Back and forth.” Yovi stood and looked toward the grove. The disfigured willows huddled together, obscuring what lay within. A snarl sounded from the darkness, followed by the shuffle of feet. A ghoul emerged, scurrying across the barren ground. Then a second. Then more. Seven in total rushed from the blighted foliage, growling and shrieking.
Subin reached into her case and took out a firejug. She shook it and it grew warm in her hand. Seeing the firejug, Narsa and Yovi retreated. Subin flung it toward the onrushing ghouls, and it landed before them. Its contents burst forth and exploded into a fiery mass. The ghouls were scattered in every direction and fell to the ground, writhing as flames consumed them. One rose from the conflagration, singed and soiled, but spared from obliteration. It scampered toward Subin. Yovi leapt forth to meet it and brought her cudgel down onto its skull, driving the creature to the ground. She whacked it again as it lay squirming, stilling it.
“Could it have been seven sets of tracks you saw?” Narsa asked Yovi.
Yovi shook her head. “There are many more.” Three peered into the grove, but the darkness disclosed nothing.
“Then let us find them,” Narsa said. They proceeded into the grove, where a twisting tangle of brown and brittle briars sprawled beneath warped willows. Yovi led them deeper into the copse. The briars and willows grew thicker, and the darkness deepened. Subin instinctively drew her hollowknife. Narsa felt a pall upon the air. There was no birdsong. No chirp of crickets. No rustle of leaves in the eerie stillness.
The willows gave way to a clearing where nine ancient menhirs stood in a circle. Ochre moss clung to them, partly concealing smooth-worn glyphs. A sword lay half-buried in the center of the stone circle. The witches saw by its curve it was a kilij of an older style, its blade tarnished and dull. Yovi continued into the clearing, inching toward the stone circle. Subin and Narsa followed. The sky above was dim and gray, the surrounding grove suffused with shadow.
Yovi reached the nearest menhir, and a chill spread through the grove. A rasp arose amid the trees. They heard the rustle of briars. Then the snarling began. It was all around them. Ghouls rushed from every direction, filtering through the twisted trees like silt through a sieve.
Subin pressed the third button upon the handle of her hollowknife. White resin leaked onto the blade, shedding pale light. She held the knife aloft, and the ghouls recoiled from the radiance, shielding their eyes, snarling angrily.
“How long will it remain lit?” Yovi asked Subin.
“As much as a minute,” Subin replied.
Yovi turned her palm to the ground and channeled energy into her weapon. Blighted though the grove was, the trees and briars were yet living, and the cudgel glowed green. She stepped to the edge of the white radiance and smashed a ghoul with the cudgel, annihilating it in an emerald flash. Several clawed in retaliation, but she dodged away. The white light burned their claws, and they faltered. Yovi turned to her sisters. “Not enough time. There are too many.”
Narsa pulled back her hood and lifted her arms, palms up and outstretched. The grove swayed, and the space between the trees distorted as she spoke verses of damnation and destruction. Caliginous tendrils appeared, spiraling out from her. Her eyes grew black, and dark veins appeared on her skin. She moved her hands as a puppeteer and took control of the tendrils. She turned her palms out and pushed her hands away from herself with a lunge. The tendrils shot out toward the ghouls, piercing their bodies, rendering them unto dust. Narsa twirled and swung her arms in an arc. The spiraling tendrils spun with her, impaling ghoul after ghoul, disintegrating them into plumes of dust and ash. Yovi turned her cudgel upon the few ghouls the tendrils missed, dispatching them in flashes of green.
The light from Subin’s hollowknife faded as the last of the resin evaporated. The grove was silent again. “What is this place?” Subin asked, looking at the circle of glyph-adorned menhirs.
“A Moongate,” Narsa answered. “The Necrologer used them to transport his armies across the steppe.”
“The Moongates are far older than the Necrologer,” Yovi said.
“They are,” Narsa agreed. “Come, let us take the blade and be away from this place.” Yovi crept into the center of the stone circle and lifted the ancient sword from the dirt. She handed it to Narsa, who ran her hand along its dull, discolored blade, discerning that no dark curses tainted it, despite its having lain decades in so forsaken a place.
Yovi led them from the grove, back into the steppe. They went west until they came to Eastern Road, then followed it south to Stonesong Bridge. While the guards had not let them cross the bridge and enter the steppe, they were under no orders to disallow people from leaving the steppe. “You were right,” Narsa said to them as they passed the gatehouse. “Many ghouls haunt the steppe. Fewer now, though.”
The guards shut the gate behind them, and three traveled beneath ultramarine evening toward Qandar’s warm lights.
They ascended the steps to a hallway lined with guestrooms; a single candle burned at each end. They went to the last door on the right and Subin knocked. “Go away,” Narsa’s voice called from behind the door. Subin knocked again, louder. They heard Narsa get up, mutter expletives, and stomp toward them. She opened the door and stood in the doorway, wrapped in a blanket. Behind her, Armik the Singer lounged shirtless in bed. “Oh, it’s you. Why are you here? I’m busy.”
Subin glanced down the hallway, making certain no one was within earshot. “We bring news from the Undermarket.”
“What, you got robbed?”
“No. A pair of traveling vendors is there who claim to have a page from the Necrologer’s Codex,” Subin said.
Narsa craned her neck and peered down the hallway. Seeing it was empty, she stepped out and pulled the door to. “Really? Did you see it?”
“No, but we would not know an authentic page even if we did,” Yovi said.
“True. Are the vendors there now?” Narsa asked.
“They were when we left and we came straight here,” Subin said.
“Good. We should go.” Narsa slipped into her room and shut the door. After what seemed an impossibly short time, she reemerged, fully clothed, her hair neatened and satchel slung about her body. She led them downstairs, where the crowd parted before her, hushing and glancing away as she passed. She joined her sisters in putting her hood up as they exited the inn.
Three traversed the shadows of Ash Alley, out onto Omen Street. Here, the space was wider and better lit. Qandar was as lively by night as by day. Countless traders and their teams arrived in the city everyday, and as night fell, these men of the Carnelian Road flooded the streets in search of libation, entertainment, and mischief. The witches avoided interacting as they ventured to Dragonsmaw Tavern on Crescent Alley, their preferred point of Undermarket ingress.
The Dragonsmaw was aswim in the redolence of sweat and spicewine. Men sat at tables awash in the flickering orange glow of torch lamps, playing games of chance, crowded around by onlookers. The witches proceeded quietly through the tavern, to a darkened alcove where a man with a kilij sheathed at his side stood beside a door carved with a dragon scale pattern. A tattooed spiral of 17 black dots adorned the wrist of his sword arm, showing he was a man of the Dread Company with 17 dead to his blade. Subin removed her hood as the witches approached, revealing her face.
“Back already?”
Subin nodded. The man rapped thrice upon the door. They heard a bolt unlatch, and the door swung open. Another man stood within, his wrist adorned with 13 dots.
“Stay out of trouble, please,” the second man said upon seeing the witches.
Narsa pulled back her hood and grinned at him. “Us? Trouble?” The man sighed and waved them through.
The scent of stagnant water, mold, and arcane admixtures hung in the subterranean air of the Undermarket’s torch-lit tunnels, which widened to a series of rough-dug chambers. Here, traders hawked rarities from beyond steppe and mountain. Poisons and potions, totems and tomes, powders and poultices, and other miscellany of wonderment.
“This way,” Yovi said. She and Subin led Narsa to a remote section of the Undermarket where a man and a woman stood in the corner, a trunk behind them, and a small table in front of them. Both had long braids and wore bearskin vests. Amulets of spinel and garnet hung about their necks on leather cords.
The man smiled at Yovi and Subin. “Did you still wish that page?”
Narsa stepped forward between her sisters. “I must verify its legitimacy first.” The braided woman eyed Narsa, then spoke an incantation, and the trunk unlocked. She pulled a vellum page from within, tattered and dirt-stained. She presented it to Narsa. Narsa had, for some years, collected pages from the Necrologer’s Codex, and recognized the sharp strokes of the Necrologer’s pen. As with the pages she had acquired, it was inked in the Necrologer’s own blood. It contained instructions for the forbidden incantation of the Death Touch, capable of laying a warrior low with the mere touch of a finger. “It is real,” she spoke.
“Of course it is,” the man said. “We do not ship junk.”
“What price do you ask?” Narsa inquired.
“We will not accept coin for this. Anyone capable of using it can offer better,” the man said.
“What bargain do you propose?” Narsa asked.
“We require the services of someone skilled enough to brave the Blighted Steppe,” the man said.
“It is a place of ruin and death. What business could you have there?” Narsa asked.
“Dead men leave treasures,” the woman said as she placed the page back in the trunk, which locked of its own accord as she closed the lid.
“What treasure do you wish?” Narsa asked.
“The Silver Blade of Senna,” the man answered. “A treasure seeker swore he saw it at the Moon Grove.”
“If he is a treasure seeker, why did he not take it?” Subin asked.
The man shrugged.
Subin crossed her arms. “I see. And if we journey there and find the blade he allegedly saw, but it is not the Silver Blade of Senna, what then?”
The man turned and looked at his colleague. “Bring us the blade from the grove and the page is yours,” the woman stated. “We remain in Qandar for six days, then we travel to the Dusk Market of Bukira.”
“What will it be, sisters?” Narsa asked.
“Let us find this blade,” Yovi said. Subin assented.
*
Three exited Dawn Gate onto the Eastern Road, where pink-silver morning rose above grass, hill, and river. They saw ahead Stonesong Bridge, named for the dissonant melodies that arose when wind passed beneath its great arches. It spanned the River Zaf, crossing to the Blighted Steppe. Guards stood atop the bridge’s gatehouse on the near bank, and another group stood by the gatehouse’s entryway. There was no traffic upon the bridge, nor in the steppe beyond, and as the witches drew closer, they saw the gatehouse’s ironshod cedar doors were closed and barred. A guard by the entrance came forward as the three approached. He held up his hand and waved them off.
“We wish to cross,” Subin said.
The guard looked them over. “No.” A second guard sauntered over to join the first.
“Why not?” Subin asked.
“Go back to the city,” the second said.
Narsa glared dread into the two guardsmen. They shrank beneath her gaze as she approached. “You will open the doors and let us through. No more of this obstruction,” she commanded.
A third guard rapped hurriedly on a smaller door set into the side of the gatehouse and the sound of footsteps preceded two more men who emerged from the door, both bearing symbols of The Theocracy upon their armor. The first was a holy partizan, and the second was a templar, the commander of the gatehouse. Narsa knew they would be unmoved by her attempts to intimidate them and did not try.
“We would like passage,” Subin said to the templar.
He scoffed in response, turned around, and went back through the door.
Subin turned to the partizan. “We would like passage.”
The partizan eyed the witches. “Three women, unaccompanied? No.”
“We can take care of ourselves,” Yovi said, brandishing her cudgel.
The partizan laughed. “Find fighting men to accompany you. You see we have barred the doors, even by day.” He motioned to the great doors behind him. “Packs of ghouls roam the steppe. More than usual. It is a bad time to travel to Kashien. Return home.”
“Come, sisters, this lot is incapable of reason. We will find crossing upriver,” Narsa said. They traveled a dirt path that continued along the south bank of the Zaf, hoping to encounter a boatman who might ferry them across. Within an hour, they found a fisher in a flat-bottomed boat. They called him over, and while he did not understand their words, as he was a tribesman from the hills, he understood silver. For one piece, he rowed them to the north bank, where three ventured into the illimitable grasses of the steppe.
Yovi led now, for among the three, she knew the wilds best. She listened to the wind, and upon it the distant song of a skylark. She ran her hand atop the high grass and felt its undulations. They traveled north. The trickle of the Zaf faded behind them, and soon it was just Narsa, Yovi, Subin, wind, and grass beneath a dome of cloudless blue. The sun climbed and lowered as the hours passed. But the terrain, with its broad slopes and unending grass, remained unchanging. To Narsa and Subin, it was a trackless expanse. To Yovi, it was the lanes of unseen migration. The byways of saigas and eagles, wolves and tigers, rhinoceroses and cobras. Spiders and scorpions uncountable. But no people, for the ghouls, leftovers from the Pestilence wrought by the Necrologer and his lieutenants, scoured the steppe hungrily for people.
Dusk approached, and a silhouette appeared in the distance. It ambled slowly at first, then sped its pace toward the three travelers. “Yovi, please dispense with that,” Narsa said. Yovi held her palm downward, and with her other hand readied her cudgel. She drew upon the power of life present in each blade of grass, and her cudgel glowed with an emerald hue. The creature growled as it closed, and the witches saw its elongated claws and mottled skin stretched tight over sinew. Yovi moved forward, breaking into a jog, matching the creature’s pace. She slid sideward as it swiped a claw, then swung her cudgel straight into its chest. Green light surged within it, and the creature’s chest exploded in a flash. Its fragmented body fell to the ground.
“Perhaps we would be wise to stop here for the night,” Subin suggested as the sun sank in the west.
“Yes. More will rove as night deepens. They will scent us and swarm,” Narsa said. Subin took a small carving of a hut from her case. She hurled it onto the ground and spoke a word of command. The carving grew into a full-sized hut. They entered, and the door locked shut behind them. They were safe in the hut, since the ghouls could not see or smell them, and were too unintelligent to deduce there could be quarry within.
It was warm inside. The hearth burned, but emitted no smoke into the air outside. A fine rug sat in the center of the space, green and black, patterned with honeysuckle blossoms. Three sleeping mats lay about the rug. Subin’s cat, Nora, was curled up near the fire.
Subin went to the hearth, where a pot of tea was brewing. She poured herself and her sisters each a serving in ceramic piyolas glazed with hawthorn leaf designs. Yovi took a roundbread and some strawberries from her pack, and the witches sat upon the rug, ate, and had tea. Yovi and Subin slept soon after. Narsa sat up studying the handful of pages from the Necrologer’s Codex she had already collected, then joined her sisters in slumber.
*
Three stood in the dewy grass under morning’s pale. Subin spoke a word of command, and the witchhut shrank again to a small carving. She stowed it in her case, and Yovi led Narsa and Subin further into the Blighted Steppe. As they traversed the grassy expanse midmorning, they heard snarling upon the wind, but saw no ghouls. Clouds gathered as the day wore, and by noon the sky was gray. They glimpsed the willows of the Moon Grove in the distance, down a broad slope. The willows were gnarled and blackened, their drooping leaves ashen. A creek trickled from the grove and snaked into the grasslands. As they drew near, they observed that grass did not grow in the grove’s vicinity.
Yovi spied footprints. She stooped and studied the bare earth. Directionless tracks made by mangled feet. “Ghouls,” she said.
“How many?” Subin asked.
“Dozens.”
“Where do they lead?” Subin asked.
“Nowhere. In and out of the grove. Back and forth.” Yovi stood and looked toward the grove. The disfigured willows huddled together, obscuring what lay within. A snarl sounded from the darkness, followed by the shuffle of feet. A ghoul emerged, scurrying across the barren ground. Then a second. Then more. Seven in total rushed from the blighted foliage, growling and shrieking.
Subin reached into her case and took out a firejug. She shook it and it grew warm in her hand. Seeing the firejug, Narsa and Yovi retreated. Subin flung it toward the onrushing ghouls, and it landed before them. Its contents burst forth and exploded into a fiery mass. The ghouls were scattered in every direction and fell to the ground, writhing as flames consumed them. One rose from the conflagration, singed and soiled, but spared from obliteration. It scampered toward Subin. Yovi leapt forth to meet it and brought her cudgel down onto its skull, driving the creature to the ground. She whacked it again as it lay squirming, stilling it.
“Could it have been seven sets of tracks you saw?” Narsa asked Yovi.
Yovi shook her head. “There are many more.” Three peered into the grove, but the darkness disclosed nothing.
“Then let us find them,” Narsa said. They proceeded into the grove, where a twisting tangle of brown and brittle briars sprawled beneath warped willows. Yovi led them deeper into the copse. The briars and willows grew thicker, and the darkness deepened. Subin instinctively drew her hollowknife. Narsa felt a pall upon the air. There was no birdsong. No chirp of crickets. No rustle of leaves in the eerie stillness.
The willows gave way to a clearing where nine ancient menhirs stood in a circle. Ochre moss clung to them, partly concealing smooth-worn glyphs. A sword lay half-buried in the center of the stone circle. The witches saw by its curve it was a kilij of an older style, its blade tarnished and dull. Yovi continued into the clearing, inching toward the stone circle. Subin and Narsa followed. The sky above was dim and gray, the surrounding grove suffused with shadow.
Yovi reached the nearest menhir, and a chill spread through the grove. A rasp arose amid the trees. They heard the rustle of briars. Then the snarling began. It was all around them. Ghouls rushed from every direction, filtering through the twisted trees like silt through a sieve.
Subin pressed the third button upon the handle of her hollowknife. White resin leaked onto the blade, shedding pale light. She held the knife aloft, and the ghouls recoiled from the radiance, shielding their eyes, snarling angrily.
“How long will it remain lit?” Yovi asked Subin.
“As much as a minute,” Subin replied.
Yovi turned her palm to the ground and channeled energy into her weapon. Blighted though the grove was, the trees and briars were yet living, and the cudgel glowed green. She stepped to the edge of the white radiance and smashed a ghoul with the cudgel, annihilating it in an emerald flash. Several clawed in retaliation, but she dodged away. The white light burned their claws, and they faltered. Yovi turned to her sisters. “Not enough time. There are too many.”
Narsa pulled back her hood and lifted her arms, palms up and outstretched. The grove swayed, and the space between the trees distorted as she spoke verses of damnation and destruction. Caliginous tendrils appeared, spiraling out from her. Her eyes grew black, and dark veins appeared on her skin. She moved her hands as a puppeteer and took control of the tendrils. She turned her palms out and pushed her hands away from herself with a lunge. The tendrils shot out toward the ghouls, piercing their bodies, rendering them unto dust. Narsa twirled and swung her arms in an arc. The spiraling tendrils spun with her, impaling ghoul after ghoul, disintegrating them into plumes of dust and ash. Yovi turned her cudgel upon the few ghouls the tendrils missed, dispatching them in flashes of green.
The light from Subin’s hollowknife faded as the last of the resin evaporated. The grove was silent again. “What is this place?” Subin asked, looking at the circle of glyph-adorned menhirs.
“A Moongate,” Narsa answered. “The Necrologer used them to transport his armies across the steppe.”
“The Moongates are far older than the Necrologer,” Yovi said.
“They are,” Narsa agreed. “Come, let us take the blade and be away from this place.” Yovi crept into the center of the stone circle and lifted the ancient sword from the dirt. She handed it to Narsa, who ran her hand along its dull, discolored blade, discerning that no dark curses tainted it, despite its having lain decades in so forsaken a place.
Yovi led them from the grove, back into the steppe. They went west until they came to Eastern Road, then followed it south to Stonesong Bridge. While the guards had not let them cross the bridge and enter the steppe, they were under no orders to disallow people from leaving the steppe. “You were right,” Narsa said to them as they passed the gatehouse. “Many ghouls haunt the steppe. Fewer now, though.”
The guards shut the gate behind them, and three traveled beneath ultramarine evening toward Qandar’s warm lights.